Hideaway Strath when we arrive, sons and daughters

The Lotturos are five weeks old today! Many of us have multiple characters but @Chusi, Hemlock, Arturo, and PPSirius are also invited. This thread is not mandatory, but it’d be nice to all get together now that the potatoes are growing legs. No posting order and no rounds; we will just do whatever we like.

Per the WOLF Guidebook: “Pups will begin to appear outside the den and can be found near the den entrance. This is the time when the pack will begin interacting with the pups. Their ears will perk up around twenty-seven days and by day thirty they should have relatively good hearing and straight ears. The tips may still be floppy. Pups will develop their canine teeth and premolars during this time. By the four week mark, their heads and paws are comically large and play fighting for dominance begins. By the five week mark, pups may accompany adults on short trips away from the den.

Equivalent Human Age: 1.5 — 4 years
Vocalization: Growling, whimpering, stronger howls, barks, lots of babbling.”

Dagfinn and Lotte had been separated before, and for far longer than a five week stretch — but this time was different. Both of them knew it. Dagfinn had a bad case of itchy paws, and Lotte could easily understand her kaksonen’s plight, having experienced her own measure of it on and off since Lærke had disappeared from Donnelaith. Still, there was a certain jealousy involved in his return to the tundra — even if he was returning to bear good tidings of her new life in the Teekons. Her sharp, practical mind told her that this might be their last goodbye — if war sprang up in the tundra, if her joyful twin succumbed somehow to misadventure, if he found a mate and started a family of his own somewhere in the great In Between — and although she had miraculously kept her composure when he’d initially departed, the well of her longing for his nearness now seemed endless. She was too weary for tears in the face of Eirlys’ near death experience, but she was primed for a crying jag of epic proportions. The weight of it hung heavy in her chest.

Fortunately, the snowdrop had finally caught up to her siblings in terms of activity and feeding. She was a little underweight, but it seemed she had hit her stride: she nursed as though she was making up for lost time, and Lotte often joked that Eirlys was making up for time before she’d even been conceived. The young mother had left her sleeping brood just after dawn, running down and devouring in hearty gulps at least eight pounds of fresh groundhog meat and chasing it with another five or six pounds of fresh salmon. Arturo and Chusi kept the songbird well fed, but this was to be the cubs’ first experience with regurgitated meat — a tad late in the game, but there was very little about this pregnancy that had been textbook. Now that the cubs could hear, she sang the tule kotiin call to summon them to her side, naming them each in turn when her song was through: “@Mallaidh, @Roarke, Eirlys, @Ceallach, come here! Tule tänne!”

Curling her coal-capped tail around her hips, Lotte lowered to her haunches and basked in the early afternoon sunshine to wait for the appearance of the four little bears.