Wapun Meadow If I can see you filling with me

It was not the herd that ended up catching his attention, nor anything else that he’d found. Rather, it was something that had found him—or rather, someone, he quickly came to realise. The sound of approaching steps earned little more than a flick of his ear, though the chuff that came soon after received so much more: his undivided attention. A gleam of curiosity shone in his eyes when he turned to face the girl, her greeting suggesting that he knew her, but the face that greeted him wasn’t the least bit familiar. He stared at her, examining every inch of her features whilst he sought something that might stand out to him, only to come up empty. Never in his life had he seen her—she was a total stranger to him.

But despite the mix-up he was not angry at her—a bit annoyed that he’d been compared with and found similar to another wolf, but not angry. “Who are you?” he asked. He humoured the possibility that he actually did know her and was just having a memory malfunction, but knew that her answer would reveal the truth to him; for those he met only in passing, or the ones that didn’t make much of an impression, their names were always easier to remember than their faces.