Heron Lake Plateau not looking for a confession

That's...a lot of mothers, said Owen somewhat tentatively, still struggling to envision any of this as Phox kept piling on the improbabilities. Now just about the whole dang pack had nursed and raised Phox, and Towhee and X and who only knew who else?! Owen was definitely going to have to find some clever little way to ask Raven about all this, and soon. Or even Quixote. It would be interesting to see what and how many different answers he got asking different wolves, really... Phox confirmed that Mom was the first one to ask, though. Which made Owen just a little extra-suspicious, now: had the two of them collaborated on some sort of crazy story to tell all the pups, just to see who might swallow it whole? It didn't seem like the kind of thing mom would really do, but then again who knew, maybe that could be part of her sneakiness too... Regardless, Owen resolved to corroborate as many of these insane details as he could, with whoever he thought might be able to give him a piece of the puzzle. One of these days he would figure out how his family worked, really.

Owen was startled however by his mother's padding up beside them, with unbelievably coincidental timing. He gawped at her a sec, and then remembered at least some of his manners and offered up a feeble smile and twitching of his tail in greeting instead. - Uh, hi Mom. - Well this was awkward. Owen had had it pretty firmly in his head that he was going to ask each wolf one on one, not here put so uncomfortably in the spotlight in front of two or more of them like this... That was the kind of thing likely to make some pup think the adults were having a joke at his expense, or something very like. ...Which meant that Owen was only too glad to let Phox oh-so-conveniently change the subject, right now. Camilla claimed you? he blurted out, finding this particular way of putting it rather baffling, at least while half or more of his brain was still genuinely stuck back on whether or not it just might be possible for wolves to hatch eggs for themselves or pups to hatch out of eggs or eggs to come out of wolfmothers or sisters to become mothers at all, for that matter. All of which was way more interesting than some vaguely-worded change in the adults' relationship dynamics among themeselves here and now, although Owen did want to have that explained to him now, too, to be fair. Was Phox just being coy about claiming mateship, or was there something else more unusual he was trying to convey in some sort of code, here?