Blacktail Deer Plateau only you, in the whole wide world

"Pura!"

The boy in question stopped and turned to look over his shoulder - right at the wolf that he was supposed to be tracking, not the other way around. It was difficult to coax straight-forward emotions out of Pura; embarrassment had not even made it into the lesson plans, loitering alongside regret and vindictiveness at the bottom of the pile. He turned slowly, coming face-to-face with Saēna after she sped up to catch him.

"Our mom died," she told him plainly, cupping her rust-coloured ears forward to catch his response. It was slow in coming. Information tended to hit a wall of molasses once it had been physically heard by Pura; he took his time turning her words over in his head, making laboriously slow connections whilst gazing at her kindly with those blank, metallic eyes. Junior had died, once. But their mother? Who was that? Did they have one? It wasn't Blue, even though she occupied top spot once - nor Fox, thankfully. Dad was used interchangeably to mean Kisu and Peregrine, and frankly, Pura did not care. But no-one every said mother.

A though crossed his mind like a passing headlight in the dark. The dead were sacred. Peregrine had told him that when Junior had died and Pura had taken it upon himself to exhume not only the grave of the Alpha's daughter, but also a second, bigger creature. He remembered the strange, leathery taste of her decaying limbs. The two ends of a connection floated in front of his eyes like two halves of a severed worm. Their mother had died. Fine. Then where was she buried? "W-where is h-her sa-..sacred place, then?" he asked his sister, his voice low and soft. She looked.. if not upset, then at least perturbed; a subtlety Pura would not be able to recognize in anyone else. But Saēna, like the wolves in the ground, was sacred.