Ankyra Sound your beguiling state in endless heights

It was not a wolf that the boy may have been hoping to see that walked the shoreline that day but, instead, the north-born leader. The uppik flew overhead, watching her ward with curiosity; she was not unaccustomed to the ocean, having observed the wolves of TakKik Kunnâk hunt seals in the past, but this one was most unlike that of the north. There were little red creatures with harsh skin that littered the beaches here, resembling the putjotik, only smaller—but just as unpredictable with their snapping. Aningan was curious of these creatures, too, and had been ever since he had first spotted one. While he still did not know what they were called in the common tongue, he notified his flighty friend of them by shouting, “Tappika! Putjotik!” Unbeknownst to him, the young leader was not nearly as alone as he’d thought himself to be; the uppik spotted the other wolf sooner than he and promptly retreated to the nearby sequoias, her decision to not intervene with his exchanges between others of his kind having been made long ago. And it was her sudden disappearance that made him more attentive of his surroundings, gaze leaving the crab before him and landing on the other boy.

As his interests shifted, Aningan abandoned the living-pinching-device in favour of greeting the other; he couldn’t remember when he had last seen the younger male, and immediately chastised himself for not making an effort to seek him out sooner. Surely, by not doing so, he was made more useless in the eyes of others. A frown flitted across his lips before it was forcibly shooed away by a smile and wag of his tail, the distance between them minimised and then erased entirely—and, at that point, he spotted yet another crab! “Hey!” he said first, and then quickly followed it with, “What is that called?” while pointing towards the fleeing crustacean. Probably not the first thing he should have said but, hey, it was something.