Cedar Sweep new horizons

They would find the hot springs together. Didn't that proposition bring a beaming smile to her face! "I would very much like that," she said. Already something to look forward to in their new home!

She listened as they pushed ahead, happy to be a listener. Taktuq considered where she had been by the time she was Ensio's age. Mother had already been gone. Had Ursus already chased her? Her childhood was really only yesterday compared to some wolves, but the events melted together in a fuzzy timeline she couldn't quite decipher. Perhaps she had already left with Takiyok for the North. Perhaps she had already found her place there.

"I believe it will be similar, but with less ice to slip on," she had never lived on a mountain, either, but had journeyed through many enough to say this thought as though it were fact. But his question to her was not about mountains. "My first home was not very far from Duskfire at all," and in fact, as they had travelled, she recognized landmarks along the way that might've led her back to Easthollow, if she had not pledged herself to Issorartuyok and his village. "There was a forest filled with many trees that looked like twins of each other and a plain that seemed to stretch on forever," she said, glancing upward to see what Ensio was looking at, "at our heart, we had a circle of stones that stood on their ends, as though reaching toward the heavens. That is where we buried our family when they died."