Totoka River i'm on my tip toes

she appeared to be amused by his questions and the skepticism he makes no effort to hide from her. she explains that they hunt fish — it takes all of his self control not to shiver at thought of hunting fish and then eating it. yuck. according to her, there's other prey too and that it's bigger than it appears at a distance and they can weather storms in their dens. he believes her, of course. he has no reason not to and she should know because she was on of their's ...but he's still skeptical about the whole idea. beach property has never been on his top list of places he wants to live. she speaks of a land bridge and the roll of her eyes — caught by him as his gaze rests back upon her — tells him that it's currently inaccessible ...which would explain what she was doing when she first came into his view. ah. he rumbles in understanding.

the pitfall of almost complete isolation. he draws. they're isolated on their island and you're stuck here until the water recedes. not that she actually needed the obvious pointed out to her. how long until that happens? hours? days? weeks? he knows nothing about the ebb and flow of the tides other than it's constantly moving and mostly it's because wintersbane doesn't much care. he'd taken bonesplitter ravine despite that it's far from homely before he settled on the coast.

oh? her warmer blue gaze meets his glacial stare and he sees the curiosity there, despite that she packed plenty of it in her simply inquiry. he takes a moment to weigh it. she's curious but is she interested? perhaps she wasn't ...but she had friends, right? word travelled and that could be a useful asset for a recruiter. not to mention, how did he expect to recruit if he kept information close to his chest? being tight-lipped would only ensure his own failure. the vartija wasn't secretive, after all.

i'm going to call it the vartija; in my native tongue it loosely translates to 'the wardens'. it's going to be a war clan where regular spars are encouraged to keep skills sharp ...but wolves don't have to be warriors or rogues to join. i just feel that it's beneficial to know how to fight even if it's to defend one's self. pretty much what i've seen of the packs i've ran with ranks are unchallengeable. you claw your way up and hope that if you're ambitious you reach as high as you want to go. there's nothing wrong with that but i like the idea of ranks being decided by contribution, yes, but also by one's own ambition. all ranks in the regular hierarchy should be challengeable but the pack should get it's say, should be allowed to interfere if they don't agree especially if it comes to leadership.

wintersbane realizes that by opening up his own rank for challenges down the road when and if it all comes to fruition might mean that one day he could lose it or be deemed unfit. and that was ok. there would be no rules saying that he couldn't challenge for his rank back. sometimes, that was just the natural order of things.

he falls silent after his monologue, taking in her expressions to gauge her reaction to his ideas. she is the first to hear of them, after all and constructive criticism was always helpful.