He felt a presence finally, and sought after it. It was wolfish and familiar. For a moment he hoped he had found what he sought… but it grew and grew until he knew it was something else; it filled the space about him, driving other things away. In that presence were yellow eyes, and a voice in his mind that was like a wolfs, which had the essence of a wolf but an elvish mind all the same. **No,** he said with his thoughts, forcing it away. But it was too late, the presence he had wanted was gone, and this one had made it impossible to recover it. "No!" he howled aloud and struggled in a hard-handed grip that closed upon his arms. He flung himself up and struck at the intruder, knowing as he struck who it was, and seeing with the return of his vision the wolf-mane of hair, the narrow, elvish face, and yellow eyes. He raged and shoved away, but Graywolf was as quick on the rocks, and prevented him with a grip on his arms and a touch at his mind:**Blackmane?**

He had not wanted to think the thought. But the question had its answer. Dead, dead, dead. So it became true. So he knew he could not get back to that place where he had been, deep inside, where a motion might disturb the dead. He had admitted that thought and therefore the other thought was beyond recall.

Therefore he slumped down with Gray wolfs small brown hands clenched on his wrists; he sat on the rock and he looked his friend in the eyes… More than Gray wolf had come. There was the wolf-friend, prowling below the rocks, hump-shouldered, ears flat to the skull-Moonfinder was his name. Not Blackmane. Moonfinder, second in the pack-till now. Till Blackmane was dead and Gray wolf s friend came to sudden primacy.

"Where?" Graywolf asked, jolting him. "Where dead? How?"

"Humans," Swift-Spear muttered, and shoved off the grip that hampered him, thrust himself over the side of the rock on which he sat and landed on the next and the next, so that Moonfinder shied away and flattened his ears.