Timmorn stared at her for a long moment, his yellow eyes, disturbing and deep, locked with hers. She wondered how he could not feel what she felt. Again, she floated on a ripple, rode a stirring inside her as Timmorn began to relate the events of the hunt, the kill, the maddened snow beast. So lost was she in the new sensation she experienced, which mingled like a strange, dark herb with the guttural sound of Timmorn's voice, that she nearly missed the rise in his tension as he told of the death of the wolf.

"Wrong!" he snarled. "It's wrong!" But he could not say why, and would say no more. Shortly, the remaining elves drifted back to their own shelters and fires, and Timmorn was alone. The camp was quiet again, except for the occasional distant cry of some great creature, deep in the forest.

Days passed, and Timmorn did not hunt again with the wolf-pack, for each night he heard the yowling cry of the wounded longtooth, and he refused to go into the woods. Seilein and the others observed that he still ran with the wolves during the day, but when darkness fell, Timmorn was to be found skulking around the camp, worried and irritated. And even though he did not hunt for them, the elves were not much worse off, for those who could still captured what

game they could. Still, tempers began to rise, especially in the firstcomers who would not adapt, and who were the most uncomfortable.

Then one night the forest was quiet again with the stillness of snow and cold. The following day was sharp and bright, and Seilein sought out Timmorn as he drank from an ice-crusted stream a little way from the camp. She approached the shaggy half-elf with a mix of feelings: attraction, timidity, resolve. Timmorn greeted her with no more than a throaty rumble, a wolfish grunt.

"We-we've waited to see what you'll do," she ventured. "The ones who can hunt and I are doing what we can, but…" There was no need for her to finish the thought; all knew that the catches had been poor, that the small game was thinning out or getting more clever. Just as all knew that there was a growing resentment against Timmorn.