Grey Wolves

Overview

Grey wolves are the great hunters of the Cradle web's woods. They live on deer and wild boar in the old forest and come out to the edges when the game is thin. To a Wood Elf grove a wolf is another hunter on the same ground, answerable as the grove is; to a Headwater or basin shepherd it is the thief of the winter fold, and the lord who keeps the hunting right and will not use it is the one to blame.

Appearance

A grown wolf stands as high as a Human's hip, long-legged and deep-chested, heavier than the biggest yard dog and narrower through the body. Its coat is grizzled grey, darker along the back, paler at the throat and belly, with a buff wash on the legs and a black-tipped tail carried low. The eyes are yellow. Winter coats are thick enough to hide the ribs of a starving animal.

Wolves move at a long, tireless trot that can be kept up all night. They howl at dusk and before dawn, a rising, falling chorus that one wolf starts and the pack takes up, and the sound carries for miles across a frozen valley. A kill smells of blood and churned snow; a den of earth and old bone.

Habitat and Range

Wolves live wherever the woods are large enough to hold deer: thickest in the deep, uncut forest of the Elderweald, in the broken thickets of the Briarreach, and in the foothill woods of the Headwater Marches. In the farmed lowlands of the Confluence Basins they are few and keep to the forest edge. A pack holds a range of many days' walk and moves through it in a round.

Behaviour and Temperament

A pack is a family: a breeding pair, their young of the last few years, and sometimes an old relative, rarely more than a dozen. They hunt together, testing a herd for the slow, the sick, or the young, then running it down in relays. They avoid people and their dogs in ordinary years. In a hard winter, when the deer have gone thin or the snow lies crusted, a pack follows the game down to the edges and takes sheep from the folds, and a lone walker on a forest road at dusk may be followed.

Life Cycle

Wolves pair for life and breed once a year, in late winter. Four to six cubs are born in spring in an earth or under a fallen tree, and the whole pack feeds them. Young wolves leave in their second or third year to find a mate and a range. Few wolves live past ten.

Uses and Dangers

Wolves give pelts for cloaks and collars, and they keep the deer from eating a forest bare, which groves know and farmers seldom credit. Their cost falls on the herds: a fold broken into on a winter night, lambs taken from the summer slopes. Human lords keep the right to hunt wolves with the right to hunt deer, and hold wolf-hunts with hounds when shepherds complain loudly enough.

Lore and Belief

Elves of the old groves count a wolf-kill against the ground as they count their own: a pack that takes a deer has taken it from the same answerable share, and a grove that hunts out its wolves has broken faith with the forest. Basin and Headwater Humans tell children that a wolf can smell a lie, and shepherds hang a wolf's skull on a fold gate to warn the next pack, which wolves ignore.

In hard winters wolves come down to the fold gates, and the fold-villages name the wolf-winters and their heroes: the shepherd girl who kept a pack off her flock with a burning brand until dawn, the lord who paid a bounty for every head and had to pay it on a thousand. Some Headwater villages still keep wolf-spears behind the door.

Where It Appears

• The Confluence Basins
• The Elderweald