The call of a stranger far too close for comfort had turned Nate from his nose-down meandering into alert attention.

He'd gone some distance from Mithwyth today, and still worried first for her before himself. They'd settled into a sort of not-routine, where they meandered in the same direction and sometimes split off, but always picked up one another's trails again between capers.

Oh, who was he kidding! She was the one who did the finding, most of the time.

He could track prints with canny certainty, but the nose was still overwhelming most days, and with mastery of it for advantage, she'd always outdo him. Catching up to the skill of one born to it proved no easy feat.

In his old life he'd been valued for his fieldcraft — a real survivalist. Even some mountain men found reasons to be surprised at what he could read on wind and grass. Eleanore, raised on silk and sugared tea, had known nothing of the art at all, as was considered appropriate for a well-bred woman.

Memory cut a pang through him, of showing her fresh bear spoor by the stream and telling her to be careful — only for her to insist she wanted him to lead her to it for a peek, as if it were a prize sow at the fair.

(He'd shown her. A mother with four cubs. He could have denied Eleanore nothing no matter how foolhardy, and listened on the way home to the names she intended for her own children, someday.)

Nate was coming to understand wahya didn't exactly organize themselves the same way as folks did where he'd come from. She-wolves weren't afforded a domestic life. Mithwyth knew how to hunt and range, and had done so on her own for long enough it felt presumptuous to think she might suddenly need his help doing either.

If anybody was the damsel here, it was him.

And here he stood, without his knight in shining armor. A pair of them offered some assurance of protection if only because numbers were a deterrent, but in a fight, he lacked certainty of the rest of him about as much as the nose.

Ducking into a crouch, he glanced up at Ko-Ga and clicked his tongue. With a caw the crow went on ahead, and Nate did his best to follow at a distance.