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await
developments.
    Hard decisions. Like winnowing the pack by pushing the old and
weak and youngest male pups outside the stockade. Marika
shuddered.
    And then she fell asleep, though she had been determined to stay
awake till the last outsider left.
     
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III
    With their interest thoroughly piqued, Marika and Kublin visited
Machen Cave often. Each time they took advantage of their youth to
shake Pohsit, running long circles, often dashing all the way down
to the bank of the Hainlin before turning back to cross the hills
and woods to where the cavern lay. The sagan could have tracked
them by scent, had she the will, but after five miles of ups and
downs old muscles gave out. Pohsit would limp back to the
packstead, jaw grimly set. There she would grumble and mutter to
the Wise, but dared not indict the pups before their dam. Not just
for running her to exhaustion. That would be viewed as common
youthful insolence.
    Pohsit knew they were running her. And they knew she knew. It
was a cruel pup’s game. And Kublin often repeated his
suggestion of escalated cruelty. Marika refused to take him
seriously.
    Pohsit never discovered that they were running to Machen Cave.
Else she would have gone there and waited, and been delighted by
what she saw.
    That thing that Kublin had sensed first remained in or around
the cavern. The sinister air was there always, though the pups
never discovered its cause.
    Its very existence opened their minds. Marika found herself
unearthing more and more inexplicable and unpredictable talents.
She found that she could locate anyone she knew usually just by
concentrating and reaching out. She found that she could, at times,
catch a glimmer of thought when she concentrated on wanting to know
what was in the mind of someone she could see.
    Such abilities frightened her even though she began using
them.
    It must be something of the sort that upset Pohsit so, she
thought. But why were Pohsit’s intentions so deadly?
     
    There was a nostalgic, sad tone to their prowlings that summer,
for they knew it was the last when they could run completely free.
Adulthood, with its responsibilities and taboos, was bearing
down.
     
    After the ground became sufficiently dry to permit tilling, the
Degnan began spring planting around their stockade.
Upper Ponath agriculture was crude. The meth raised one grain,
which had come north with tradermales only a generation earlier,
and a few scrawny, semidomesticated root vegetables. The meth diet
was heavy on meats, for they were a species descended of carnivores
and were just beginning a transition to the omnivorous state. Their
grown things were but a supplement making surviving winter less
difficult.
    Males and pups did the ground breaking, two males pulling a
forked branch plow, the blade of which had been hardened in fire.
The earth was turned up only a few inches deep. During the growing
season the pups spent much of their time weeding.
    Summers were busy for the huntresses, for the upper Ponath meth
kept no domesticated animals. All meat came of game.
    Their cousins in the south did herd meat animals. Several packs
had had tradermales bring breeding stock north, but the beasts were
not hardy enough to survive the winters.
    Tradermales had suggested keeping the animals in the loghouses
during the bitter months. The huntresses sneered at such silliness.
Share a loghouse with beasts! Tradermales had shown how to
construct a multiple-level loghouse, leaving the lowest level for
animals, whose body heat would help warm the upper levels. But that
was a change in ways. The meth of the upper Ponath viewed change
with deep suspicion.
    They suspected the traders of everything, for those males did
not conform even remotely to traditional male roles.
    Yet one of the high anticipations of spring was the coming of
tradermales, with their news of the world, their wild tales, their
precious trade goods. Each year they came trekking up the Hainlin,
sometimes only a handful