The small scout stood outside the abandoned densite, simply taking in the view she had worked so hard to discover. Evann had told it true: Hollowheart Keep was gone. Naia had already circled the densite, widening her circles more and more until she had traced the entire territory. The scents of the Keep wolves had faded to the point of being nearly undetectable, but a clever scout didn’t rely on just her nose. While casing the densite she had discovered piles of scat in different states of decay, with only a few “fresher” leavings from the last couple of wolves who must have dragged their paws leaving their homeland. The majority of the caches had been opened and relieved of their smaller, carryable items, and the larger meals had been long torn apart by other scavenging beasts. Naia found no sign that they had left in a group, as a pack leaving one territory for another would. No, this pack’s numbers had dwindled slowly to nothing, just as Pitch Pine Trail’s had not so long ago.

This one last leg of her mission was over. Naia could finally return to her lover and her pack. It still maddened her to think of how miserably, unnecessarily long this journey had been. Why, why why hadn’t Evann told her that Hollowheart Keep had moved from the Pass? Naia had replayed their conversation many times, and she was sure that she told Evann, “You are welcome to join me on a trip to the Mountain.” How hard would it have been for Evann to say, “Oh, we haven’t lived there in ages. Sometime around last winter we shimmied down a little escape route that will take you forever to find ‘cause it was so long ago, and then we got dumped out into these horrible freaky woods where we settled down.” That information certainly would have made Naia’s trip a good deal shorter, but she could hardly blame her homeless, distraught friend. Perhaps they would laugh about it later, when Evann met Naia at the River border.