"I think you're on to something," Longreach assured the scowling craftswoman.

"It doesn't look like the one in my mind."

She snatched it up and made to throw it far across the brook when the storyteller's fingers closed over hers.

"No need to be angry with it. See it for itself. As a bowl— well, perhaps it has a flaw or two; but as a tallow-lamp—see, the high edge will protect the light from the wind. ..."

"It was supposed to be a bowl," Brownberry insisted, though she relaxed her grip and let her friend take the pottery into his own care. "They never come out the way my mind's eye sees them."

Longreach set the bowl, now a lamp, in the grass beside him. "At first they didn't come out at all. You'll get the knack of it yet. What's a few more tries?"

The chestnut-haired Wolfrider sat down with a sigh. "They laugh at me," she said without meeting his eyes. "Briar, Foxfur—even Skywise—they don't even try to hide it. Pike even asked if I was growing another finger."

There was no more potent insult in the Wolfrider's tongue than a five-fingered elf, yet the storyteller wasn't entirely surprised. Brownberry had pursued her notion of working with clay for many turns of the seasons now. The need to shape the red muds ate at her in ways she herself did not seem to understand. Perhaps it was some dormant aspect of her elfin heritage—a different shade of the magic that flowed through Rain and Goodtree—perhaps not. Either way, the need to shape something was not a need which erupted frequently in the Wolfriders.

His own thoughts found their ending, but Brownberry was still slump-shouldered. "What did you tell him?"

"I didn't tell him; I hit him one with my spear."

"That certainly got your point across—but there have been other ways, you know—"

Tanner's Dream by Nancy Springer

Toad turds!" Tanner exclaimed softly to himself. He had lived for over seven hundred years and been the chieftain of his tribe, the Wolfriders, for some four hundred of those, but the seasons had been quiet, spent mostly in wolf-time, the Always Now. Seldom had Tanner produced such an outburst or felt the need to. At this point, however, mere toad crap seemed inadequately disgusting. "Ripe, rotten toad turds!" he expanded in his soft, chirring, birdlike elfin tongue, staring downward through dense leaves. The man, the human, was standing directly under the oak tree, his crude fur skirt upraised, urinating.

**Told you,** came an amused sending from Tanner's side. On the broad oak branch beside him knelt Brook, his hunt leader. Though the human, and humans in general, took elfin speech for birdsong, Brook had a hunter's instinct for silence and preferred to send. **Every day, just like a dog wolf marking. It's a wonder he doesn't get down and sniff around.**

**Timmorn's blood, the flood of it!** Tanner exclaimed, sending also, lest in his dismay he should speak too loudly. **And the smell!**

**Potent,** Brook wryly agreed.

The human finished, shook the final drops off his member, let the stiff, smoke-cured leather of his skirt fall, and lumbered away toward a stand of hemlocks, leaving a yellow puddle slowly soaking into the loam at the roots of the oak. The man disappeared into dense forest. Stretched out full length along his supporting bough, Tanner let his head fall to the rough bark.

"My leathers," he groaned aloud. For under the tree, at the very spot the human had chosen to flood, Tanner had hidden a pit full of the finest hides Brook could bring him, layered with an exacting, laboriously gathered mixture of barks, acorn cups, leaves and berries, all bestowed with utmost care to undergo the silent, unseen process by which crude, flinty-hard, sun-dried hides would become—Tanner hoped—fine, supple leathers for his tribespeople to wear.

Brook reached over and gave his chief a light slap on the shoulder. **Lift-Leg we call him, even though he doesn't,** Brook teased, and then he went off, padding and leaping noiselessly through the treetops, bound for the hollow where he would drowse away the rest of the day while the human hunters blundered about below.

Tanner remained where he was, to brood.

"Humans," he muttered. "A stinking, muck-eating human."

This was rather strong language for him. Tanner was not much in the habit of brooding or hating, but the matter of the urinating human had upset him deeply—the more so because no one in his tribe but him would care about it as he did.

He was a throwback, though he could not himself have explained it in that way. A throwback, not to the wild half-wolf urgings of Timmorn, but even beyond, to the gentle, beauty-loving nature of the high ones. Their blood stirring in him had taken a bent form, skewed his thoughts away from the thoughts of the other Wolfriders. He made a clumsy hunter, with no passion for the kill. He seldom rode on his wolf-friend, and there was no wanderlust in him. He had taken no lifemate, or lovemate either, in all his many sea-, sons. But he had a dream, an artist's vision, of what leather could be.

Or rather, the dream had hold of him, as relentless as disease or infestation. Fine, supple, many-colored leathers, if he could just find the right mix of tanbarks and oddments ... And now the human hunter had pissed on his pit. A year's labor, buried there, and another full four turnings of the seasons for it to steep, and Lift-Leg had taken it into his head to use that very place in all the vast Everwood as his customary spot to pee.

"Humans," Tanner moaned aloud again. Timmorn would have driven the man away. Two-Spear would have killed the human before looking at him twice. But Tanner had stayed in hiding.

Through the long summer afternoon he lay on the oak bough, his gray eyes thoughtful, restlessly stroking the hair of his short brown beard, until the fireflies came out at dusk. Then, as lithely as Brook (though the hunter was less than half his age) the Wolfrider chief made his way through the twilight treetops to the hurst, where his people were gathering for the nightly howl.

It was a hilltop, a bluff rather, overlooking the clear river that flowed northward into Muchcold Water. At its crest stood a grove of beeches, their bark nearly as smooth and pale as a Wolfrider's skin, gray of sheen, like Tanner's wolf-friend, Stagrunner. Spreading beech branches kept the forest floor beneath them nearly free of undergrowth. Around and between the gray gleaming trunks cubs were playing tag, they and some of their elders as well. As Tanner swung down to the ground he was met by smiles and a thump—a laughing, heedless Wolfrider, running into him, then darting past without a word, her long hair looking pale as moonlight in the night, tossing behind her. One of the cubs, Tanner recalled. A skinny youngster, half grown. Stormlight.

"Tanner!" It was Joygleam, one of the young hunters, smiling merrily along with Brightlance and Brook and others, her comrades. "I hear that luck is against you yet again!"

Without anger Tanner gave her his quiet half-smile. It was true that he had tried tanning leather again and again, seasons stretching back long before she was born, and there were always setbacks, and the stench sometimes was enough to drive a wild boar out of the woods—though never the lumpish humans—and never had he been wholly satisfied. But it did not matter. There was always the chance to try again. It was the reason why the tribe had stayed so long in one place, his tanning, his pits always being filled or waiting to be opened.

"Are you not glad you need not always wear stinking, rotting hides such as the humans do, Joygleam?" he asked her.

"Puckernuts!" cut in one of the elders before Joygleam could answer. It was old Fangslayer, one of the few Wolfriders who was older than the chieftain. Fangslayer had been grown when Tanner was yet a cub, and Fangslayer did not hesitate to speak his mind. "It's a waste, say I. Waste of time better spent, waste of shaper's labors setting the trees to rights after you're done taking the bark from them, Tanner, and now a waste of good skins, sitting in a hole in the ground for the humans to pass water on!"