Tanner said, "You would truly rather wear smoked hides rubbed with grease and brains?"

"It was good enough for me in your father's time," Fangslayer snapped.

"But that would truly be the waste," Tanner said, "when leather can be so much more. Don't you see, if I learn how I can make it thinner, softer, thin and soft as new leaves, and I can make it as many colors as the pelts of the wolf-pack. Or I can make it thick and hard, for protection in battle, should we ever have to battle the humans, or tough and supple for shelters, or I can make it stretch over a form as the humans stretch it for their drumheads. If I can learn to lace it tightly enough I will make pouches of it that will hold anything, even water. And—"

Caught up in his own fervor, it took Tanner a moment to notice that all the tribe had fallen silent and was gathering closer, listening to him. When he saw it, he stopped, lest they should hear promises where he had only dreams. He was reluctant to share such dreams; they were as nothing, he thought, before he made them true. To his tribe-mates he gave instead his shy, crooked smile. They smiled back, and some gently laughed. Fangslayer snorted and walked away. But the cub Starlight stood scowling earnestly at her chieftain, though he did not notice it. And Brook offered, "My chief, do you wish us to guard the pit from the human?"

The human tribe had come to their patch of the Everwood a mere hundred-some years before, and as yet knew nothing, or almost nothing, of the Wolfriders. Tanner and his people had learned new stealth; they had kept it so. Indeed, the rare human sightings of elves were hotly disputed around the tall ones' cooking fires in the evenings, and most of the humans scoffed more heartily than Fangslayer.

"No," said Tanner quietly to Brook, "thank you, but no. Let it go as it is." And he strode to the brow of the hurst to lead his tribe in the howl, to listen as tales were told of battles and migrations, of the days of Prey-Pacer, Two-Spear, and Huntress Skyfire, days so dangerous, so different from the safe and settled life of Tanner's time.

Night followed night, howl followed howl, and in the Now of wolf-time moons followed moons, scarcely noticed. Orange autumn moons, cold white winter moons, and through them all Lift-Leg remained faithful to his oak tree and relieved himself on Tanner's pit. Watery spring moons, and still Lift-Leg did not falter in his routine. And Brook, Joygleam, and the others gleefully brought their chief the news of it all the while, until, when the thaw finally came, Tanner had no heart to open the pit.

"I swear by Timmorn's bones," he said to Stagrunner one night as they sat atop the silent hurst, "I would like to just let it lie."

The wolf-friend sat stolidly under the starlight. Concerning things of this sort, Stagrunner was the only one Tanner could talk to. Brook was a loyal friend in the large things, but in the small things he could not be trusted not to laugh or bear tales; he too dearly loved a joke. Though to Tanner leather-making was no small thing.

"And if it were not for Fangslayer," said Tanner morosely, "I think I would do just that. Let it all lie and rot."

Stagrunner panted, his white teeth gleaming in a grin of wordless agreement.

"But he'd never let me hear the end of it." Tanner shrugged, suddenly putting on again the air of half-smiling bemusement that he wore like a cloak. "So open it I must. I believe I was born to be the laughingstock. Walk with me, my good friend?"

Side by side, they ambled off into the night together.

On another night not long after, a night of the full moons, Tanner led a troop of strong young elves down to the oak to help him open the pit. And though they were outwardly silent, many were the jests that were privately "sent," especially as they drew near enough to whiff the place's aroma.

But on the way back to the hurst there were no jokes at all.

"Well?" Fangslayer barked, meeting the group of elves with their bundles of heavy, still-wet leathers. And Tanner, in the lead, looked straight at him with a smile that was neither shy nor wry.

"They are nearly perfect," he declared.

The leathers were lovely, fine and supple, softer than they had ever been before.

A tanning agent without peer had been discovered.

For days Tanner luxuriated in heady victory. Eagerly he assembled the next year's batch of hides, already harvested by Brook and sun-dried atop the evergreens, where the humans would not see. Eagerly he fetched tanbark and dried leaves, expertly placing them with the hides as he set them in the ground.

The seasons went round the cycle of four, one more moment-year in the nearly-endless span of elfin life, and the next springtime, seemingly no more than a moment later, found Tanner once again in despair.

Lift-Leg, the human, had unaccountably changed his habits. Perhaps the smell had become too much for him. He had taken his bodily wastes elsewhere. Not even once had he vouchsafed to piss on the awaiting pit. Tanner had undertaken to service the site himself, but without much hope; instinct told him that elf urine was quite different from human. In desperation he had attempted to obtain wolf urine, without much success. And to add to his gloom, the struggle had caused the relationship between him and Stagrunner to become chill and strained. And the leathers, when they came out of the ground, were solidly second-rate.

All his tribesmates, even Fangslayer, tried to tell him otherwise. "They're fine," Fangslayer snapped. "Very serviceable.''

The Wolfriders nodded, watching their chief with concern.

He had grown far too intent on his leathermaking to be laughed at.

"There's nothing wrong with this year's batch, Tanner," Brook told him. "Really."

Oddly, instead of comforting him, all this made him secretly furious, more furious than he had ever been when they had laughed. And oddly, it was one of the cubs, Stormlight, who was of better help to him.

She came to him where he was sitting alone for want of Stagrunner, sitting beneath the stars at the brow of the hurst. With no greeting or apology she sat beside him. "I know what you want," she said.

Still furious, all the more so since he could not shout at his well-meaning people, Tanner did not look at her or answer her. But Stormlight spoke steadily on.

"You want leathers as soft as flower petals, and colored all the hues of sky after sun goes down."

His head snapped around so that he looked at her.

"You want deerskins the color of honey, but softer than a newborn baby's hair. You want split pigskins as red as a robin's breast feathers, and purple as oak leaves in autumn, and gray as twilight, and deepwater blue. You want doeskins of milk white, able to be folded flat as a leaf and opened without a crease. You want the smaller skins, treewee, ringtail, even swamp rat, no less beautiful than the others."

She understood.

She, a cub, understood better than any of her tribe-mates. Tanner was astounded, for it was seldom that any of them, least of all the cubs, saw him as anything but a stodgy, eccentric elder with a sparrow-brown beard, an undistinguished body, and no skills at the hunt.

Anger gone as if it had never been, Tanner looked hard at Stormlight. He might as well have been seeing her for the first time. Indeed, she had only been in his long life for a mere eyeblink, fourteen years or so, a tiny span compared to his seven-hundred-some years. She had been a fair-haired flash darting past him in the night, no more. Now he saw a cub—yet not a cub. All slender quickness and lank lengths of growing bones, but something stirring in the fine, pale face, the huge, night-shadowed eyes faintly sparkling with starlight. She was a cub at the edge, the verge, of passage and adulthood. And she understood.

Tanner found his voice a trifle husky when he spoke. "I had not thought of the purple," he admitted.