At dawn the Quiet Spring lay as flat and clear as a pane of window glass under the cold grey sky.
The original mouse woke first inside its half-covered boot-nail box beside the stove stones, stood up on its good hind leg while balancing with its stiff one, and nibbled half a toasted oat kernel before climbing up Pip’s thinner left-middle leg into the warm chest fold for the morning march. Over by the windbreak, Siv woke with his left cheek noticeably flatter than it had been for three days. When Kiv offered him a strip of dried mutton soaked in warm broth so he would not have to chew hard on the treated premolar, the old wolf swallowed it cleanly and shook his coat from ears to tail without wincing.
Ysabet walked down to the runnel below the spring lip with the two leather water skins slung over her left shoulder and knelt on the flat granite to fill them.
Pip did not immediately go up the bank to eat its morning chalk. It stayed sitting on the white stone-crusted moss right at the pool’s edge, its six legs tucked under its green-and-white patchwork shell and its branching lattice antlers reflected upside-down in the still water.
