Etched in Bone

To: Tolya Sanguinati, Urgent

Officer Debany is concerned because Barbara Ellen is moving into a house with a male named Buddy. Do you know him? Is he a suitable mate for her? Please reply as soon as possible.

—Vlad

To: Vladimir Sanguinati, Urgent

Buddy is a suitable roommate for Barbara Ellen, but he is not a suitable mate. Buddy is a parakeet.

—Tolya

Dear Meg,

These are sketches of my friend Amy Wolfgard. Whenever I’m outside drawing, she tries to steal my pencils. I thought she was going to chew on them, like Wolves chew on twigs to clean their teeth. Then, just this week, she shifted to (mostly) human form, and I discovered she’d been trying to indicate her interest in what I was doing. She wants to draw too, and trying to take a pencil was her request for me to play, to share. I want to show her how to draw, but I don’t know how. I can’t explain what I’m doing or how she can do the same thing. No one taught me; I just hold a pencil and things get drawn on the paper.

Grace Wolfgard went down to the Intuit village here at Sweetwater to see if their little bookstore had any books about how to draw, but they didn’t. Jackson and some Intuit men even went farther down the road to Endurance, the human town. What’s left of the human town.

Where do the people who survived the Elders go if they want to leave the place where they live now? Jackson said the people in Endurance were fools for packing up their cars and sneaking off in the middle of the night. He said they should have left at dawn and traveled during the daylight hours because all the humans had been warned that there is no safety in the dark. But some of the people didn’t listen, and now the Ravens and Eagles are flying over the roads and telling the Wolves and Intuits where to find the cars—and what’s left of the bodies.

The people who remained in the town are going to stay. They told Jackson and some of the Intuits that this was never a kind place to humans, but they would endure as their ancestors endured. That’s what I overheard Jackson tell Grace.

Nothing feels different in the terra indigene settlement. Well, Jackson and Grace have decided all the youngsters should have some book learning. They’ve hired an Intuit teacher to come up to the settlement to teach everyone who wants to learn how to read and write and do sums. So every morning, the Wolves haul a rolling blackboard to a shady spot, and youngsters from all the gards—Eagles, Ravens, Hawks, Wolves, even one of the Panthers—gather to listen to the teacher. Most don’t shift to a human form; I don’t think most of them have ever tried. But we all listen. Grace said that even if this is simple for me and something I learned before, I need to pay attention because I need to set an example for the rest of the youngsters about how to behave during school. I think I’m doing a good job most of the time, but sometimes when I’m listening to the teacher I slide to a different place where I still hear her voice but it’s far away. And then I blink and there’s a drawing filling a page of my notebook and everyone is watching me, including the teacher. But no one says anything. No one threatens to cut off my fingers like they did when we lived in the compound. Jackson just comes over to where we’re having class and removes the drawing from my notebook, and the teacher starts talking again.

Grace says the young cassandra sangue who are living with the Intuits are doing well. They have structured days that include schooling and chores appropriate for their age. They also get to experience a little bit of new every day. So do I. The land around our settlement is the same and different every day. I like it.

Could you look in your bookstore and see if there is a book to teach someone how to draw? I’ll pay for it, once I figure out how to do that.

Your friend,

Hope Wolfsong