Woofy, asking about her father, had set something off inside Diane that had been dormant a long time. Now it was smouldering back into life. She was determined now that she had to face the problem head on. So she went looking for Woofy. But the snow defeated her before long, Woofy was a native to such snows, and Diane was not, having grown up in Northern California where winters were rain and fog, not snow. So after floundering and freezing for a short time she returned to the cave. She shook her wolf body briskly, removing most of the dampness from melting snow, then lay on her side in front of the fire, staring at it intently.

In the flames she saw bits and pieces of memory. From very young childhood, her tall lanky father, almost always in human form, despite his lupus origins, quiet and withdrawn, only the second, and final, time they had met. He had given her a hug, and a stone painted with symbols and words; she had left the stone behind when she left the Western Eye. He had said few words to her. She remembered talking to him, spilling out things she had never told anyone else, and he had seemed to listen, seemed to be giving her his full attention, and then he had gone again, never to return. She envisioned the hieroglyphs painted on the stone, the only thing of his she'd ever had. Eye, hawk, oval cabochon, sheaf of wheat. No one had ever been able to tell her what it meant. She'd drawn the picture for a professor of Ancient Egyptian archeology once, but he'd told her it wasn't anything he could translate.

His name had been Ahmose, and Diane's mother had told her it meant Moon-born. Diane's mother had told her many stories of her father, but uncharacteristically, Diane did not remember most of them. She did remember two stories her mother had told of her father, though. One had been about their meeting. She thought about it for a moment, then turned her mind to the other story, the story of how her father had met a spirit in the Umbra on the way to visit Western Eye just before Diane's birth. The spirit had stopped him as he walked through the weirwood forest, huge ancient penumbral trees reflecting the redwoods that surrounded Diane's birth sept.

"Your daughter will be born under this moon," the spirit told him. It was in the form of a golden horse, with eyes of amber, and a mane of lambent flame, flickering in the windless forest air. Ahmose shook his head. Diane's mother always described Ahmose as a man, not a wolf, in this tale, though Diane suspected he had traveled the distance in lupus form, if only because it was far easier to travel that way, and because he was wolf-born. She was sure, from the vantage point of years, that his seeming reluctance to leave human form was put on only to win her mother's favor.

She returned to her memory of the story her mother had told so many times. Ahmose had shaken his head, not knowing he had fathered a child, that his dalliance with Diane's mother had borne its tainted fruit. Well, her mother had never put it that way. Anyway, he had not known. And the golden horse spirit repeated it, looking up at the moon's bare sliver, waxing toward the quarter crescent. "Before Luna is new again, she shall be in her mother's arms."

Ahmose thought back to eight or nine months before, as the story did not consider the possibility of wolf cubs. It did imply, with phrases like "mother's arms" and "your daughter" -- a single birth would be rare for a wolf -- that the daughter was not lupus. And he remembered. His steps sped faster, and he arrived at Western Eye the next night.

The point of this story, as Diane's mother had told it, was that her father had not turned away in shame on being informed of his having fathered a metis child, but instead, returned to be present at her entrance into the world. Diane thought her mother had tried rather too hard. She stared at the fire, silently thanking Gaia that she could never have children.