"I didn't remark that you didn't smell nice," Gomposh said. "Smell is a thing for everybody to decide on for himself.
"What is the smell in me that isn't wolf?" Shasta asked.
"That you will know later," Gomposh replied.
"But when?" Shasta asked. "Today, or tomorrow, or when the moon is full?"
"That I do not tell you," Gomposh said. "When the time comes, you will know."
And that was all Shasta could get out of him. Gomposh either couldn't or wouldn't say more, and when he had sat for a little while longer he got up and slowly walked away.
Shasta watched him disappear into the chaparral thicket to the left, and heard him for some time afterwards as he knocked the rotten logs to pieces in his search for grubs.
For a long, long while Shasta sat where he was and gazed down the gorge. An odd feeling that was almost unhappiness was in his head and his stomach, and the feeling went rolling over and over inside him and knocking itself against the corners of his brain. "Not a wolf! Not a wolf!" the feeling kept rapping out. Then, if he was not a wolf, what was he? he asked himself. His memory, groping backwards into the dim beginnings of his life, worked hard to uncover the secret of what he really was; but, try as he would, he could remember nothing but the den and the wolf life that had its centre there, and the happenings of the mountain and of the forest, and the ways of their folk.
There was nothing else—no shapes of tall beings that carried bows in their fore-paws and walked always on their hind legs—nothing that told him of his Indian birth.
The morning slipped into the afternoon, and still Shasta sat motionless, humped upon the rock. His eyes were down the gorge, or on the opposite ridge where the tops of the spruces were jagged against the sky. Down below him, on the old run-ways that had threaded the thickets since the beginning of the world, the creatures came and went. Shasta knew them each by sight. He had known them all his life. Yet now, as their familiar forms came noiselessly like shadows over the grass, he had a peculiar feeling of being separated from them by the new knowledge that, somehow, he was of another world. When the thin smell of the twilight came drifting through the trees, then, and not till then, Shasta slipped down noiselessly from his rock and stole homewards to the den.