"The wolf is not our business," they told him in the first week, "and it never will be."

The Stonelore druids were plain with him in the first week. The wolf was not their business and never would be. What they had to teach was shape held as a craft: a thing done deliberately, in daylight, with witnesses, and undone the same way.

It took four years to hold the ursauk for the length of one rainstorm on a hillside. The bear is heavy and slow and entirely obedient. That is the whole of its appeal. Learning it did not touch the wolf. He has twenty years of evidence that the two have no relation at all. The druids told him so before he paid for the lessons.