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Author Insight
When the forest burns
The Wolf’s Tooth is a book with many transitions. This is an early—and painful—one. Twee’s world changes not through choice, but through fire. He doesn't know what fire is, but the wolves do, instinctually. They sense danger before he does. It’s one of the first signs that, though he lived among them, he isn’t quite one of them. This scene marks the end of his time in the wild. The smell, the panic, the glow above the treetops—none of it is gradual. The world comes crashing in, and Twee, for all his instincts, is unprepared. I wanted this moment to feel like what many transitions feel like: disorienting, sudden, and irreversible. The wolf’s tooth can’t protect him here. But everything that follows starts with this spark.
Book Excerpt
The Wolf's Tooth
It started with a smell in the air-acrid, bitter, and burning. The wolves looked up first. It took the boy a while to register what they were smelling. His nose worked better than the nose of someone who hadn’t grown up in the forest, but it was nothing to the wolves.It was early morning. The pack had returned from hunting. The boy had been doing his local solo hunt and had been successful this night. He was cutting up some rabbit meat. He wiped his tooth on the grass and put it back in its sheath. After his first knife had deteriorated with time, he learned to keep the new one clean.The wolves, as one, lifted their heads and started sniffing at the air. After a moment, once the boy knew to pay attention to his nose, he also noticed the smell.The boy didn’t recognize the scent right away. He hadn’t been exposed to fire in the last few years and had no memory of it from the time before the wolves.The wolves recognized the smell instinctively and immediately. As one, they all rose to their feet. There was a concerted chorus of whining and whimpering. The pack wasn’t sure what to do, but they knew the scent meant they needed to do something.Once the smell alerted them, it didn’t take long to notice something else. A glow showed above the tree line and shone through the trees around the clearing.The transition from seeing a glow above the trees to the fire being in the clearing was so fast they barely had time to react. The wolves were milling around in the open area of their sleeping territory, whimpering and whining. The trees on one side of the clearing started shooting up sparks. It had been a dry summer, and the fall foliage was ripe for burning.
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