Before October 4 a wolf at night circled, growled and sprang for a leg, and a step toward it, a blow or a raised torch sent it off. That evening it learned what a spear is. Point one at a wolf and it will not come inside the point’s reach. It circles to get at your side and lunges when you turn away, and if you keep the point on it, after a while it gives up.
Holding the point steady was too safe on its own, so the wolf began to feint, darting in at the point every few seconds and springing back. Twenty minutes later the pack began to work as a team, one wolf coming in while another circles round behind, and soon after a missed jab became an opening. The first version had a flaw: wolves feinted inside the reach of the point, and any jab counted as a miss. Within the hour a jab going forward stopped being an opening; only a miss coming back is.
The dragging came the same evening. A downed player near a pack is taken by a leg and pulled away into the dark, and a lone player bitten may be dragged too. At first the wolf was too fast to catch and could pull a body straight through trees and rocks. It slowed to 1.4 meters a second, the body now snags on trees, rocks and ledges until the wolf lets go, and a kick only lands when your feet can reach its head.
Then light. A torch had kept wolves off you even from the far side of a rock, and a sheep behind a ridge was safe from a fire it could not see. From late on October 4 fire and torchlight protect only where the light reaches. The first version let every tree throw a shadow in the firelight, so wolves slipped through it. Taking the tree shadows out took the rocks’ shade with it for a little over an hour, until rocks and cliffs began to shade firelight again early on October 5. Trees still do not.
On October 7 and 8 the wolf also became easier to kill cleanly: an arrow or a spear through the middle of its neck drops it on the spot.
