Perhaps Jem had the dream only because he’d seen the wolves that morning. But if he’d told Enkara, or one of the other old people, they might have said it was a sign. Like the wolf in the story, he’d gone seeking something, and had come to the edge of the world he knew as solid, to find a different world he couldn’t fathom—a world whose border was inhabited by shadows. And they were shadows of himself.

When he awoke, he realized his dreaming mind had faithfully played out a story he knew well. It was one Enkara often told when people crowded into the big, smoky room at the Women’s House to trade tales and songs—the story about the old mother wolf hunting for her shadow. Some of the images in the dream were hazy, as if in a white fog, but most were vivid and clear, as if he’d actually followed the wolf, seen the gray seals among the rocks on the beach, seen the shadow itself.

—from White Sky (Volume I of In the Shadow of the She-Wolf)