Foulsen

Body

Compact and thick-set against the cold. The winter coat is pure white and deep enough to hide the frame, moulting to a thin blue-grey in summer. The ears are markedly shorter and rounder than their kin's, the muzzle blunted, the footpads furred over. They hear prey moving beneath snowpack.

Under the coat it is the base body and the base costs. The heel rides high, the leg is a long spring with a heavy tendon down the back of it, and it gives forty yards from a standing start and nothing after that. The eye is a dusk eye that opens to a full round black at a quarter of a moon and closes to a hair in the glare off snow, which is the one country where a Foulen's daylight is worse than everyone else's. The brush is the balance organ and is carried low in company and level when working, and a docked brush in that country is a shorter sentence than elsewhere, since a Foulen who cannot turn at speed does not last the winter.

Country

The northern verge, which is the Verge like any other, the band where the trees stop and somebody's living begins, except that in the north the living walks. The last stunted trees, tundra beyond, herd tracks, sledge roads and sod villages, and a range that is a route rather than a boundary.

They are the only Foulen who follow rather than hold, tracking the herds and the herders instead of working a fixed four to nine miles of margin. They will not go deep into forest, which is the Fould's, and they will not live inside a town, though the taverns of a northern trading post are kept in business by them in the dark months.

Where the Ossurn hold the frontier, the Foulsen are on the outside of the wall, and there is trade. The Ossurn are tolerant in a way that surprises everyone who hears it, and their reason is that a thief in that country is a person who has not been given enough yet, which makes the Foulsen the only Foulen anywhere who are met at a door with cloth instead of dogs.

Society

Their thin packs are the largest, because in that country a lone Foulen freezes, and a bought pack is warmth as well as numbers. The bell does what it does everywhere: a collar of polished metal, a pack trained to it from the first day, and a boss who has not needed to raise his voice in years. Ohmi Redglove, who runs forty and holds a legal charter as a road warden, is a Foulsen out of the snow country and uses the charter.

The two Nights are kept, the taboo list is kept, and an oath is sworn on the brush held in the swearer's own hand. The rite of the Silent Horn is performed at the edge at dusk, alone, in full, and nothing answers it in the north either.