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Oren's Forge PG 352 (Patreon)

Published:
2025-08-04 21:00:07
Imported:
2026-09
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Content

New page out next Monday!

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Comments

Dhaka Yeena

Damn these bison do not play around

JD

Still kinda confused to why new pups can’t join. He said the sun will kill the pups in front of swift or use them for sport why? What’s stopping the sun from doing the same to the pack’s pups?

Dhaka Yeena

I think it’s just “new pups” the pups they already have are enough, anymore would be too many

JD

Perhaps they do not want the wolves to outnumber them?

Sarah

It’s understandable to not accept new pups, but Singer’s actions went far beyond reasonable when he hunted Swift down rather than just letting her move on. It’s unclear if Hap is complicit in that or if it was Singer going a bit rouge, but it wouldn’t be illogical for it to be part of the sun and moon pack’s strategy to simply eliminate any and all competition, including pups from other packs. Wild wolves in real life do it all the time! But obviously it’s in their interest to have Ramble think they’re reasonable and that Swift abandoned him. Interesting to see how things pan out!

LukeOnTheBrightSide

Rask has gotta be fishing for the pups, right? I’m so excited for that!

LukeOnTheBrightSide

They don’t want dead weight. Pups that can’t contribute don’t benefit the herd, and the herd is facing serious struggles from armed competition. Whatever way the wolves are fed is very much looking like it’s not worth it. When the wolves are useful, keeping the pups fed is how you get more wolves for the next generation. When the wolves aren’t useful… why have the pups? The wolves aren’t in charge here and don’t have any threat of becoming in charge. It’s brutal, but so is life for most of them.

Gale Tazzin

might just be that the bison want to destroy any wolves who won't protect them. it seems like Singer and Hap were BOTH acting on the Sun's orders

JD

That makes sense. Thank you!

Julian Seguin

Survival of the fittest. And I definitely think Ramble is coming around to their way of thinking. The mere thought of the Bison going full “Mountain” on Swift’s pups is scarring enough. Also, love the continuity of Keen’s mate grieving after learning of his death. Do they have a name?

Torakhan

So the wolves see themselves as submissive to the Herd, who literally throw them a bone now and again for being their foot soldiers. An interesting twist.

Torakhan

Then again, given that they lost so many of their hunters, you'd think the herd would want them to regain their numbers... unless the novelty of the wolves as merely scouts for the herd is wearing off.

JD

That’s what I thought as well. They’ve lost a lot of Hunters so what’s the harm in allowing new pups to join? Perhaps there’s more to it than we thought

Torakhan

Also, did I miss something, or are we seeing a prelude to another story piece where something happened to one of those two wolves' cubs, or mates, or something?

Krzysztof K

I'm curious about how bizon feed wolves and what mothers choose to give to the wolves, and what Hap's solution is for sharp animals.

Microgrampup

Swift killed her mate, Keen.

Grey

I didn't think of that! Good eye!

Microgrampup

The grey mothers are starting to not want the hunters to regain their numbers and need more bulls to be eaten if they’re just going to need large numbers of the bison killed in battle anyway. For now, Hap saved them all by learning how to “deal” with armed prey. However I imagine it does not take much evolution for the prey they chased off to finally learn how to get around Hap’s solution and they’re back to square one where the hunters need the herd to sacrifice their members in both battle and Zenith. They’re just letting their wolves kill off entire generations that could have helped them against competing herbivores just out of pure altruism at that point. They’ll want more bulls to help them fight off armed prey and preserve even more of the grey mothers’ family lines, and no wolves to end family lines while being useless in combat in that case.

Teagan Gavet

Oh, to put it plainly-- consider if you are a bison and you have a herd made up of bulls, calves and mothers. You invest in wolves to cut down on outside predation and to ensure you always have the best grass for your family to graze. In return, you get to "choose" a set amount of bison who will die and be fed to the wolves. You no longer have to worry about calves or mothers dying. The alternative is you have no wolves, and you risk losing more bison, particularly calves and mothers to predation or starvation. Things are less stable and more random, more prone to collapse. If, however, you have just a bunch of puppies who cannot offer you any protection from the outside world or secure good grazing ground, then for YEARS as they grow you are now sacrificing bison to feed them, as well as losing random bison (including mothers and calves) to predation. So, puppies are just a sunk cost with no return.

Teagan Gavet

There's also more the narrative will reveal about Hap and the Mothers but I think it's easy to make the case that the pups that were already born into the pack got grandfathered in.

JD

That makes a lot more sense. Thank you! Love your work!

Dario

I love the depth of Singer where he has that "different person at work than he is at home" vibe. Really appreciate how no one is one dimensional here, and they all show a cold and warm side. The four square panel where Hap, Singer, and Singer's mate put the close on Ramble, and give him the reality and honesty of the situation that he deserved, with the follow up comforting paws on his shoulder is brilliant.

Luckyclaw

"What's stopping them?" Was actually answered directly in an early panel at the start of Part 3! Nothing. Nothing is stopping the bison from just trampling the wolves. The Sun will do whatever he wants, actually, it seems that Hap is not truly an equal authority.

Luckyclaw

I'm reminded of the cougars who tortured Hemlock's daughter as they ate her alive back in Part 1. Bored and lazy at the same time. I love the way Teagan can connect the cruelty of both herbivores and carnivores and bring the theme back around so often.

Luckyclaw

I think it's both. It suddenly makes sense why Singer kept saying "the zenith PAIR" instead of "the moon" during his little campaign... but also, Hap seemed clueless about why Ramble was SO jumpy when he first came, and Singer's personality has flipped from "WE WILL PAINT THE WORLD WITH THE BLOOD OF YOUR CHILDREN" to "uwu soft bean." I think this society is barbaric and Singer is a snake who found a comfy niche in it.

Krzysztof K

Hap keeps saying that the only function of wolves is to protect the bison from predators and danger. During the pronghorn war, the bison saw that wolves weren't all that effective because the pronghorns were quite effective against them with metal, so the gray mothers wondered whether to keep the wolves. Why didn't the bison figure out that they could defend themselves with metal, which they now have baskets full of? Hap's idea for metal weapons must be really good, because it makes me worry about the Hollow animals and my favorite characters.

Chasey

They make a convincing argument, but I still think Singer's an absolute rat.

Luckyclaw

(to preface this isn't being critical of the plot, but being interested by the logic the bison are employing here and putting out thoughts and feelings about it) Seeing puppies as "sunk cost without return" is still incredibly short-sighted, though, because... clearly they DO have return. There's actually four big ones; 1. Obviously, a puppy becomes an adult. The return is a grown wolf in 6 months, give or take how altered the setting's metabolism is for "anthro-mammalians." 2. Puppies who have grown up in the Zenith are socialized to its customs. If the bison care about the temperament of the wolves in their pack, it's much wiser to target younger animals who're more receptive to learning the group's philosophy. Adults are likely to join with a notion that the bison are just future meals and look for loopholes, which needs time to unlearn and could pose a threat in the meanwhile. 3. The return on investment is higher when the pup joins later into its childhood. Getting a "toddler" means skipping a pregnancy, whelping, AND infancy-- which means less meat invested. "Wildborn" pups are much more efficient than a "herdborn" litter. 4. "Where there's a pup, there's a pack." Less adult wolves are being recruited because parents won't come without their kids. This means more herdborn litters are needed to reach that pre-Pronghorn population, and ergo a less favorable pup-to-wolf ratio on top of the lower ROI. And even more than that, the command to kill babies lowers morale (unless youre singer lol), and is simply counterproductive to Hap's goal of stability. The Zenith didn't just fail to recruit more hunters, they LOST two. In fact, Singer's sadistic prose about baby's blood bloodlust was what broke Scree. "Quality" recruits like strong hunters and friendly/prosocial blokes are more likely to have kids in their lives they care about, and therefore refuse to cooperate. This strategy is going to keep selecting for two personality types to join the Zenith; reluctant recruits who just don't want to die, and violent thrillseekers who are enabled to be as cruel and brutal as they like because there's a constant supply of rolling hills to conquer. It's people like Keen, seemingly upstanding members of their community, and Scree, who has a breaking point where she won't stand for injustice, who are eliminated. People like Singer go home at night. But the bison probably don't even see that, because they don't seem to see the wolves as equally "human." Or, whatever the general term for a sapient animal in this setting is. Wolves are tools to the bison. Specifically, tools of enforcement. Bison seem both scared of and disgusted by the dogs, worried about being "hunted as a stray" if they leave, but also demanding submission, and even reveling in the idea of tormenting pups to death as "sport." Hap doesn't seem to have a say in this, as if she would just have to watch helplessly if the Sun murdered a child in front of her. For The Gray Mothers to even consider a question like "Keeping The Wolves Around" reveals that wolves aren't considered citizens of a collective society lead by "The Zenith Pair." The dogs are the Sun's pets. You can do anything you'd like to them as long as he approves. I said it in another comment, but I'm having flashbacks to the horrific behavior of the cougars who captured Hemlock's fluffle. Yet, this is somehow even worse than the lions, because it doesn't just stop with animals they would have killed and eaten either way. I keep thinking about those pronghorns. To the Zenith, they were "following the rain," but to those Pronghorn, it was home. Intelligent animals living in one place for a long time would have known of and welcomed the restorative ecological impact that bison bring to a shortgrass prairie biome. In fact-- Pronghorn LOVE bison. Bison graze down tall grass and woody shrubs that pronghorn don't eat. Pronghorns even start their rut right after the bison's, because grazed land is their optimal habitat. So for them to take up arms like that, to "deny access" to their land? Land that was pretty clearly overgrowing...? Hap didn't tell Ramble the whole story, and it's likely Pivot merely scratched the surface. The bison seem to demand absolute control over whatever pasture they set their eyes on, expunging the native population of both predator and prey, using the wolves as colonial soldiers. They don't want to see or hear about anything troubling. No "fear" of the outside world, no stewardship over the land, only benefit of its resources. Worrying endlessly about social constructs like status and herd position, while also being completely unable to ask for help from their peers for anything as simple as collecting some medicine. A self-made hell. Something is wrong about the Zenith, deeply wrong. Something destructive, short-sighted, and cruel. It makes me eager to get back to the Hollow, to see how it evolves socially. How it'll both compare and contrast to the other "mixed" society we just glimpsed. TL;DR haha funny furries go brrr

Krzysztof K

On the previous page, Hap said that the pronghorns refused to let the herd enter the new pasture. I understand Hap's statement to mean that the pronghorns were confused about what was going on. The wolves could have explained everything to them (I guess they know the herbivores' language, after all, they talk to the bison), or the bison themselves, but it was the pronghorns who wouldn't let them in. This gives me a little hope that maybe all this (with Hollow and Zenith) won't end the way I wrote in the comment on the previous page.

Grey

No mention of "we'll be the only pack left" though. I wonder when that shoe will drop; I don't expect during the initiation.

Felidae

If hap wants more healthy adult wolves as hunters they've been doing a really bad job sofar if it really is true that the Bison mothers want to restore protection/force projection from more healthy adult wolves the Zenith wolves meeting the wild wolves have been nothing but self-sabotaging Also Luckyclaw has some great points on future plot development

treefiddy

I'm curious if the wolves of the zenith rely entirely on bison meat as their only source of food, or do they branch out some and augment their 'gifts' from the grey mothers with other animals/plants in the area. Especially as of late since they've been receiving less and less meat as their pact destabilizes.

Luckyclaw

I'd reckon they're supplementing their diet significantly, since the bison sacrifices are once a month and they don't have a mobile fridge. The waste of meat here would actually be staggering if they aren't doing systematic food processing.

treefiddy

Wolves IRL will typically go a couple weeks to a month between meals. A real wolf can also eat upwards of 40 pounds of meat in a single sitting. So I dont think it would be too much of a stretch to assume they are actually only eating once a month. If every wolf eats their fill of meat, they could clear out all of the offerings and get their months worth of calories in just a couple days. Rake also mentions that the full moon means full bellies, I don’t think that'd be a significant point if they were actually eating more regularly than that.

Givemeyourmilk

Fascinating how the bison provide for the wolves, but it is the bison who call the shots. Much like keeping dogs for protection.

Luckyclaw

It's true that they CAN go two weeks without eating, but it's not a good thing for their bodies to do that all the time, and it's not typical! There are animals that swallow a large meal and then conserve energy by digesting it over a long period, but most mammals don't work like that. Especially not a pack like the Zenith, who can't just laze around for days after they eat. (also another quick correction; they can eat about 20 - 25 pounds in a single sitting, about 20% of the individual's body weight. Gray wolves are between 150 and 60 pounds as adults, so 40 pounds would be record-setting for even the largest sizes. A chicken is 5 pounds and a wolf's stomach is about the size of a basketball. Imagine putting 8 chickens into a basketball. Now imagine the tummyache.) For reference, a human can also go 2 weeks without eating. We can even last about 1 - 2 months before we die of starvation, on nothing but water. WITH an "average" of 1.5 pounds of food a day (as in, he got 5 fawns and a beaver and ate them quickly), V080 of the Voyaguers Wolf Monitoring Project took about 2 months to burn through his fat reserves and starve to death. Comparable to a human. (tangentially related, this is a massive W for wolves. Primates, and especially humans, have a ridiculously slow metabolism. Being on-par with a human in terms of how long you can fast is remarkable in the mammalian kingdom. Rask absolutely cannot do this. In fact, American martens can't even store fat very well, and need to constantly eat. COMMON SMALL CARNIVORE L. MAKE WAY FOR THE REAL GENERALIST, FUZZY POOL NOODLE) What IS typical is that in abundance, wolves are feasting. They're eating almost every day and just picking out the best parts of their kills to get fat, not even dealing with low-value parts like skeletal muscle and bone marrow. Then, in times of scarcity, they've got fat reserves to deal with that "famine" part of their lives. This is when they'll circle back to old carcasses, crunch hard bones and stale meat, turn towards human garbage, y'know. Stuff you don't really WANNA do, but hunger wins out. "Feast and Famine" is used to describe gray wolf diets in simplicity a lot, but as a simplification, it cuts out the fact that "Feast" and "Famine" also includes two halves of the year. You need seasons of abundance to pack fat for those lean periods. After all, starvation and malnutrition are actually two different medical conditions. Often related, but not the same thing. (yet another side note; I can't hunt down a source that completely confirms if wolves go TOTALLY without eating during the "two week" number that keeps coming up. I see some sources describing this as "two weeks without a MAJOR meal," which makes me think that doesn't rule out supplemental "snacking" every few days. Diet and nutrition is a lot more complicated than a "hunger bar" that gives you a game over when it hits zero, and nuance doesn't find its way into the snapple cap funfacts.) All that to say, eating once a month every month is really unlikely. Even if just for the fact that you don't stop getting hungry when you're fat. If you've got nothing in your stomach, it's going to hurt, and you're going to be affected by that feeling. It only takes 8 hours for food to fully pass through their digestive tract-- there's truth in the phrase "Hungry like the Wolf." BONUS MATH: I decided to crunch some numbers to see if, ALL NUANCE REMOVED, just TOTALLY accepting the monthly food wages, a Zenith wolf could eat enough to create the correct "average" of meat to last the month. AND how much time and how many wolves you'd need for no food waste. - A wolf could eat 20 pounds at a sitting, and it takes food 8 hours to pass through its system. - That's 3 meals in a 24 hour period. - 60 pounds of meat can be consumed in a day. - Wolf needs somewhere between 2.5 - 3.7 pounds a day to survive, 5 - 7 a day to thrive. - I'm going to simplify that to 3 pounds and 6 pounds so I don't have to deal with decimals. I hate you decimals. - We're also going to say a month is 30 days because I continue to hate decimals. (MORE SIDE NOTE: I don't think 3 pounds of meat is actually enough for a Zenith wolf. According to Voyaguer, V080 needed about 5 pounds a day to maintain his body weight. I'm guessing that's because he was a yearling, and needed all that extra energy to do his active solo hunting. Zenith wolves feel comparable to that, needing to keep up with the herd, run long distances, and fight to the death on a regular basis. I'd more comfortably put the estimate of daily average meat at 5 to survive and 10 to thrive, based off what I hear from gray wolf field studies rather than general wolf org articles. BUT. THAT SAID. FOR THE SAKE OF ARGUMENT. 3 to survive, 6 to thrive, 10 to... jive idk.) If the herd only allows the wolves to eat from the carcass for ONE day before moving on, those 60 pounds of meat will only give that wolf a 2lbs/day average. Literally "starvation wages" which would need outside supplementation-- or maybe the occasional stray or fallen sickly. If the herd is stopped for a THREE day feast after the full moon, that's 60 x 3 = 180 pounds for the month. That's 6lbs/day, which would be enough to thrive on. In order to hit the highest estimate of needing 10lbs/day to thrive on, the herd would need to stay parked for FIVE entire days for one wolf to pack in 300 pounds of meat. During that time, the wolves would need to be doing nothing but diligently gorging themselves every 8 hours. Assuming that the Gray Mothers chose to sacrifice only 1 fully grown bull at a given Zenith, there would be 2,000 pounds of meat at the full moon. You would need about 33 wolves to eat it all in one day, 11 for 3 days, and about 7 to eat it all in 5. Not only CAN the Zenith support a massive population, they actually NEED a lot of wolves in order to not leave behind a trail of morsels that scavengers would follow. (TL;DR it's more about time spent eating than pure amount of food provided. This also feels like further justification for my contempt towards the Zenith's bison for demanding puppy purges from newcomers. The 15 they have might not even be a drain if they're already killing 2 bulls to feed the remaining adults and moving on after 3 days, since you can't sacrifice only half of a person. By the time they eat substantial rations, they're big enough to contribute.) (...and now I'm wondering just how many adult wolves they actually have, currently. Have you counted?)

Luckyclaw

Another detail I like a lot is how Hap and Singer keep touching Ramble when they give him the motivational baloney. I hate when people do that. It's like when a scummy manager is trying to convince you that you're all One Big Family™ at MinimumwageCorp.