My sense of the Shadow Children and why a last one ("call me Ishi") produces a Group Norm of Self/Other confusion:
Please correct me. I think the name sets change entirely for each number group of Shadow Children.
When there is only one Shadow Child, he is "Wolf."
When there are five (or maybe six? if we include the newly adopted one) then one of the group (or each?) is "Swan."
At stages in between one and five (or six) there are "Foxfire," "Hatcher," "Hunter."
To make one set of all this (under the possibly incorrect assumption that new names are added to the list rather than having an entirely different list for each group size):
1. Wolf
2. Foxfire
3. Hatcher
4. Hunter
5. Swan
6. (the New One)
Well anyway, we don't know what the optimum number of Shadow Children is. When it gets down to one, i.e., "Wolf," it is actually =two= because Sandwalker (adopted as "the New One" in my terminology above) is still there.
So we don't really know what a lone Shadow Child would be called.
And we do know that the Group Norm of "Wolf" in "A Story" is one Shadow Child and one something-more-human, that is to say, the Group Norm is now 50% Shadow Child and 50% human, where it started out as 84% Shadow Child and 15% human. Thus the fuzzy nature of tribal identity at this later stage.
Throw me a bone, as it is said.
=mantis=