Quinoa

Quinoa was a deaf wolf whom Polar found in the Prairie. She doesn't talk either, but uses signals to communicate. In fact, she had to point to quinoa plants to give Polar her name. Despite her disability and age, Quinoa was a trained hunter and proved to be quite competent using her scent to track prey. Quinoa will always be remembered as a welcome addition to Rime Pack, doing as much as she could to help the pack, until both her body and vision had grown frail, forcing her to retire.

One day, Polar would one day find Quinoa wandering about in the Prarie, after she had seemingly gone missing. The pale yellow wolf was sniffing around in a ranch hut, no place for any sane wolf. It took Polar a while to get Quinoa's attention, but she was able to retrieve her just before the humans arrived with their shooting sticks. When they got back to territory, Polar noticed Quinoa was carrying a few herbs with her: a quinoa stalk, and bunches of the mysterious flowers that had been popping everywhere. But, rather than give the flowers to the herbalists, Quinoa ate them up as though they were as delectable as fresh meat.

Quinoa would continue this pattern of traveling to the Prairie bringing back the mystery herbs. Polar was worried Quinoa would end up somewhere she couldn't be found. The last time she would see Quinoa in the prairie was right after the mysterious flowers had stopped appearing in the lands. Quinoa was desperate to find more of these plants, but they had all disappeared completely. She ended up stuck beneath a barn fence, so Polar had to pull her out before the cry of roosters would summon the man in change. The two barely escaped as he was shooting, though Quinoa was still trying to turn back. For days, Quinoa would become upset, and she held onto the strange herbs she had managed to gather, even though they had long since dried out. The herbalists were the ones who concluded that Quinoa's sadness was likely due to homesickness, as the flowers were non-native, and may have come from her home land. Polar would then assign Misty and Gravel to take on the role of caring for and comforting the old she-wolf.

After showing signs of memory loss, Quinoa's overall health would decline, to the point where she refused food. She would be the first wolf of Rime to die of old age, a fate more merciful compared to her predecessors. Polar wonders if, in her passage, Quinoa might instead choose to wander the fields of her native homeland.

Polar would soon uncover the Sleeplands, the place where Rime's ancestors would continuously reside. She found out that Quinoa had chosen to stay there, watching over the pack which took her in, and communicating with Ravine, their Moonspeaker.