Notch is the name that stuck because nobody gave him a better one. Born in Crinos with curved pronghorns and a scream like a coyote caught in wire, he was the visible proof of somebody's broken Litany. Sept-raised, barely tolerated, he drifted to the edges as soon as he could. First the edges of the sept, then the edges of town, then the edges of the wilderness between. He lives like a coydog: denning in culverts and under porches, eating what he can scavenge or kill, moving through the spaces between human and wild that neither side claims. The people in town know him as the weird skinny guy who smells like an animal and wears a hat pulled low. The coyotes in the hills know him as the strange one who walks on two legs sometimes. He doesn't think of himself as a person, exactly. He's Notch: the fork in a pronghorn's horn, a tally mark on a fencepost, a mountain pass you go through to get somewhere else. HOMID: Lean, angular, sun-weathered. Hard bony lumps on the forehead where the horns push through, coverable with a hat. Moves with a rolling lope that reads as off. Light amber eyes that make people at the gas station look twice and then look away. Smells like wild animal no matter how recently he's washed. GLABRO: Wiry, rawboned, looks like he's been sleeping rough for years. Sharp cheekbones, too-prominent brow ridges where the horns are trying to break through. The loping gait gets worse. The smell gets worse. People can't place it but they don't want to be near it. CRINOS: A jackal-thing. Too lean, too angular, all wrong angles and sinew instead of bulk. Long arms, knobby joints, that narrow coyote skull stretched over a frame that shouldn't exist. The pronghorns are fully grown and prominent, curved, hard, undeniable. Bright amber eyes with that flat reflective predator shine. The kind of thing that makes other Garou uneasy, not because it's big and scary, but because it looks like something the Wyld coughed up by accident. HISPO: Bigger than a natural wolf but the proportions stay wrong. Legs too long, ribcage too narrow, ears too big for the head. The pronghorns are fully defined and curving. Looks like something out of a rancher's campfire story about what he saw by the fence line at dusk. LUPUS: A coydog. Smaller than a proper wolf, lean and leggy, oversized ears, narrow snout. Tawny dusty fur, patchy and uneven. The pronghorns sit between the ears like stubby curved growths. Looks like something you'd see trotting along a highway ditch at dusk. Not quite coyote, not quite dog, not quite right.

Notch was born in a sept somewhere along the Front Range. He doesn't talk about which one, and nobody's asked twice. The birth was what it always is for Metis: a screaming reminder of someone's shame. He was raised in the sept because they had to, tolerated because the Litany says you don't throw away what Gaia makes, even the broken things. He learned what they taught him and stayed out of the way when they didn't want to see him. After his Rite of Passage he left. There wasn't a fight about it. He just stopped being there one day, and nobody came looking. He ranged the Front Range corridor for a couple of years, living rough along the edges of Denver and Colorado Springs, drifting through suburbs in Lupus where the eating was easy: trash cans, pet food left on porches, the occasional rabbit in a drainage ditch. He pushed north toward Wyoming when things got too hot in the city sprawl, then drifted back south when winter bit. A coydog circuit, following the food and the weather. He found the Vail caern by accident, or maybe by Curious pulling him somewhere he shouldn't have gone. The sept was already bleeding when he got there. The old beta had led an unsanctioned raid into the silver mines and paid for it with his life, along with several ranked members. The new beta, the former Mistress of Rites, had sealed whatever Wyrm-thing was down there, but the seal was a patch job and the corruption was still leaking into the local wildlife. The sept was short-handed and fractured, and that's probably the only reason anyone let a stinking Metis coydog skulk around the edges. The alpha, an Uktena elder, took a kindness on him that Notch still doesn't entirely understand. Maybe he saw something useful in the scrawny horned thing poking around where it shouldn't. Uktena watch and wait and see value in things other tribes throw away. Either way, he let him stay, and staying is the closest thing Notch has to a home.