Ghost

The silent white runt found a little away from the litter ÔÇö like the boy who claimed him.

The wolf itself

Ghost is white ÔÇö not pale grey, not cream, but a true unbroken white from nose to tail ÔÇö with eyes of a deep red that catch a torch and hold it. He was the runt and the smallest of the six by a clear margin, small enough that anyone weighing him up at that age would have written him off. He did not stay small. Past the first year he began outgrowing his brothers and sisters and never stopped, until at full size he is the largest of the litter: a heavy-shouldered animal who can put his head on a standing manÔÇÖs chest without lifting it, and who is capable of dragging down a horse. In snow he is close to invisible, which is a considerable advantage in the part of the world he ended up in, and which has got several people killed who did not know he was there.

The thing everyone notices is the silence. He does not bark, growl, whine or howl ÔÇö not as a pup, not since. The other five made a racket in the crate on the way back to Winterfell and this one made none at all, and that is where the name came from. He warns by appearing. He shows his teeth without a sound, which is worse than a snarl and is understood as such by wolves, dogs and men alike. His temperament is his boyÔÇÖs in every particular: he does not seek company, he watches from the edge of the room, he is not friendly and is not hostile either, and he attaches himself completely and permanently to exactly one person. He is also, when he does decide to move, the most sudden of the six.

The bond

The finding is the single most efficient piece of characterisation in the first book. Six pups beside their dead mother, five Stark children counted out with one each, and a bastard doing the arithmetic aloud and concluding there was none for him ÔÇö and then hearing something in the snow a little way off, and coming back with a sixth: white, red-eyed, silent, and lying apart from the litter. Nobody has to explain the parallel. Nobody in the scene does.

The warging came slowly and was resisted. Jon spent years having dreams he described to nobody, in which he was running with his own limbs the wrong shape and the whole world had gone to smell and sound rather than sight, and in which he could taste blood he had not spilled. He also dreamed of the crypts under Winterfell, repeatedly, and hated it. When he and the wolf were parted for a long stretch, the dreams got stronger rather than weaker ÔÇö which is how the story tells the reader that the thing is real, and that it does not need proximity, and that the Stark children have been given something rather larger than a pet.

It is worth noting how much of himself Jon puts into this animal. He is a boy raised in a household that fed him, taught him and never quite let him belong. Ghost belongs to him without qualification. Everything Jon does afterwards with people ÔÇö the awkward, dutiful, unmistakably deep loyalty ÔÇö he learned to do with a wolf first.

At the Wall

Ghost went north with him and turned out to be worth more than most of the men. He hunted and fed himself, which no other recruitÔÇÖs possessions did; he found things underground that nobody had looked for, including a cache of buried dragonglass in a cloak of the Watch, which is the sort of discovery that changes a war three books later; he woke his boy in the night and took him up the tower stair when a thing that should not have been walking was already inside it; and he made himself extremely disliked by an eagle belonging to a man who could see through it.

He also does the thing that direwolves in this story are actually for, which is to have opinions. Ghost dislikes certain men on sight and is invariably right about them. He objects to certain rooms. He puts himself between his boy and people who have not yet drawn anything, and the record of those instincts is unbroken ÔÇö every single time somebody at the Wall has ignored the white wolfÔÇÖs assessment of a man, they have been wrong.

Beyond the Wall and back

The one long separation came when Jon went over the Wall among the free folk and could not bring an animal that would have announced exactly what he was. They were apart for months. During that time the wolf dreams did not stop; if anything Jon slid further into them, and the free folk ÔÇö who have names for this and are frightened of it ÔÇö noticed things about him that he had not admitted to himself.

When the two of them found each other again it was in the middle of something violent, and it was decisive, and the reunion is written with no sentiment at all: the wolf simply arrives and the situation ends. That is the shape of the whole relationship. Ghost is not a comfort animal and the story never makes him one. He is a silent, enormous, red-eyed fact that turns up when it is required, belongs to one man, and asks for nothing.

What became of it ÔÇö if an ending is written, it is here. Spoilers.

The chronicle records no ending here ÔÇö or none the maesters have set down.