After he familiarised himself with the she wolf he spent sometime speaking with her, he spoke about Winterfell, his family, loss of his mother, the North ,the time he spent at Eeyrie, he didn't know why, he felt like she understands, when grief choked his voice when he spoke of his mother she whined and licked his face as though to cheer him up. After words ran dry she laid her head in his lap as he ran his fingers through her fur. After sometime he heard his gaurds approach and a wolf howl in the distance, she got up sniffed him one last time, licked his face and disappeared into the forest, silent as a shadow.
Captain of his guardsmen , Rodrick Cassel entered the grove and said, " My Lord, you have missed the midday meal and evening is fast approaching, it would be better to leave now, if we want to return to Castle Black before nightfall"
" Thank you , Captain, I have lost time in my contemplations, I will eat some jerky while horseback, let us return in haste, as we don't want to be caught beyond the Wall after losing daylight" , Ned replied .
They made good time back to Castle Black, and reached it well before dying of daylight. As he neared the Wall though, Ned felt as there was a soft thrum in the background just beyond hearing, yet the guardsmen and Black Brothers not seem to notice. He pushed the thought aside and once again joined Lord Commander for supper in his solar .
The next day he joined Maester Aemon for his survey . The Maester is man of vast knowledge and great wisdom, at five and seventy namedays old, he was one of the oldest people he met, on par with Old Nan, and the numbers and data he provided painted a very bleak picture of Nights Watch, the Black Brothers numbered a little less than two thousand and five hundred, of them not even a one half of them are volunteers, while financial situation is not truly dire, that was only because of their dwindling numbers, builders and skilled craftsmen are rare in number, only revenue Nights Watch has are taxes from the North , as the South and the Crown hasn't been sending any aid in decades, except for a horse breeder near Queenscrown, land of Gift and New Gift produce neither revenue nor grain, as any villages that spring up there are usually destroyed in raids by Wildlings. While Mole's Town is named a town, it houses less than five hundred people , it is mainly used by Black Brothers for its brothels, and it doesn't generate any revenue worth noting. If situation continues deteriorate at current pace there won't be a Nights Watch in fifty years. This won't do, even the hypothetical threat of Others is great enough that the Wall should be manned to capacity, the Wall is a tremendous military asset, but it won't help jackshit if there are no men to man it. Eddard needed to expand his plans for the Wall beyond a business venture, to do that he needed to know how the situation has come to this, and here is a man who witnessed last four decades of it first hand and knowledgeable about what happened decades before that. Eddard is going to spend majority of his time at Castle Black with Maester Aemon.