Dejé el sur Viajé al norte Conseguí confuso, maté un caballo
“Usted nunca fallaría incluso en invierno,” huskily drawled the honey Spanish voice of dark el Extranjero, who lay under a summer sun with his back to a tree, twirling a daffodil through his nimble fingers and regarding it airily, “porque no hay tierra ahora a congelar debajo de usted.” He smiled a glint of white teeth. There was a pause as a quiet breeze fluttered the plant's yellow petals. “Ah, feliz verano,” he said to the flower in tones most concluding, and let it flutter lazily to the ground. So the day continued, the engagingly tall coyote getting to his feet with a flamboyant sweep, and pointedly heading North.
New scents were beginning to make themselves known; wolves, a species with whom the open-minded stranger was familiar, but who took a place in el Extranjero's heroic back catalogue only when he deemed them as cultured as he. For wolves and coyotes did not always inter-mingle, and why should they? Different species didn't tend to, no matter how common their ancestors. El Extranjero could be said to have a great deal of weight on his shoulders, but instead he took each day as it came, never dragged back, little time for resting, waves of constant energy to do with what he would, but with, as ever, ongoing élan.
Eventually the land moved quite considerably, and that was what was best about travel. The scenery changing, and el Extranjero saw it with romanticism rather than dull realism; the scenery changed, but el Extranjero didn't. As it did, and as miles passed beneath his paws, his sinuous muscles far from aching, his dark eyes no less keen, the afternoon waned and plains stretched before him. But he halted, and tactfully so, for this was evidently a territory claimed. Had he been a wolf, el Extranjero would have expressed even more appropriate tact by turning and being on his way, for high on wooden pikes were distinctly lupine skulls.
He regarded them not with fear or disgust, but with mild interest. Simple death it may have depicted, but it also suggested a history. He took a walk along the borders. And he did so without any great deliberation; he wasn't stalking the territory or waiting to get in; or spying or loitering. The Spaniard's gaze picked up the landscape and noted it like some tenacious geographer.
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