Dancing with myself

[Castor]

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For the most part, he had done just as he said he would. Or implied, rather. He was staying well out of the way, and whether the alpha had his issues and it was a real threat, the large sable male saw it as no concern of his. He considered himself an outsider in the pack, and had no plans and no will to change that. Whatever the rest of the pack did was fine by him and ignoring the subtle details was number one on the game plan. If he had one. In fact ― inadvertently ― he had avoided attachment and any sort of permanent residence in Clouded Tears itself, and spent his time anywhere but there. Mostly he had kept to the coast, briefly to the mountains, and once he had vaguely chanced upon the human city, and none of this was anything new to him. When If he slept, he chose anywhere that was just comfortable enough, not to mention strategically located, wherever he happened to be. He didn't have a den in the pack territory itself because he didn't feel it was necessary. Really though, it was more to separate himself from everyone else as much as possible.

The approach of winter was thoroughly welcome. The yellow-eyed male rarely worried about from where his next meal would come, and he preferred those frigid months to the humid, sweltering months of summer. The sea would hardly change save its temperature and he would simply have to do without walking where the water rolled into the shore. Although, the sky was frequently more monotone and the storms would no longer include the rains, and sooner or later he would resent it, he would still welcome the arrival of winter. When it settled in and began to push and shove him, he would grow slightly irritable, he knew, but when it slipped away into spring, he would miss it. It had been the nature of humans too, and he supposed the nature of all beings capable of reasoning and emotion, that satisfaction only existed in a few degrees of all the world around, and the rest was wishing that things were some other way than what they were. He knew this, accepted this, and yet he was still a victim of this, as much as he had ever been, as much as he ever would be.

The fog was not enough to steal or mute his senses, and as he was intending to make his way from the lake to the boundary of the territory, he caught the scent of blood, along with the scent of another wold, somewhere in between, not far from where he stood. A tattered ear strained to detect the faintest sound, his eyes zeroed in on the direction the breeze carried the scent, his nostrils flared, every muscle subconsciously preparing for an outbreak of movement. But he knew it wasn't necessary. That scent belonged to some creature, someone's prey, obviously, and yet as he ventured nearer in his needless curiosity, he thought perhaps that he had heard a faint scraping of feathers. A wolf, a bird? and prey, or perhaps the two latter combined, but he didn't think so.

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