[html] wow, i totally didn't think i wrote this much. sorry!
Hemming was not a strong runner. He was fairly fast, certainly, mostly due to his long stride, but he did not have the grace or control of one who was truly made for running. He enjoyed it anyway, especially when it was utilized for entertainment purposes. The wolf made his way through the forest, the thrill of the chase like a drug in his veins, with his feet hitting the ground haphazardly. Occasionally he would glance to the moss carpet of the forest to make sure he wasn't about to step on a particularly obstructive root or the home of a small animal. For the most part, though, his eyes were ahead of him or turned backwards to see how close Anu was. She was a quick runner, her feet barely even hitting the ground before she was in the air again. The only hints of her presence were the flickers of white in between the trees. These glimpses of wolf were getting more and more frequent as the female gained ground, and Hemming knew that he was very close to losing his turn.
As he spent more and more time checking over his shoulder, his odds of disaster increased. The trees were close together and sporadically arranged. A particularly prolonged glance over his shoulder gave a tree time to sneak up on him, in a sense, and the wolf's shoulder grazed it. He took the hint and turned his eyes forward again, but not in time to avoid a second tree that had jumped out in front of him. The wolf hit it at an angle, his chest colliding with its great trunk. If he had hit it straight on, it probably would have been too painful for him to keep on going (the wimp that he was), but the angle and the endorphins that pounded through him seemed to absorb all the pain. As he hit the tree he folded around it, his eyes glancing upwards to its high branches and his arms reaching around to the other side, and with the momentum of his run he slid around it a little. "Good day, sir, and sorry!" Hemming cried up to it, wearing a wide grin combined with sympathetic eyebrows. If the tree had been wearing a hat and Hemming had knocked it off, he would have picked it up, dusted it off, and placed it back on the tree's head. For some reason, the tree seemed to have the personality of an old man, and for just a brief second the odd wolf thought it ought to be wearing a nice bowler hat.
He only had a moment to be off again, though, and he disentangled himself from the tree quickly and started to run once more. Now he paid much more attention to what was in front of him, though he did still glance backwards when he got a chance. Anu was so close to him now, within arm's reach probably. Had she seen him crash into the tree? The thought made him giggle a little as he ran. It wasn't that he would be embarrassed (was that feeling possible around his friend?), but that he had found some humour in it, so perhaps she would have too.
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