07-15-2009, 04:58 PM
[html]This post is a bit sucky. D:
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Warren was frustrated. The rain, which had been a constant over the past few days, had finally let up, though the lull was nothing more than a calm between yet another storm. Dark clouds still queued above the earth, grumbling faintly like a beast in slumber. The weather was generally gross, the ground soggy and the air thick with humidity, but Warren was quite hungry and in need of a meal. His supplies had run out just the day before, as he had eaten all the jerky he had prepared himself, so there was no option but to hunt. And hunting was the source of his frustration. He had never been an adept hunter. For most of his life he had lacked the will to hunt for himself and therefore not become skilled in the art of lone hunting. The toll that starvation had taken on his body still lingered as well; he was considerably under his natural weight and very much far from his potential. With all that was against him, he knew he needed to try. Picking up the relatively fresh scent of a hare sometime earlier in the day, he had followed it all the way to the edge of the dense forest, where it grew stronger. He slipped quietly over the sodden earth, in his excitement shifting from Lupus to Secui as he moved. As he emerged from a tangle of old deciduous trees and into a small meadow, the scent trail gave way to the form of the young hare grazing obliviously at the far end. Warren crouched, feeling anxious and with the sense that he was about to make a fool of himself. Both prey and predator took off at exactly the same moment, bursting wildly back into the forest. The hare zigzagged through the trees with uncanny speed, executing turns seemingly in mid-air, but Warren kept up. The pair kept up their dance through the trees for several minutes, waltzing like leaves tossed by the wind. And then the hare made a fatal mistake; it turned sharply to circle around a wide oak and double back the way they had come, intending to confuse and shake Warren off its tail. It was unsuccessful. Completely convinced that he was making the wrong decision, Warren came around the tree from the opposite direction and, to his surprise, face to face with the hare. With a swift nip to its neck, the hare was dead and in the lanky wolf's jaws. Warren laughed in surprise and triumph, the sound muffled against the soft fur in his mouth. What the flint canine failed to realize was that his chase had taken him very close to the borders of an unfamiliar pack. The sky rumbled loudly, and the first few drops of the storm began to fall. |
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