08-31-2009, 11:37 PM
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| http://digital-bonsai.com/katew/rp/kae/kae_fall.jpg); background-position:top center; background-repeat:no-repeat; background-position:fixed; padding-top:240px; padding-left:15px; padding-right:15px; padding-bottom:10px;"> The coyote woman had lived in a pack once, in a time that seemed like ancient history now. She had been less than a year old, her head barely at her alpha's shoulder. It was a foggy, dim time in the coyote woman's head. Her memory could not recall many specific details, just the vaguest impressions of things that might have happened. Then again, memory in function was often wildly inaccurate, only occasionally recording reality as it actually was. There was generally some slant, some skewing of perspective that only increased as the time between the present and the moment the memory had been formed. All she could recall now was a crushing sense of unity, suffocating and uncomfortable. From what she remembered, everything was based on conformity and sameness, whereas Inferni's bonds stemmed from their shared blood and a single ideal, wordless and unspoken, but pulsing beneath the surface, inherited from the coyote clans which had spawned their kind. The coyote woman knew that the wolves used different rank systems from her own, but she had no idea how much they'd changed. Any of the names she would remember were gone, and she had no use to learn any of the leadership rank's names, only that they were leaders and subleaders. That was all that mattered to the hybrid woman; the rest of them were simply serfs, the tiny wheels of the machine that spun and kept it running. "Our leader," she elaborated, nodding to herself. Aquila was a more powerful word than alpha, she thought—maybe alpha was older, but Aquila simply had a better sound to it. The red wolf before her spoke of death, and the coyote listened intently. She was confused at first; so this pack was a clan that had existed elsewhere first, and they were an extension of the original. The hybrid woman spied a fallen tree several feet away, relatively fresh. There was still life in parts of it—though it was totally horizontal and fully half of its roots system was exposed, green leaves still dangled from the far end of the tree, since parts of its roots were still submerged beneath the dirt. It must have fallen recently during the storms, and the coyote woman pointed it out to him. "There?" Though Kaena knew damn well where Inferni stood as far as trespassers went, she was uncertain as far as visitors went—it wasn't a good idea to allow foreign canines to creep around inside of their land, even with a guardian. The coyote started toward it, looking over her shoulder to insure the other was following. The walk was short, after after about twenty feet the coyote woman settled onto the tree, leaning her back against a thick, raised root. She dropped the rabbit at her foot, and it crumpled into a pile. "I need to bring this back for the others. The rain caused some of our territory to flood, and hunting has been scarce these past weeks," she explained. She hadn't even eaten any herself yet; there were younger mouths still in Inferni, most importantly Mason. He was far too small to be hunting successfully on his own. This little tidbit was hardly an admission of weakness; they still had the coast to fish from, and once the rain settled and the waste drained of all the excess runoff, things would be back to normal again. The hybrid woman's single eye focused on Dawali for a moment, watching the russet wolf, again surprised at the similarity between him and Fatin. The ashen hybrid wondered if many from his clan were red wolves. "Inferni is a very simple machine. Cross us, and we bite. Leave us alone, and we have no quarrel," she said. It was a simple matter, really—the coyotes could hardly afford to go stirring up trouble with every bunch of wolves that banded together to form a pack. Sooner or later, someone with a brain would figure out that four or five packs working together could easily obliterate a single coyote clan. "Maybe we are the same in that way," the coyote offered. "I don't want to have to bury my children or my grandchildren." The coyote woman had lost three of her children, and she did not wish to have more of them perish for no good reason. |