Ours.

One of very few French words Penny had learned came to mind when she caught the large omnivore's scent. She didn't feel particularly endangered- she figured she was far enough away that t might not give a damn about her, nor did she think that a bear would go after a wolf anyway. They were big, lumbering, and she was as quick as a wolf could be, and so long as she didn't get within swiping distance, it couldn't hurt her. She felt obligated to respect them, as well-- for as large and powerful as they were, their diet consisted mainly of berries and fish. Or so she thought, anyway- she'd only ever seen them fishing or cleaning up a large portion of a wild blueberry field. There'd been a sort of unspoken truce between them, as both omnivores ate the berries- as long as she surrendered whichever patch she was eating in and moved to another should the bear lumber in her direction, the bear had remained calm.

So she figured she had bears completely figured out...Thus why she decided to follow this one. It was getting closer to the time of year where bears would be stocking up, eating as much fatty food as they could so that they could hibernate. Penny was envious that these creatures could simply gorge themselves, then live off their fat for the entire season. She was a scrawny thing herself and wouldn't have lasted long had she decided to try the whole hibernation thing, but enjoyed the concept nonetheless. She hoped that the bear might lead her to a patch of cranberries, or a stream where fish could be caught- either way, she had a certain amount of faith invested that the bear would lead her to her next meal.
""

Firenza's paws had carried her far and fast in recent months, so the journey from the Sierra Hills to the vast and sprawling woodlands that were known to the residents of the place itself at Cedarwood Forest (and known to Renza only as More Damn Trees) seemed a relatively easy and slow-paced jaunt. The canopy of autumnal boughs enveloped the dark-furred female in the scent of dying leaves and petrichor that lingered now even though the rains had ceased. Another odor, a sharp and pungent counterpoise to the saccharine perfume of the season's decaying foliage, latched onto her senses as she padded along a row of red aspen trees, and Firenza lifted her head.

Hawklike yellow eyes sought the source of the maliferous scent, peering between the trees for the shape of any bear, but particularly wary of sighting a mother and her cubs. This time of year sent them all into an eating frenzy, but in lieu of a smorgasbord of fish, Firenza didn't doubt that wolf meat might sit equally well in their stomachs, and she didn't fancy becoming a nice roll of fat on their sides all winter. She'd encountered a few bears in the past, two peaceable enough if they were left alone, and two with moods as mercurial and violent as any sociopath's. All in all, the yearling had decided that ursidae was an evolutionary family best avoided for the sake of her health. After several moments of standing still, she caught a glimpse of the lumbering beast quite far off, nosing at a tall pine tree's bark.

Relieved that the bear was not in her immediate path, the female made to continue her walk through the trees, trudging along with leaves in a myriad of purple, gold, and red hues crunching beneath her paws. Keeping the bear in her peripheral vision, Renza made her path a wide arc, but so intent was she on the most immediate potential threat that she found herself rather surprised as she wandered upon a silver-frosted female who seemed to be as focused on the bear as Firenza herself. "Do they call you She Who Watches Bears?" Her voice, kept somewhat hushed, was light and obviously joking, but there was a hint of incredulity that this thin, small female was actually lingering around in this bear's vincity. Renza was always up for a challenge, but even she wasn't planning on provoking a bear's wrath or drawing its interest, even in the slightest.

"I'd planned to keep moving to get away from those big claws and sharp teeth, but I don't know if I can in good conscience leave you behind. I don't sleep much at night as it is." Firenza grinned. They were still a short distance from the aforementioned weapons of this bear, but the yearling suspected that the ursine might be capable of moving much faster than either she or this female had imagined, and she wondered if she could coax the other dark wolf away to a healthier distance.

There it was- or, rather, there its backside was. It was a healthy black bear, its dark fur lightened somewhat from the summer sunlight, so that the tips of its guard hairs were a mahogany colour. She couldn't see anything besides its rump which was round, its thick, trunk-like hind legs and its shamefully small bob of a tail which nearly caused Penny to giggle when it twitched, flicking from side to side. Such a funny thing, for a large creature to have no tail! It was as though other nature had thought she was pinning a tail on the rabbit- but missed and pinned it on the bear instead. She muffled her laughter bu pressing her muzzle into her shoulder, and in doing so, spotted a lean female wolf coming toward her, whose colouring was not that far off from the black bear's coat- though with a good deal more brown around her body.

Penny grinned, welcoming the company with an amicable swing of her tail. At the girl's comment she chuckled quietly, trying to choke the sound so that she didn't distract the bear, and she shook her head. "They call me 'She' for short," She said jokingly, winking one of her bottle green eyes at the masked female. Penny wasn't terribly good at making snappy jokes- but still managed to laugh at whatever she was able to produce as though it had actually been clever.

Her new companion seemed relaxed enough to make funny comments, but seemed wary of the bear and wanted to steer clear of it. Penny shrugged one shoulder. "They're not too bad, as long as you don't get too close. Besides, they're kinda slow- something with an arse as big as that surely couldn't run very fast!" She said, gesturing with her muzzle to the oblivious bear's behind. It had obviously had no problem finding lots of fatty food over the summer and beginning of fall. "But sure- I'm just lookin' to find somethin' to eat, was hopin' to scavenge something offa this guy. D'you have any ideas?" She asked, willing to abandon the bear if this wolf had any suggestions as to where she could find a meal.


""

"She" quipped right back, and Renza was pleased to discover she hadn't offended the other girl. Some folks just didn't have a sense of humor, and hadn't appreciated Firenza's demeanor. As far as the yearling was concerned, life was too short to be completely serious all the time. It seemed she'd found something of a kindred spirit in that regard, and so the loner cocked her head to listen to the female's words. Her lips broke again into an unbidden smile in the middle thereof, for she hadn't expect arse to be in this petite woman's vocabularly. Nevertheless Firenza was scandalously delighted that her expectations had been exceeded, and as she considered herself an excellent judge of character, she knew that she liked this stranger instantly and that they'd get along fabulously--if "She" could be persuaded to get the hell away from this bear.

"My first idea," Renza opined, "would be not to try to scavenge anything from this bear. I've seen more than one wolf who'd had his face rearranged by just such a dinner plan. I don't know about you, but I think I'm pretty gorgeous just the way I am, no makeover required." The one-year-old struck a pose with her head tossed high in the air and batted her eyelashes, and the breeze picked up for a moment, obligingly rippling through her chocolate fur as if she were in a sexy photo shoot. A moment later, the del Bosque femme was back in her typical smirk, tail whipping back and forth. "I nosed a buried cache just a ways to the north. I wasn't going to bother digging through the mud to see if there's anything worthwhile, but if you're starving, the two of us could make short work of it."

Firenza shrugged; it was a take-it-or-leave-it offer. Some of whatever was left might be a bit rancid with all that moisture, but maybe there'd be enough for a shared snack. "I'm Firenza del Bosque, by the way. A mouthful if you don't habla espanol or parlare italiano, so Renza's good enough for me." Though Firenza's accent was spot on, she would be hard-pressed to speak much true Spanish, but she could understand a fair bit of it. Mostly their ancestral tongue had served as a battle language for their childhood wars, and to talk trash without being understood. Nevertheless she wore her name proudly, and her accent lightly flavored her speech. Sunny liked to say how romantic it all sounded; Renza rolled her eyes just thinking about it. Romance, pah. Sunbird could keep all the boys she wanted. Firenza would gladly had them over, but first they'd have to beat her in a spar, otherwise they weren't worth her cousin's time.

The reminder that Sunny was out there somewhere, surely throwing herself at every new hunk she could find without any screening process whatsoever, reminded Firenza to ask, "You haven't seen any of my family around here, have you? My sister and three of my cousins are traipsing around, probably smell a bit like me. None of them have my charm and charisma, but, you know, a bit of family resemblance."

Though Penny could be thick-headed and didn''t tend to like taking advice from others when she had a plan of her own in mind, she didn't mind listening to her companion at all. She wasn't patronizing in the slightest, which was the best way to go about things when dealing with Penny. She tip-toed around the subject of scavenging alongside a bear or trying to steal its leftovers (of which there wasn't usually much) and said something that struck Penny as being kind of funny. "Face rearranged," She echoed- she liked that expression. Not that it was something to laugh about, but it just sounded kind of funny. She pictured someone having their nose perched on their forehead and one eye down around their chin. Not in a bloody, messy way, which would''ve been more accurate had the bear been the plastic surgeon, but in a more natural way- and in that way, it seemed pretty funny to her.

She smiled brightly and nodded quickly, winking one eye again at the charming, yellow-eyed stranger when she struck a pose. Had she not been so quick to speak again, Penny might've added a compliment, but as soon as the topic returned to food, all other things were forgotten. Penny's ears perked and she nodded quickly. "Foooood. Yes, let's!" She said, eager to find something to eat for a snack. She didn't really mind messing around in the muck, so long as it meant she'd get an easy meal. "North, North, North....Thataway...Yeah?" She asked, having glanced this way and that and finally settling on the direction based on the daylight.

"Firenza del Bosque," Penny said carefully, though with her twang the name ended up sounding very North American- Furenza deyl bawsk. She smiled, but shook her head when Firenza mentioned something about other langues. "Nope, I don't ablaspanyol or parly-taly-ano,," She said, her further butchering of the accent proving her point. It didn't occur to her that even attempting the accent- and massacring it so badly- might've come across as being impolite, as it hadn't been at all what she intended. "My aunt taught me a bitta French, but all I know's just a bit of this and that. Never could do languages well," She admitted, but wasn't overly upset by this fact. Other wolves could learn whatever languages they wanted to- as long as they spoke in English to her, she'd be happy.

"I'm Pennyroyal Baskerville, by the way," She said, and sniggered. "Guess my English-speaking parents were a bit ridiculous too with the long-name-thing." She said. "You c'n call me Penny. Or Pen, if y'want." She said, doing her best to mimic the charming smile Firenza had used earlier- though falling quite short of it. She liked having a nickname for Firenza- Renza was much easier to handle, and it seemed to make her even more like a friend, rather than just someone she met some day, some ordinary day. She mentioned her family and Penny's ears perked. She looked Renza up and down and inhaled, then twisted her mouth from side to side. "Mmmmmmmm, nope, I don't think so. Haven't met much of anyone to be honest with ya," She said. "How many cousins you got? You from a big family?"




""

"Well, you've nearly butchered it, but not quite." This was Firenza's unique form of praise, for she couldn't bring herself to lie and said the other woman had come anywhere close to Firenza's own fluid pronunciation. But it had been a basically recognizable, if grating, rendition and so the newly-dubbed deyl Bawsk carried on without further comment. "Penny sounds like an old lady name," she offered her thoughts without being asked. "You need something hip and trendy, like Roy. That's mysterious--if I talk about you as Roy folks won't even know if you're girl or boy." Well, it was edgy in Renza's mind and so Pennyroyal's equally-cumbersome full name was shortened instantly to Roy, almost without thought to the other girl's opinion on the matter. Only as she opened her mouth to ramble on some more did Firenza think to ask, "... Unless you prefer Penny. In which case it's a wonderful name and I'm sure whatever old lady you're named after is honored you're carrying it and I will naturally oblige and call you Penny instead of Roy."

A week or two away from her little band of yearlings had made Firenza lonelier than she'd realized until this moment. Her encounter with the male in Sierra Hills didn't count as a sociable meeting, really, since he was very much her elder and not someone she could just talk with. As much as she feigned disdain for Sunbird's boychasing antics and however much she coddled her more delicate sister Violette, she missed their company. The boys, of course, were poor conversation; Tercel was just full of hot air, and Mercury could spare little time for discussion of things outside of whatever microcosm of insects-living-in-moss that he was investigating at a given time. So on this day as she led the way in backtracking to the northward cache, Firenza found herself talking and talking. As long as she could walk and chat at the same time, she supposed it wasn't a wasteful or idle chatter.

"I've got loads of family," she explained with a grin, "older siblings, and younger siblings now, too, and..." She trailed off, counting under her breath, before announcing, "ten cousins, on my dad's side. I don't know my mom's family. I only went to see them once and I was pretty young." Firenza shrugged and pressed her nose to the ground, finding her own scent trail and retracing it back around a copse of ash trees. "But my sister Violette and my cousins Sunny, Tercel, and Merc all travelled with me here, and we split up to scope the area out maybe a week ago now. I haven't seen them since, but I'm sure they'll turn up. How about you, all your family have big fancy names?" The girl's words were muffled by the carpet of fallen leaves, but a wagging tail punctuated her inquiry. The leaves in this particular spot tucked behind several thorny bushes had been recently overturned and hastily rearranged, and Firenza nudged at them. "There's something fairly fresh down here, maybe a couple of days old. Could still be something worthwhile." She set to excavating the first layer of wet soil with her front paws.

Hardly phased at all, Penny laughed and lightly shouldered her companion when she commented on Penny's pronunciation. She knew that she, compared to most other wolves- even those within her own family- didn't have the best grasp of even the English language and that her pronunciation of most English words was incorrect. This was something she'd picked up from her poorly educated Father and something that her very intelligent mother had found endearing. Thus, she felt no shame in accepting any comments about the way she talked.

Her features lifted when she was told that her name sounded old- and this too she took in stride. "My dad's idea," She said, fondly. "He got to name some of us, and he named me after a plant." She said, a hint of pride in her voice. Anything plant-related was good, in Penny's opinion. She'd never thought of her name as sounding old- likely because she'd never met a Penny before. But Renza seemed like the worldly traveler type- even if she did seem a bit younger- so she accepted the comment and locked that away in her memory. Penny is an old lady's name. As soon as she came up with a new nickname, though, Penny's jaw dropped.

"Roy?!" She blurted, and though Renza went on to talk further about the name it was everything Penny could do to keep from interrupting her. Once she finished, Penny was nearly fit to burst. "I love it! It sounds so badass!" She said, wishing then that her parents had named her Roy instead- or that they'd been clever enough to call her that as a nickname. "That's so great, I love it! Ugh, Pen. My older brothers used ta call me Pig-Pen, too. Roy is much better!" She said, having fully embraced this new moniker.

It seemed that the two had even more in common, on top of their quirky personalities which seemed to mesh together completely. Renza too had come from a large family- with plenty of cousins and siblings, some of which were supposedly in the area. "If it's only been a week, they're probably around somewhere," She said optimistically. Though a wolf could cover a lot of ground, if they were expecting to meet up again, she suspected they wouldn't go as far as they absolutely could. They'd come to the place where Renza had found the cache, and Penny- Roy- moved alongside her to help dig.

"Yup- I got all kinds of cousins and brothers an' sisters. Some of them have three names- first, middle, and last, and they're mostly named after our like...great-great-grandparents and stuff, like Sassy Allure DeMonte, Berlioz Bronx DeMonte, that kinda thing. Got juniors too- Giddy Jr. an' Felix Jr. an' Tula Jr. an' Bronx Jr. Then some of us're named after herbs- Tansy, Peppermint, Basil, Clover, Hyssop," She said, rattling the names off one after the other. "None of them come here, though. I'm the only one so far as I know," She said, and sneezed after a dried leaf tickled her nose. "Whoo, bless me," She said, as a means of excusing herself while she continued to dig. "I can smell it!" She said happily, as they began to dig through tougher, semi-frozen dirt.

It seemed that Roy was as eager to talk as Firenza herself, and so the brown wolf listened intently as she dug. The smaller wolfess, despite her age, reminded Renza of her sister in appearance, but in mannerisms this female was more like Sunny--outgoing and apparently quite upbeat. Renza herself was cheerful at present, but at times she knew she had an edge; her temper was easily invoked, and she was fierce when the situation required. Still, there was no call to show this side of herself to Pennyroyal, and so the del Bosque female kept it to herself. "What you're telling me," she said mildly with a wry smile, "is that your family is highly unoriginal when it comes to names, and would be quite put off by my VEXATIOUS choice of nickname?" The thought rather pleased the girl, who thought that the older generation could use a good shakeup once in a while, to keep from becoming too set in their traditional ways.

By the time they broke through the final layer of densely packed soil, Firenza's tongue was dangling from her mouth and she could feel warmth radiating from her ears into the cool autumn air. She'd enjoyed the physical labor; now to reap the rewards. Stepping down so she was half inside the cache itself, Renza dipped her head and sank her canines into the sodden hide of a deer's hindleg. True, the fur smelled more than a bit moldy, but the frosty nights had half-frozen the meat within and it didn't taste rancid. Pleased with the find, Firenza dug her rear claws into the dirt and used them as leverage to haul the deer's limb out from the earth. A great jerk of her black-masked head brought their meal sailing through the air and landing with a thud a wolflength's distance from the cache. Panting, Firenza grinned at her companion. "Dig in, Roy," she offered the meat to the other femme, who had been the hungry one in the first place. "Then you can tell me all you know about the local packs. Winter will be here before too long, and I don't intend to freeze my arse off alone in the wilderness."

"Uhmmmmm," Following Renza's question, Roy paused in thought for a moment, one paw hovering just above the freshly overturned earth she'd pulled away. Highly unoriginal? Well, they did reuse names. A lot. And the only other names in the family were names of plants which made perfect sense, given that the patriarch was obsessed with them. Thus she deduced her answer. She grinned and nodded. "Yup, pretty much that!" She didn't care, though. She was hardly insulted that A. her name was apparently old-fashioned and B. Her parents were being labelled as unoriginal- the fact was that yes, Penny was old-fashioned and her parents didn't exactly take home the 'most creative award' for naming their pups.

She continued to dig alongside her friend until their claws began to pull at dirty fur. Firenza went in on her own to grab at it and penny backed up to stand out of her way. She could already tell by the scent that it was deer, and the more Renza tugged, the more it became apparent that it was a deer's leg- a pretty good find. Whoever had buried it would likely be quite upset to find such a good meal missing! She laughed when the deer's leg went sailing into the air and hopped back a step trying to catch it but missed. It landed with a thump on the ground just in front of Penny who, without a second thought, pounced on it.

She growled playfully, grabbing it and shaking her head from side to side to tear through the hide; it was easier than it would have been, had it been fresh- and Penny wasn't a picky eater. Her ears perked, though, when Renza asked about the local packs. So that she wasn't chewing and talking at the same time- a polite gesture that Penny seldom used- she tossed her head back and swallowed down the piece of meat she'd had in her mouth. She gulped and licked her lips, then shook her head. "I don't really know nothin'," She admitted, raising one angular shoulder. She tore off another piece of meat and swallowed it down quickly. "I can just smell 'em. Haven't...OH- wait," She said, suddenly remembering. "I met one fella- Aeolus- said he was a pack wolf. Pitch Pine Trail's the name of it." She said, having remembered the crow-chasing incident a moment after having previously answered Renza. "Nice enough guy," She said. "But I don't know anyone else. You gonna join a pack?" She asked, a tad hopefully.