A calling note curled through the frozen boughs of the willows, rousing Skana from her tired watch of the den site. There was little for the old wolf to do with the dead of winter settled thick around the Lore, smothering life beneath it and threatening to crush the wolves under its weight. Skana rose to her feet, standing on legs which were once defined with muscle but now thin and brittle, not even her winter coat able to hide the effects of starvation. The hope that the weather would ease up had been extinguished, and the only thing that Skana could do was wait for it to pass and hope she'd be alive by the end of it.

Skana made her way towards where she had heard the howl. The Ridge pack could always do with new blood, and during better times that would have meant more power and greater success. Now though, she wasn't so sure that more muscle would help them out much. It wasn't even a matter of there being less to go around, when there was simply nothing to eat at all.

It took Skana a while to walk through the deep snow, careful to go slowly lest she stumble and hurt herself. At this point even a small injury could be fatal. Eventually Skana could smell the loner, a female, and her notched ears tuned to the soft sounds of breath. Even in broad daylight her vision was poor, and the pale color of the female melded right into the snowy landscape. She eventually did spot the wolfish shape, and had to squint to make sure she was in fact looking at a wolf and not a deceptively shaped tree stump and moved closer towards it.

"Skana Coho, of Willow Ridge," Skana introduced herself, with her tail waving up above her back and head held proudly erect. "You've come looking for a pack?" Skana guessed. Why else would a single wolf be standing at the border in the middle of winter?

Skana could almost smell the tension emanating off of Coquina. The crone was pretty sure that it wasn't her run-down appearance striking fear into the girl. Standing on strange pack borders would make most nervous, in any case.

"Do you know anything of us? Or, are we simply the first pack you've-" Skana started but the word's caught in her throat as she heard the scrabbling of coyotes. The wind turned and carried the scent of old moose, coyote, and Elettra. Her eyes narrowed as she swung her skull in the direction of the noise. The bare skin of her scars puckered as her nose wrinkled, her chest rumbled in the beginning of a growl. Skana had had enough of vermin encroaching on the territory, with the foxes and coyotes making bold moves to steal what rightly belonged to the wolves. Quickly enough came Elettra's bark, and Skana was briskly on the move towards her.

"Come," Skana commanded loud enough to carry to the female she had turned her back on. She wasn't leaving some stranger standing around their territory unattended, and it was a subtle test of the newcomer's compliance, and literally if she could trust her back to her. A bold move, but what had Skana to lose?

Ears back Skana approached Elettra. Her tail, steady with her back, had begun to sway upon seeing the meat and absence of coyotes. The hunger that had been long present and long ignored roared to life in her stomach, but she would wait patiently for Elettra to take the first bite before she even touched it.