Halfway through her meal, someone came creeping up through the dense wood.  Instinctively, she tensed and her feasting ceased; Mojave's gold eyes scanned through the wintry wood to seek out who was coming.  And she found him easily -- his dark pelt stood out against the bright surroundings like a black hole.  In a way, the way he captured her attention may as well have made him a temporary black hole, as the hare remained locked beneath her feet.  She was a terrible judge when it came to the basis of age, either wolves very young or old, and most fell into that indiscernible area of 'dunno'.


He called out and she crunched noisely; he hadn't quite found her yet.  But when he did, his demeanor lit up as though she was the best thing since sliced bread, which for all intensive purposes would have gone along with the thought of meat he was having.  Mojave couldn't help but be flattered slightly, though she also did not let up on the tension that had built beneath her shoulder blades.  Should his personality be no more than a ruse, she was ready to pack up and bolt from the scene with her lame hare in tow.


Instead she swallowed the bone piece she had been crunching up and offered him a waning smile.  "You know, if things were different, I'd just have likely assumed you'd be here to take my food," she said, opting to believe -- no, forcing -- that he wasn't there to take away what she had worked to get.  He looked better fed, anyway, not all mangy and scruffy and roguish like her.  This Ostrega was quite the vagabond.

And as if she hadn't been aiming to make an ass out of herself, something else did the job for her.  What she thought she had originally sussed out as being a rabbit warren was far from it -- apparently something else had left a present somewhere too.  Something that her dark-haired counterpart picked up far easier than she had.  She had been thinking of a clever and playful retort to his comment when he set off with such a nonchalant remark.  It took a few moments before she realized he expected her to follow; Mojave almost balked on it.  She had her hare and was quite content, but what if there really was something better?


Inevitably, her curiosity got the better of her in a matter of seconds.  She gathered up her hare and trailed behind him, only to come to the realization that the thing she had picked up all along was no more than several yards off from where she had been.  A deer carcass, though picked through.  Mojave did not readily approach it, instead she gave their surroundings a survey.


"Are you sure this is safe to eat?  It looks like something left it here for later," and that was probably because it had.  She stepped forward and set to investigating the snowy ground beneath them, but the tracks weren't familiar.  Too small to be cougar, which she had seen before.  Definitely not a wolf or some other canine variety.  "What kind of tracks are these?"  She had seen them before, she thought, but couldn't place a name to them.  And already she was quick to jump on the assumption that her companion was more native to the area than she was.

Mentally, she could have facepalmed when he stated that it was safe of eat. Mojave hadn't thought that she queried about whether or not the meat was any good. She certainly didn't anticipate her words coming out that way, or at least being misconstrued in such a streak. Still, he seemed overly interested in the prey and couldn't offer up any suggestions as to what made the tracks. Instead, he appealed the daredevil sense, suggesting that they make haste and start chowing down before some angry feline came back to tear their hides in half.


She huffed to herself, surprised as he went right on ahead to make good on what he said. No room for recourse or rejoinder, just boom, breakfast's ready and it's already halfway cold. Mojave dropped the hare to the ground then, only recalling that hey stupid, maybe that's why he didn't know what you were talking about. "You're a brazen prince charming," she said then with a spark of amusement. "Don't I get your name before you take me out to dinner?" Typical man, too busy shoveling food into his mouth to get the name of the woman he just picked up for speed dating one-oh-one.


And then in a show that she possibly didn't care either, Mojave joined him in the leftover theft.

She tore easily into the carcass, having already forgotten about the meager supplications of the hare she had picked around at. The meat was more than just half cold, it was cold. But nowhere near as tough as she had found the hare, and it did not take more than a scrap of that meat in her mouth to ignite the fact that she had been scraping by with nothing more than morsels for a while. It was of no wonder why she was so ragged and worn; her tank had probably been running on empty for a handful of days up until that point. No wonder she had been fine with settling for a hare, right?


As he paused to introduce himself, she only caught the glimmer in his boast from the corner of her eye. She didn't want to pause to acknowledge it, though there was a particular note of interest buried in his words. He prompted her and she found that she had to pause, if only for a moment, because fair was fair. She had wanted to know who he was and in turn, he deserved to know who she was. A modicum of thanks and all. "I'm Mojave," she said, licking at her chops for a moment. "So why are you a former prince? Isn't a prince always a prince?" She thought he had been joking about the prince thing and boy, how wrong could she be.


The note about the Ridge he spoke of would have to come in a moment; she wasn't about to overload him while he regaled her with a tale of how he lost his princedom.