The Wildwood Wishful Thinking

Anyone is welcome to jump in after @Treyah

Kobe shook the snow from his fur and stretched. He’d laid around long enough, it was time to move. His exact destination was a mystery even to him but he supposed anywhere was better than resting on the gnarled roots of bare branched tree. Trotting off in a random direction with his chin up and tail held high, he could’ve been mistaken for an alpha if there had been anyone following behind. Nevertheless, he felt like one and that was all that mattered. Not that he’d be one to ever take on responsibility. The notion in itself seemed like a nightmare. Being relied upon not to mention, trusting others? No. The hassle it seemed to involve seemed immense. He was never a people person. There was no point in pretending to start.

Still, he could see the allure. He wasn’t adverse to the glorified importance the role entailed. However, it was all just the wishful thinking of a loner who had no intentions of joining a pack. That was for wolves who found restriction enjoyable, company an asset rather than a liability and took the words of superiors as gospel. He for one wasn’t interested in returning to that life. At least, not yet. He wasn’t starving.

(This post was last modified: Dec 28, 2016, 01:08 AM by Kobe. Edit Reason: fixing grammer )

@Kobe

When it was all said and done, it took them almost a whole week to travel this far. For a while there the girl had even feared her mother might not make it back down the western side of the Heights but manage somehow, she did. Now, well, she supposed they didn't really have a plan, other than to rest their aching limbs and try to scrounge up some food. Not for the first time, her stomach gave an angry growl. How long had it been since they had last found a decent meal that wasn't a frozen carcass soaked in cougar piss?

Her nose still wrinkled at the thought. They could still be at home, they could be safe and warm and fed. She couldn't bare it anymore, and so she had left under the guise of searching for something other than snow to line her stomach, half expecting her brother @Reiko to tag along behind her. As she kicked another drift of snow, muttering under her breath all the time, she struggled to bite back a yelp as her frigid paw hit something unexpectedly hard. "Ouch!" She finally managed rather loudly (with a lot less profanity than one might expect given her lineage). That really really hurt!

sorry for the wait!

Kobe jumped at the voice. He whirled around, on edge. Not out of concern for the yearling he spotted but for his own sake. The pup could’ve been pounced on by another predator for all he knew. As a loner with no one to look out for him but himself his well being was his first priority and he didn’t like being caught unawares.

“Who are you?” he asked. He approached the younger wolf without the slightest caution. What threat could she pose to him in all her inexperienced youth? “What are you doing out here alone?”

He asked the questions for himself. Everything he did was for himself after all and if the girl with others as he suspected she was, he needed to know. With knowledge came power. The power to get out of dodge before whatever adult she was with came down on him. If the girl was alone, well, the idea of her companions would no longer be a plague on his thoughts and would leave him to think of finer things. Things of merit for such a high intellect as his.

He looked the yearling over. She wasn’t thin and not even close to malnutritioned as he would expect if she’d been on her own. And yet she was alone. The prospect of talking to a potential runaway bothered him. He didn’t want her to stick to him.

~~ Do it or don't do it, you'll regret both ~~

Her muttering and angry paw shaking was cut short as a voice broke through the static sounds of nature. The young wolf braced herself with a start, yellow eyes squinting through the glare of sun on snow to fall on the smaller, if not obviously older dark wolf. For a moment she dared to hope it might be her brother Darrah, but then, he had always been so large. "I'm Treyah, who are you?" she questioned back boldly, her own tail laying neatly between her hocks, neither tucked nor waving. This was all so foreign, the scent of Oak now gone from her fur and replaced with something much thinner. She wasn't sure how to react when she didn't have the upper hand.

His next words only served to confuse the not-yet-yearling more, "My parents are somewhere nearby, my brother too... and @Leotie I guess. We crossed the mountain a few days ago, I think they plan on finding somewhere to hang around." She gave a shrug. It still wouldn't make the place home. But perhaps he had been asking for more nefarious purposes, her eyes narrowing in suspicion. "What about you? What are you doing out here alone?"

@Treyah

“Kobe,” the dark male answered. He looked over the younger wolf’s indecision between submission and dominance. She was so young that it hardly mattered to him what she did. She wasn’t a threat and thus no concern of his.

The information about her family caught his interest. So she was traveling with others. Figures. He should’ve kept his assumptions at a more reasonable level. Her countering question made him a little guarded. What was he doing out alone? The life of a loner was anything but glamorous no matter which how he tried to dress it. It was difficult, unforgiving and exhausting both mentally and physically. Each day that passed was another where he would have to watch his back, stalk small game and warm himself in the cold.
“I am a loner,” he finally answered. “I have no pack. I am out here to…survive.”

He felt odd discussing his life choices with a child. How far had he fallen? What exactly was he doing with his life? Was this really living? Could he call a daily life of paranoia and hunger living? For heaven’s sake he got most of his fun out of offending and insulting random wolves and other loners. His fur prickled, he had made far to many enemies as it was.

~~ Do it or don't do it, you'll regret both ~~

Sorry for the hold up @Kobe

Well, she thought as the black wolf answered, at least they didn't have to worry about a pack somewhere her parents thought there was none. Not yet, at least. "I suppose that's what I am now too," she contemplated aloud, a loner. She didn't think she liked the title terribly much, and either did her stomach. The growling of her guts reminding her the purpose of her walk to start with. "Is it hard? Surviving?" She questioned with a grimace, only assuming it must be so. She couldn't hunt, she couldn't fight, what on earth were her parents thinking?!

And once the question left her lips there were only more to follow, "Does it get easier? Are you hungry all the time? What do you do when you get really really cold?" and one that wouldn't leave her lips, are we going to die out here? Already convinced that there could only be one true answer. She was going to starve, or freeze, or get eaten by a bear, she just knew it, and it would all be her stupid parent's fault. She hadn't realised how down her face had turned, worry clearly etched in every dark tipped hair. She needed answers, and not the casual brush of 'everything is going to be fine' deershit that her mother was trying to feed her.

(This post was last modified: Dec 28, 2016, 06:24 AM by Treyah.)

No, you're good. Take your time :) @Treyah

“Hard?” Kobe couldn’t help but laugh. His tone however, was humorless and he stared at Treyah with an unreadable expression. “Living itself is hard…”

His patience grew thin as a flood of questions left the girl’s mouth.

“One at a time,” he couldn’t help but snap at her. His gaze drifted past her for a moment before returning. “As long as your parents don’t suddenly appear in the trees, I’ll answer your questions. There’s nothing else for me to do,” he sat. “No, it doesn’t get easier. Why would it? As a lone wolf you have no territory. You must consider every wolf as a foe than a friend. Any prey you catch must be quickly eaten, lest you’re forced to fight over it with another more hungry predator. And of course you’ll be hungry. Its winter. Hunger will probably be a close companion if only your parents hunting. They’ll be hunting not only for themselves but also you and your brother…” he looked off with a thoughtful expression. “Your belly depends on their experience. If hunting doesn’t happen to be their forte then you’ll be lucky that hunger is your companion rather than starvation. Scavenging isn’t fun. To put it lightly the cold is anything but your ally. Loners succumb to winter’s icy embrace more than pack wolves every year. Snow is beautiful but its beauty pales when you wonder what bodies it could be hiding,” he gave her a meaningful look. “Not all carcasses are that of prey.”

Kobe glanced at the sky. The snow continued to fall and he wondered when he too would be buried beneath its chilly blanket. Each day he woke with it clinging to his fur and every night he curl up within it. Just what was his fate? How long would he continue to walk in the snow? How many winters could he weather alone?

~~ Do it or don't do it, you'll regret both ~~

@Kobe <3

Eyes opened wider with each word that fell from his inky lips. She knew it! "Mum's too old to hunt anything that isn't already half dead and Leotie..." well she wouldn't speak ill of the woman but her gentle demeanour in general didn't very mush lend itself to the fierceness of Aponi leading a hunt, and her father... "Dad got kicked real bad one time..." the last was barely a whisper, her breath coming in short shallow gasps. "I'm gonna die. I knew it! I didn't even do anything wrong! Why did I have to go too?" Too young to wrap her head around the intricacies of it all she just couldn't understand why her parents chose to leave at all.

The cogs of her mind were turning so quickly her tongue struggled to keep up, W-Wut if you stayed with us yeah? What if all us loners got together and worked like a pack? Then we could hunt and eat and be warm right? Right?!" There was no masking the desperation in her voice. She just wanted to live, but apparently that was a mammoth ask given their current circumstances. She may as well be wishing for the moon. Oh why wasn't her sister here? She knew this stuff better than Treyah did. Sahalie would fix it and everything would go back to the way it was before.

@Treyah

Kobe blinked. Just how old was the girl’s mother?

“Just how old are your parents? Neither one of them sound cable of taking down a deer,” he no sooner rolled his eyes at her panicky irrationality.

Why was he getting caught up in all this—this emotion? He wanted her to close her mouth and backtrack to that innocent curiosity that’d drawn him to bother to answer her questions in the first place. Still he had to admit she was entertaining. He smiled at her outburst about dying.

“You don’t have to do anything wrong to die,” he said sadistically and waited for her reaction. It’d never occurred to him that pups could be naive enough to take a stranger’s words as gospel. Well, then again he hadn’t exactly lied about anything either. However, life wasn’t quite so hard as he’d painted, not all the time. Winter was difficult but when one had a full belly and enough sleep, it was peaceful and serene, even if the snow did hide bodies.

“Stay?” he could barely get the word out. “Why would I stay with your family?” he laughed. “Why would they have reason to trust me?” his eyes glinted. “Loners are alone for a reason,” he got to his paws. “Some like me, are alone by choice. Others…are not. Wolves who wander alone come from all kinds of backgrounds which are rarely good. Would you want to be in a pack with someone who killed a sibling? How about one that's half-crazed? There are all kinds of wolves out there and now you’ve joined their ranks,” he gave her a quizzical look. “Why are you a loner?”

(This post was last modified: Dec 28, 2016, 07:58 AM by Kobe.)

~~ Do it or don't do it, you'll regret both ~~

Just how old are your parents? She would come back to his question once she got her breathing under control, but he kept talking before she could give it. His questions only dredged up the whispers she had heard from other wolves in the pack. "They're old old, ma was the oldest wolf in the pack..." or she had been, Ice hadn't been around long enough for Treyah to get a good read on him. But she supposed, nobody walked around calling him too old when he couldn't hear it. As to his other suggestions, well she was just a child and hadn't quite figured out the brain-mouth filter thing yet.

"Mum killed her brother, and the others called her crazy sometimes. She couldn't hear them most of the time anyway, but I think even if she could, she's got thick skin by now." It wasn't something she herself thought odd. "We're loners cos my... sister, Aponi challenged Spieden, then Spieden ran away with Mako and Marina and dad wanted to come back to where he was born... or something... It was a big mess, everyone was angry and upset." She wasn't sure on the specifics, all she knew was that she had been uprooted, from everything she had ever known and loved like it was no big deal, and now she was going to die. The thought alone was enough to make her skip a breath again. No, she had to keep it together.

"Why would you choose to be a loner?" Always with the questions, would they ever cease?