Ice -- Wolv book II

3 - Another disappointment

I lay on the wooden floor, unmoving, as the night warmed to day, and then gradually faded to night once more. The shock of gorging after such an extended hiatus left me immobile as my body extracted what it needed from my meal.

I finally opened my eyes when the sky began to brighten once more, signalling that yet another morning had come. I twitched my paws and groaned, seeing a tiny cloud puff out of my nostrils.

Ohhhhhhh, I've gotta get up. I could put off the call of nature no longer; my bladder and my insides were almost screaming for relief. Slowly, I pushed myself up off of the floor and slunk out of the rickety door frame.

The sky above was painted a uniform grey, and lazy white snowflakes drifted down from above. My eyes narrowed as one landed on my nose, melting instantly. The air was cold yet refreshing, and with every breath I drew into my lungs, I could feel myself slowly beginning to wake up.

I sniffed at a rock, then lifted a hind leg and relieved myself, marking the spot with my scent.

"It's about time you got off your rump!"

I lowered my leg and hissed in annoyance at Nadie's intrusion. "Give a guy a little privacy, would ya?"

She laughed quietly. "Oh, come on. Nothin' I haven't seen before."

I rolled my eyes at her coy smile, but she was right. After wearing technically nothing for several months already, seeing someone else relieving themselves was bound to happen often.

Still...I didn't like being watched, even if we were practically a couple.

"Am I the last to get up?" I asked, changing the subject. Nadie sat down and raised a paw to scratch her ear.

"Nope. Tara is--unnn, that's the spot!--Tara is still sleepin' in the shack." Huh. I guess I missed her on my way out. "Hutch and I got up last night. I had a quick jog, just to get the lay of the land."

Oh, great! I wagged my tail expectantly; if she'd done a look-around, she would already have determined if it was safe for us to stay at this place. From the moment I'd met her in Winnipeg, she'd shown that she had an incredibly sharp mind. No detail escaped her; making her nearly impossible to lie to.

She saw my tail wag, and lowered her eyes. Uh-oh. She shook her head at me, her eyes conveying our mutual disappointment. "There's some kind of fly-in hunting lodge about seven kilometers east of here. There were bear and coyote skins hanging in the windows of the place."

"Shoot," I muttered. "I guess we shouldn't have gotten our hopes up, what with that uneaten fish we found the other day." Someone would have had to have been in the fish cleaning shack recently, in order for that fish to be in relatively good condition when we found it.

"Yeah. We can't stay here. It's not safe at all."

I sat down on the granite, hanging my head. I didn't want to run anymore. We desperately needed someplace to claim as our own for the winter, and sadly, this wasn't it.

There were undoubtedly hundreds of places that we'd passed that would have sufficed, but after watching our old pack being butchered at the hands of people, we were fearful of any signs of recent civilization. And nearly everywhere we'd traveled thus far had been uncomfortably close to humanity--too close for any of our likings, at least. So far, the most desirable place we'd found to date was, ironically, already inhabited by a rather large pack of wolves. Given that we were sentient and they weren't, it had made our only interaction with them...tense.

"We've gotta keep going." I turned to see Hutch walking past me, a blank look on his face. I studied the scar running down his face next to his left eye, and his folded right ear. Normally, his past injuries only made him look all the more fierce, but now, I felt an oddly depressing aura emanating from him. He doesn't want to keep running, either.