Florence
The worst part about midday was that in the afternoon I commenced my training in human form.
The claw marks on my shoulder had stopped bleeding, and had healed back to my smooth skin in less than an hour. The small cuts had gone also, after spending more time in wolf form.
My leg was bandaged up, and needed the night to heal properly. No one had talked to me or mentioned the fight, but we were all aware that it was fractured.
Currently, I was on my back on a weight bench. I was ordered to do a circuit that Erik had set for me a few days ago, which consisted of various weights and stretches to condition me.
The weight circuit had been set up in the living room, and surprisingly, when some of the couches were moved back, it created quite a large space. After I had finished fifty ‘reps’ of bicep curls, I moved on to some lunges.
It was day seven today, and I was glad to see some results from my training. My endurance for long distance runs had increased, as well as my speed for the timed races in wolf form. Shifting and living in my alternate form had become easier and less foreign. My hunting skills had definitely developed, and I was trying my hardest to become less adverse to the idea of hunting other animals. Even from doing a daily circuit of weights, I could feel actual muscle on my arms now. Erik had said that when training, it was important not to neglect either form – human or animal. They both needed testing and conditioning, for if one was weak, the other could not reach maximum potential.
However, all these results didn’t mean that training was easy now, on the contrary, I was always achy and sore each night. After an early dinner, I would have to shift into my wolf at 6pm until midnight. Not only did this help me learn to shift better and live as a wolf, but I would also heal more rapidly in that form, which was a bonus.
After my lunges were done, I moved on to sit-ups, push-ups and more weights. It took over two hours to complete the circuit a few times, and the end of it wrecked me. My arms felt like jelly and wobbled at my sides, and I could barely stand up without wavering. I had to take an extra ten minutes just to steady myself.
I waddled into the kitchen favouring my right leg, and I watched as Steven and Erik both looked up. Steven visibly winced at my condition, and Erik looked back to the papers they were studying. Steven had spread out an array of instruments, papers and electronic devices on the kitchen table to ‘plan’ while I was busy conditioning.
“Anything I need to know?” I queried.
Steven sighed. “You need to sit down, we have a lot to tell you.”
I scraped back a tan chair from the table and dropped into it. Both Erik and Steven were already seated. I looked at them expectantly.
“We have a good idea of where Kyle is.” Steven told me straight out. “Now where did I put that – oh here it is,” he pulled a large map out from under some more paper and put it between us. “We’ve marked any animal sightings and attacks since when Kyle disappeared. We’ve also looked into any missing persons as well. If you pinpoint all of these-” he dragged his finger along the map, over several black dots.
“-It forms a path.” Erik finished, speaking for the first time.
“He was thinking with a clear head at first, there were no animal attacks or sightings until about 300 kilometers out of Banff. After that, he started to slip up, and was easy to track,” Steven explained.
I looked at the map myself and smiled. Banff was in the top right hand corner of the map, and the closest black dot was roughly southeast, where a wolf sighting was reported in Elkford. Next was a bear attack, in Fernie, even further south. There was an unresolved missing persons case from Libby, which may or may not have been connected, and a few sightings of new wildlife in the Swan River National Wildlife Refuge. If this path was the movement of Kyle, it made sense: he avoided the major cities and travelled through the mountains and forests.
