In the orchard: Daniel/Aubrey
The moon had nearly gone. Just the barest sliver like a shield’s edge remained in the sky, hardly enough to pierce the occasional cloud scudding across the twilight. The orchard was quiet. The wolf had no particular reason to be loping between the rows of trees with his muzzle low to the ground, easy breaths misting a trail of vapour that dissipated beneath the stride of his legs. The moon’s song waned along with her light. But he liked the quiet, and the sweet tang of fermented fruit that lingered underfoot, long forgotten after the autumn’s harvest.
The wolf liked the quiet, and the man had been restless. It was getting worse, each moon that passed without a pack. Each dwindling abate from full to new felt more like glass under Aubrey’s skin. He’d started to shift more evenings than not, running the perimeter of what the wolf considered his territory: an undulating winding that extended past the town limits and skirted through the woods and around the lake, miles beyond the houses set along the shore. The wolves in town that weren’t his, they were either wise or accidentally fortunate enough not to cross his path. But he could always smell them in the woods.
Aubrey didn’t mind, but the wolf heaved a disgusted sigh when he thought about them. The force of the breath through his nose sent a flurry of dried leaves into the air. Some of them caught in the deep silver of his ruff, tickled the fur of his muzzle where it darkened into a deep black, and he sneezed in a manner that caused the man’s presence in the back of his head to make a very undignified snort. The wolf’s upper lip curled and he shook his body from his head down to his tail, then slipped between the next row of trees and continued on his way as if nothing had happened. As if he was not looking for something that was not there, and the moon’s nearing absence did not weigh heavy in the thudding of his paws over the softened earth.