Repose Memories (reposememories) wrote in repose, @ 2017-06-07 21:25:00 |
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Entry tags: | atticus mcvickers, ~plot: memories |
[memory]
What: Memory
Will characters be viewing the memory or experiencing it?: Experiencing
Warning, this memory contains: Animal gore
The cave is cold, and the walls are wet with the slime of dripping water. Your sensitive nose picks up the scent of long-dead small creatures who once made this their home, plus a bear who hibernated here last winter, her peculiar muskiness still clinging to the vegetation.
You are not cold. Your cold is thick, and it keeps you warm. It isn’t even winter yet, just a cool autumn, the leaves of the trees limned in red and orange. Curled around yourself, you make your own heat.
A few feet away, there is a green canvas backpack, its contents spilled across the floor. A pile of clothes lies next to it, half-folded. You are lying on a blanket which trails in the pack's general direction, pulled to the center of the cave with your teeth. You’re watching the cave mouth.
No one comes back. No one ever comes back.
You uncurl yourself, yawn, shake. You put four legs under you, and pad quietly outside on four small paws.
A river flows through the valley just down the slope from your cave. It flows fast, crashing into rapids not far downstream. You pad to the edge of it to drink, lapping the water. The wolf in the rushing reflection is fuzzy, indistinct. White? Grey? Small, that’s for certain, not much more than a pup.
You pad away, following the scent of warm prey into the underbrush, skirting far, far from the new scent of bears or bucks. You’re painfully hungry - it’s been a day since you caught your first meal on your own, and you’re not much good at it yet. It seems like you’re always hungry, always empty in your belly, always driven for more meat.
If you have any innate skill at all, it’s a knack for padding softly. You spot a rabbit, and you follow it through the brush for two hundred feet before it pulls up on its hind legs and scents you. By then it’s much too late for its little life - you lope forward and catch it as it tries to dart away, snatching it in your small jaws, ripping and crunching it, crushing its little lungs. You don’t feel bad about it, or feel anything about it except the rush of adrenaline of the run, the viciously satisfied feeling of something to eat. You’re a wolf, and you’re hungry.
You only remember a few days like this. Prior to that, things are fuzzier. There’s the impression of a different life, of a muddy family group. Peculiarly, they seem to be human beings, this pack of yours. They disappear like meltwater from snow when you try to hold onto them.
Anyway, you’re still hungry when you’re done with the rabbit. You eat what little meat there is on the bone, cracking into marrow, gnawing gristle, walking away again with blood on your muzzle. Still hungry. Always hungry. There’s a cold spot deep inside you that you just can’t seem to fill.
Then it hits your nose. Blood, fresh blood, not far from here. You follow it, moving slowly. A fresh kill could mean fresh meat, or it could mean something big and dangerous. Instinct says run, belly says go forward.
You come to the edge of a short drop, where forest vegetation trails over the edge in chains of green, shifted by the wind and by shuffling paws. You peer down and sight a buck, a large one, bitten in about a hundred places, its entrails splayed across the mossy ground. The pack that took it down is tearing large hunks from its side, including a wolf about three times your size. He’s even missing an ear.
Your hunger gets the better of your instincts. You know this is a bad idea, and you don't want to get anywhere near another wolf, but you're still hungry. The meat from the deer's belly is steaming a little in the cool, clear morning air.
Slowly, you follow the edge of the rise downward toward the kill.