This place was too - damned - hot. Kiba padded along miserably, tongue hanging out as he panted. The sun had risen and fallen two, three times since he'd pulled himself out of the oddly warm sea, and in the time in between then and now he'd scouted out his surroundings as best he could.
At first he'd headed into the wilderness, preferring untouched jungle to human-tainted township, but.......it had been strange there. Hot, damp, and so full of strong scents he could barely keep track of any single one. The jungle was not the forest - or the plain - or the mountain - or the canyon - or any sort of terrain he was used to. Brought up in a post-apocalyptic world, it was too damn full of life for Kiba.
And it was especially too full of strange life - forms that slid noiselessly in and out of shadows, scentless and silent and too large to move that quickly, that he only ever knew of out of half-seen glances in the corners of his vision. Kiba did not like feeling he was the hunted.
Kiba was an alpha wolf. He was no coward, and he did not like but had experience with being hunted. He knew how to deal with such - how to go on until he could turn and put those hunting him at bay.
But he did not have a pack.
Besides, the things he could find to eat had too many legs or too few, and stung sometimes. There had been this crawling thing with giant claws........delicious meat though, after he'd crunched through the shell.
So he'd ranged out of the jungle and into the sun-lit beaches, diving into the sea often to combat the heat. There were fish and after a few false starts, he had been able to perect a sort of half-pouncing half paw-flip approach that netted him quite a catch of sleek, juicy fish. The salt-water was beginning to make him itch, however, so he took himself out.
Jungle and beach seen, but what of the township? He remembered Hige - and Toboe - and their ways of scrounging food from humans. He'd never stoop to that, but he did know humans usually meant the presence of food caches somewhere. And over time he had grown - accustomed to humans. He was used to living, if not alongside, then at least where their existence registered. Odd, unpredictable creatures.....dark and light in complex ways wolves could never understand.
Or could they?
Kiba was a wolf, not a cat. But in this case his curiousity moved him to investigate the human settlements, and he started with the curious structure that smelled of fish and human blood and - his nose twitched - beef jerky?