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Ira had woken early, attempting to move out of the communal denning site where the wolves of Silvertip slumbered close together without waking those that still inhabited it and when he was free of it, shrugged out of the scent borders and into the no-man’s territory and then beyond to the free territories that stretched out before in a canvas of green and brown and blue. If anyone were to ask he would have shrugged it off as the fact that he was doing recruiting - which wasn’t an exact lie. He wasn’t going to recruit anyone if he was never outside of Silvertip’s borders and he was always looking for potential recruits even if the concentration of his attention and intentions remained elsewhere. He could multi-task well enough, for a teenage boy, for what it was worth; but there was a hidden truth to his venture. He was hoping to catch a glimpse or even a tendril of Bones’ scent. Something. Anything. Even if she had bypassed him to go straight to Atticus - Ira didn’t even care. At least if she was with Atticus she was safe and it meant that she hadn’t been eaten by any kind of beast or anything (Ira wasn’t very imaginative and even if he was he probably would have never predicted the truth). He was becoming almost pitifully desperate for some kind of news no matter what form it came in; and then scolded himself internally. This was what happened when he let himself get close to others. …Though the boy attributed it to his imagined curse, the truth of the matter was: he often wound up hurt. And beneath the pain he felt wrath - at himself, at those that hurt him, at his “curse”.
He tried not to dwell upon it, not wanting those hateful and fiery feelings to manifest unfairly. He had no idea what was happening and it was wrong to assume that Bones just broke up with him without telling him or whatever. She was probably just really busy with things in Swiftcurrent Creek -- or maybe Fox had banned her from seeing him (it was kind of a long shot because he didn’t think there was any hostility between Fox and himself). Tucking those darkened thoughts away he turned his attention to his path which had over the stretch of the morning eventually found him, by mid afternoon at the ’watering hole’ that touched by the sunlight was a shimmering lake, fresh tracks of deer leading in a confusion of trampled trails that split in several different ways - but he wasn’t here to hunt. He had been sort of heading towards Blacktail Deer Plateau but had decided to apply the brakes his over zealous pursuit of his girlfriend. Jinx had not given him permission to visit them to ask around about Bones and he respected his mother too much to outright do something without making her aware first. Sure, it wasn’t as if he had intentions of doing anything that would reflect badly upon Silvertip - all he wanted to know was if anyone had heard from or seen his girlfriend - but still.
Turning his body towards the lake he bent his head and lapped up the cool, refreshing water, ears swiveling out to either side of his head to listen for any sign of approach while his back was turned.