Moonspear She takes me away

While out on an evening hunt for dinner, Wraen caught a smell of an animal she was sure she had never met before. The molecules her nose caught and her brain analyzed were a mix of earth and metal, water, weeds and snails, fur, musk and the undeniable scent of a living being. Before following the trail, she spent a moment going every compartment of her memory to figure out, if this truly was a creature she had never smelled or seen, and found neither similar, nor matching options.

Therefore she began to track the curvy path through the forest, now and then stopping to examine the footprints left behind or strands of fur that had caught themselves in the twigs of the greenery. It was not a particularly fresh smell, but - if she was lucky, she would catch up with - whatever it was - at some point.

After a little motion was spent and some steam burnt off at the little creekside, she steadied back and relaxed her gait. The night was fresh still, and bright. Alive, well, and she was happy to partake—only more so if it weren't for the hungriness beginning to creep up on her almost obnoxiously.

She prickled up her wet, bladed coat and thought she caught a whiff of raccoon nearby. But roving on further provided her no good trails. Instead, she noticed subtle tellings of one of their more recent additions' scent. That, she decided, she could do well to investigate further. She went tracking after Wraen, noticing a little something extra to the trail now that it was underfoot, and the dark alpha slid comfortably down the forested trails she had passed through not too long ago. Ame knew she was closing in before much longer. Once close, she edged from the shadows with a soft chuff, curious of the female's business.

The longer Wraen searched, the less sure she was that she would catch up with the animal eventually. She felt a little like in the tales about will-o'-wisps, except instead of the flickering ghost-lights she was following a ghost-scent.

To make sure that she was not heading towards anywhere dangerous, she stopped, looked around and listened, quickly realizing that someone had been and still was following her. That would be a new one... she thought, turning around and staring in the darkness to find out, who the person was.

Soon a dark she-wolf appeared and at first glance it seemed that it was one of the three identical sisters. Yet upon closer inspection, this lady was older, therefore Wraen correctly assumed that this had to be the mother. "Hey!" she replied to the leader's greeting.

"Hi," she returned more formally and stepped even closer, still quiet and still poised beneath the cover of the moonlight. Since she liked Terance and had held their father in high regard (especially for her standards), Amekaze was already prepared to find Wraen as favorable company. Her subtly lifted tail waved softly, a signal of her curious good mood for the moment now that hunger was relatively distracted from by the notion of someone else to engage. "Were you tracking something too..?" she quipped, then licked her lips while breathing deep a long whiff of distinctly nighttime air mottled with various hints of this and that.

All the while, she was trying to remember how long ago it had been since she had last seen Dante, and was soon left realizing how long it had been—especially now that she looked his grown daughter up and down. Terance still made her feel that way sometimes too, although he was quickly morphing well past Amekaze's memory of his sire into a key facet of Moonspear thanks to his loyalty so far. 

"Oh, yeah," Wraen was happy to reply. "Though I am not sure yet, what that creature that I am tracking is," she turned away from the leader briefly to sniff the trail left by the unknown animal and decide, whether the scent was entirely new to her, or maybe she had caught a whiff of it before. 

"What do you think it could be?" she asked the leader, after she herself had not come to a definite conclusion. Though she did not know, how old the alpha female was, she surely was more experienced than Wraen and hunted many beasts.

With a small measure of reluctance, she pulled her stare from tracing the sterling patterns of Wraen's coat to the nearby scenery—towards where, presumably, something had lurked through here not too long ago. "Hm, where did you follow it from?" she asked, sniffing first the breeze, then down low closer to the ground to test where she might get a better lead. If she knew the features of the land the critter was tending towards, maybe she could begin to narrow down what exactly it could be.. unless she got a good sampling on the scent first. "My trail had a whiff of raccoon, but was spotty at best," she explained with a shake of her head. "So, maybe that, or I have seen marmots near here before. Or.. hmm, this seems like something a bit.. muskier," she said through a concentrated furrow, and nosed along further to confirm.

"There," Wraen beckoned in the direction she had initially come from, "though the track did not start flat out there, of course. I picked a thread along the way."

"Racoon... hmm..." she thought for a bit, comparing the two memories of the scent and, while there were similarities, she could not quite say that they belonged to the same animal. "Marmot? Huh," she had never heard of that animal before. Mammoths yet, but marmots? "What are those?"

She followed her sights to Wraen's heading, and kept her look of concentration firm. Hm. It didn't particularly answer anything, or even narrow it down majorly. It didn't seem like raccoon was fitting the bill either. At least not perfectly. "A marmot is, well, a lot like a bigger squirrel, and a kind of groundhog at the same time. They like grassy spots on mountains," she detailed, wishing she had a better trail on one to just show her what she meant. She glanced around again, then forward before she nosed on a few lengths again. "Sometimes, I have seen them get pretty hefty.. for a rodent, anyway." So a pretty good snack despite being an elusive catch because of their burrows and alarm calls that could make hunting them frustrating. They really weren't a main go-to for her, but an option.

She half paused again to sniff, then glanced over her shoulder. "What was your last home like? What was the typical hunt there?" she asked out of curiosity (since she knew relatively little of Dante and Osprey's home beyond the Teekon), and wondering what she had good experience with, if not marmots. Or maybe she just knew them by a different name.

"I know groundhogs," Wraen interjected somewhere between Amekaze's explanation and, realizing that interrupting was not a polite thing to do, smiled apologetically until the leader finished talking. 

"Well, we traveled quite a lot and since we were small and not efficient hunters for a long time, we went by the small game. You know - mice and rats and occasional groundhogs. And... now and then we would be very lucky and find a dead animal or two next to those very big and solid paths. You know, where there are monsters with big, flashy eyes going by," she left out the bit that, when there had been really nothing to fill the stomach with, they would also eat berries, leaves, grass or whatever could quench the hunger, but do very little to satisfy one's needs. 

"Once we were lucky to take down a deer," it had been their very first succesful group hunt and Wraen remembered it fondly, because there aren't too many moments in one's life, when you can be really, really proud of yourself.

They followed the scent for a while, until the trail disappeared completely by a riverbank.