Wolf RPG

After thinking on it a while, Wildfire came up with an idea. She would start small, test it out on her usual prey, then maybe work up to something bigger if it panned out. After giving Floki a goodbye kiss, the slim yearling climbed down the mountain and soon found herself among the trees of the forest. She began to search, not for prey but for something else. She found it between the robust roots of a sycamore overshadowed by a dormant chokecherry bush.

She began to dig. Wildfire didn't stop until the hole was deep enough that practically half her body length fit into its depth. She balanced on the lip of the pit, eyeballing her handiwork and chewing on her lip. Was it deep enough? She wouldn't know until she tested it. She glanced sideways at the withered bush, applying her teeth to one of its many stems to severe a large bough of leaves. Carefully, the Gamma placed it over the hole, hiding it from view.

Instead of attempting to bait it or even chase a victim into it, Wildfire set out into the woods and spent a solid two hours tracking down and eventually capturing a rabbit. Her jaws closed around the back of its neck but she didn't apply a killing bite. She growled around the struggling lapin as she carried it through the woods. She took more than a few kicks to the face, yet she would not relent her grip on the animal.

When she arrived at her trap, she roughly kicked aside the branch and dropped the hare into it. Although the rabbit began to desperately leap at the sides of the pit, attempting to claw its way to escape, it couldn't quite manage to scale the earthen walls. A grim smile of satisfaction began to curl Wildfire's lips—until the desperate animal made a wild leap and managed to launch out of the trap, right into her face.

She was too caught by surprise to try grabbing at it, so the hare darted away into the underbrush. A breath gusted out of her mouth as she wryly mused aloud, "So—deeper."

Ness held a lazy trot, following a scent she knew but had yet to put a face to. Though she felt rather indifferent towards the art of introduction, it was deemed a necessary evil. The she-wolf was far too casual to care much of what impressions she made, and it was a personal wish that everyone could simply read her mind and know what they needed to know without her having to tell them. How she managed to be both dilatory and ambitious was beyond anyone's guess.

The feminine perfume she remembered clinging to Floki like a blanket, led her to a small, red-furred wolf, peering down into a freshly excavated hovel. Having not seen what had transpired just moments before, Ness assumed that the fellow yearling was digging an overly deep hole for her excrement. What else could she be doing? "Shy shitter, huh?" she asked, a loose smile pulling against one side of her muzzle, and her friendly eyes regarded the Gamma unabashedly. She came right up, too comfortable in her own skin, and peered into the hole as well. "Yeah, I like to bury mines pretty deep too— but you got me beat, girl." Unless she had a bowel problem that required such deep bathroom fixtures. though this was in Ness' mind, she tastefully avoided saying so.

How much deeper did it need to be, though? Wildfire canted her head, wondering if she could even dig down that far. Maybe she should get Floki or someone larger to give her a hand. It was also possible that this idea just wouldn't work, that there was no way wolves could dig a pit deep enough for this purpose. But Wildfire wasn't ready to admit defeat yet, not by a long shot.

She was so lost in her thoughts that she didn't realize she had company until a feminine voice said, "Shy shitter, huh?" from about three feet away. The Gamma startled and stood, amber eyes slightly wider than usual as she ascertained the stranger beside her. She was tall and leggy, the smudges on her fur vaguely reminding Wildfire of Charon.

She was still talking and it took a beat for everything to click in Wildfire's head. "Wh—" she began to reply, then found herself laughing instead. Wildfire wasn't usually one for (literal) toilet humor but the misunderstanding somehow tickled her funny bone. "This isn't a latrine," she eventually said, eyes still amused. "It's a small game trap. Well, it's supposed to be. It's still in need of fine-tuning," she admitted with a slight downward curve at one corner of her mouth.

"Oh!" Ness said, blinking rapidly as she completely rearranged her preconception of the hole and imagined it instead as a trap. Suddenly her indifference dissipated, and her curiosity spiked, causing the nosy wolf to smile. "Now that's what I'm talking about," the she-wolf exclaimed, examining the fixture more closely and completely missing the disappointment in it that her packmate was currently faced. "Just a little deeper, a little stepper, this baby'll turn into a bonafied hop-stopper." She'd just made that up, but pretended as if the phrase was already a thing. She was bowed at the lip of Wildfire's creation, her paws hanging over the edge.

"Could I help you? I really wanna see this thing work," she asked, youthfully excited, peering up from her crouch at the small wolf. "I'm Ness, by the way."

The stranger seemed quite taken with the entire concept, once Wildfire cleared up her misapprehension. She even gave it a crazy title, which Wildfire mouthed to herself with a quiet smile of amusement. An offer of help and a name were forthcoming and the Gamma mused to herself, This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

"Yeah, I'd love a hand. I just tested it out and, well, you can guess how that went. It needs to be deeper." The huntress chewed her lip thoughtfully, then remembered to add, "I'm Wildfire. You can call me Wifi, though." She tossed a smile across the pit. "Your legs are longer than mine; maybe you can dig a bit further?"

"Wifi," Ness repeated fondly, thoughtfully— though what she could have been thinking about was anyone's guess. She peered down into the hole, nodding at Wildfire's suggestion that she had the tools to dig deeper than herself. Dropping her forehalf down, she began to awkwardly shovel deeper into the hollow, careful that she didn't create a slant from which prey could gain leverage and escape. It was a tight fit for her, but Ness was not keen on making it too large; it would become too noticeable.

From inside the hole came Ness' slightly muffled voice. "I think you look more like a Firebird, than a Wifi," she commented, trying to raise her voice up out of the ground. She stopped shuffling, her body becoming abnormally still for an overly long second and then: "hey! I think if we bowl it out down here," (like a round-bottomed flask) "it'd make it just that much harder for anything to get back out." She pushed her dusty front up out of the hole, if only so that she might observe her lab partner's expression on the thought. "You're the architect," she grinned a literally dirty smile.

Ness evidently didn't need much more invitation than that; she bowed forward into the pit and began to dig. Wildfire remain crouched on its lip, head canted slightly as she watched her pack mate work. Ness's body actually obscured most of her handiwork, though Wildfire decided to stay and oversee, of course. It was her project, her brain child.

The unexpected nickname surprised a laugh out of the young Gamma. "That's funny. That's what my parents call myself and my siblings collectively," she mused. "Most tell me I look like I should be named Fox. Too bad my mom already had dibs on that name."

Before they could get any deeper into a discussion about names, Ness proposed they bowl it out, which Wildfire quite frankly didn't comprehend for a beat. She might have been the architect but... "How do you mean?" she questioned, needing a deeper description.

"Like this," Ness prompted, stamping her foot down so it made a clear pawprint in the earth, then using one of her toes, scratched a line upwards from the indention— a representation of the bottle's neck. "They'd fall in through here," she motioned with her foot down the drawing's tube; "and then this part," her foot circled the pawprint; "is where they'd be trapped. See?" She looked up, wondering if Firebird was picking up on her general idea. "It would make the sides round, wider than the opening, and the bottommost point of the trap would be too deep to jump straight out of."

She took a breath, though the over-confident Ness never quite felt as if she was being too wordy. The girl hadn't a shred of self-consciousness. "I just think it'd be kinda harder for them to get out, if they had this bowl down there— all that space— and an opening that was only big enough for them to fall through. Come to think of it, I wonder if this would work for a predator. Y'know. A big enough one? How high can coogs jump anyway?" she asked offhandedly.

Ness drew a rough diagram in the soil and Wildfire peered at it speculatively. She was no engineer, though she didn't understand how they would make the bottom of the pit wider than the so-called bottleneck. If the earth was wet, it might be possible to pack it, otherwise it seemed to her like it would just collapse in on itself.

Before she could comment on this, Ness began babbling about cougars. Wildfire's lips twitched in amusement. "Charon would like it if we came up with one big enough for bears," she said, then added, "but I don't see how that's possible. It would have to be enormous to effectively trap a larger predator."

Glancing back at the image scrawled in the dirt, she asked, "I think this is a great idea in theory but how do we go about this? How do we stop it from collapsing in on itself?"

Ness was not a grand schemer— nor was anyone from her family, really— and being a wolf that preferred action to planning, it was also fair to say that she was inclined to "jump the gun" with an imagination that wasn't the most practical thing in the world. As Wildfire poked holes in her wild theory, Ness found herself becoming aware of her outlandish theme yet again. Her tail flicked, and she took the revelation with a shrug, recovering smoothly form disappointment. "You're probably right. Just a snazzed-up idea— all bones, no meat."

She scrunched up her face in thought. "There'd also be the issue of whoever was digging such a big thing... how they'd get out." She began laughing as her idea of a scarf unraveled quicker than it had been knitted— the most tired scarf in all the lands. "Oh well. We can experiment with some stuff," she mused, winking at Firebird (in a totally non-suggestive way) before diving back in to scoop out more dirt. "We gotta catch us some test subject too!"

The Gamma felt a little bad, poking all sorts of holes in her pack mate's theories, yet Ness didn't seem particularly bothered. She declared that they could experiment and Wildfire grinned and nodded. She sort of liked this process, of brainstorming innovative ideas and trying to bring them to life. So it wasn't going well so far. So what? Even the best hunters—her father, for instance—failed much more than they succeeded.

Although Ness seemed keen on continuing the dig, Wildfire tapped her hip and said, "I vote we do that now—catch another test subject, I mean. We may have to catch two things, actually, because I'm really hungry all of a sudden. It's been a workout." She motioned toward the hole, then backed up to make room for Ness even as she swiveled. She licked her lips, paused long enough to make sure the other she-wolf was coming, then plunged into the underbrush in search of more small prey.