@Rana
Anyone (including @French Fry) is welcome to join in on this as well!
--
Aside from the one or two occasions where his people ran late from work Big Mac had never really known
hunger. But with a solid week of being a 'wild animal' under his belt there was a desperation in his bones...a sense of feral longing that came with being half damned starved to death.
He and Fry had managed purely on their collaborated efforts to survive: the Retriever with savaging not yet ripened berries re-growing from the locust plague and the Newfie with his clumsy attempts at fishing. There was success on rare occasions - moments that felt to him more important that even the highest praise from his people - and the two dogs split the meal accordingly. Fry was rapidly slimming and Mac was losing the mass of his muscle; it was with a tender touch that his brother noted a hollow dip in the juggernaut's haunch.
Mac staggered deeper into the wildling territory...his eyes wide and trained on even the slightest movement.
I need people he thought desperately.
Please! A small cry escaped him as his energy depleted and forced him to sit, breathlessly, in some grassless plain for which he had no name.
Rana was out exploring more of the new area she called home. Though the territory of the pack she belonged to was quite a ways away, her thought was to see as much as possible. Now in an open plain after traveling though wetlands, she sat and yawned. The plan was to let the water soaking her legs to evaporate or trickle into the dirt. Her ribs could be seen, but were not so defined as they would be if not for the fish.
She looked around the open space and saw a form in the distance. Cautiously, the dark female rose, she wasn't going to be the one approched. With the lack of prey plauging what seemed like the entire world, it was impossible to tell what other predators would do. The way she saw it was the one to notice last was at the greatest disavantage.
When the form became clearer, she noticed it was almost a wolf, but not quite. The thing, as far as she could tell, was larger then her. A word was trying to push its way to the front of her mind, but the thought of possible threat pushed it away. Not knowing exactly what the creatures intentions were, she stopped a fare distance away to give herself time to react if attacked.
While trying to catch his breath the back of Mac's neck prickled with the sense of being watched. Warm eyes lifted, expecting to see Fry staggering across the distance, but instead he only found the distinct silhouette of a creature he now knew by the name wolf. She kept her distance...the same curious awe Ondine and Spring had emulated stagnating in the silence shared between them.
He tried his best to be friendly with the wary she wolf studying from the distance. It was easy to understand her misconceptions about his appearance; where he only needed to learn once what wolves were the wolves in return needed to learn of him one by one by one...the repeated suspicion thrown his way was little more than a delay in introductions. Thus far he'd not encountered anyone who gave the direct impression that they'd like to hurt him.
"Hello!" he woofed with a casual thump of his tail. If that didn't convince the femme that they were destined to be best friends forever then he didn't know what would!
The female stayed quiet for a moment longer before letting herself relax. With the greeting and thump of the creature's tail against the ground, she didn't see it as a threat. However, she decided to keep her distance. She sat and raised her head high, an old habbit that would never fade.
"Hello, might I ask who, and what, you are?" Along with exploring, she thought it would be beneficial to talk to anyone willing to do so. Again, there was a work trying to push its way forward, but she wasn't able call it any farther.
"I'm Big Mac!" he said with a prideful lilt in his voice. "I'm called a Newfoundland...I'm a dog!" The trouble with all that was he had no concrete definition of dog for these lithe beasts of the forests. He only knew that he was one; the inability to compare himself to something this far from the mainland was troublesome indeed. "I think I'm like a variation of you," he commented with a quizzical tilt of his head. "But bigger." He grinned just before emphasizing, "And droopier."
"You're a...wolf right?" the Newfie questioned courteously before the she wolf felt compelled to explain her heritage to him. "I've met two of your kind before. Nice gals." He settled heavily back against his haunches - a faint groan squeezed in his chest as the pain of weariness crept up his back - and fondly reminisced the encounter. "What's your name?"
The female listened intently, dog, that was the word that refused to surface. With the word in mind, she recalled her aunt introducing her to one before she was even old enough to be alone. What she couldn't remember was how they looked, what they called themselves, or even their gender, only that dogs lived beyond her birth pack's territory.
"That's an unusual name, and mine is Rana." Instead of saying 'yes' or 'no' to being a wolf, she simply nodded. The other two wolves mentioned didn't matter to her, since they weren't around. Her ears swiveled back for a moment before she turned her full attention back to Mac.
French Fry was never too far from his inky-furred friend. Normally, his excess energy dictated that he run circles around the ponderous Newfoundland just to keep pace without wearing Mac out, but hunger — this kind of hunger, new and foreign and seemingly without end — had slowed the Golden Retriever down. His empty head hung between his forelegs as he bumbled along, the plastic cone dragging limply. Normally the cone didn’t provide much of a hindrance; French Fry was a russet-furred freight train and generally jovial. Now, though, he wanted it off.
The sound of Mac’s voice, sonorous and courteous as always, paired now with an unfamiliar and decidedly female timbre, brought a spring to French Fry’s step. Looking a little worse for the wear, with his battered satellite dish encircling his slightly more slender neck, French Fry stopped in his tracks as he regarded this new stranger. Not the pallid marshmallow fluff of Ondine, nor the chocolate and chestnut agouti of Spring, this female was decidedly Mac-colored with adornments of white accentuating her ample curves. She was, without a doubt, the most beautiful creature French Fry had ever seen.
With a cheerful whuff French Fry ambled over to his beloved big brother, a note of worry at Mac’s weariness causing Fry’s brow to furrow momentarily before he butted his head [i.e. butted his cone] — sssssTHWUP! sssssTHWUP! — against the Newfoundland’s shoulder and neck. Then, a little shyly, he dropped into a sphinx-like position to show instinctive respect to the love of his life the raven-furred female. “Hello,” he mumbled bashfully. “You’re bea — I lo — er — h’lo.”
Please marry me!
A small smirk - admittedly with a tinge of enjoyment - coiled the corners of his lips as he watched Fry struggle to find composure in the presence of their new acquaintance. Mac's terrible operation had been preformed far earlier, too early by his standards, and he felt nothing but amiable curiosity toward the she wolf standing before them. But Fry, on the other hand, was pretty much fresh off the table...the camping trip had been a misguided attempt at bolstering the young Retriever's spirit in light of his new self.
"Fry," he introduced gladly with a wide gesturing of his head-
BWUMPH!
- the Newfie jerked his noggin back after his cheek struck the edge of the cone unexpectedly. His eyes were wide though he was clearly unhurt by the ordeal; the gaze narrowed at the satellite dish that had brought both himself and (most definitely) his brother nothing but trouble from the very start. He huffed, contemplating, and then shook his head as a second breath hissed between his teeth. "It's gotta go," he mumbled to no one in particular. It'd be worth the stern remark of Bad Boy! if only to see his bro not get tangled up in the bushes again. Or hitting a tree. Or smashing their too few meals while trying ferociously to eat with a 2" gap between his teeth and the food. Or partically blinding them both when the sun caught it juuuuuust right.
"Can you help me?" he asked of Rana with an expression of intense hopefulness.
The dark female watched them, and was unable to suppress a smile from creeping to her muzzle. Her head tilted to one side, not knowing what the thing around the new dog's head was. She figured it was from a place she hasn't explored yet, or just a piece of trash humans left somewhere. She was snapped out of her thoughts of what the thing could be when Mac asked a question.
"Hello...What did you say? I was distracted by that...what's around the other one's head?" She straitened her head and nodded towards Fry. She'd missed everything both of them had said since noticing the second dog.
I apologize for the delay! orz
French Fry’s head bobbed automatically at the sound of his name, though he found any words of confirmation had lodged in his throat as a beautiful smile shaped Rana’s lovely muzzle. His tongue lolled from his muzzle as he began to pant — does anybody else think it’s hot in here? no? just me? — and he found himself unmotivated to do anything but simply stare at the female, his soulful brown eyes filled with wonder and affection. Not looking her in the eyes, of course — that was so uncomfortable to endure! — he fixed his gaze on some safe middle ground between her throat and her forelegs. He didn’t know her name, but he was already wondering how he would explain to the Family that she needed to come home with them.
The conversation passed harmlessly around him.
“It’s gotta go. Can you help me?”
“Hello...what did you say? I was distracted by that...what’s around the other one’s head?”
Just then, Rana’s attention focused on Fry as she nodded cordially.
WAS THIS LOVE? IT SURE FELT LIKE LOVE.
French Fry’s tail quivered and wiggled like a live wire. He had no real understanding of what the operation was for; Mac understood it better, but Fry was just a little slow on the uptake. “I had an operation,” he piped up bashfully. He remembered when the e-collar had been a point of pride — a force field. It was something he’d brandished repeatedly at poor Big Mac. “Try to bite me in the face, Mac!” he had repeatedly urged the poor Newfoundland. “Try to chew on my ear, Mac!” And when the more stoic of the brothers had obliged his eager minion with a soft sigh and a harmless NOMF, French Fry had gone bananas with his victory. It was a comedic vignette that had inevitably made its way to the Facebook pages of all the Family’s friends by now.
“It was only supposed to be for a little while,” French Fry explained with a low whine of dismay, his pitiful eyes looking as though his face should be backed by a Sarah McLaughlin song. “But this sure feels like a longer while.”
I hereby ship Fry and Rana <3
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"So he'll quit peeing on the bushes," he said with all the brutal honesty of an older brother. "No baby making is what He said," tacked on the Newfie with finality. He was as close to a God as Mac's dimly lit imagination could conjure; what He said almost always went. Unless Mac found a piece of food too close to the table's edge and then screw the God and his rules...he was his own creature that didn't need no man!
Except right now he REALLY needed a man. A dog's got needs ya know.
"The cone of shame keeps Fry from being a bad dog," he explained. "No boo boo touching." Thanks to a certain movie no human on this earth couldn't NOT refer to the Elizabethan collar as 'the cone of shame' and Mac only knew it as such. He studied Fry's bashful behavior and gave his plume an encouraging wag before clasping the edge of the cone gently in his teeth and giving it a little tug. It'd been fun dragging Fry around the yard like a toy at first- the dog was helpless but to follow the Newfie's enthusiastic Pied Piper routine as he led them both from one corner of the fence to the other - but now he found the obliging follow up of the Retriever's body a nuisance.
With his grip firm on one edge he looked to Rana and boofed a soft plea at her. "If yew howd one end I cahn pull from the ather," he said with little more legitimacy than a stroke victim. But he pulled back a ways so that Fry involuntarily leaned in the direction he was going...hoping Rana got the idea that she needed to grasp the other side and pull in the opposite direction.
--
"If you hold one end I can pull from the other."
I'm leaning towards it, but who knows?
She couldn't understand what some of the words meant, but she did get the idea that this so called 'cone of shame' was used by humans. This forced a frown as she got up and made her way over to the two dogs. Again, she couldn't understand what was being said, but for a different reason. When she noticed Mac pulling the cone to one side, it took her a moment to register what he wanted her to do.
She cautiously grabbed the other side of Fry's cone, but let go soon after. The thing felt weird with her lack of experience with the material. In her mind, this made her look scared, so she grabbed the cone again with more confidence.
iamsonauseous x__x
“So he’ll quit peeing on the bushes.”
A low groan rumbled from French Fry’s lips, dropped down to a feeble whine, and wheedled plaintively up the musical scale — the canine equivalent of, “Maaaaac, stahhhhhp!” Why was the inky-furred Newfie being such a brother? Theatrically the yearling canted his head and averted his eyes, mumbling, “I’m mortle-fied,” casting a surreptitious glance at Big Mac and Rana to see if they’d noticed his SAT word of the day. “I was protecting the bushes.”
French Fry wasn’t one to sulk, however, and the moment Big Mac grabbed the rim of the Elizabethan collar firmly between his teeth, the Golden Retriever bounced obligingly to his feet. Automatically he began to follow Mac, but he froze immediately when Rana approached with a measure of caution and grabbed the cone’s other side. She let go briskly, but French Fry didn’t pick up on any signs of fear — he figured she was just adjusting her grip.
The plastic contraption itself was littered with little tooth marks — French Fry was no stranger to being dragged around — but with his brother on one side and the most beautiful wolf he’d ever seen on the other, the Golden Retriever felt literally torn. His tail wagged appealingly as he glanced from one inky face to the other, his body hunched into a rather hunchbacked posture as he wavered between a playful bow and a submissive crouch. I don’t understand this game, bespoke his awkward body language, but, oh! I do want to play, ever so much!