She woke to heavy rains this morning but did not let them deter her. Quell made her way to the creek, where she found Frolic waiting for her. When he bounced excitedly on the bank, then motioned for her to follow, the youth gave him two
thumbs dewclaws up. She watched the otter scamper toward the water, gliding along the ground and slipping beneath its surface, his head reappearing a few feet offshore. He dove again, emerging further upstream, and Q grinned as she readied to lope along the bank as Frolic led her on an adventure.
They soon found themselves on the edge of what she thought of as Mal's great lake. Frolic exited the water and chirped at her, weaving in and out of her forelegs. Q nipped at him, his enthusiasm contagious.
"I wish I could get in with you," she said to him, slapping at his long rudder of a tail,
"but I'd turn into a Popsicle." In fact, the temperatures had dropped over the course of the morning, the rain having turned into snow that tumbled thickly around the odd pair.
Dauntless was still undecided. Between Whitebark Stream, U... however that one was pronounced, and Kaistleoki, there wasn't a clear "winner." Maybe he could just keep flopping between all three to visit his siblings and make them fight for his allegiance. Just kidding, he wasn't that kind of guy. Instead, Daunty found himself wandering southward, no real plans in mind except that maybe he would run into somebody interesting. He smiled as he thought about young Ashlar and what fun he had been to coach.
As he approached a large lake, the Morningside wolf noticed a strange creature doing figure-eights around a wolf's front legs. It really was a strange sight, and he didn't understand why she wasn't eating it. Dauntless had never even heard of other species as companions. Are you gonna eat that?
he asked, licking his lips. With a critter like that so eager to please, it would be easy to snap it up and have it for dinner.
Quell didn't realize they had company until he spoke, though she didn't appear in the least surprised when her eyes flicked upward to regard the stranger. "Yeah, but I'm saving it for later," she replied without missing a beat, giving Frolic's rear end a nudge. He knew what it meant and slithered into the nearby water, vanishing from sight entirely.
Quite used to fellow wolves expressing interest in eating the otter, Q didn't hold it against him. She smiled as her lavender eyes trailed over his features, though her happy expression vanished suddenly when a particularly large snowflake drifted right into her left eye. Her face scrunched as she rapidly blinked. Snowflakes were supposed to be soft and pretty, not aggressive.
"Actually," she said as she continued rabidly blinking the discomfort from her eye, "I'm saving the otter for dessert. I was thinking of doing some fishing. You wanna join...?" Q asked, trailing off tellingly in the hopes he would provide a name.
Dauntless was suspicious of her answer(s), but he didn't nettle her further. It wasn't his style. Instead, he was happy to accept her offer of fishing with an eager nod. Yeah!
Unfortunately, he wasn't bright enough to pick up on her cue for a name, so he didn't give one. Daunty ambled over to the water, eyes immediately scanning for any activity. Fishing wasn't his strong suit, but it wasn't his weakest suit, either. He considered himself a hunter, after all, and what good was a hunter if they could only ever catch one kind of prey?
Letting his focus remain on the water, he started up some idle chit-chat. So, you live around here?
he asked. She was a potential mate. And by that, he meant that she was not too old, not too young, and female. As for suitability, that he'd have to learn through conversation.
Her knee-jerk reaction was to tell him no, she lived quite a ways from here, though she caught herself and smiled. "I do," she replied, "I'm Quellcrist and I live with Sagtannet, back that-a-way." She thumbed dew clawed in the direction of the mountains, then asked, "What about you? Do y—"
Her voice cut off when a fish abruptly leaped from the water and smacked into the side of her neck. Quell jerked, a paw clapping over her throat as she made a dramatic choking noise. The fish, of course, fell to the ground and flopped toward the other young wolf even as Q shot mock daggers at the nearby waters. She saw no sign of Frolic despite his obvious handiwork.
She introduced herself and pointed to the direction of her home, but she didn't have much else to add before a fish came flying at her throat. It flopped toward him, and Dauntless looked at it with mild surprise. He'd never seen a fish fly out of water like that, and it didn't occur to him that the otter might have thrown it. Let's be real, Daunty is not the brightest.
A fish out of water was a fish for food, and he clamped down on it without a second thought before slurping the rest of it down his throat: tail and all. Once the last of it had made it down his gullet, he licked his lips. Well, that's one of the weirder things I've seen today,
he commented. I'm Dauntless. I don't really live anywhere... yet.
She turned back just in time to watch her new pal gulp down the fish. Quell's lips parted on a surprised but delighted laugh. Dauntless, she repeated in her head. Badass! It was too bad his appearance didn't quite match up with the name. She wouldn't have called him ugly, though there was something homely about him. Perhaps it was the drab color he wore.
Q wasn't about to hold that against him, though. "Yet?" she echoed aloud. "I smell a story," she added, sniffing loudly at the air and giving him a grin and a nod, inviting him to elaborate.
While he talked, Quell scooted to the water's edge and dipped her toes into the frigid liquid. Slowly, she eased her forelegs deeper, the water passing her ankles and then her elbows. She began a stirring motion, all the while keeping her head tilted toward Dauntless. So when she felt Frolic push a fish into her submerged paws and she withdrew it from the water, it looked like she was an effortlessly expert fisherman.
This continued twice more before Q decided she was going to get frostbite if she kept up the ice fishing. She pulled back from the water and looked down at the fish, kicking one more over to Dauntless before gulping down the others herself. They conversed a little more after that, until Dauntless announced he needed to go.
Only when he'd disappeared into the distance did Frolic emerge from the lake, chirping as he nibbled at Q's freezing toes. "Thanks, buddy," Quell murmured, planting a big, sloppy kiss on the otter's forehead and earning a slap of his tail for her effort. She smirked at him, the two of them playing on the snowy shore for a while longer before they retraced their route back toward their respective new homes.