The last thermals of the afternoon were winding down just as the sun threatened to slip behind a mid-horizon cloud, and a dark speck wheeled downwards in lazy circles. The pinprick morphed into a rangy creature with long, crooked wings and a broad wedge of a tail - a blade of obsidian that cleaved aside the summer haze as she pulled in her flights. It was a casual descent, but she could not help but inject a bit of play into it, and for no reason other than her own amusement, the bird rolled into a stoop and plummeted a hundred feet before unfurling her wings and fanning them to their full extent. She shot upwards on a new trajectory, pulled in again, and carved a new arc deeper than the last. Each successive swoop was more daring until the very tips of the pines quivered within claw's reach, and it was upon one of such lodgepoles that Altai lit and ruffled her windswept plumage with a throaty croak to proclaim her temporary domain.
Tonravik had dealt with many a bird. Among her favorites were crows and ravens, though for no real reason other than they had led her to carrion. Now, it was she who brought them the meals... repaying the favor, as the circle of life often seemed to have them do. As Tonravik moves through the forest, contemplating the things going on within, she hears a familiar crow. Not familiar in that she knew it personally, but familiar in that she knew to what sort of avian creature it belonged to.
Idly, she moved in that direction, looking to the treetops. While she had no desire to interact with one, she reminisced in as fond a manner as one who could not feel any true affection could.
Altai gave a soft gurgle and began to preen, realigning the delicate filaments of feather that her tumbling had put into disarray with a well-practiced toss of her head. It was a perk of being at the top of the aerial food chain that she could allow for such blatant disregard for danger - a raven would be more likely to harry a bird of prey than the reverse, and her chicks had long since fledged and were no longer at any great risk of becoming a meal. She could preen, sun herself, or nap in peace.
A distant shadow of movement caught her eye between bouts of feather picking, and Altai paused. The identity of the creature would determine her degree of future interest in it, but the pine boughs still mostly obscured her view. Another gurgle escaped her bill and she hopped down from the crown of the tree to a lower perch. She cocked her head and stared down the direction from which she anticipated the creature to come, eyes glimmering at the prospect of a meal or simply something to harass.
The sound of the corvidae did not give the woman any pause. Instead, she moved onward and forward. Her interest in seeing the critter died some when she heard the sound of an animal moving through the low underbrush. Near enough to a waterbed for Tonravik to rightfully assume what the animal was, the woman instinctually surged after it. Was she hungry? Suddenly, yes.
And it took her minutes to pounce and take out the muskrat that had tried to evade her. She nibbled on it, but suffered a loss of appetite. Tonravik thought to cache it, but first felt the need to urinate. Idly she thought of the crow she had heard, but felt the animal would be of no consequence. And if the creature took some of her quarry, so be it. Tonravik had fed with ravens many a time, some leading her to meals. If it were winter, she might have taken the food with her.
The sounds of a brief struggle - a rustling, the muffled squeak of some mammal's breath being extinguished, and subsequent silence - piqued Altai's interest, and she dropped out of the pine, coasting down to ground level and scouring the undergrowth with a sweep of her beady eyes. She landed in a mottled patch of sun and flicked her wings, warily scanning the immediate area before hopping back into the air and investigating the next patch of clearing. Her sense of smell was poor but her eyesight more than compensated, and she had barely cleared the next bend before she saw the wolf's retreating form. There, in the wolf's wake, lay a partially consumed carcass.
Food for a raven was plentiful in the summer and she was in no dire need of sustenance, so Altai did not pounce upon it, but she glided down to the woodland floor and landed several yards away to gauge the wolf's reaction. She didn't particularly feel like squabbling over it, but if the wolf would tolerate a few scraps stolen, it wouldn't hurt to test the hunter's tolerance.
After releasing her bladder, and kicking dirt over it, she returned to her scraps. And there was the raven she had heard. Tonravik looked to the meat and then the raven. Neither of them seemed to want for anything in that moment. The leader thought of what she knew of the creatures, and recalled that the birds had a good memory. So, Tonravik was complacent, and stepped aside to lay down, affable and inclined to let the other peck at the meat as it pleased.
The woman would do more for ravens than she would for other lesser canine creatures. But they had done for her a great deal more, and with significant less harassment (though that was not to say they never did). A large bough covered her in shade, and the leader rest her face between her forelegs.