Stavanger Bay You ask me to enter

ooc: takes place after this thread - http://wolf-rpg.com/showthread.php?tid=15675 .Miscellanous hunt roll for scavenging - unsuccessful. 

Osprey had never been the one to take food for granted. She had lived a long and eventful life, where periods of abundance of food were fewer than times, when there was not nearly enough. This famine was the worst she had experienced so far, but as with all things, she believed that it would pass eventually. In a way it was a challenge for her skills not only as a hunter, but also as a scavanger. 

After the succesful hunt and meal, Osprey had found a safe place to nap for few hours and therefore in the late afternoon, when she woke, the wolf had enough strength and energy to explore the nearby beach. The ocean waves tended to bring all kind of stuff out and scatter it in the sand and she thought it would not hurt to check, if there was anything useful there. There was hardly any place in her stomach to eat more though, but this didn't deter her from going through the pieces of wood and sea-weeds, once she arrived.

Would she happen to be lucky (not this time though), she could try to bring her kids here one day.

Bumping to present day!

Tetsubo had returned from his venture up the mountain with a vicious hunger; it dwelled within the pit of his belly, burned the back of his throat, and presented a need like he had never had before. As he returned to the sands of the bay, and to the many tide pools, he was at first beset by a moment of confusion as he looked about the beachfront. It was not common for his people to live so close to the sea - they had access to it, and occasionally had gathered from its shores, but he had always been too young or too busy with his own training to bother with hunting and gathering. Now, faced with this task which seemed insurmountable to one unaccustomed to such a strange landscape, Tetsubo paced sullenly through the bay and alongside the sea with his head downcast, and his mouth hanging open in an eager pant, while he searched.

His search was not empty. At first there was nothing but wet sand, or patches of dry grass further up the shoreline, but eventually he came to a point among the rocks where he could smell fish - but then, everything smelled like fish here. The rocks were littered with smooth white shapes (broken shells, although he'd never know it), pieces of crabs left behind by the shrieking gulls overhead, and thick tendrils of shining, wet, green plants. He was skeptical of each find, but was hungry enough to test the seaweed with a few snapping bites, leaving some bands of thick green with evident divots from his muzzle.

Growing hungrier by the moment, Tetsubo thought of retiring from the seaside and finding something more suitable, or at the very least more familiar, and so he turned away from yet another pile of kelp (this one with a strange bulbous end that looked as if it was half deflated, perhaps stepped on by something or smashed against a rock), and that was when he spotted the gray woman pacing across the sand. He boofed softly, although the deep sound did not carry far beyond the crashing of the waves, and deviated his course to intercept her.

Osprey did not find anything useful, but luckily enough she was not that desparate to try sea-weeds either. One rather reckeless event in her early youth had taught her for life - never, ever eat sea-weeds. The massive bouts of diarrhea and genera illness were not worth an hour of full belly. 

She digged upon an unopened clam, which she picked up with her teeth carefully and walked a little distance away. There she put it down, sniffed it first, then pawed at it a little and after a bit of thought she took it again, manouvered it between her molars and cracked it open. 

"Bleh," she spat the thing out of her mouth, the moment it's rotten shit-smelling juices hit her tongue. "Urgh..." the she-wolf muttered, trying to get rid of the foul taste, while not noticing that there was a quiet audience to this small, unlucky ordeal.

It was clear she had not heard his call, and that she was preoccupied by her own search. Was this an ally to Skellige as well? Perhaps. But he assumed the chances of that were reduced the further he traveled, even among the boundary of the bay. The pack that his lord wished to form here had yet to take root — the witch doctors had a blessing to perform, and some sort of mysticism to imbue upon the coast — so Tetsubo was prepared above all else to find stragglers, or beings intent on trespassing, and was keen on chasing them off. He was not choosing to do so yet with this woman, only because he was hungry. She seemed to have found something, although for a time Tetsubo was too far to discern what exactly it was. Then there was a pop, and she made a strange face, and a mixture of fluids spilled from her mouth - and then she cast aside what looked to be a stone.

Curious.

He approached at a brisk pace but halted when he was within a wolf-length of her, and bayed as softly as he could, although this time the bass of his voice carried to her. The beast did not say anything; he was observing, and looked from the mess of wetness on her lips to the pile of stones at her side, indicating as clearly as he could that he was filled with wonder. What are you doing? His actions asked. The beast's body prickled with hostile energy, but he curbed his desire to do any harm to this stranger because he needed an answer. If Tetsubo was to survive upon these shores, he would need to learn how. She would tell him now, or he would run her out.

Osprey almost choked on the residue rotten mush in her mouth, when out of the corner of her eye she caught glimpse of the beast that was standing behind her. She spat and jumped, and took few steps away from the man, though it was clear that if he decided to attack, she would need a way longer head-start than the one she had now. 

"Geez, man you are bloody scary!" she said without any restraint. It was strange, how fear gave you some sort of freedom. Such as - not worrying about insulting this man in any way. Should he decide to eat her... few foul words would not matter a great deal, would they?

Thinking that he had made himself quite clear, her reaction upon turning and spotting him was met with a brief blankness, and then the knitting of his brow as he assumed the expression for confused and worried, which was on his list of masks he had learned to wear. In truth, Tetsubo was neither concerned nor worried, but it was how others often reacted in these instances, so he'd observed. And now he watched the odd gray woman while she sputtered and lost her nerve, which he knew could never happen to himself. There was a line of yellow gunk on the side of her face that he watched, like a mustard stain, which must have come out of the rock she had cracked, and he waited until she had more control over her body - and mental processes - before he intoned his question.

Did you eat a rock? He asked swiftly. Tetsubo's tone was bland indeed, not even holding the inflection of a question, and he thought afterwards that he should have put some sort of guise upon his words as he had his face, because that might have brought a better response out of this odd woman upon the shore. Maybe then she would have been more co-operative, instead of melting in to hysterics, as people so often did around him. Next he dipped his head and observed the stones around his feet, even probed a few with his nose, and while they clattered across one another, none looked to be remotely edible.

"A rock?" Osprey furrowed her brow, confusion reflecting in her features. Then she looked down at the little pile of clams the male was now nosing. "You mean those?" she asked, though for some reason she knew that she would either get one word answers from this guy or another question. 

"Oh, no, no, no," she shook her head, but took another small step or two backwards. Just in case. "These are clams. Usually there is tolerable stuff inside. But the one I ate was plain disgusting," she winced at the recollection and because the taste was still strong in her mouth.

They looked like rocks to him. Small, smooth, piled across the ground where rocks often lived. He looked down at them for a minute longer, missing the sight of the woman adding distance between them, but when he raised his attention back to her, he took notice of it, though did not move. He then glanced at her paws, and at the broken bits of shell, and the line of clam guts that had wet the previously dry array of stones.

Clam, he murmured as he looked back at the shapes at his feet. He sounded like an idiot, surely, but it did not bother him. She was teaching him a vital lesson, and perhaps it would be enough to spare her life. Tetsubo reached out then, and he grasped one of the objects, but when he pulled it out of the sand there was a mess of other things that came with it: namely, other clams. There was a line of barnacles and a tendril of some sort, like a root, which seemed to net them together. With a yank he managed to pull a trio free of the rest, but resorted to spitting it out again, and letting it fall to the ground with a clatter.

It was at this point that, should Tetsubo have been able to identify emotion, he'd have realized how much he hated the beach.

He grunted, probably to indicate annoyance, licked the salt from his lips, and then nosed about the pile of clams that he had dropped. Some had cracked but not enough; others were leaking fluids that smelled just as foul as Osprey's find across the beach; and yet there were still others that were untouched, and they gleamed beneath the summer sun as if to beckon him closer for another attempt. Rocks are not for eating, he recited back at her, although he was still looking down at the pile.

"I could not agree more," Osprey called out to the man and added a nervous smile, while her eyes were studying the man and mind worked on the difficult mathematics of probability that she would be able to escape with her hide as whole. She had met great many people during her life and therefore this brute did not stick to her as someone strange and odd. Rather scary and untalkative, but he was not the first one and definitely not the last one she would come accross.

"Those - should taste better," she explained. "Just have a good sniff at them and rule out those, which taste like shit." She kept to herself the fact that the shitty ones could also be poisonous. One brute less in the world - there would be more weaklings to survive.

He contined to inspect the strange shapes beneath him, but found mostly rocks, or what he believed to be rocks. Some he nudged, others he lipped, or grabbed with his teeth, and sometimes when he bit them he made a strange face, only to spit them out again. The majority of what Tetsubo found were indeed real rocks; they did not make the wet cracking sound that he had heard before, and nothing rancid fell from their depths, because, like him, they lacked anything inside.

When finally he managed to lift free some clams and crack them, the instantaneous burst of flavor and strange saltiness made him spit them back out again quickly. They had not gone bad like the bits and pieces the gray woman had tried to eat - he just found no appeal within the brine of their meaty innards. This was fine. Tetsubo was hungry, and he had learned of these clam things, but he had also learned they were not his ideal concept of sustenance.

Spitting a few shards of clamshell from upon his tongue in to the sand, he looked hesitantly at the gray woman, as if trying to decide whether to speak again, or to give chase, or maybe just to study her in case of future encounters — and then he turned and began to leave her, silently, creeping upon the beach in search of something of more value.

Truth to be told, Osprey felt quite relieved, when after getting all of the information he needed, the big wolf left her on the shore. While his back was turned and his mind was focused solely on telling clams apart from the rocks, the elder took the opportunity to retreat even further. When some time passed and it did not look like the man had any interest left for her, she turned around and ran from the beach right into the forest and headed home.