Bitterroot Valley she said it didn't seem like that long ago

She felt close to full strength again, her young body bouncing back with alacrity as soon as the sickness was gone from it. The elk were still too much for her — and perhaps it would be many seasons before she felt confident enough to take one down on her own — but she was an old hand by now in a deer hunt.

The girl had stalked this heard for several long minutes before she made her move, hidden in the brush at the treeline. As soon as the doe lowered her head to feed, Angel rocketed from her hiding place and launched herself across the short distance. It was just picking its head up, already halfway turned to flee when she made impact. Her jaws closed around its throat while her momentum swung her underneath it, tearing flesh with the force of her bite and the weight of her body.

Blood spattered over her face. She let go, tumbling a short distance to sit panting in the grass. She didn't bother giving chase just yet. The doe was as good as dead, even as it went stumbling off at a quick hobble. She followed it with her eyes, licking blood from her face.

The grass had whispered to the wind, which relayed the message to Miska's senses - a hunt was afoot. The smell of blood followed the urgent sounds of an ambush, and then there was only the sound of wet, ragged breaths. Disguised by shadows and thick brush, the dark wolf enjoyed Angel Oak'a efforts with closed eyes and flared nostrils.

"Cruel woman," he piped up, a little too cheerily  when the doe began to fade. The singing wolf was watching her prey bleed out when Miska detached from the shadows. "Letting deer living so long with knowledge of she is dead. Miska only do this for wolf. " He grinned his shark grin.

Angel startled when a voice spoke behind her. She'd not noticed her audience, and still reorienting herself, was quite distracted by the doe still fleeing from them.

"Miska," she named him in greeting. She'd never seen him before, but his scent was familiar, and his familiarity of address gave her quite the clue that this was the man Elowyn had spoken of. "You can kill it then, if you like," she invited, turning her head to watch the doe retreat once more.

It was slowing, blood loss and shock setting in quite quickly — but death would be much slower. Angel only had plans to help it along once the doe lost its footing. Only minutes from now, most likely. 

Inwardly, she resented the commentary.

Her voice attached a trace of something to his name, a feeling, but Miska could not place it. Not fear, not quite wariness. Something.

"You can kill it then, if you like," she invited without giving her own name. Miska conducted a quick search of her face, eyes narrowed, before he followed in the doe's final earth-bound steps.

It was over quickly. A strangled sound, ineffectual flailing, loss of consciousness, death. Miska held the soft flesh of the creature's throat in a vice grip until he could no longer feel the rapid beat of its heart against his teeth. When it fell, he bent down to whisper softly, soothingly in its ear - old words to guide it to the open plains of the great beyond.

"Sss!" he called back at Angel, popping the sacred moment like a party balloon. "Food for you is ready. What is favorite part - eyeball? Hole in back?" The black wolf snickered. "I knowing such wolf. Very ugly. Mouth smelling always of shit."

Angel followed the dark male in silence, studying his back for want of anything more interesting to look at. His accent was different from Sega's, but both men seemed to struggle with the common tongue. She wondered if she would recognize any of his words, but as he sounded even less familiar to her than Sega, she doubted that she would.

She watched dispassionately when he killed the doe, and then with quiet interest as he whispered to it. She opened her mouth to ask — and then grimaced when he immediately spoke crassly instead.

"I'm going to save the pelt first," she told him, firmly side-stepping his language, and the implications of his words. She felt it was a dig at her, but perhaps it was just his way to speak rudely, no matter his conversational partner. She would offer him, for the moment, the benefit of the doubt.

"What did you say to it?" she asked him, having never seen such a practice before.

Their flavours of communication were not a match - strawberry meets eggyolk, beef fat courts vanilla. Miska grimaced inwardly at the effort it would take to swap his usual obscenities and crass jokes for whatever passed as acceptable outside the brotherhood. He considered to what extent it was worth it.

The preserving of pelts was new to him, but seemed widespread in the wilds - @Nowke, son of Skorpa, had worn the remains of bear. The dark wolf frowned, looking between the Angel and the doe, lingering on the dead animal's glassy eye. It surprised him to feel mild disgust at the idea. Not so much the peeling of the skin, but what it might mean for its owner's afterlife.

"Niech wiatry niosą twoją duszę tam, gdzie biegnie wieczne stado. Is goodbye," Miska said, a little tartly. "Girl should saying something if want take skin. Seem rude." He stepped back from the body, inviting Angel to thank the animal for its gifts.

Miska seemed upset, though Angel had no earthly idea what he might have to complain about. She supposed he'd picked up on her own tone, and perhaps resented her for it. Feeling chastened, Angel stepped forward as she was bade, even as she cast a startled look back at him.

"To the doe?" she asked, not skeptically, but with childlike curiosity. She didn't need an answer, though. It was clear that he did, in fact, mean for her to speak to the dead doe. She did so with all gravity, even if she felt a little awkward.

"Goodbye, doe." Here, she stumbled over what ought to come next. He'd said a lot more than goodbye, she was sure, but what sort of ceremony they stood on was almost entirely unknown to her.

"I'll see you on the other side," was what she settled for, falling back on a Morningside blessing she'd been taught.

She looked to Miska again to see if she'd done right.

Young people these days, though Miska, as an endlelssly long line of the middle-aged had thought before him. He nodded impatiently when she asked if he intended her to speak to the doe - what else? The sour wind of your next fart? It went unsaid, burning a hole in his throat.

She did her best, he supposed - not the most eloquent send-off, but said with sincerity and her own little flair. Miska nodded again, approving, almost a little proud. She was so young.  Beautiful, as only a fresh-faced creature could be, but there was no denying the weight that was settling around his shoulders: the mantle of uncles, resplendent in tweed.

"What you do with skin?" he asked, intending to stay for the de-robing. "I meeting boy-wolf with skin of bear. Very bad smell. Not all fault of bear."

It was a relief when this send-off was accepted, as she did not want to speak any words to the cooling doe that she didn't mean. Blessings given in bad faith were curses, after all, and only they, the living, could receive curses.

Still. It was clear that Miska had a different relationship to the doe than Angel. She looked down at it again before answering, unsure what time she should take or how her wording ought to change — so she gave up and spoke simply, her tone matter-of-fact.

"It'd probably soured," she said of the bear pelt, privately thinking that the bear must have been long dead and overripe before the boy even found it. "I clean, dry, and stretch mine. Where I'm from, we used them to line dens in the winter, and for young women to show of their skill and craftsmanship, and for men to show that they are loved, and proud to be loved."

She thought it was beautiful, even if the Round Valley contingent had thought her rather strange for the practice.

"There is a smell," she admitted after a moment. "I suppose I'm used to it. But it doesn't smell as bad as even a living bear."