King Elk Forest i am the quiet

the cold was a wraith, sinister and deadly. the beauty and relative easy of the early winter was gone, the cold growing and the prey populace shrinking.  The air was sharp, cutting a burning path down to her lungs, and there was a silence upon the land that was unheard of in warmer times. She was the only creature in the face of the bitter cold for a long while, interrupted only one by a fleeting group of songbirds, and then she was alone once more. 

The cold seeped through her fur, trailed down her spine, bleed into her bones. Her breath was a cloud of white, and hunger was a keen blade she sought to dull. Summer's hospitality was gone, and with it much of her weight. Earlier, a hare fallen prey to the winter had dulled the pain that was hunger, after her teeth had worried the frozen meal for much of an hour, but that had been long ago. 

Movement caught her keen gaze, and she stilled, ears pricked atop her skull and gaze fastened in the scene a distance away. There stood another, barely made out through the veil of falling snow, and after a moment, the elk that lay before him. Thunder rumbled, low and ominous, and the woman still did not move. She did not seek the company of others, did not wish it, but the male was currently in custody of something she required. 

Slowly did she approach, watching, waiting, stilling a distance away, and watching for a reaction that would determine her next move. Again did the thunder make it's prescence known, the white gathering on her pelt increasing, the sharp cold ever there. She ought to find shelter, she knew, but hunger was the primary concern at the moment.