Blackfoot Forest so many walls up

Leto's hours in these woods had been few, but they were some of the most pleasurable she could recall in these last few weeks of travel. Nights had begun to turn cold and worry was settling comfortably into the back of the one-year-old's mind as she considered over and over her options for the winter. Returning to Emerald Forest was never and could never be a possibility, but remaining a wanderer through bitter cold and biting snow was hardly a practicality. No matter if Merak thought that the coyote part of her was strong enough to outlast anything--her stomach, an equally important part of her, was not so confident. Over and over the arguments for and against seeking a pack roiled in her mind, but the usually-certain female was uncharacteristically unsure.

Her afternoon spent in a pleasant patch of forest, however, had yielded a plethora of food in a pair of fat quail. She'd flushed them from their nest purely by accident, but a swift jump and a swipe of her claws brought not one, but both of them to the ground. Never the most skillful hunter but always a swift one, Leto had eaten until she was satisfied and buried the few remnants at the base of a tree to come back to in the morning. Her good mood had lasted into the evening, when the sinking sun gave way to a few shining stars in the twilight. Leto had never put much thought to the heavens until she'd traveled and spent so many nights beneath them, and they could at turns make her feel incredibly amazed or incredibly small and insignificant. Tonight they were a marvel and a wonder, until deeper darkness fell and the last vestige of sunlight left the sky.

Then did a true blackness cloak the forest, and any sense of comfort and pleasure leeched away into the cool night breeze. Slowly, so slowly, a chorus arose, and Leto froze where she stood, the dark ridge of fur standing up along her nape and spine at the ominous sound. She thought, initially, that the screaming might be coyotes, but she'd nosed no coys on her way into the woods and didn't suppose they'd come in now since she'd spread her half-wolfish scent around all day. Besides, she'd never heard such an unearthly wail to belong to Merak or any of the coyotes she'd had run-ins with in her summer of journeying. The only comparison she could make was to the sound of an injured fox she'd once had the misfortune of stumbling upon and forcing herself to dispatch just to end his suffering. She'd supposed that was the sound of a terrified and pained fox, but it seemed that all foxes made such a banshee's noise, and that they must be hidden throughout the woods to make every tree and stone echo with their yowling.

Startled by the noise, Leto found herself racing through the forest in near-darkness in search of a place where fox howls couldn't carry. And soon, it fell almost eerily silent. Leto stopped mid-stride, hesitating. If the chorus of foxes was unearthly, this silence was unnatural and sinister. She should at least have heard the vulpines at a distance, but no sound penetrated this deepest part of the forest. Then, though, a low pitched and undulating rumble, like thunder, reached her. The half-coyote lowered her head and bared her teeth in an instinctual display of defense against whatever this was, for logic told her that there had been no clouds in the sky at sunset and that thunder didn't take a pattern of up-and-down tones like speech. Creeping warily through the underbrush, Leto's emerald gaze swept from side to side and the sound grew louder, and turned into a voice, but she couldn't understand the words. Another roar of noise and then the sound stopped abruptly. Leto, too, halted, frightened of what she could no longer hear and still could not see.

A loud crash off to her right, not twenty wolflengths away, send the female skittering backwards to avoid danger, but the sound of branches splitting and bushes being trampled told her that whatever made the wake of destruction was going the opposite direction. When after many long minutes the sound faded and the fox cries reoccurred in the distance, Leto was able to overcome her instinctual caution and slipped into a clearing.

There was no one and nothing to be seen, but the scent of ash, like trees after a wildfire, filled her nostrils with a bitter tang. Beneath the acrid scent Leto could make out the scent of wolf, and so began to track the scent through the pitch black forest. It was a challenge, but this had always been a skill for the girl, since the days she'd begun tracking Merak's coyote clan. At length, the trek paid off, and there the wolf was, ivory like a glimpse of moonlight in black forest. From a distance, Leto could see few details, but with the night growing old and day soon to break in the east she was more confident, and the forest did not seem so dangerous now. "What in hell was that back there? Were you attacked?" Her voice was more ragged than she intended, made so by long disuse. She couldn't tell, from several paces away, if the stranger was injured, but surely whatever beast had lain waste to that path in the forest was large enough to kill this woman, whose slender build was not unlike Leto's own save for looking more wolflike.