my old aches

Perfectly fine! Was hoping to bait you actually. :D
Don't mind Jinx, I'm using her to practice my wolf body language skills so I decided she's not going to talk very much anymore, but anything in colour italics would be wolf body language that Kisu would be able to understand like speech!

A near-audible hiss slid by her teeth when a voice directly behind her rattled her heart in its cage of bones. Her fur shifted through a spectrum of states — raised in a prickled ridge of hackles, flattening as she calmed, and lifting into half-raised caution and concern — as she turned to face him head-on, with no shame in locking her eyes with is. He was unknown to her, as nameless as the forest she had ascended into, but his question placed him within a handful of acquaintances, despite them having never met.

The bark she had splintered from the tree lay in the scarce, muddied snow at her feet, momentarily forgotten as she weighed his question mentally. She could speak, answer him outright, but part of Jinx, the part that had been shaken by what she'd witnessed to the point where her sanity had fragmented and rationality had become misplaced, rebelled against it. Part of her did not want to give the satisfaction of words when not necessary; words were for her god and her religion, not wolves who could speak the ancient language of posturing.

And so instead of responding verbally, Jinx performed the first of countless body language interactions she would employ for the remainder of her life: the flagging of her tail, the stiffening of ears and the straightening of spine as she stretched her neck skyward, challenging him with a full-on stare to the face. Perhaps this would answer his question: respect, her posture demanded, for I am the one you speak of.

There was always the possibility that he was chummy with the unknown wolf she had responded to, and that he was in fact more highly ranked than her, but Jinx didn't know that. It was through action a wolf established its rank, and having met none of the pack's denizens, it was now up to them to establish their respective places here and now.