he stands not alone

Just one other, please. =)

Akhlut's heart pounded in his chest as he dodged the hog's tusks, snapping his jaws back in its face menacingly. It was, he knew, a stalemate, but his stubborn nature would not allow him to give way so easily. The hog's squalling piglets had been his intended meal, one for himself and three more to fill Horizon Ridge's newly-dug cache, but he hadn't supposed Daddy Hog would be just around the bend in the creek and hear his young ones' panic. Now it was a matter of pride that he at least attempt to best the coarsely-furred beast, but every time he sank his teeth into the boar's thick dark hide he found himself the target of a battering ram's swings at his chest, his shoulder, his sides.

"Damn you," the Alpha snarled, and dislodged his foreclaws from where they'd dug into the hog's rear haunches before loping a fair distance down the rocky hillside. He watched with wary ice-blue eyes as the swine nudged his children back into the rotted-out log that was their home. Snorting gruffly and not unlike the pig itself, Akhlut followed the creek—Tumbledown Creek, he'd dubbed it, in his own mind if to no-one else—a bit further downhill before lowering himself to the ground and beginning to lick the scrapes and shallow gouges his could-have-been meal had inflicted. Idly he daydreamed about some docile doe wandering across his path, an easy meal that would be delicious, could feed more than one of them, and didn't involve a risk of having his own guts spilled on the ground.