Ouroboros Spine Oh, in time you'll see

The minute you mentioned marshes, I was teleported back to my childhood of living around creeks and lakes that were excellent for the very thing Mordecai is facing. My mother still has a pair of shoes lost by my childhood home because of this. <__>

When it came to the thought of winter, Mordecai anticipated a harsh one. Though in reality, he had never been this far north. His parents had come from a slightly northern climate, had lived through a horrible, deadly winter or two, but he had been born of warmer climates. Truth be told, he knew in the middle of the winter he would definitely miss the warm, gritty grounds of Sedona. Not that they had never received snow of course, but the winters there were shorter in comparison to what he experienced now. It was a gradual sort of slide however, and though the days grew colder and colder by the hour, no snow had yet to fully reach the ground.

For that, he was thankful. There were still those last minute preparations that he wanted to do within the Spine, things that he wanted to prompt the wolves beneath him to work towards. They had been fortunate in their hunts, but the need to hunt still remained. So like Sialuk, he too was exploring the marshes for what he could scare up. Deer had come through at some point, their prints in the muddy terrain told him where to avoid unless he wanted to become the next victim of a mud pit. Not that Mordecai himself had avoided being sufficiently muddy — he was coated. There was just no getting around it. And currently, he found in just a few short steps why there had been a sudden scattering of tracks ahead of him that steered well out of the way of the marsh altogether.

It happened quickly in just a few short steps — one foreleg slid beneath the damp, cold terrain. The others were quick to follow, leaving the fledgling Spine alpha to tug angrily against the mud. The worst he tugged to move on, the worst it seemed to hold him. It was a slow going process there, only serving to get him more muddy as he tried to work his way out of one particular mud hole that would have rather kept him. He growled pitifully, oblivious the fact that he was about to be happened upon…