Hoshor Plains the remembering

fjall answers and arktos is quiet, throwing in a soft noise of understanding. i get that, though in some ways arktos was blessed as a man with no past: there wasn't much to think about aside from the here and now ... and his future.

there's some groundhog left, if you're hungry, arktos offers what was left of his meal with a small gesture of his muzzle in the direction he'd came from. it was a plump little bastard. a lotta fat and hardly no gristle. he offers as a sales pitch, but not overly worried about it either way. if fjall declined, arktos was sure someone else would eat it, when tucked into a food cache.

the sounds of the herd are a constant for arktos, letting them wash over him like a country lullaby in the thick of night and his reassurance that all was quiet on the homefront during the day.

i don't have a name for 'em, arktos admits; words of his lack of a past, of memories before ground zero festering behind his teeth. so far, only nephele knew and in truth, that was only because arktos thought it important that she know about the man she called husband, that maybe he was haunted by a lot of ghosts despite that he couldn't remember them. and perhaps one of the few wranglers more familiar with both territory and beasts had told it to him but in what he called the bison appeared to be stuck in his mind as a habit all the same. collectively, i call them the herd. individually, i separate them into bulls, cows, and calves.

a wily grin is given. wanna see 'em? arktos invites, beckoning fjall into yellowstone's borders so that he might get to see the herd that it's wolves have integrated into their pack structure, if he wanted to.

i stared at the word 'calf' for so long it's now registering as gibberish in my brain, lol.