Blacktail Deer Plateau [j] turn my swag on

OOC: I've sort of rethought bringing Roanoke into the game—she's too much like Jinx now, and these two's swinging behaviours would turn her off the pack anyway—but I still want to finish this thread. :D

IC: There was something overly fishy about these wolves. Roanoke couldn't put her finger on it, but something about them seemed... Strange. Unnatural. She chocked it up the Alpha's abrupt mood swing. It was uncommon for a wolf to one moment bare its teeth in aggression and affront only to return to a semblance of calm a moment later... But maybe Hawkeye was just bipolar. It wouldn't be the first time the Eyjolfur had come upon a wolf whose attitude swung violently from one extreme to the next.

But what tipped her off wasn't really the Alpha, for she'd already decided to set aside that episode. It was Robur, who displayed a similar shift in attitudes, although it was much more subtle. But Roanoke was perceptive—one of her many outstanding qualities, but for once, a true talent rather than her own vanity—and she picked up on it. Perhaps not the sidelong glance he exchanged with his Alpha, but his words.

"Excuse me," she said haughtily, stopping in her tracks to address him even as he led her to a deer he had cached. "You aren't no poet either, so I wouldn't be so rude." Of course, it was all a ruse—she found all boys to be pathetic and not good for much more than using, and that applied to him as well, by no fault of his own—but nevertheless she acted wounded. Rightly so, even if it hadn't been pretend, for Roanoke was, in fact, the most well-spoken of her siblings. Suttree was more direct, Cormac rarely spoke at all, and Umbriel, though good with words, spoke so quickly and quietly it was a wonder anyone heard her.

They reached the deer, with Roanoke still pretending to pout, and unearthed it without much trouble. From here, she set about her life's work: carefully opening the deer's belly with precise and slow clips of her teeth, until she set open its entire ventral side with a cut so clean it might've been done with a knife. From here, she began extracting the organs, carefully setting them aside without so much as a tooth puncture in any of them. She grouped them by perceived function, as taught by Skoll: the heart and lungs to once side, intestines and bladders and the like to another side, kidneys (which were the hardest to get) and spleen and liver to a third.

This complete, she stepped back, examining her careful work proudly. "These organs all have use in the body," she explained, knowing most wolves knew as much about organs as fat kids did about cake: that they were tasty, and not much else. "Should an enemy or a friend perish I know how to examine the organs to determine a cause it was not outward. An autopsy specialist," she repeated. Roanoke could also do other things—heal outward wounds, harvest prey organs for preservation given an ocean was near, and the like—but they were more boring in her opinion than this.