Arrow Lake Deerly Departed

Nynka doubled down her concentrated attacks on the insultingly uncooperative leg-of-deer. She bit and yanked on first one end, then the other again, then the middle. When she darted back to the thigh to hissingly sink her teeth in and tug her hardest once more, she managed to jolt the meat free— for half an inch. Then, in a scraping of wood and with a small fluttering of bark chip crumbs, it wedged again. Nynka screeched at it in frustration, her eyes wild as she battled valiantly with it and then, for a few moments, turned her teeth and claws angrily on the trunk of the tree that was thwarting her.

You stupid— stupid tree creature! The words were unthinkingly shrieked in-between disgusting mouthfuls of slightly-mossy bark shreds. They were the grossest thing Nynka's tongue had ever tasted, but she wasn't about to let that stop her. Her teeth grabbed onto a protruding nub that had once terminated in a branch and gave it a vicious twist, ripping it from the towering plant that was only 50 or 60 times her size, after all, and whose continuing intransingience and stoic silence Nynka was choosing to take as mockery. You'll never get my deer! she yelled up at it after spitting out the nub of wood. Its bitter woodsy taste only increased her high dudgeon. Never ever ever ever! The tree seemed...unimpressed.

Furiously Nynka went at the deer leg itself again— it wasn't about to defeat her either, not when she'd hauled it this far!—but although the two-tined black hoof flopped about on the farther end of it in protest, the whole shank seemed quite content to stay right where it was stuck. Forever. Oh no you don't! thought Nynka, and would have screamed it at the deer haunch in turn if she hadn't been preoccupied with a large mouthful of deer fur and meat from which she was whipping her whole long body about wildly. As the first tuft of fur came suddenly loose she tumbled back onto snow and dirt, only to come flying right back up with a wild war cry of vengeance and a slightly browner dirt-speckled coat to latch herself onto the meat once again. She jerked and pulled and scratched and bit at the thing like her life depended on it: this was a matter of principle, now, and the little weasel was not about to let this deer shank or its greedy tree friends win. Not by a long shot. ...Meantime, she remained oblivious to the only other animate living being in the area.