Otatso Wetlands get up from there

gonna give colt a generous THREE DAYS TO LIVE without immediate medical attention

1. a big chunk taken out of his right cheek
2. lacerations to his fore-wrists
3. general shredding to nape/throat/flanks
4. several broken ribs
6. blood dripping from cuts inside his mouth
5. a fever

colt briggs dreamt.
and while he was asleep, his mind revisited the things he had been and the things he had wanted to be. and one of those was a softer man than he had ever been in his life.
reno
the fierce waters of the creek rushed him back toward the taiga. a distributary channel took him left, and then colt was washed into the cold wetlands.
sadey
he was not lucid and unaware that he had stopped bobbing in the water. he did not see when a lone duck came warily to investigate, then plodded away with a resolute flick of its crisp little tail.
red
"red," colt slurred in a voice that was little more than dust. his breath continued, but at a great and uneven price.

She’d wanted the duck.

She didn’t get the duck.

Instead, when she jolted forward to grab it, she tripped over something and was sent head over tail into the muck. The duck, unphased, waddled away.

Lonesome Dove gave a short huff of mud from her nostrils, the coywolf gathering her lanky limbs beneath her and lifting up.

Whats the-oh! She had started, only to turn around and find some corpse looking dude was hanging out behind her. Ewww, had she tripped over that? She shook out her paws.

Hey, you can’t just lay here. Are you dead? She asked, nostrils flared as she took in the wounds across the thing in front of her. The blood made her think he was, but the raise and fall of his chest made her think not.

You made me scare off my duck. She lowered her chest to the mud, ever so slowly reaching out with a paw to poke at the man, before trying to pull up an eyelid.

If he was dead, he wouldn’t mind if she nibbled on him right?

they were frolicking and the meadow was sunny and sadey was there, watching them with her usual disdain. but what mattered was that were together. he and red.
"GAH!" the pupil contracted. colt gave a jerking motion, trying to pull away from whoever had let the sun into his skull.
his nostrils flared. one paw fluttered weakly in the mud. colt was angry and as reality set in, filled with a searing anguish in every blame tissue of his body.

forgive me all I know of herbs is warrior cats

He wasn’t dead.

He did scare poor Lonesome though, the girl letting out a short wark! of a noise, more coyote than wolf. She scampered back a few steps, ducking low and staring at the corpse.

That was a bummer, to her at least. But hey, at least he wasn’t dead. He was kinda messed up though, so Lonesome crept back over on short, slinking strides.

She stared at him, watching his flailing, before she raised her head up and around the swamp. Well, she was a battlefield medic (read: aggressive bandager of paper cuts) so she had this well in hand.

She went slinking forward, craaaaning her head up and over the man’s body to catalogue what she could make out. Then, she scampered off. A few minutes later and some mildly frantic chewing, she came back, still chomping on the swamp goldenrod she’d managed to find. 

She hoped this stuff wasn’t poisonous in some way. With the skull of a toddler playing operation, she pressed the poltice shed managed to make onto a pawpad, reaching out to gently slather it on the wounds she could see. Or, rather, she patted at them rapidly.

warrior cats is OG <33

the pain was immense. he shut his eye and blacked out immediately.
when he came to again, there were small patting motions upon his body. through a bubble of blood forming in his nostril, colt caught the brief scent of herbs.
his mind refused to work. everything was a blur of pain and a haze of anger. he forced himself to focus and to recall the last thing he remembered.
bye, red.
and then dark.
colt slipped into unconsciousness again and stayed there for a while this time.

The man kept breathing, so Lonesome Dove thought she was doing at least something right. She kept leaving and coming back, leaving and coming back, using the barely there knowledge she kept to make vague guesses to what she could find to help.

She knew spiderwebs though. After she was done with the poultice part, she managed to find a few, sans the spiders of course (she ate those), to wrap the wounds she could see. Of course, there was always the worry of things she could not see, but she would have to wait for her patient to wake up for that. And he better, she thought. She was treating the guy, perhaps for her own self gain. He might know where her siblings were and how she could find them. That’s what kept her coming back.

If he died, it would be back to square one and she’d have to eat his liver as a consequence.

Eventually, she had turned the man into a mummy of cobwebs, and she sat back to admire her handiwork. Her eyes turned to the swamp, then back to the man, then to a piece of dry land.

He needed to be dry, she supposed, so she did as best she could to push, shove, pull, yank him over onto the dry land.

Then, she settled on her stomach, legs pulled beneath her and eyes wide and watchful, and she waited for him to come alive. Like Frankenstein watching over his monster.

you came early to the gang. children. orphans, mostly. but occasionally they'd just be stolen, collateral for a job gone bad. you came up hard and you came up early. colt himself had been in the former camp; who needed a ma and pa when you had the gang to beat anything too soft out of you?
it was what had been done to him.
it was what colt had been doing to indra.
he lay in his wet layers and cocooned.
his breathing was a slow shudder. but it continued, and eventually the eye blinked open once more. all he felt was agony. all he smelled was mud and the plants that had been put on him.
colt could not even shift from one side to the other. he lay only focused upon the expansion of his lungs.

By that point, Lonesome had fallen into a doze, a whistly little snore leaving her nose every time she breathed. It took a lot, doing what she’d done, but she would accept all the accolades for it.

She came awake with a jolt when a piece of swamp grass was sucked into her nose on one of her breaths, rearing her head up with a snort like a mustang, before she settled, blue eyes falling to the corpse.

You not dead yet, are you? She asked aloud, fully expecting to get absolutely nothing in response.

"nnnn - oo."
the syllable barely slipped beyond the lacerations to his throat and the burn of the waterlogged back of it. 
he took inventory of himself. he was no longer in the water and was wrapped in something inexplicable. his good eye roved for his savior — or the one waiting to kill him.
colt focused on his breathing and how the very act of it sent agony spearing through him as his ribcage swelled to take the air. broken; wouldn't be the first time.
everything was fucked.

Great!

Spoken with the gravitas of a funeral home dj.

Youre really messed up, mister guy. I got you covered in messy stuff to keep it for hopefully getting infected and bleeding you dry, but I’m not a miracle worker. Lonesome tried to explain as fast as she could, leaning over so she could be seen by the roving eye.

What did you do anyway? Piss off a herd of giant deer? A group of mountain lions? The entire mountain?

female. skinny. coyblood. his nose worked well enough. there was only one of her but he was leery all the same. still he chose not to offend his court-appointed physician and lay still so he could hear her questions.
her inquring provoked a breathy laugh that turned to a growling whine of agony. "wwwolf."
the good eye rolled as if to say it had not been his choice to run headlong into their land. the irony was that colt hadn't given a blue fuck about keeping the creek. he had simply wanted to rendezvous there, made sure the gang had made it out of the taiga forest.
all hotfoot needed to have said was 'yes' and he would have gotten a nice warning about the hydrophobia and maybe a group hunt.
bastard fuck. bastard fuck who'd grabbed red and choked — 
colt's pupil dilated with a sudden hatred.

Jeeze mister, must have been a big wolf if they did all of this to you. She tipped her head to the side, then sidled sideways to block the sunlight with her head.

That better? She asked, bushy tail giving a soft flick.

I was gonna ask you a question but I don’t think you’re in any shape to answer it. She said, pressing her head out over the man.

"twwo - ooo." colt briggs would have his accolades. two bastards and the creek besides. and he still wasn't dead.
sadey and he had been through a lot. this was the worst though, he decided.
and red —
colt grunted gratefully as the girl moved to block the sun. daisy, he decided. sunnier than him as she bobbed in and out of his vision. 
he blinked and focused directly on her. ask.

He blinked and focused on her and she felt like a butterfly pinned to a board. Her ears shriveled to the sides, and she drew a breath.

You seen any other wolves like me? Uh. Coyote like? We look very very alike. She needed to find Dusty and Meridian, wherever they’d run off to.

They go by Dusty Rose and Meridian. A pause.

Im Lonesome Dove. By the way.

"nnn - oo." only them two. only his gang. only the wolves galloping through the taiga. she was the first. 
lonesome dove. she didn't seem very lonesome or dovelike; he preferred daisy. but he would amend it. "co-lt." he wouldn't pretend he could make more than a few sounds.
the man was starting to sink back into oblivion. he sighed and shut his eye.

He hadn’t seen them.

Lonesome’s personality wilted like a flower under the snow. The man-Colt and wasn’t that a name- was fading fast into unconsciousness, and her face adapted its normal, stressed frown.

You should probably rest. She murmured.

Is there anything else that hurts that I missed? She asked meekly after a moment.

colt's eye blinked in no. she had done a fine job, though he could use a bit of something far harder.
beggars couldn't be choosers.
"waht —" he tried to ask, for the brackish liquid just out of reach. but he could not finish the word, and let his breath exhale in surrender.

His eyes went to the water and hers went big. Oh! Right! She slipped away with a murmured apology for the light, reaching to strip a bit of moss from the trees nearby. She rolled it into a ball and dunked it into the water to soak it in.

Then, she plucked it out of the water, dripping and drooling water, before she took the sopping wet ball back to Colt and sat it in front of his nose.

Here. She murmured.

he drank, pulling the moss closer and closer until every droplet was gone. his throat felt better at once, though still lined with knives. he looked for daisy-lonesome-dove. 
"'hanks."
the effort had been monumental. she would see the white of his eye as it rolled up and colt briggs went into another dead swoon.

He was asleep in an instant, looking at her one moment and gone the next. Lonesome was, again, all on her lonesome.

Colt was asleep, so Lonesome decided to pad across the island that they stood upon, tucking her legs beneath her and plopping her head down enough to see the rise and fall of his sides as he kept breathing. She would need to find nourishment at some point, for herself and for him, but for now she would watch.

And wait.