Never Have I Ever

Justice had set out from the pack lands to explore the lands to their north. She'd let Gwen know she was leaving first, of course. With so few adults to protect their borders anyway, having anyone leave for any real length of time meant some serious rearranging of patrols and hunts and put an additional burden on the remaining adults, but Justice had been getting a bit stir-crazy being stuck in pack lands so she'd gotten permission to go on what Gwen had called a "fact-finding mission" to see what was going on in the world between Celestial's territory and Lirim's. She'd gone up along the coastline until she reached a natural bowl in the land filled with sweet-smelling grasses. In the heat of the summer sun the smell was almost overpowering to her keen wolf nose, but she was interested to see small herds of bison and pronghorns and other grassland dwelling prey animals grazing in the distance every time she bounded high enough to see over the long grass.

It was too bad Mask had left the pack without a dedicated hunter. This would have been a great place to hold a pack hunt under his leadership. She herself was an ok hunter, and Aurielle had some training from Mask, and Laisren had experience with hunting, but none of them were really hunters, but rather all warriors. They could use the same fighting moves against prey that they would use against another wolf, but a real hunter would know the behavior and habits of every prey animal they were likely to come up against, they would know where to find them and how to track them, and the best tactics to use against them. They didn't have that sort of subject matter expert anymore. She certainly didn't have any interest in learning hunting to that depth. She just wanted to fight, and to heal.

Not that she did a whole lot of the second - she had no one to teach her. Paladin hadn't held another training session after the one about birthing, probably because it was clear that his interests were in a very different side of healing than hers and Domari's, and then many members of the pack had left, and now the only healers were he and Justice, and it probably didn't seem worthwhile to him to train just her. It left her somewhat at loose ends, though, and she'd spent far more time with the pack's legionaries, Gwenevere and Laisren, than she had with the healers, who at this point meant just Paladin. Maybe, though, if any of Gwen's new pups were interested in healing, they'd be holding more training sessions again. But what if Paladin was still reluctant to? Or wasn't back from his trip to finish his training with the nomads? Who would? She couldn't. She didn't even know most of the basic healing knowledge.

She puffed out a frustrated sigh, then bounded up above the grassline again, twisting catlike on her way down to land back on her paws. Wait, what was that line of movement through the grass there? Another wolf? A wildcat of some sort? A wolverine? It was certainly moving closer and closer. She went on the alert, eyeing the grass in front of her warily.