Time's A-wasting

The time Mikkal had spent in Boreas had been spent largely alone, which might have bothered a more socially needy sort of creature. But even with his love for family, even with his enjoyment of others, all Mikkal had ever really needed were the caribou.

Even with his help though, his herd had a rough winter the year before, and their numbers were still suffering. The weak, old, and injured had been already fallen, and the young and healthy were all needed to bolster the falling numbers so he didn't feel comfortable taking any from the herd for his own use. Getting ready to go into winter, though, he needed to be thinking about putting on fat stores and preserving more meat for the lean times which meant something larger and richer than snowshoe hares or ptarmigan.


He left the caribou herd to continue their slow southward migration on their own. He had noticed some time back that as this herd became more tamed, much like his family's herds back home, they tended to remain together more and longer than the wilder herds. With him to guide them to richer feeding grounds they had less need to disperse after the fall rut, though eventually in the deep winter when lichen was too scarce even for his keen nose and experience to find in large amounts, they would spread out too far for him to keep track of every individual alone. That was when he would lose the most of the year's casualties. The rut was coming soon for them as well, and for that couple weeks the bulls would be in danger not only from each other but from opportunistic predators. For now though he didn't need to worry as much about leaving them. They would stay together on the migration path, while he put up supplies elsewhere.

Lifting his nose to the wind, he breathed deeply. It was the moose rutting season, which put them high on the list of possible hunting, but while the rut made the bull moose vulnerable it also made them dangerous. Moose were dangerous at the best of times, let alone when they were maddened by the scent of cows in estrus, and at close to a thousand pounds or more they had a lot of bulk to back up their belligerence.

It didn't take long for him to catch the scent of a wounded bull. The blood wasn't as fresh smelling as from a new injury. Maybe a couple days old injury that was still weeping, which was all to the better as far as he was concerned. A fresh wound meant a freshly wounded bull, which while it could mean a bull tired from battle, it could also very well mean an angry adrenaline fueled monster. But one that had been this badly injured days ago was a bull whose injured body had had time to stiffen up, who'd been losing blood off and on for days, with infection setting in and deteriorating condition. It would be the ideal prey, if he could take it down safely.

But when he caught up to the bull, he saw with some dismay that weakened or not the bull was an impressively sized specimen of his species. Easily a thousand pounds and pushing a couple hundred extra, he was well over the size Mikkal thought he could manage a way to take down alone. Maybe if he had one of these handy cliffs to run it over, but even then, faced with just one wolf the bull might just turn and fight. That would need two or more wolves working in concert to harass it until it broke and ran, or they infuriated it to the point of getting it to chase them towards a crevasse and dodged at the last minute.

Mikkal sighed sadly. It was a shame to let the opportunity go to waste. As badly wounded as it was - clearly despite its size it had bad luck in a recent battle - it would die anyway, but he didn't have time to waste waiting for it to die on its own. He'd have to hope he found another injured moose that he could more reasonably take down alone, somehow. Unless... unless he could find another wolf willing to hunt with him for a share in the reward. It wouldn't hurt to try.

Lifting his red-streaked face, he howled, letting his voice carry across the land in the hopes of reaching another hunter, inviting them to the hunt.

Word Count So Far: 754