what's up danger

A bracing chill ruffled his thick coat, bringing with it memories of home. He wove through the trees, happy to be out of the wind. A raging blizzard had driven him to the shelter of the trees, where the weather couldn't batter him so relentlessly. His mother had told him a story of when she had once found a little girl who glowed, in a great redwood forest in these lands, and reunited with her niece. Strange to think that he had cousins he had never met roaming about, and that he might find them one day. Monstrous form strode confidently through the trees, tail loosely trailing along his thighs. Crown aloft, the male felt little fear for anything he might find here. A good fight would do him well- he wanted to hit something. Make something feel pain so he could forget his own.

Something was decaying nearby. As if on cue, his stomach rumbled furiously. A quick change of course brought him to the frozen corpse of a mangled elk doe. She had starved to death in the land of plenty, evidently too little, too late. All the better for himself. The hide was tough, frozen nearly solid. Tilting his broad cranium to one side, he parted his jaws and gored the doe's flank with one of his thick tusks. A few more swift blows, quick upward motions of the head, and he'd mangled the flesh enough to tear the frozen strips away and work them into something edible. It was bloody work, but food was food.