Don't Snap An Elephant To A Tree [Mikkal]

Mikkal was running low on supplies again, as winter ground on and he followed the herd. He had pregnant cows to watch over, now, and it was hard to tear himself away from guarding them from other predators to go hunt. Far better to depend on the smoked meat he'd had left over from his last major kill than to waste time every day hunting. He didn't want the local predators getting any ideas if they saw him regularly leaving the herd.

So, early this morning while the herd had bedded down among the pines he had slipped away in the hopes of finding something that suited his purposes. Another badly-injured moose to chase off a cliff would be nice, but he didn't have Kai to help him this time. He'd have to hope he could either find another predator's fresh kill he could chase them off, or someone who could help him hunt and hope that he could somehow communicate with them. Admittedly his English hadn't been great to begin with and years of living on his own with the reindeer he hadn't exactly taken great pains to practice the language. So, other than the spattering of words in other languages that he could, with great effort, dredge up from memory, he reverted automatically to thinking, speaking, and singing to the caribou in his native Finnish without much in the way of English breaking through. The majority of the wolves in Boreas spoke English though, or a myriad other southern languages that brought to mind rolling green hills or warm Mediterranean waters, not the cold frozen pines and tundras of the north.

Preoccupied with thinking such wordy thoughts, he was taken a little by surprise when he broke out of the terrain onto a short cliff overlooking one of the north's rocky beaches. No soft white sands and pleasant blue waters, these were the beaches of his childhood and filled him with much more fond memories than the unfamiliar site of a warm beach full of frolicking children would have. Rocky beach, driftwood-strewn, with crashing breakers in a sea of gray. His gaze was drawn to the fuzzy gray bodies that sunned themselves on the rocky beach, and he regarded them with pleased delight. Seals!

His family had always been reindeer herders, in-landers, wolves of the tundra and the pine forests, not wolves of the cliffs and the sea, but he was not unfamiliar with the scandinavian shoreline and the food sources there. He hadn't thought of it in quite some time, but more than once in his youth he and his siblings had been brought to the shore. They'd hunted seals on the beaches, puffins on the cliffs, even gathered sea life. It had been fun for a wide-eyed young reindeer-herder to see how very different life had been for the wolves who didn't follow the caribou, but in the end he'd never seen a more superior life for him than the herds. He did have a brother who'd left the family to live along the shore though, and having visited him several times before he'd left the homeland entirely to follow his cousins to a new land, and new reindeer, he'd learned the skills fairly well.

He was thinking now that it was too bad his brother wasn't here now, or Kai. Hunting seals wasn't anywhere near an easy endeavor for a lone wolf. Still, he thought wistfully, those big seals would provide not only a lot of meat, but a lot of blubber and good waterproof sealskin to tan.

His eyes were suddenly caught by something that didn't belong on the beach, a patch of white that drew his gaze. He focused on the distant form, until he could pick out features. A wolf! A wolf, crouched like a hunter staring at the seals. Mikkal grinned. Good! Someone to help him! He hoped the pale hunter knew not to try to catch the seals like that, though. They were canny beasts and would break for the water as soon as they saw him, and if he tried to chew through their blubber to kill them he would quickly find himself in the icy waters with them, or crushed when they rolled on him.

Mikkal quickly picked his way down the cliff to the beach, skirting along the cliff edge to avoid the notice of the seals and made his way to the other male's side. "Psst," he hissed to get his attention, then burbled in a happy whisper, "Hyvää huomenta! Oletko täällä metsästämässä hylkeitä? Olisin iloinen voidessani auttaa sinua, jos et ole koskaan metsästänyt niitä ennen." At the male's blank stare he rethought his position on the whole jabbering in Finnish and hoping they understood. "Mikkal," he said instead, pointing to himself. He couldn't think of the english word for seals, so he added, "Hylje? Hunt hylje?" while indicating the seals. He tilted his head to the side, struggling a little. "Hylje big fat. Not-teeth, hmmm. Stick." He picked up a reed from the ground at their feet and mimed a stabbing motion. "Stick, not teeth, stick big fat hylje." He grinned at the other male. "Kyllä?"

Without waiting for a reply, he crawled over to a pile of driftwood, pausing whenever the seals glanced his way. He selected two long, thick, fairly straight branches and carefully broke them off the rest of the driftwood. He rolled one slightly away so the other male could take it. Taking his own branch between his forepaws he settled on his belly and proceeded to use his teeth to strip any remaining twigs and bark off it until he had just one long, bare length of wood. The wood was old and dry, so it was fairly lightweight despite being the width of his wrist. He could grip it fairly easily in his mouth. He found a length that was comfortable, then used his powerful bone-crushing jaws to snap it off and strip the tip of it into a relative point.

Selecting a rougher stone, he used his teeth to hold the stick and one paw to press the side of the tip to the rock and scrap it back and forth along the rock repetitively until the side was fairly flattened, then flipped it over and did the same to the other side. He checked it - a long, flat, vaguely leaf-shaped tip ran two paw-lengths along the top of the rod, forming what was basically a wooden spear tip. He eyed it critically, then sanded down the flat sides closest to the outside even more until it was much thinner at the edge than the center, leaving it fairly sharp for wood. He grinned to himself, then checked over to the other wolf to see how he was progressing.

Waving his tail gently to get the wolf's attention, he gestured to the seals again. Arranging small twigs to indicate the shore and stones to indicate the seals, he pointed to the other wolf, then used his paw to 'run' along back and forth between the rock 'seals' and the twig 'water'. The other wolf would run along back and forth along the water to keep the seals out of it - he was bigger than Mikkal, so he'd be a more formiddable barrier to the seals and they'd hesitate to bull past him to the water. Pointing to himself, then his other paw - with a twig between his toes like a spear - 'pounced' on a stone seal and stabbed it with the twig, and the other paw - with its own twig - 'ran' up and did the same. "Ta-da!" he added with a flourish of his paws. "Kyllä?"

Word count: 1284
Total word count: 2,035