ready to be hurt again

The warm summer sun felt hot on her black fur and it made her regret coming out of her temporary den at all. The evening had felt much more welcoming to her as of late, but some strangely renewed sense of self preservation had driven her into the open. She was still far too exhausted to feel like she was doing well, but she at least felt like she should get herself up to find something to eat. The pursuit of food brought her to this mostly open open area that was only really obstructed by the rocks dotted across her view. She was oblivious to the rest of the world as her instincts pulled her forward, tracking the scent of her prey till her mint green eyes landed on the hare that had yet to notice her. She crept forward with a practiced steadiness, the many lessons from her childhood still burned into her muscles. At the exact moment that the rabbit noticed her presence she pounced, catching it under paw and making quick work to kill it.

Normally she would have taken her prize back to her den to eat in some sibilance of protected peace, but the moment the taste of her meal hit her tongue all she wanted to do was eat. She made quick work of it, cleaning every morsel of meat she could possibly pull from its bones. Her stomach disagreed with how frantically she was eating, but she didn’t notice until she was unbearably full. She nudged the carcass of the hare away when she was finished with a sigh and started trying to think back to the last time she had eaten more than just a scavenged bite from someone else’s kill or some stray berries she came across in her adventures... and came up short.

In her mind’s destructive spiral, things like remembering to eat seemed far fetched and difficult. She frowned at herself as she pulled herself to her paws and sighed. Sometimes she wondered if being alive seemed this difficult to other wolves or if this was a singular problem for her to bear. It was a question that tended to pull her into her own doubts and self pity so she let it drift off without looking for an answer. She turned her attention back to her surroundings instead since learning the lands of what was quickly turning into her new home seemed to be one of the only things she found interesting enough to distract her. She left the carcass of her kill behind and began to weave slowly in and out of the rocks around her, licking her lips clean as she walked. Her eyes trailed up the tall rocks as she passed them, wondering curiously how they came to be here and why these lands were formed in such a way.