A hazy, white light filters through the dense canopies above. Everything here is thick and green and covered in a pristine blanket of sparkling snow, offering seclusion from wandering eyes with towering trees. Leera's paws press quietly in the snow as she slinks slowly into the deeper parts of the wintry forest. Between her jaws hangs the corpse of a hare, quite possibly the largest hare she's ever laid eyes on.
He'd been simple enough to kill, slow with unnatural plumpness. Leera had snapped his head between her teeth and crushed his skull, all the tiny rabbit bones popping in her mouth. And now, his fat and abundance will nourish her.
The forest is eerily silent, even with the sound of her own loud, post-hunt pulse. Winter gives a milky wash to everything; it all glints and shimmers at her like a thousand tiny eyes. But Leera doesn't spook easily, and so she finds a dark place beneath a run of thicket and curls up with her kill, dropping it gingerly at her paws. She licks at the tufts of fluffy fur stuck on her lips and prepares to dig in, but it interupted by the close sound of nickering coyotes.
Ears pin against her crown as she lifts her maw, growling in warning. The hairs along her nape and spine raise. She can't see the coyotes -- there must be three or four -- but she can hear them, smell them, taste them now. They nicker and yip and growl with each other as they move in, seemingly treating this heist as a game. "I can kill a pair of coyotes in the time it takes for you to blink," she growls, pink eyes flicking every which way to try and spot them. Finally, she does. They appear one by one, three of them, from behind the large foot of a gnarled tree. Her warning words have clearly gone unacknowledged. Each of the coyotes growl at her, ears flat against their too-pointy heads, tails all fluffed up like squirrels. "Back. Off."
Instead, the largest coyote gets a bright idea and sprints foreward, jaws snapping at Leera's kill. Perhaps it has underestimated Leera's ability to defend what's hers merely by judging her small size -- this doesn't bode well for the coyotes, and nor does it sit right with Leera. She's more than capable of keeping what's hers, hers. Eager to prove her bluff, Leera pins her ears, tucks in her chin, and drops her tail, lunging at the moronic coyote with wide, recieving jaws. She catches it on the ear as it yelps and flies back, but not without taking a good chunk of felt with her. She pits it out and snarls again, watching to see who was next in line.
The other two, which are admittedly quick and hard to follow in their size, zig-zag one another in a dizzying manner. Leera yowls, the low, deep sounds curling out of her stomach and into her throat. When the first coyote reaches her, it manages to get a deep nick with its teeth into Leera's left paw, but she retaliates with a blow to the head with her uninjured paw. The force knocks the coyote onto its side, and it lies there a moment before scrambling to its paws and retreating.
The last coyote isn't as easy. It manages to sneak its clamping teeth into the hare and begins to drag it off, down the run, pulling it quick in the snow. Leera yelps and leaps after it, bounding with fiery rage, until she finally reaches the cotoye Its banner-like tail is just close enough for her to snag, which she does with reaching teeth, and she clamps down and yanks on it. Coyotes, she knows, prize their tails. In an instant, the coyotes drops the carcass and tries to scramble out of her teeth, tail fur ripping and tugging until finally the coyote comes loose and it disappears over the hill. With that much finished, Leera spits the coyote fur from her maw and reclaims her meal.
The wolfess carries it back to her original spot near the thicket, exhausted now, and lies down with her kill. It takes her a short while to regain her breath and to cool down -- a hunt paired with a match against coyotes wasn't something she had been preparing for this afternoon. Either way, she's starving now (and livid, which makes her even more hungry) and she crosses a paw over her hare and begins to eat quickly. There's no way of knowing if any more predators would pass this way; she hadn't even realized how pungeant the smell of her kill's blood had been. Perhaps winter has hit this part of the east hard. Perhaps the scavengers are getting risky now for lack of prey. Leera stores this information in her mind for her next hunt. There's no way she's going to try and have a meal in the open anymore.
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