Chapter 29
Two days Ariel spent recovering. By this time she had gone a week and a half without food, though she made sure to make yer way to the brook to drink. She was surprised at how quickly she healed, shifting to her human form to check the progress. She cleaned the dried blood and dirt from her skin, taking care of the wounds while she could. Ariel did not go back to the area where she had fought the wolves. She didn't want to know if any of them had died because of the fight, and she really didn't want to know if any of them had lived and got up.
She moved on the third day after the fight, giving the battle area a wide birth. She knew she was going to have some very noticeable scars from the wounds. She didn't have the supplies that were necessary to properly take care of them. Instead she could only keep them clean and let them heal on their own. She stopped to rest once the sun set, and set out again, this time looking for food. She had lost the trail of the deer and rabbits she had been following before, but thankfully was able to find a sizeable rabbit den and she took a few of them. She had to remind herself that she needed them to survive, and ate everything in her wolf form. It was easier to eat as a wolf, since as a human and had to cook her food. She didn't have a proper shelter, or a way to properly contain fire.
Though she was sore, her wounds were mostly healed, a gift she didn't realize she had before. It was exhilarating to know that she could heal so quickly with just some rest and food, though her wolf did warn her that the wounds would leave scars. Ariel understood. She hadn't been able to get proper medical attention for her wounds, and so she was left with the evidence of her first won battle. It was still a mystery to her how she had won. She never fought before, as a human or wolf. She could only guess that the wolves who attacked were silimarly as untrained as she was.
On the hunt a week after the fight, she thought back to how far she had gone. Not as far as she had wanted, trying to get to a place with migrating heads of grazing animals, but it was a good distance still.
With her sharp sense of smell, she knew that she was at an intersection between two packs, and a wild unclaimed wilderness. She had skirted along the edge of the pack she had found the trap in and saved that wolf, now smelling a different tereitory as she continued on her way. She was glad for the lack of claim where she was, she didn't want to have to try and sneak through the territory of others. She got the feeling that would not go over well for her, so instead she remained away from their borders.
Ariel was on the trail of a herd of smaller deer that resembled gazelle when she smelled the smoke. It was not strange for her to have smelled it while traveling, camps, houses; where there was people there was fire. This wasnt just a camp or hearth for though. It stunk of acrid chemicals and things that should never be burned. She had smelled this once before as a child. It was a house fire. Their neighbors house had burned down when she was young, everyone inside had perished. The smell stuck with her, and now with her wolf senses being as sharp as they were she could smell something she had never smelled before. It was a scent both sweet and terrible, like cooking meat but wrong. Her heart hammered in her chest as she abandoned her hunt and sprinted toward the new pack territory. She could see the dark plumes of smoke already rising above the trees, dancing on the wind in thick angry waves.
Ariel felt like her legs could not carry her fast enough. She passed over the border of this new territory, a moment of fear searing into her, but it didn't stop her. It didn't even slow her down. The smoke was getting thicker, and large cinders were now falling from the sky. This was far worse than just your average house fire. It was as I'd the whole world were catching fire, and she had to zig zag through the forest to avoid small pop up fires and dense bands of choking smoke.
A sound reached her ears as she continued to run that almost made her stop. She raced in despite the images that flashed through her mind. Her friends were with her as she broke through the trees, the heat from the fires opressive. The smoke drifted through the air close to her, but spun up and around a towering inferno that reached into the sky with scorching tongues of flame. Screams could be heard now, mixed with the roar of the flames and the loud snapping pop of gun fire.
She raced around the edge of the open area she had come to, stopping only when she saw a lone van parked off to the side. She found it strange that the van would just be sitting there. Why was no one using it to get away? Or at least using it to get supplies to the fire and fighting.
It didn't take long for her to get her answer. Even through the smoke she could smell them, carrying two children each as they pulled open the back of the windowless can and placed the children inside. She knew what this was. Knew what they were doing. Rage like she had never felt surged through her like a tsunami of heat and she was running before she realized what she was doing.
Those were hunters. The gun fire was hunters. They probably started the fire as a diversion and they were killing off the adults and older children while they took the youngest. The ones that were too little to run or remember. The hunters had come for this pack. Ariel was not going to let them get the children.