The night before had been terrible. Heavy rain just after melt-season. The hard packed earth was still swollen from freshly thawed snow and frost could bear no more. Pooling water massed and coursed into their den. Fine, silty soil that had come apart easily in their paws when they were digging around the roots of a great oak came apart just as easily at the urging of a hurried stream. A trickling flow that gnawed at the interior of the tunnels, painting the walls with slick precipices and reducing floors into gooey, frothing quicksand. Fenix remembered pulling himself by the thread-feather dendrites of roots just to combat the flow. Water splattered over his chest – soaking his fur through and through while drizzling him with a dressing of mud and silt. The bitter taste of it made him wrinkle his snout even now. Hard, crinkling sediment wedged somewhere along his gum line – drifting here and there to unpleasant places even as he spat it out.

Outside the den had been no more hospitable. There was an owl lurking somewhere above. Its occasional silent swooshing swoops downward were difficult to predict in the storm-cloud cluttered twilight. Stars could not pierce its veil and the moon turned its face away from their plight. The only warning towards that silent devils approach was the sudden absence of rain splashing down. A terrible, awful stillness before talons snatched some unsuspecting victim from the bare, mossy ground. Trying to cross the waist deep puddles did not fare much better either. The constant influx of rain above churned the miniature ponds into mires. Water logged bodies could all too quickly slip down some unseen crevice or hole. The mud and runoff would not permit you back up for air if you got stuck in their tenuous grasp. The wolf recalled scampering along the roots and ridges of the tree for the underbrush – away from avian eyes. Beyond the reach of those heavy, disorientating drops that battered his muzzle and left him dazed and dizzied. Paws scrambled ahead of him – putting distance between him and any thorn vines or unseen walls of bark. He’d pulled away rain-slathered leaf after leaf until he finally found the naked stem of smooth-barked sapling. The young woodmeat was soft enough that he could sink his claws into it and heft himself off the ground. Rain-cratered earth could play host to nastier things than owls and he did not want to greet them alone. A few body lengths up off the ground were sufficient to evade their lazy inquiries. Bark and sap stuck at his fur as he resettled himself, peering out into the night. It was clutching a half-bent branch in the depths of twilight, to a lullaby of rainy plip-plaps and intermittent thunderclaps that Fenix’s adrenaline rush bled away and he drifted to sleep once again.

Morning broke into a benevolent scene of dew crested branches and eaves of leaves that twinkled in an absent breeze. Fenix’s arms were wracked with a profound soreness from their still vigil throughout the night. A tingling sort of pain whose depths he need only stretch to fully plumb. However, the lemon-orange haze of dawn filtering through the mid-morning fog was a welcome enough sight to forgive his body’s regrets. An open palmed smushing along the sockets of his eyes was sufficient to clear the gooey-mire of condensed dream-dust from his eyes. The air contained a crisp coolness that percolated through his sinuses and swept out his chops in a broad yawning exhale. It was a soothing sort of coolness that wetted the dry stucco in his throat – made it permissible to wriggle his snout and breathe regularly without constricted, sleepy wheezing. It also alerted him to a disturbing reality that lurked around him.

The cool scent of mid-morning enveloped everything. The humid humus breathed an earthy, semi-sour gust over him as he neared the ground. It was rich and organic and alive with the smells of fresh rainfall. Thick with the aroma of wet soil. But that was all it was. The crackly dry scent of cedar and the musty meandering of elm were absent. Acrid undertones of once upon snakeskin and the ammonia reek of territorially markings had been washed away. He searched the ground to trace out his hurried footsteps in his flight to escape the owl and the punishing precipitation – but the raindrop cratered muddy soil made his passage indistinguishable from any random indentation. The cool morning air seemed to condense on the tip of his spine as it dawned upon Fenix that he had no idea where he was.

Standing beneath a leaf and batting at it occasionally permitted Fenix to scrub caked mud from his fur with the drizzle-stream of water collected there. The absence of aromatic landmarks to go by was disorienting. It threatened to make relocating the tribe difficult. He was glad some of the water lingered though – looking like an owl pellet wasn’t going to get him noticed any faster and the mocking taint of his own fear from the night before was all over him. The last thing he needed was something curious investigating that and tracing it back to him. It was only after he felt reasonably cleansed that he picked a direction and set out.

What should have been at best a short jog was turning into a worrisome trek. A syrupy latex stink of broken milkweed had been cascading from somewhere downwind. The bitter aroma was enough to warn him to steer clear; it warned of tainted sticky ooze that would take more than a moments washing to clean out. It also threatened something big enough to snap those loom-leery stalks. Neither were domains he wanted to stumble across. But as he carried on, the canopy of leaves and root-strewn hillocks intermingled in the underslung underbrush. It formed a blurry mosaic of unremarkable ancient cypress evergreen and youthful lime shoots dispersed in a mishmash of auburn soil and pine-tar brown. Ruinous, colossal pine cones littered the open spaces. Their haphazard alignments were occasionally disturbed by the foot-prints of some seed-scavenging monstrosity. Naked flares tipped with weather worn barbs offered little solace in their destitute, directionless positioning. It was hard to recall whether these were new spaces or the same ones he had stumbled across before. The dreadful familiarity and danger of walking in circles began to sink into the shaded corners of his thoughts.

Morning stretched into mid-day. Harsh, blue-sky sunlight cut like a razor through the lingering, cool after-rain fog. It bore a dispassionate gaze over the dew-drizzled leaves and lake-puddles, rendering the low lying air into an exhausting sauna. The heat made his wilting ears flare and reduced his breathing to a heavy, full lunged panting. Pools of still, murky water mocked his emerging dehydration. Water, water everywhere – but nary a sip he could afford to drink. The wolf huffed to himself as he wiped at his brow, seeking out shade. Rain washed stalks glistened brightly and their bases were all steeped in quicksand-mud. Sprawling tree roots burrowed up from the soil, offering neither cover nor shade. It was only along the bones of some long felled titan; a partially decayed pillar of pine, that Fenix espied an outcropping of ivy and un-ripened honey suckle.

The sight was enough to make his weary tail wag. With exhaustion weathered caution, he pushed through into the cool cavern of green. There was an immediate sensation of relief, stepping into the darker domain. His eyes adjusted as his body relaxed in the swath of shade. The space beneath was mostly dry; a basket of vines and wide spanning leaves had kept the penetrating daggers of rainfall from stabbing through. It was a pleasant, dark, cool oasis with a nestling of ancient pine-needles whose acidic, woody aroma hung heavy with every intrusive footstep. The musky, dry air stank of comforting rot. Perhaps there were termites somewhere he could dredge up. The distinctive smell hung thick as he stepped further into the shade. His whiff-sniffing snout however, could not place the achingly familiar scent. Though it made the fur on the nape of his neck rise none-the-less…

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Part I (You are here)
Part II
Part III

Art by the ever lovely  fiberopticfeline
Fenix the Wolf belongs to  jphoenix98