The morning was dark and damp. It had stormed the night before and I had taken shelter in a cave, but somehow, I still managed to get soaked to the bone. I stood and stretched, my fur dripping rainwater. How was it that I always got wet? I could have been in the bone-dry desert and still be soaked. Infuriating.
It had stopped raining, so I peeked out of the cave's entrance to see if the rest of my pack was still there. Deserted. Not a single pack brother in sight. Where was Alfa? Had he and Seru gone hunting? Surely not without me. I had led the pack's hunting expeditions since the day I caught my first squirrel. Seru and Alfa, if they had gone hunting, wouldn't have taken the whole pack anyways. There were too many small pups for hunting with the WHOLE pack.
I stepped outside of my warm cave and searched the surrounding area for any signs as to which way they may have gone. Nothing to the north but some rabbit prints and a few cedar trees, west there were only a few leaves and a patch of grass and clover, south there lay nothing save the face of a steep cliff, far too high for the pack to have gone up, and only a set of bear tracks were to be found to the east. My entire pack, the whole family, had disappeared without a single trace. No scratch marks on nearby trees, no leftovers from last night's hunting trip…
I was completely alone.
Hours later, after deciding to head east, I found myself sitting in the higher branches of a willow tree near a pond. The still, reflective water shined in the sunlight that filtered through the willow's leaves. No wind blew then, nor were there any birds or other creatures stirred or called to one another. There was a sad stillness surrounding the willow and that only reinforced my loneliness.
Here I sat, motionless, saddened, pack-less, and without a single companion in this silent world. There was nothing else I could do for it but either sleep or move on.
I slept. A deep, dreamless sleep from which I did not awake until first light the following day.
When I did awake, I found myself, no longer in the still world I had drifted off in, but instead surrounded by my own kind. True they looked like me, but they were not my pack. I had never seen them before.
The largest of the red-hairs approached me. He must have been the Alfa because he seemed to have expected me to lower myself to him. I did not.
He growled a command at me and my ears flattened. 'Act like your own Alfa,' I told myself. This meant trying to look big, but when you're about half the size of what's in front of you and scared out of your wits, looking big is anything but easy. Still, I tried. I stood firm and growled back. I could tell he didn't appreciate small gray females sticking their muzzles in his territory.
I eyed him warily. He looked as though he were tensing himself to attack. If he did that, I would have no other option but to run, and as small as I was, I would never manage to escape.