Hige is a very hungry person, I think. Maybe he's missing something important.
We were together for three days and I had more food in those three days than I collected in a week. It was wonderful. Hige didn't care much for hunting like I did. We didn't hunt pigeons or rats. Instead, we gathered human foods. Human foods are kind of horrible, but they are easier to get than hunted foods. Hot dogs were the easiest to get and the most tasty, which is not to say that they wee tasty at all, just more so than all the other foods they had.
One time, we managed to get a steak. I like telling this story. It starts out like this:
On the second evening, I head Hige's stomach growling. "How are you still hungry?" I asked him and he said, "I don't know." So we got up, both of us looking like humans, and started walking around to look for something to eat. We pass all kinds of human shops and some of them even have lights inside. There's one selling spicy cooked foods and one selling sweet cooked foods and one selling humans for sex. We weren't really interested in any of them. We were, however, interested by the sweet raw meat smells from the butcher's shop.
"How can we get some?" I asked Hige, looking into his face for a plan. He had one. It was great.
I ran into the butcher's shop, acting like I had been attacked. There was some blood on my clothes. The butcher's wife came to my side first, followed, reluctantly, by the butchers. She asked me who had done it and I said that I didn't know. I didn't let her or the butcher touch the bloody, torn part of my dress, claiming that the wound hurt too much. The wife wanted to call the police but the butcher didn't want any trouble. He said he could stitch me up just as good as any doctor. He went into the back of the store and after a moment the wife follows him, too, and I can hear him arguing. While they are gone, Hige comes in and, as wolves, we take as many steaks as we can into our mouths. Then, the butcher comes back in.
He yells, quite loudly, and his wife screams, too. He grabs a knife and tries to get us, but we are too fast for him, we are wolves, fast and mighty. We escape by the skin of our teeth and run down the street as fast as we can. I hear the butcher following us and try to run fast, but I am small and weaker than Hige. Hige turns a corner, but I don't turn fast enough so I miss it. We became separated. I was still being chased. I tried to run faster than my legs would let me.
I let loose a few steaks to trip the butcher. He doesn't trip. But, I can hear that he's getting tired. He is a large man and likely doesn't run this much. I am tired, too, though. I know that even if he is slowing down, I am as well and that if I slow down too much, he will kill me and sell me among his wares, I will become reduced to "dog- liver, sausage, steak" right next to "cow- steak, ground" and "venison- ground, sausage, steak." I do not wish to be dead right then. I turn a sharp, dark corner.
When I turn this corner, I am upon the boys I saw the other day. I am between a rock and a hard place. I decide to hit the hard place. I keep running and run through group of boys. They wrap their arms around me, pull at the steak, even pull my tail, there was a pain in my side like a kick, but damn, I kept running and they didn't follow me. When I escape the alley, I hear them argue with the butcher. The rock hit the hard place and they've made a spark and now they've become a fire burning very naughty words as kindling. I've escaped him, so I slow to a walk. The steaks are still in my mouth and I felt incredibly light headed, as a person barely escaping death should.
It only takes ten minutes of wandering before Hige finds me. We met in an alley. When I see him, I drop my steaks carefully and wag my tail. I tried to sit down, but the pain in my side wouldn't let me. Everything got a bit blurry. Hige is at my side before I am aware of it and helps me lie down. This is the first time I notice the blood leaking out of my side. This is a red darker than my fur.
Hige looks very guilty. I do not think the ground will kill me. I want to lick the wound clean, but I can't. Hige starts to do so for me.
"Alright, Tabby," he says after a while, "Let's just stick to hot dogs from now on." I agreed.
I was perfectly fine in two days time. Even better than fine. The steaks we got were infinitely more delicious than hot dogs. On the evening of the fourth day together, we sat on a rooftop and watched the sun set.
"You know, there are other wolves in town, too. I can smell 'em," Hige said.
I nodded. I still smelled the wildflowers and the smell of the one I knew long ago, but they mingled with the smells of new wolves, too, and together they brewed a most interesting scent.