(no subject)

[hired_pistol]

From atop his rock, the traveler could see the wolves. What worried him most was how they were no longer leaping up at him, slobbering vises of teeth scissoring air. No, they were calmly waiting down there, panting, emitting the occasional whine. All the noises of the social management of a pack in audible form. A matrix of alphas, betas, omegas, played as a symphony for him in the desert night. He adjusted the frayed, wide brimmed hat he affected, though it was long since dark and there was no need to shade his eyes from the desert sun. He sat. He waited. He was beginning to feel the scraped sting of the bite on his calf. If he lived through the night, he would have to clean it immediately. Time passed like this until he was numb with boredom and there was streaks of his calf-blood on the rock from all the changing of positions he did. 'Calf blood...' he thought. '...for I am a calf here. Meat in a thin, gelatinous shell. Disgusting.' He gave an affected shudder for an audience of none. To compare himself to such a creature, with its big, innocent, uncompounded eyes...A little macabre even for him. When the sun came up, he noticed one of the big wolves whining fiercely, like a pup. The others were baring teeth and growling at something that was not him. Something on the ground. The big alpha worried at its own left front paw. Whatever had caused this was below his range of vision, but he could make an educated guess. These wolves were newcomers to this place, by the standards of his kind. They'd rampaged in, claiming the space of apex predator. But the apex was an unstable place to be. And the ancestors of their assailants (for more wolves where whining now, snapping at the sand, worrying at their own paws) had come to this place when it was pristine. They had claimed the right of first arrival in the Devonian period. The stung wolves paced, growled, foamed at the mouth and eventually died, paws twitching convulsively as their nerves danced their final manic jigs. The rest panickedly left their big, bold superiors to their fates. The man lept down, wincing at his hurt calf but glad to be free of his tormentors. He knelt on his good leg, held his hand out to welcome and regard his saviors. One climbed up, knowing instinctively in the tiny ball of its brain what he was. Two foreclaws that waved like an effusively smokin Italian making a point. The hunched spring of four pairs of legs. Convulsively working mandibles. A body like a shield or a coffin. And that customary curved erection, that bent prick, that limb of potent killing agony and delight, the stinger. "Sister scorpion." He said to the big female with a grin and kissed her foreclaw. He did not truly believe that any of the creatures gathered around his feet understood his words (though perhaps they appreciated the gesture as he appreciated gestures himself). But there was an ancient kinship between their kinds. The phylum Arthropoda was constantly expanding and devouring itself, but shared a common disdain for those yipping upstart invertebrates. Proud and noble wolves, capricious and self absorbed primates, those were to be looked down on. They could not take the life of their largest representative. It was a matter of pride. He repeated his thanks to each, poured whiskey on the punctures in his calf and moved on. The ranchers he was to find for this feeding foray were somewhere near here. Perhaps he could pull a location from the stupid, hyperactive brain of one of the flies infesting that bloated donkey carcass...