Something Wrong?

[crowtalon]

It was early in the morning when Crystalsky rose, and she was in no hurry to wake up. She knew she would have to go out and hunt and fight and live, when she wanted to just rest.

Not ready at all the embrace the day, the she-cat finally stood up, stretching each powerful leg as she walked. As she appeared at the entrance of the den, the wave of cold air hit her like a wall. Her body felt stiff and unnatural in the brittle air. Something had to be wrong here. Crystal perked her ears, listening closely to the sounds around her.

She became aware of everything as she walked: the beating of her heart, the movement of other cats, the cold, wet snow on her feet, each snowflake landing on her body. What was wrong? To the eye, everything seemed natural - Clan cats doing what Clan cats do, the weather doing what the weather does. But yet there was a vibe something was off, something seemed so out of place.

Crystal walked around the camp, warming herself up from the bitter cold. She was extremely jumpy; even things as harmless the movement of a bird in the corner of her eye spooked her. There was a determination inside of her to figure out what was wrong. But more than anything right now, she just wanted to crawl back into the den and fall back into sleep.

[Twigtail]

Twigtail had woken up on the wrong side of the den… quite literally. He liked to sleep near the entrance, as to make his early-morning escapes out into the fresh air before other cats awakened. But last night had been bitterly cold, and he didn’t fancy having his thin pelt frozen off, thank you very much. So he’d wandered farther into the den the night before and curled up by a back wall. But now, as he lifted his head with a yawn and blinked open his yellow-green eyes, he saw, through his sleepy grog, that pale morning light was shining through the den entrance. With a groan, he realized he’d slept through the prime time for sneaking out. Still, he uncurled his scrawny body and arched his back in a stretch, his spine sticking out unappealingly as his legs quivered. Yet the dim light of the den wasn’t good for him awakening. He wound through the sleeping bodies of other cats to emerge, blinking, onto the sand, which was, today, dusted with snow.

Blinking as bright light, reflected off the frost, accosted him, Twigtail found himself temporarily blinded. Slowly, as he stood there in the entrance to his den, a black-and-white blob swam into his sleepy vision. Ugh, the warrior tom thought distastefully. Can’t say I wanted to see Patchstar this early in the morning. D**n, how long was I asleep, for that fat old cat to be out? Ignoring the black-and-white shape pointedly, the ginger tom padded into the brisk morning air, shivering as falling flakes soaked into his thin, mangy fur. Well, his morning plans were ruined, he thought as his vision finally returned. He had wanted to go off on his own, possibly run by the Twolegplace to see if his favorite rogue was up, but that fatty patch-pants would probably be off yowling. What a bother.

But it was funny, Twigtail thought as he padded towards the fresh-kill pile. As his vision cleared, he saw that it was, in fact, early morning, a time ruled by early-risers like himself. He hadn’t expected Fatty to be even awake yet, unless the mad old cat was on the warpath again. Pausing as he hovered above the last few scraps of food, the skinny warrior turned his pale gaze back to the black-and-white cat. Oh… so it wasn’t Patchstar. This cat was much too skinny for the job. After a moment, the tom recognized the warrior she-cat Crystalsky. Oh, he didn’t care about her. Going back to ignoring her, he snatched up a hairy squirrel in his teeth and dragged it towards the camp wall to eat, so he could munch before making his great escape.

[crowtalon]

Crystalsky nearly fainted when she saw the moving figure in the corner of her eye. She turned her head and met the cat's eyes, and the shock ebbed away when she realized who it was. Twigtail was hardly a threat to the Clan. What's wrong with me today? There's nothing strange about this. It's just life. Averting her gaze from the tom cat, who was apparently also an early bird, she trudged through the heavy snow to the kill pile.

Excited to be able to eat and kill the gnawing hunger of her belly, she leaned over to see what was buried. Not much was there - she knew she should have expected little, being leaf-bare and all, but it was still a disappointment. She grabbed a finch from the pile, frozen from lying in the snow, the sudden cold hurting her teeth. Tempted to drop it, she bit in, ignoring the cold feeling on her front fangs as she went to eat.

[Twigtail]

After ripping a few gray-brown hairs from his squirrel’s flank, Twigtail paused in his work, looking down at his breakfast with keen yellow-green eyes. Did he know this squirrel? Why, yes, he believed he did. Suddenly, the ginger tom didn’t really want to eat his morning meal. If it wasn’t eaten fresh, the tom had a thing about eating things he had caught. Perhaps it was knowing precisely where this particular prey he had been. The warrior glanced up, to look at Crystalsky. The black-and-white she-cat wasn’t looking at him, but he doubted he could put back this squirrel without her raising a fuss. And then Patchstar really would come out of his den. Turning his eyes back to his prey, the warrior grimaced, but returned to ripping apart the furry carcass.

He wasn’t particularly fond of the cold, hard flesh he had to shred apart with his brittle-feeling jaws. Neither did he like how strings of flesh stuck between his teeth. But Twigtail disliked Patchstar’s attention more, and suffered quietly. Finally, when the ginger tom had gnawed the stringy creature to a bunch of fragile bones lying on a heap on the lightly sticky snow, he yawned and licked his nose, trying to get rid of the taste of old (though not rotten) meat. It wasn’t pleasant. Like a bad memory, the warrior scraped sand and snow over the remains, burying it. When he was done, he stretched again, pushing his forelimbs out in front of him, bony rump sticking in the air, and then flexed forward, pulling up his shoulders; he grunted with the effort. But when he loosened his muscles, he felt more refreshed, if dissatisfied with breakfast.

With a wary glance back at the warrior she-cat, Twigtail turned back to the camp wall. Crouching for a moment, he sprang, clawing for the top of the weather-hardened fortification. He scrabbled a bit, like usual, to get to the top, but there, he crouched, ginger fur stark against a pale blue-gray sky, and then slid down the other side. He plopped gently on the snow-crusted sand, legs bent to absorb the shock, and stood, whiskers twitching and ears flicked back, listening for anyone approaching. After a brief moment, he satisfied himself. This morning he didn’t have the patience for caution. He trotted casually towards the climb to the forest and heaved himself up the ice-slicked rock, his newly-stretched muscles flexing easily. Of course, having traveled this familiar path most of his life helped his ease.

Near the top of the rise, his head twisted to the side, ears pricked as he looked expectantly for a weathered path. Ah, there it was! Tail flicking with a brief feeling of triumph, he clawed his way over to the sandstone path in the short cliff wall. Being slight had its advantages when it came to cliff scaling in this fashion, Twigtail often thought, grinning to himself. He liked this advantage over the larger cats. With deft precision, he padded along the path, one he had traversed many times to get to a series of gull nests when the chicks were born, a favorite place of his youth. Also, the place he had earned his ripped ear. Still, he was quite sure he knew the place better than any other cat in IvoryClan.

[crowtalon]

As she began to eat the bird, the flesh became warmer and less uncomfortable on her teeth. After she finished her meal, her stomach was still uneasy with a dull sort of fright, making her feel nauseated, although she was not hungry. She glanced over at the tom, Twigtail, as he was going over the camp wall. Probably off to hunt. Deciding to follow his lead, she approached the wall, focused her energy on her back legs, and leaped, claws gripping the stone as she heaved herself up. Another leap and she was at the bottom of the wall.

She studied her surroundings. She saw Twigtail disappear behind a cliff wall, going a path not usually traveled. Should she follow him? The question crossed her mind for a moment. Deciding that, for now, she should mind her own business, she headed on a more traveled path to the hunting grounds.

[Twigtail]

Twigtail padded comfortably along the narrow path, his shoulders relaxed. He highly doubted anybody but him even knew that this trail along the cliff side actually ended in anyplace useful. A boulder reared in the middle of the path ahead; well, not really a boulder, but a place were the cliff jutted out, obscuring the trail. Without a flicker of doubt in his whiskers, the ginger tom hopped to the top of the boulder, and then pulled himself up the side of the cliff. Unbeknownst to other cats, the trail continued. Once on top of the boulder, it was just a short hop to a ledge along the cliff face, which widened into another path a couple tail-lengths above the original. Now, though, the top of the cliff, the place where the forest hang over the edge of the rock, was just beyond jumping distance over his head. Still, who would see him waltzing along on this path down here?

Also, he wasn’t far above the camp on his narrow ledge. Curious as any cat, Twigtail poked his head over the edge, to see the camp wall he had climbed not long before several fox-lengths below. He smirked, thinking of the losers stuck down there, while he was up here.

Not far now, he thought, feeling suddenly jolly. He paced along the narrow trail until it broadened. The cliff opened up in a shallow cave, more like a huge crack in the wall, where the gulls often nested. Few were present at this time of the year, but Twigtail’s one good ear still flicked towards them: a precaution. Close to where the trail entered this shallow cave, he sniffed at one of the last areas the snow could touch, cold and sticky against his large orange paws. Quickly, he pushed his paws into the clinging white crystals, digging through them and into the rocky, cold, hard soil beneath. There, hidden where the earth was cold, was his treasure horde.

This horde consisted of three stiff, small fish, one squirrel, and one mouse. Each corpse was frozen stiffly into the ground, preserved by the frigid weather. Twigtail sniffed each one in turn. The pieces of prey were up to three days old; that was as long as he kept them, before they went bad. Whenever he had a particularly fruitful hunting mission, he would hide a portion of his catch here, for emergencies. It was a bother, though. This was his one true act of Clan loyalty, and if anyone found out, they’d probably consider it the opposite. Perhaps that was why this course of action appealed to this particular warrior so much.

Two of the fish had to be taken to the camp today, or they would rot where he had buried them, spoiling the rest of his treasure, too. They would be old and hard, like the squirrel he had been forced to eat, but they were food, and in these frozen moons, the Clan hardly had the right to complain. He picked up the fish by their stiff spines, his narrow mouth easily crammed by their solid bodies. With a flick of his tail and a last uneasy glance at the drowsy gulls, he pushed snow and soil back over his collection and turned back the other way down the path, his tail raised cheerily. At least the Clan couldn’t complain that he wasn’t contributing.

It was a simple matter, going back down the one narrow path, leaping down to the boulder, and continuing down the final stretch to the more frequently used trail up to the forest. At the end of his private and personal path, he dropped the fish; holding them in his small mouth was always an awkward task. But as he put them down, he detected scents of another cat. A moment was all it took for him to identify Crystalsky. Twigtail’s spine stiffened for a moment as he tasted the air, concentrating on the she-cat’s scent. Was she still lurking nearby?

[crowtalon]

Crystalsky had traveled her own path for a short time, the time in which Twigtail had been going to his secret storage. She had been hunting, and found nothing. All the prey was gone by now, hibernating or starved. The birds above weren't even chirping, in fact, there was no sign of them even being there. She was sure they were, though, and she even considered trying to scale a tree to catch one. But she decided against it. The trees were snow-covered, heavy, and slippery. The added weight of a cat could cause a weaker limb to snap. Of course, even if it didn't, she was sure the birds would have felt the added weight causing the tree to bend, fly away, out of reach. And there was always the chance of a deadly fall.

Disappointed from her trip, she was trudging through the snow, marking out her path unintentionally as she headed back to camp. Near the camp wall, she scented Twigtail coming closer - he must have been back from hunting also.

[Twigtail]

Twigtail sniffed again. Well, the scent was fresh. But, when he peered up and down the slope, she wasn’t around. But his fur prickled with a sense of urgency. The only reason her scent would be so fresh was if she had either gone up or down. But it had to be up, right? Well, he wasn’t stupid enough to rely on it. He wasn’t sure how he was going to explain fishing from the top of a cliff if it came to that. Not even the most senile elder would buy a story like that, unless they assumed that the birds were now swimming while the fish were flying. Whiskers twitching with annoyed agitation, the ginger tom scurried down the slope and raced back to camp, belly fur skimming the slick surface of snow atop sand.

And, of course, luck decided to be against him this morning. Cursing himself for choosing comfort over convenience in his decisions about where to sleep, Twigtail slowed as he spotted a black-and-white form near the base of the camp wall. The two stiff fish were still in his mouth, clearly not fresh-caught. He glowered for a moment at the warrior that was clearly that inconvenient Crystalsky, but only allowing for that brief expression of annoyance. Forcing his countenance to clear, he dropped into a brisk trot. A final decision was reached, only to answer questions if asked.

Lucky for him, he had an unfriendly reputation. He brushed brusquely past Crystalsky and scrabbled back up the camp wall without so much as a glance in her direction, though he kept his pinched face carefully neutral. Swiftly, he swarmed down the other side of the wall and continued his purposefully unhurried walk to the fresh-kill pile, holding his head as if there was nothing to hide. Twigtail quite doubted that anyone would care enough to notice these fish had long been dead before he brought them to camp, or, even if they noticed, they wouldn’t ask. Prey was too short in leafbare for complaints. He dropped his stiffs with the rest of the prey from the night before; nobody else seemed to have brought back food yet.

This time, though, Twigtail planned on going hunting. He would bring whatever he caught to his private store. He started padding back for the camp wall, his eyes oddly defiant for the rest of his cultivated, bland expression. He had to allow himself something, after all.