Desperate, Bloody Maws

The red wolf stalked her prey through the brush and into the derelict steel mill. The wind had carried its smell into her waiting nostrils and empty belly a mile or so back. Peeping through brush and shrubbery, she spotted her prey dashing between the silos. It had been many years, close to a century, since red wolves treaded this far north; but as the factories closed and the workers left, wilderness began to horn back in.

Creeping in through a hole in the fence, she followed the scent into the steelworks and though the train tracks. She moved stealthily between titanic blast furnaces and colossal coke ovens that towered over her and blocked off the few rays of sun that made it through the dense overcast sky. She stopped to peep below the broken down locomotive at the end of the tracks.

She could smell her target, but she couldn’t see it. This was a slippery and difficult catch, and not one she was used to hunting. Agile, alert, and a itself a predator, she couldn’t afford to make mistakes. Red wolves typically prefer to hunt in groups, but after the conditions for survival further south became untenable and the numbers of her pack dwindled, she was forced north and left to fend for herself and her litter alone. It had been many days since she caught anything, and most of that went to her young. Their survival depended on a successful hunt today.

Her sharp eyes scanned the landscape. Immediately before her was a parking lot full of cars enclosed by a chain link fence. Beyond it, past the open gates, stretched a highway. To the right of the highway rose a pine forest of small and scant trees. To the right, past a field of open tallgrass, was the abandoned neighborhood where the factory workers used live. No sign of her pray.

A stroke of luck. For only a brief moment she spotted a barely perceptible flash of light reflecting over a metallic surface in the neighborhood moving between houses. She was unsure of what it was, but without any other sign of her target she pressed forward. She passed through the gates and moved through the field, careful to stay low between the grass. Her white legs blended in well with what little snow was left. It was late march, but it had been a particularly cold and long winter.

Quietly she creeped between yards, fences, sheds, houses, and cars. They had only been abandoned recently, but some already started to show signs of decay. Some had their windows and doors broken with various things strewn about in the lawn, looted for anything useful, but most looked identical to the day they were left behind. Nixon and McGovern lawn signs and children’s toys on the front yards. A couple American flags, and one or two Steel Worker’s Union flags and POW/MIA flags.

She followed the trail down a side street, then an alley, passed between multiple yards and across the main street. This is where her target lived, and it’s scent permeated the entire neighborhood. Desperate and confused, she began to believe her pray might have given her the slip. Her hunger gnawed at her stomach harder than ever as she became more distressed. Did she even have the energy left to return to her progeny in the forest?

Suddenly to the east, not too far away, she heard her loud meowing. Swiftly she moved towards the sound, careful to remain out of sight. The neighborhood was deathly still. She took great care to ensure the only thing disturbing the silence where the calls of her careless target. Not long ago this neighborhood had been quaint, quiet, but very much thriving and alive. The steel mill had provided for hundreds of families for generations, and it seamed like it could provide work for generations to come until the last bit of iron had been taken from the core of the earth and recycled a hundred times. The day the bombs fell an army convoy of men in large trucks and hazmat suits came to take the people away. The radioactive cloud of the blast that had reduced nearby Cincinnati to dust and rubble threatened to move westward, and so they had to leave with only the clothes on their back. The second strike further obliterated the remaining transportation infrastructure and hit several refugee centers, no one was coming back any time soon, no human at least.

Finally, she settled behind the bushes dividing two yards. There he was, the large black and white cat she had been stalking all day lay on the front porch of an abandoned house, facing the door and meowing. She hesitated for a second, it was almost too easy. She took a final breath and shot out of her hiding place, her hind legs digging into the dirt as she leapt from the bush towards her target. The cat hardly realized what was happening, much less had a chance to flee when the wolf’s piercing canines dug into his lower chest, spine, neck, and collar, whose metallic tag had given away his position earlier. He managed to let out a loud, penetrating shriek before the wolf lifted her snout and shook him about vigorously. He was dead, the hunt was over.

Doubts over the long term viability of this strange new habitat still remained in the back of her mind, a single successful hunt doesn’t necessarily mean an abundant food source. Still, all the energy she expended running down her pray was not going to be in vain, and her offspring wasn’t going to starve this day. She adjusted her catch in her maws for a better grip and began making her way to her waiting, hungry litter. She walked across the front lawn, into the main road, and stopped dead on her tracks. She turned her torso to face the four legged figure standing about half a block down the road to the south, in the direction of the old steel mill. The other figure also stood motionless and tense. It had bright copper fur interspersed with spots of white and black, like hers. It’s light brown eyes gazed deep into her own, and hers likewise gazed back. It’s razor sharp claws were dug taught and tight into the road, like hers. His jaws were covered and dripping with blood, like hers.