He felt he had been followed for several hours now by the two fools and was now wedged inconveniently in the center of two equally pressing matters: a particularly enticing meal and his own death. In the face of this he found no suitable reaction but to go forward in the hopes that one would justify the other. Inwardly he knew that the hunt trumped all, that it took precedence over petty things like survival, that it took life and gave life and so demanded all that he could give. The hunt called to him several hundred meters in front of him and the hunters were much closer behind him, but he carried a strange apathy to them. He knew where they were and how they fumbled with the weapons they were not fit to hold and whenever they lost track of him he felt a pressure lifted from his back. If they were to bring his death they would bring it at some time or another and the more he ran forward the more he ran back from the hunters. It was a vicious cycle, and under this threat of death the prospect of food was foremost in his mind.

And there was the meadow.

He had seen it often but visited it seldom because it so rarely held anything of value to him. It was impossible to hunt in such an open clearing and his dinner did not lend itself easily to being murdered. Where food did not pertain the place was of little use to the wolf, so he knew it only vaguely. Now, however, with the hunters at his backpaws, the clearing seemed suddenly a much better choice.

In it were, for now, a duck who seemed to have for himself some minor mental failings from the way he swam in the pond (or perhaps it was simply that all ducks shared these failings, as was the way of the birds) and a cat who seemed to be plenty relaxed considering the wolf’s presence. Perhaps his nose was broken, or perhaps he was equally stupid. He was a house cat, it seemed, one who would willingly allow himself to be restrained. The wolf did not know who lived in the house or what manner of human they were, whether they carried rifles, whether they would flee him or shriek at him angrily. He had found all manner of humans before and none of them had yet been eager to allow him a meal to himself. And the humans behind him were, of course, a different problem altogether.

With momentum his guide and an unmistakable impulse for action his master he leapt forth, his sights set on the duck, the stupid duck. The cat, dull as he might have been, knew full well, at least from the instincts his ancestors so generously provided, when death was on his tail and he sprang up almost without thought into a tall tree, gripping its bark so tightly it was comedic. The duck had no such gifts of nature and within an instant the wolf bounded over him and, in a single deft motion, swallowed him up so quickly that the duck still did not know his fate.