The morning was dragging on, and as it did the rattletrap old truism seemed to clang louder and louder in his ears - a lone wolf is a dead wolf. A lone wolf is a dead wolf It nagged and pulsed with the insistent pain in his foreleg, and it brought with it the elaborate imagery of his death, starvation most likely, or perhaps some great beast out in the wilderness would find him a meal too easily served to pass up.
And it wasn't as if he'd been doing something stupid. He was hunting, chasing down a rabbit, and at the end of an impressive bound he'd landed awkwardly, done something to his ankle, lost his breakfast and resigned himself to a festering injury, which would bring about his death. His ears pinned back against his skull, and he grieved, pulling his poor paw up close to his chest. "A lone wolf is a dead wolf," he intoned with a dour sort of melodrama, and sat down in a huff. The last wolf he'd run across was over a week's journey in the direction he was coming from, and that was as far as his knowledge of the territory stretched. Just what was a wolf supposed to do?
