*This is a short pitiful chapter, I realize. But I got caught up in my classes, and I feel I should compensate for how long I was out of the circuit.
All characters are 18+*
Matteo and Ahote only had a few minutes of a head start. Soon the entire pack was howling after them. Howling for their blood. They had injured the Alpha, and they would die.
The night was eerie and dark and full of shadows. The moonlight was weak, and the stars winked like cold diamonds. The trees seemed stark and menacing, and the snow crust was treacherous, holding their weight at times and at other times letting them crash through.
The only sounds were of their panting breath and the angry howls of the pack. They had a chance, a single solitary chance. If they kept moving and stopped for nothing. Ahote was lean and fast, used to running great distances across the plains. Matteo was even faster, a quick little thing. They just needed to keep running, and they did.
They ran west, towards the distant mountains that blotted out the stars. They ran, and the howls faded, but that meant little. It just meant that the pack was saving their collective breath for running. They found a game trail and followed it, Matteo in front of Ahote. Ahote refused to let Matteo out of his sight, even while running for their lives. Breath plunged from their open mouths in white clouds.
The tiny moon was cold, and the stars even colder.
---
They had drawn themselves a lead of about a mile. It was a margin of safety, they still ran at breakneck speed, but they had at least one mile.
It was Matteo, speedy, exhausted little Matteo, who smelled it. He veered to the right, and Ahote followed him, confused, but trusting his lover. Soon, he could smell it too.
It was a large flat clearing, and the skeletons of old wigwams stood out of the deep snow like dead trees. They had almost no time, but they did have Matteo's supersensitive nose.
Matteo snuffled in the deep snow, gasping for air, his thin matted sides heaving. He fastened his teeth around a large ruined hide. The hide was stiff and old, chewed by mice and at one point, a fox. It was thick, and it was heavy. Matteo nudged the frozen stiff hide into a sort of ball, and Ahote picked it up. After another precious moment of sniffing, Matteo picked up a discarded spear from the snow and they started running again, this time laden with the things they needed to survive.
---
They splashed through streams. Ran until they could no longer hear the baying of the wolves that pursued them. Ran until the great power slipped away from them, and they fell in the snow, their bodies trembling and steaming and naked in the deep snow.
They were exhausted, but they had to keep moving.
They were in a rocky area. Low rocky hills cut by countless streams. Boulders jutting from the frozen earth like the knucklebones of giants. The huge evergreens had given way to birch and aspen and maple. Matteo and Ahote were blinded with snow, and utterly exhausted. Ahote looked around, holding Matteo's tiny slick body in the freezing cold.
He saw the cave. The cave was a tiny crack at the base of a gigantic split boulder. The rock rose in a craggy triangle from the stony ground. Ahote dragged Matteo and the hide and the spear to the crack, and slid inside. The inside was dark and tiny. An irregularly shaped chamber, narrow and tapered. Filled with rotten nuts from some squirrel that had used the crack to store their cache.
The bottom of the cave was soft with clumpy dark loam and dead leaves, little snow had reached the inside. Ahote was frozen. He had to start a fire, this place was small, if he could start a fire, then they would survive. Matteo was barely concious, shuddering weakly in his arms. Ahote curled him up, and wrapped the filthy stiff hide around his tiny body. Ahote ran naked into the cold, knowing that he only had minutes until they froze to death. They were naked and their energy reserves were depleted. They were soaked with sweat, and they were so weak. He only had this one chance to save them.
Matteo shuddered in the cave, the hide held in enough heat to revive him, he felt as if his energy was just leaking away, like water from a sieve. He tried not to fall asleep, he stared at the entrance numbly, shuddering and struggling not to let his eyelids droop. He was so cold. So cold that his limbs were burning and numb at the same time.
Ahote ran in his face crusted with snow that wouldn't melt because his skin was too cold to melt it. He had a handful of birchbark, the thin outer sheets of it that were powdery, and filled with a natural combustable oil. He had a strait stick and a thick log in the other. He crouched on soft cave floor and made his firedrill, shaking with cold.
Matteo crawled over to him and draped his tiny shaking body over Ahote's icy shoulders, wrapping the hide around them both, trying to transfer any scrap of energy or warmth to his lover, to help him.
Ahote groaned. The cold was like a physical pain. He stripped the bark from the log in several swift deft strokes with the sharp stone spearhead from the weapon that Matteo had taken from the village in his jaws. The spearhead was broken, but still very sharp. He made a flat wood surface, and gouged a small notch in the flatness. He shredded the birchbark into fine hairs with his shaking hands and gathered the thin papery bark in a ball of fluff near the notch he had carved.
With that, he sharpened the stick he had brought in with a few scraping strokes of the spearhead and started rolling the stick in his hands. Making fire with a drill was a long laborious process, and Ahote fumbled several times, forcing him to start over. Matteo was barely conscious when Ahote crowed with delight, and Matteo smelled the tiny wisp of smoke.
The tiny red ember was precious and fragile. Ahote blew on it, and prodded the finely shredded birch bark towards the tiny dying ember. A tiny flame took hold. The wisp of blue was no larger then the nail on Matteo's littlest finger. Ahote fed shreds of birchbark into it, and it grew. Ahote put dead leaves in it, and finally, a handful of thin twigs. Matteo opened his eyes and saw the tiny fire, burning gamely, but with almost no fuel. Ahote got up and ran back out into the snow, snarling at the cold.
Matteo huddled around the fire, scrabbling along the ground for dead leaves and twigs. The fire was life, the fire was their only chance. Ahote came back with an armload of thin sticks, and a heavy pine bough covered in green needles. He blocked the thin entrance with the branch, and it did a little to block the drafts that kept whistling in.
Ahote fed the little flame with twigs, and then slightly thicker twigs. He ran out to get more firewood, and Matteo ran out with him. They gathered up a stockpile of sticks and branches in the front of the cave, to block the entrance and the icy winds that came through.
Ahote and Matteo huddled together, the stiff and curling hide around their shoulders, the fire's heat warming them. They sat so close that they nearly singed, but their backs were frozen.
"We made it." Matteo whispered, softly, and in French. Ahote didn't understand the words, but he thought he understood the gist. He lay down on the soft bed of dry loam and crunchy leaves. Matteo lay in the curve of his body, as they curled around the fire. The hide was wrapped around them.
The exhausted wolves fell asleep.
---
Matteo woke up, shivering. Ahote was gone, but the place occupied by his body was still warm, so he didn't panic. He shoved a thick dead bough into the fire and sat up, huddling under the stiff hide. He watched the fire lick around the damp bark, making it steam. He watched the wood singe, and steam, and finally, reluctantly, catch fire. He was hypnotized by the warm orange tongues of flame. Those flickers of light, and the ragged hide on his shoulders, were the only thing keeping him alive.
Ahote lurched in, shuddering, his skin shiny and dull from the cold. Matteo jumped over to him, and wrapped his body and the hide around Ahote's shoulders, gasping at how cold his lover was, and trying to transfer his body heat. Ahote dumped an armful of branches and twigs near the fire, and shuddered.
They were both weak. Hunger gnawed at their stomachs. Their fast hot wolfish metabolisms were the only thing keeping them alive, but it would also kill them. They would be very weak if they managed to survive for the three moonless days.
Ahote eventually stopped shivering so badly. He built up a wall of snow near the entrance. Matteo blinked at the sudden warmth. Drafts still whistled through the bare hole near the top of the snow wall, but more heat was retained. He let the hide slip a little from his shoulders.
Matteo knew what he wanted. He gave the hide to Ahote and scraped together armfuls of leaves over the softest bit of loam. He took the hide back and threw it over the pile of soft sand and leaves. It was warm enough so they both shivered, but the fire warmed their naked bodies.
Matteo shivered. He was still sore, but he wanted to know his lover, and know him fully. He didn't know if he would live or die. He lay on his back on the hide, and beckoned his lover to him.
