"Okay," you laugh. "Go me!" He recognized that acting normal around strangers is difficult for you, and instead of writing you off as a weirdo, he congratulated you for succeeding at it. This makes you feel half a dozen things at once, and blush, and trip over your own feet a little. You reach the climbing area with somewhat exaggerated relief: "And now I'm going to do something I don't suck at."
You sit down in exaggeratedly solemn attention. "Go on," you say, thumping your tail once. Then you're distracted by a grasshopper flutter-hopping across your field of vision, and pounce on it. Once you catch the thing you remember you were supposed to be attending a lesson, but he hasn't started yet. You settle back down, crunching your prize a little abashedly. "Now go on," you say.
You chuckle. "You don't have to watch every moment, it's not one of those blink-and-you-miss-it sorts of things." Hanging your chalk bag from your belt, you dust your hands and pick your route. You were only bouldering this morning, playing around on the car-sized and house-sized tumbled chunks of stone lying at the foot of the cliff. Now you're going up the spire. There are fittings for safety ropes and whatnot, but you've developed a taste for free-soloing since people stopped shooting at you. Apparently you just don't feel right if you're not risking your life a little bit. You fit your fingers into the first hold, and begin patiently and steadily working your way up the rocky tower.
You watch him go up. Humans are slow, ginger climbers compared to basically all the other primates, but you suppose the awkwardly oversize back legs are to blame. They're certainly decent climbers compared to ostrich, or kangaroo. Bel moves cautiously, but is clearly enjoying himself, and is to his credit going basically straight up like a spider. You lean your forepaws up against the cliff-face when he's something like twenty feet up and give a sharp "Woo!", the intonation mostly human, to cheer him on, then loll your tongue out when he looks down and smiles. After that he's too far up to bother communicating with, so you wander off around the boulders to hunt for more grasshoppers. It's not that you're particularly hungry— the amount of food you've bolted down the last few days, you could run for a month on— but the bitter crunch they make is nearly as fun as the stalk and pounce. You make a game of provoking them into flying hops, then snapping them out of the air. After awhile you're drooly and warmed up and out of grasshoppers, so you set off for a lope around the lake. Maybe you'll be done by the time Bel is.
The really addictive thing about climbing is the way it forces you to focus. It narrows your world down to you and the rock and the interaction between you and the rock and gravity. Everything else goes away. By the time you're navigating the tricky bit of overhang just before the top, you've stopped even wondering whether being a werewolf would allow you to survive a fall from this height. You're not wondering anything at all. You simply are. At the top, you sit and look out over the lake, feeling the cool wind drying the sweat on your back. Little by little, context returns. You take a picture of your feet dangling over the long drop. You take a less alarming selfie to send to your dad -- your smiling, freckled-and-sunburned face with the lake view in the background. You put your phone away and start down again, choosing an easier route this time. Not so easy that you don't have to focus, though; not so easy a slip wouldn't send you to smash like an egg on the boulders at the bottom. Focus takes over once again. When you reach on the ground at last, you feel peaceful and exhilarated both at once. Like surviving a firefight, but no one got hurt. Nothing was changed. Nothing was even accomplished, really. You just went to look at the view and came back. There's a zen sort of emptiness in that.
You've come back from your run and dozed off in a nice sun-toasted corner of rock, and when you hear Bel coming back you raise your head and give him a sleepy, thoughtless tail-wave. It was a good run. You went around the water twice, faster and faster till you burnt through all the accumulated human detritus in your head. You could go for another. Maybe go run north and west again. Alaska's out there waiting. Bel pats you. That's nice.
You sprawl out on the sun-warmed stone, one hand on Erskin's neck for pats, and watch the clouds. There's no need to talk. You're perfectly content right now.
After some aimless, pleasant, dozey time, the sun moves over the cliff-face and you are abruptly in shadow. You open your eyes and go "mrr," disapprovingly.
"Mm, yeah," you agree. You yawn and stretch. "Proposal: let's head back to camp to ditch my clothes and your collar, and go for a run to work up an appetite for supper."
You like your collar! It keeps you from getting shot. And your bandanna is bright yellow, which is also stylish and useful. You scoot a little ways away from him in disdain. You know fashion.
"You don't like that idea. Okay, how about we go back to camp and one of us changes so we can have a conversation. Either that or you learn Morse code, because buddy, I can't read your mind."
On the way, you muse aloud on how generally useful Morse code ought to be for werewolves -- say, if you happen to get cornered during the full moon and can't talk, everyone knows SOS, paw it on the ground or something. Could save your life. And of course for the people who do know it properly, military and police and radio hobbyists and so forth, you could communicate anything you like. At camp, you strip down and drop into fur. "I dunno, what do you wanna do?" you grin.
"Put off learning morse code until tomorrow," you tease him, licking his handsome face. "You should have put on a bandanna if we're going to be running together. I suppose I'll have to be flashy enough for the both of us. Are there game hunters around?"
"Doubt it. Not this close to a camping area, and we haven't heard any guns. If we stay off the maintained trails we won't meet anyone." You frolic a little with anticipation -- you have never in your life known how to frolic, but in this form it comes naturally. "Come on, show me things, show me all the interesting smells."
"I've been around the lake twice, let's try a wider circle," you say. "Race you around the bluffs you were climbing earlier, and then we can do another few passes to chase mice at twilight."
"You're on. Do you need a head start to make up for your stubby legs?" you tease, and then launch into the undergrowth. Despite the length of your stride, you're actually at a disadvantage; handling rough terrain on four legs isn't something you've had all that much practice at, and Erskin's hells of graceful. Mostly you're chasing the ginger flag of his tail, scrambling to keep up. It's fun, though. You love a challenge. Every so often, the two of you lose interest in racing for a little while, and take a break to roughhouse instead. When you're breathless and laughing and covered in burrs, you flop down to chew the prickles out of each other's fur and exchange some lazy, affectionate trash talk. Then one of you will get the zoomies suddenly, and you're both off and running again.
When the sun tips below the treeline you lead Bel on a wide, wobbly arc back to the bluffs. "Mice!" you yell— well, yip, rather— and pounce for one of the little grey shapes creeping between the rocks. Mice are significantly more difficult than grasshoppers. They're fast as hell, spin on a dime and will jump right up over your snout if you miss a snap. You're no lithe little fox and Bel might as well be a fluffy rhino, so you miss your snap nine times out of ten. At least mice have an even shorter attention span than you do: when you've flushed all the mice out of one area, you just go around behind another area and there more are. When you've chased those mice, the mice in the first area have snuck back out of their hidey-holes. You could hunt mice all night, and as a point of fact you sometimes have.
The mice aren't big enough -- or full of poop enough -- to set off your squeamishness. To your wolf palate, they just register as 'crunchy snack'. It's like eating taquitos that squeak and run away from you. "This is really fun!" you confess to Erskin several times -- you only mean to say it once, but you can't seem to break the habit of accidentally expressing yourself. For which reason you also remind him a few times how cute he is and how much you like him. But the great thing is, it doesn't seem to bother him at all. He's not even rolling his eyes at you, he's just cool with it. At one point you get a sharp rock between your toe pads and plop down to worry it out, and Erskin comes over to show you how it's done. You lick his face in thanks. "Hey, when we're done here," you propose, "I mean done in this park, you wanna go somewhere we can really run? Show me how you do the daily life thing as a wolf? I dunno where; someplace hunting wolves is illegal, ideally."
"There's nowhere hunting wolves is illegal enough that people don't do it," you tell him. "But yes, that sounds lovely. I'd been meaning to strike out between towns, when I'd fed up at that place you found me. We could make some northerly progress."
