Once you really get warmed up you don't stop loping for hours, not until the moon's gone most of the way across the dome of stars and you've fetched up on some little two-lane road, somewhere. It's been superbly fun to sail along the smooth asphalt, dodging only four or five vehicles the whole night, racing them along the shoulder of the road, laughing and pretending as if the two of you could drag down an entire truck and rip it to bits. Finally you wind down into a trot, then a walk, then sit down. Your tongue's hanging out, your shoulder's on fire, and you realize dimly you don't know how far, exactly, it is back to the safehouse. "I'm thirsty," you say, just realizing it.
"Me too. We'd better head back." It finally dawns on you that you haven't been keeping track of direction and position the way you normally would; your brain doesn't have that second layer right now. "We'll just have to follow our own trail back, we'll get lost if we try to shortcut it. Come on, I think I smelled running water not too long ago."
"Mmn." You trot slowly and tiredly along back the way you came, not thinking of anything in particular, until you find a culvert with a bit of unfrozen water, then drink eagerly. It's cold enough to make your whiskers tingle. "I'm tired," you say, licking your shoulder. "We could probably curl up down here for awhile, it's overgrown. We'd be hidden from the road."
"Okay. If Pancho gets worried she can come find us." You wait for him to get comfy, then curl yourself around him like a big fluffy blanket.
You doze for a few hours, feeling warm and happy, and when you wake up your shoulder's perfectly healed and your friend blanket has been frosted. Snow is coming down in big, chompable feathers. "Oh, look!" you say, delighted, and scramble over up and up the bank. You jump up and bite a drifting flake, then jump and get another. The flakes are just big enough you can feel them on your tongue before they melt. "Haha! I'm going to eat all of it!"
You still have enough coherency to make mental note of which direction you were headed before you napped, but you have no interest in keeping Erskin from playing in the snow. You're enjoying it yourself. Out on the plains, dry powder snow and hard spattery pellets are the usual, so these fat soft flakes are a special treat in a way, even if they're what you nearly always get in the lake country where you grew up. So you chase snowflakes with Erskin, and laugh and run around, and roll in the frosty grass, where the ground is starting to whiten between stalks. It's lovely.
After some amount of time playing, it occurs to you that there was a place with free food you should probably go get more free food from. You go sniffing around the road. "Where was that place?" You ask Bel. "You know, with the food. And the extra people."
"Thattaway," is the best you can do. But you're sure if you head roughly in that direction you'll smell it eventually.
You trot after him, interested in how he's going to get you back to the place. It's getting a little tough to sniff out where you've already been, as the snow piles up, but he's smart, he probably knows the way just in his head.
You definitely don't know the way just in your head. You do have a pretty good sense for what seems familiar, even with the snow changing it, and between the two of you and all the spam Erskin's been eating, you can sniff out your trail for quite some time with a bit of effort. Eventually, though, you have to admit it: "We're lost. I know we've been going approximately the right direction, we haven't been getting more lost all this time, but where to go from here, I can't do better than 'sort of east-ish'. Got any secret werewolf orienteering tips?"
"Oh! Um. I don't know, I never really have to go anywhere in particular, so I'm never really lost." You sit down and think really hard. "We could... ask someone?"
"I didn't bring my phone," you point out unnecessarily. "And I think we're close enough to the moon that changing's going to be a huge pain. We're fluffy and there's mice, I'm not terribly concerned, are you?"
"Yeah, that's tonight." Even with dawn painting the whole sky grey and yellow, you know. "Well, I don't care if you don't care. It's nice out here. It's safe. There's no other wolves in the whole... area. Province. This whole everything, did you smell? I like when I'm the only wolf." You realize that might have sounded mean. "Well, it's nice also to have you along being a wolf too, I like that a lot. Do you want to find something bigger than mice?"
"We could give it a go. Jackrabbits are probably too fast even if we tag team them, but it'd be fun to try!" You yawn and stretch out your whole body, shake snow from your fur, and bounce to indicate readiness. "If we keep moving sort of east as we hunt, we might come across our trail or smell the place on the wind."
"See, you're very smart, that's why I keep you around. And also because you're pretty and nice to me." You lick his snout warmly. "Okay, I'll race you to the first rabbit!"
"Wait, are we just running along and hoping to smell one, or --?" But Erskin's already taken off, so you just shrug and start running too. As long as you don't get separated, you don't guess it really matters.
You go along until you smell rabbits, which turns out to be one rabbit, which is dead on account of having been run over. "Does this count?" you wonder.
"Well, it's a rabbit and you found it first, so technically you win. Personally I am not desperate enough to eat tire tracks." Nose theatrically in the air, you trot onwards in search of a rabbit that is a) more fun to chase and b) less funky-smelling.
He's squeamish! That's delightful! You grab hold of the biggest chunk, peel it off the ground, and gallop after him. You're going to tag him with the crusty bit and see what happens.
"What, no, don't bring it -- eat it over there -- eww, Erskin!" You dodge his attempts to touch you with it. "That's so nasty, stop!" Of course, this simply ensures he'll never give up. You run away. Once you've outdistanced him on your long Russian Death Machine legs, you pause for a howl: "ERSKIN IS A GROSS YUCKFACE WHO EATS ROAD PIZZA!"
