The little creature-girl is absolutely in on this little hunt, so enamored by the thought of food, that it felt almost like the foreignness became moot within moments. She crouches, he does too, and when he springs up, so does she - him circling to cut off the rabbit from it’s escape and face it back to the rabbit hole it thought that it might escape into and out of -- only Roman crushes it’s exit as it is pursued by puppy teeth into the hole and suddenly all four rabbits are instead trapped as he circles back and sits at the warren’s only remaining mouth.
He looks and waits for Peregrine to look at him and then says calmly, only the barest bit raised in breathing, “Well, they are trapped. So now it’s your decision, do we kill them all? Do we pick one? Two?” Teaching the laws of waste so early might seem strange to anyone else, much less with a full grown wolf and a hungry pup to feed, but what better time to start than when attention was on him and trust was temporarily obtained, at least.
“If we kill them all, we cannot know if there will be enough rabbits next year - if there is sickness or famine that will kill them and make us hungry. If we kill all the does, we cannot know if there will be others to give birth to more little rabbits in the future - or if those born will be mostly bucks. If we kill the buck and a doe, the other females will be able to find another buck and we each will have a rabbit for ourselves.”
He finishes, then looks at the hole, stands, and digs his paws into the dirt until he can lunch in and bite the back of the buck to render it unable to run and the doe in the back legs for the same reason, leaving the other two to bolt from their broken home and race off into the woods. “The doe there,” he says when he removes the hyperventilating doe from the den and puts it in front of Peregrine. “put it to peace. It cannot run and it is now a mercy to put it in the arms of Death. She will run again, only not in this lifetime.” And in order to show Peregrine just how, he puts himself over the buck rabbit.
His mouth is gentle, but deliberate as it pinches the throat between his teeth to mimic for what Peregrine could accomplish -- and then the pupils grow death-large and he open’s it’s belly to enjoy the fruits of his meager effort.
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