The darkness that contrasted the relative warmth of day was a cruel mistress, one laden with unspoken, unknown, and unimagined horrors that modern man had left behind, one who chose in the depths of its seeming void to fill with shearing cold in place of any ounce of sympathy. For earlier, while it had dusted snowfall throughout as a blessing, now the deathly chill was a curse, one that threatened to sap life until death; exposure. What few graces there were, if one could even think of them in any straight, sane mind with the hand dealt, were that the killing cold was not perpetuated by flaying winds or dense fall... though the graces there ended, perhaps with a sense of determined punctuation to them, as though fate thought itself much too kind.

Unlike the lone man wandering the dark, the more fierce things did not find themselves blinded or burning by the cold. Instead, these curses were the boons they could have asked for should they have had the power of mind to beseech such powers for the gifts; they made prey stiff, inflexible, easy to track, blind, deaf, and more importantly, reckless and easily startled. Predators relished the night, even the hours of dawn and dusk, but they as those to come after them had a special fondness for the cold and snowfall. It posed advantages that were never gained in the hours of daylight or in the warm midsummer months where the herbivores flourished.

One of these fiercer things, in its own lonesome, had taken to the night at hand from wherever it lurked. Perhaps some of the thicker brush or exposed stone, or maybe it was such a hardened thing as it appeared that the snowy cloak that fell over the land posed it no real need to avoid the cold, rather only the desire. Whatever the case may have been, its stirring was not without purpose, for in order to fill its need - the desire to live and survive - it would need eat. Though what could be done alone? Large game was difficult by one's self, nothing to distract or lure it into a well laid trap, just as small game was too fleet of foot to keep on in pursuit of. Scavenging was always an option, especially as the hungry cold preserved meat and bone alike from the various forms of pestilence, almost neatly packaging it for any hungry carnivore to come. 

Something was different in this nightly venture though, something unexpected. It came with a scent to several hundred million receptors that made up the nose, something that would put its distant competitors of the future to shame in. Curious as it was, scanning the dark, it wasted no time in drawing the cold, scented air in across its jaws with an agape mouth. Such fine tasting of every detail, it could withdraw facts as subtle as age, fitness, fatigue or stranger things yet, but there was no true need for these - not nearly as much for direction or detail. Whatever it was, it was no large thing and was pronounced with exertion and agitation. Odd that it made no sound, not as others did in such a state, but enough to rouse curiosity and the uncontrollable urge to hunt.

Thus when the once settled paws put to tracking in a calm walk, testing the air time and again with an open, fanged mouth, the wandering, wavering pattern diminished as it honed in closer to the source. First it was the odd gust that moved with the wind, tossed aside, but soon it was a trail, then on? Not even the concealing snow could hide tracks, layers or not, light or rather the seeming lack thereof. The contrary was true at that, the ambient moonlight refracted amongst countless falling icy particles and scattered wide; how bright it made the night to anyone with the talent to truly see it. Sound in all of this, a factor as it needed to be to come, played but no role still - no baying or whinnying - instead just deathly silence, as much so as the deadly hunter itself.

That gift of hearing would come in due time, but in the meantime the calmly hounding figure kept on in search of its quarry, pausing now and then on its winding way to discern where next the wind would come and go until it could find the source outright, walking almost as if it moved in an arc.