Now and again a pause amidst the tall grass glazed with frost was needed, a nose wafting over their long blades, with a rolling breath washing over them in the process. The trail itself was irrelevant, the shortest distance between two points not the focus of the matter, rather just the type of thing it was in the first place. What information could be gleaned made it clear it was small, no greater than an elk in size for certain, no smaller than a pronghorn, but none of those was it at all, especially not as it traveled so alone in contrast to what was to be expected.

Still, moving on a distant curve away from the beaten path following the scent upwind, the cut in on the path from a flank was made only when the smell began to strengthen in intensity and concentration. For the hungering maw, whose jowls and whiskers were tinged with gathered snowflakes and naturally camouflaged in the embrace of winter, it flared and drove the rest of the elongated body to a halt. For a time it waited as it had before, but now the surveillance changed in nature; food was close, but where upon the horizon was it? The tall grass would obscure at least part of it, so to hurry into the scene out of hunger and curiosity was out of the question. Instead, with pupils enlarged and scanning, it noted every subtlety of the environment.

Motion was its trigger, for while it could not discern something as fine as the difference between turquoise and aquamarine, even the slightest movement overlaid an object and betrayed its position. Camouflage or not, if it were not still or could not expertly mimic the environment, it had little chance of evading the eyes of a cat. Sure enough from this, despite the ambient snowfall, a silhouette in the distance appeared, breaking the scattering of light to form a moving figure which was backlit; it was odd, tall rather than long, with strange prongs front and back.

Only casually breathing, mouth agape, it proceeded to watch from its point in the distant dark, well over a hundred meters, ears listening for the slightest detail; at times it tapped the crunch of snow and grass beneath the thing, the eerie quiet giving the illusion of auditory improvement when rather it only drown out other noises. But the giant tan thing was not so limited, for even as it scented the air again and continued to watch the open night for anything else that might be stirring, one ear kept tab upon even the slightest noise it made whenever they did rarely reach it, turning to track the sound. It decided then, with the tip of its tail flicking from left then to right, back again and then some, just what it intended to do.