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The sun is just starting to dip below the tree line as Marty ('Party-Hearty Marty' to his friends) sets up his traps. Dressed in a camouflage outfit he'd picked up at the army surplus store back in town, Marty fancies himself an up-and-coming hunter. He's gotten the gear, watched the videos, and now he has a plan: he's going wolf-hunting. He knows there's a pack in the area; there've been flyers up all over the local campgrounds and the downtown warning hikers and potential campers of the risk and giving them safety tips in case of a wolf encounter. He figures he's doing the community a favor by getting rid of the beasts, and besides, he's seen the kinds of prices a nice wolf pelt can get on the fur black market. Who cares if this is a national forest and the wildlife is protected? It's not like wolves are endangered or anything.
He's been planning this trip for a while, ever since he'd found those 'mountain lion' traps at a hunting expo. He can already see himself handing the furs over to the dude who'd been running the trap booth, the one with the nasty scar and nastier smile, in exchange for a hefty bonus. Ah, the booze he could buy for all that money...
Satisfied that everything's in order, Marty climbs up into a nearby tree to watch his traps. He's picked out what looks like a decently well-traveled critter trail, one he's seen wolf tracks on in past expeditions, and he feels sure of his success. All he needs is patience.
After a couple of hours, dusk has settled in for real, and he hears a rustling in the underbrush. Suddenly, with a horrible racket, a terrified stag comes tearing toward his spot through the trees, pursued by at least three huge wolves. Oblivious and frightened out of its mind, the animal stumbles into the Marty's little clearing and blunders over one of his traps. With a metallic crash, it snaps shut around the stag's front leg. Thrown off its balance, the deer hits the ground with sickening crunch and stays where it lands, its neck snapped in the fall. The 'hunter' waits for the wolves to come after the dead animal to investigate, but they stop as one just beyond the edge of the clearing, wary, sniffing the air as if suspicious. After a pause, one sits back and howls, then ventures carefully closer to the fallen deer. Marty is breathless with anticipation, waiting for the inevitable wrong step and loud snap, but somehow the wolf gets all the way to the stag without springing a single trap. Baffled and irritated, Marty reaches behind him for his new state-of-the-art hunting rifle. After all, he's up in a tree, and there are only three of them.
But where's his gun? His hand touches nothing but bark, and he gropes the branch he's settled on blindly, unwilling to take his eyes off of the scene below him in order to turn and check where he's certain he'd set his rifle down when he'd first settled on the branch. A noise from behind him makes him freeze in place, but only for a second. Whipping around on the branch and looking up, it takes a moment for him to make sense of the barefooted young black woman crouched on the branch above him, holding his rifle up by the scope and grinning at him. She seems to be no older than 20 and is dressed in a pair of jean cut-off shorts and a much-too-big tie-dye t-shirt with the sleeves torn off. He blinks at her, speechless, uncomprehending, as she tips her head back with a smirk and howls. Remembering the large and dangerous predators loitering below, Marty lunges to cover her mouth, but miscalculates and loses his balance, his feet failing to find purchase on the slick bark of the tree branch.
Falling, he flails, trying to grab on to something, anything, before he hits the ground and triggers one of his own traps, but he grabs only air. He braces for impact, but it never comes. Instead, he is caught in a pair of strong, sturdy arms, and then deposited none-too-gently in a heap on the ground, outside of the range of his snares. Springing up, Marty gropes for the brand-new hunting knife attached to his belt in order to defend himself from the other wolves he knows he heard coming in response to that blasted girl's noise, but his efforts trail off as he takes stock of his surroundings.
Perched in the trees surrounding his little trap clearing, over a dozen people of varying age and background regard him silently with hostile expressions. None appear to be over 40. They're dressed in a variety of outlandish costumes, from what looks like a semi-presentable pink ball gown to full-out punk, complete with fuchsia Mohawk and a vicious-looking spiked collar. The wolves are nowhere to be seen, but crouched next to the dead stag now is a young man wearing what appears to be a black bodysuit, his shoulder-length blond hair falling wild and tangled around his face. After a moment, he speaks, his accent vintage Valley-boy but with an odd, foreign lilt.
"Dude, why'd you catch him? He ruined our hunt, and all this stuff," he gestures to the semi-concealed snares littering the clearing, "is like, totally illegal. It would've served him right to land in his own ambush." Marty, realizing that Bodysuit isn't talking to him, whips around and comes face-to-face with an older man wearing a black cloak over some sort of fancy suit. Around them, other voices chime in.
"Yeah! You're only a guest, what right do you have?"
"What if you'd been caught in one of these? We're lucky we were chasing something or that might've been us!"
And so on. The young woman from before, the one who'd grabbed his rifle, drops to the ground soundlessly amid the argument and starts prodding one of the traps with a stick until it snaps shut, slicing the stick in half. Her eyes wide, she raises her voice in alarm, cutting through the hubbub. "These are wolf traps!"
That silences everybody for a moment, but then the noise breaks out anew, this time with real anger behind the rising din. The brave would-be hunter shrinks into his fake fatigues, glancing around himself in fear. The girl, he notices, has slung his rifle over one shoulder, the dull brown and black of its body blending smoothly with one of her dark arms as she grips the butt with a familiar ease. That, for some reason, frightens him more than anything else.
When the clamor of dispute seems to reach its height, the cloaked man steps forward, carefully, until he's in view of everyone in the trees. His hands up, he pitches his voice so as to carry above the uproar, and somehow manages to shout while still sounding calm.
"Please, please! Brothers, sisters!" The squabbling quiets. He waits until everyone is paying attention before going on. "You have been roaming too long, spending too much time outside of society." Murmurs spring up, but hush with Bodysuit's raised hand. He gestures for Cloak to continue with a warning glare. Cloak gestures to Marty magnanimously. "This man has done wrong, yes, but nothing irreversible. There will be other deer. Let him answer to the police, not to us. Being isolated, you seem to have forgotten that pack law is not universal." The 'hunter' stares at Cloak incredulously. He's arguing that all these crazies leave Marty alone, which is great, but what does he mean, 'pack law'? Others in the trees are nodding, though, and a few drop from their branches at Bodysuit's gesture to pick their careful way towards the stag carcass. Marty is struck by a disquieting thought. Are these... werewolves, or something? His blood chills even more than before, and he's suddenly aware of how cold it is outside. No way. But then, where did everybody come from? Now that the group's attention is no longer on him, he can think straight, and begins to wonder.
Hot breath in his ear makes him jump wildly, and he spins to see the tie-dye clad woman standing inches from him, a dark smile on her face and his rifle dangling loosely by her side. She speaks, her voice deep and tinted with a rich old-fashioned Southern accent, and he nearly faints when he sees fangs flash in her pearly smile. Werewolf, then. Definitely werewolf. Her breath smells like toothpaste, though, which surprises him enough that he snaps out of his haze in time to catch the last part of her sentence.
"...ready to face the music?" She says, shifting and griping his gun fiercely, her finger tugging the trigger. He flinches, squeezing his eyes shut in preparation for the shot, but realizes as the retort echoes through the quiet forest that she'd been aiming up into the air, not at him. Dumb-struck at this seeming kindness, he watches, frozen, as she empties the clip of his rifle in a similar fashion and gently takes the extra bullets out of his jacket pockets. The ammunition is handed to Cloak, disappearing into his suit pockets, and before Marty can do anything, the girl throws his state-of-the-art hunting rifle into one of the unsprung traps with a surprising amount of force, making it snap shut around the body of the gun with an crunch. The girl looks at Cloak. "You pardoned him, Modoc. What do you want me to do with him?"
'Modoc' gestures airily. "It's your pack, Moya. As they said, I am simply a guest. Bite him, tie him up, do with him what you will, as long as he's not permanently harmed." He taps the side of his head with a slight smile. "Remember, just because we have the advantage does not mean that we are better than him."
Moya spits on the ground near the hunter, who has decided that huddling in the dirt seems like a fine idea, but her face is tolerant as she glares at Modoc without heat. "Enough of your preaching, child. I taught you those lessons; don't recite them back to me." Modoc blinks, then dips his head graciously.
"Please forgive me. I forget, sometimes, that not everybody is in need of a guide." He looks back up at her, meeting her gaze with a smile, and after a moment she grins and knocks his shoulder with her fist.
"You and your... I give up. I knew I should've let you be when I first saw you." She steps closer, shaking a finger in Modoc's face playfully. "I thought to myself, 'This man'll be trouble, just you wait', and here you are, giving me lip and lecturing my pack on how to stay human. It's my punishment, it must be." She throws her hands up in the air. The hunter flinches, and she looks down at him as if she's just noticed he's still there. The grin vanishes from her face and her countenance twists.
"You have no idea how lucky you are, boy." She snarls. "I would've just killed you." With that, she brings her foot down hard onto Marty's shin, and he swears he can hear his bones splinter. Wailing in pain, he curls up around his injured leg. Dimly, he registers the rustling of fur, and is witness to the incongruous image of a punk 20-something and a woman in nothing but beige riding jodhpurs and knee-high snakeskin boots carrying away the carcass of the stag he'd 'caught', wolves streaming around them.
When the park rangers find him two hours later, Marty is huddled in the middle of his little clearing, surrounded by sprung traps and covered in wolf piss. To this day, he can't hear a wolf howl without shaking.