Lamont traipsed through the woods aimlessly, sniffing the ground, wiggling his ears and feeling the leaves, twigs and mud of the forest floor on the pads of his bare paws. He almost stepped in dung a few times, but he passed around the feces with a few idle sniffs to figure out what it came out of. It turned out he could instinctively identify most of the forest animals by their scents. He would sniff in one place and the color-drained image of a deer would pop up in his mind; he would sniff somewhere else and involuntarily start to visualize a bear. Feeling oddly inadequate that none of the solid or liquid waste in this forest had come out of HIM, he squatted down, arched his tail and abruptly released a warm, gentle trickle out of the opening he'd been provided with for that purpose. It was embarrassing to him that he was no longer able to do this through a penis, but a warming satisfaction stirred within him when his pungent urine's odor reached his nose; he even mustered a sly tail wag because it stayed there--stinking like a nasal beacon--even as he walked away.
"All right, calm it down a little now, Lamont," he told himself internally as wandered on along. "All you really did was take a piss. What do you want, a medal?"
Normally, he would have been afraid of getting lost in a giant roadside forest like this. This is the kind of thick forest people ventured into and lost their way or met some violent fate, never to find their way out. But Lamont was starting to understand that he was no longer a person. If he decided to leave, he could simply follow the smell of his paw prints back the other way, like a lost dog returning to its owner. There was nothing for him to go back out of these woods to, though, at least not while he was in this form. People in the woods felt "lost" because they didn't belong out here and needed to get back to their houses and other people. A person wandering the woods is a missing persons case. A she-wolf wandering the woods is just enjoying its natural habitat. It was weird to think that he would basically always be out here among the trees and meadows from now on, that it was really his home now just like it was home for the bears and the snakes and the squirrels.
After a couple of hours, he had trouble thinking about much of anything for very long, because he was distracted by his stomach. He'd gone without food since he changed, and his hunger was starting to catch up with him. Normally by this time of the evening, he would have already ordered a pizza or threatened his wife that she'd better cook his after-work steak MEDIUM RARE this time, or else. It was safe to say there wouldn't be any pizza delivery out here in the middle of the woods, he thought. Sniffing the ground more urgently than before, he noticed some of the smells were making him hungrier--he could EAT some of these animals if he could get to them. Unfortunately, he kept coming up on bits of land he wasn't allowed to stay on, because it belonged to a pack or was part of some other lone wolf's turf. It seemed he couldn't walk fifty meters without coming up on some new scent marking that his snout interpreted as yet another KEEP OFF sign. It was like a wolf suburb, with lots of firm boundaries and very little communal space.
Walking deeper into the wilderness and getting ever hungrier, he finally detected a fresh aroma that perked his ears and sped his heartbeat up. It was a rabbit! It was a recent rabbit, one that had to still be nearby. Tracking the scent like a bloodhound, his heart sank when when his nose hit another hostile patch of wolf urine. KEEP OFF! The rabbit scent was just too good to be true--he was standing on some other wolf's hunting ground! Or was he?
"I don't think I'm going to let a WOLF tell me what to do," thought Damon, once again feeling defiant. "Especially one as scrawny and anxious as this one smells." He stopped for a minute to cover up the other wolf's scent marking as thoroughly as possible with his own, and kept on traipsing through the woods after the rabbit. His ears perked up in interest--he could hear it chewing grass, wobbling its ears in the air! His stomach rumbled. All of the juicy blood and organs inside it made his approach feel like walking through the food court in a mall. Zeroing in on it with his eyes and crouching down for a minute to aim his body, Lamont took off! The rabbit was fast, and at first Lamont thought it was sure to get away. But his own paws pounded the ground in such quick succession that he soon found himself catching up, the trees flitting by faster than he'd ever seen except through the window of a car. "This new body sure is FAST!" he thought. Air was surging through his lungs and his heart was thumping in time with the rabbit's. It was exhilarating!
Finally the rabbit started slowing down, and Lamont caught it in his jaws and held it until it stopped struggling. Its hot blood squirted into his mouth like juice from an orange. He lay down and started tearing meat off his catch with his big strong jaws. While he was still sitting there, holding the small creature down with his fore-paw and picking at it with his red-stained muzzle, a twig broke and a low growl rumbled nearby. Taking his now indispensable sense of smell for granted, Lamont immediately sniffed the air. Ah! It was the wolf he'd deliberately trespassed on. It was showing its teeth, and it let out a few angry barks between growls and the new wolf in these parts who had just swiped ITS rabbit out from under its nose.
Lamont didn't think this argumentative wolf's teeth were any more impressive than its piss, and certainly not more impressive than the ones he now had in his own mouth. He dropped his prey and rose to his feet. He growled and felt his hackles raise. The two wolves circled each other in a tight stare-down. Neither one was going to leave without a fight.