And the winner is..
Nicolae wrote:This form could take a while. ;u; I'm an on-off workerUsername: Nicolae
"We came down from the north, blue hands and a torch,"
Name: Sinopa Blackfoot Indian name meaning 'fox'
"Red wine and food for free, a possibility."
Age: 2 1/2 years, not quite fully mature yet but as large as she's going to get.
"We share our mother's health, it is what we've been dealt."
Personality: Clever, practical and an excellent judge of chance, Sinopa has an extraordinarily businesslady like personality. She is her own motivator and decision maker, relying on no-one and nothing and instead making full use of her own skill set. Sinopa has an extraordinary memory and learns from her mistakes almost mechanically, requiring no effort to learn new tasks providing they interest her in some way or another. Sinopa's talent for filching what she needs to in order to make sure she stays fed for the meanwhile is relatively unparalleled, her intellect and mental dexterity benefiting her in terms of survival. Even as far as fox-to-fox or human-to-fox interaction goes, Sinopa always remains 'her own person' and maintains her independence. Curiosity is a conditional aspect of this LLF, only acted upon if Sino feels as if it will somehow better her situation to investigate.
"What's in it for me? Fine, then I'll agree."AssetsFlawsSmartOverthinks thingsQuick learnerBrashGutsyOverconfidentSmallSmallBorn survivorRisk-seeker"Trees there will be; apples, fruits maybe.
[color=#4040BF]History: Born into a large litter, Sinopa was one of the runts; while she did have one younger brother who was significantly smaller she herself was seriously under-powered in comparison to her larger littermates. At first the only problem was having to wait for the larger pups to stop nursing to get a meal; however as they were all weaned and meat became the primary staple of their diet, the issue became more obvious: the carcasses brought for the pups to gnaw on were finite unlike the seemingly endless nourishment they had been getting from their mother. By the time Sinopa and her younger brother got to whatever fowl or small animal had been brought for dinner, there would be nearly nothing left but bones and unsavory bits. This was where Sinopa first learned how to use her native ingenuity.
Away from the prying eyes of her siblings, the vixen would go off to find an outcropping of rocks between which to wedge various bones and pull them against the stone until they cracked. The marrow allowed her to subsist on the scraps and eventually outlive most of her littermates, leaving her a small, raggedy little thing besides the two surviving giants of the family. Over time she taught herself to lie low and wait, to hunt for treefrogs that came to ground in order to breed in the summer, to catch crickets and large slugs. She began to match the size of her siblings, going from half of their body-mass to three fourths. It was this insatiable period of learning to survive which eventually spurred Sinopa to leave the den earlier than most juveniles, striking out on her own long before her larger sisters. She had metaphorically outgrown her childhood home.
While there was nothing particularly wrong with where their mother chose to den, it was still in close enough proximity to a nearby Spokane reservation to warrant caution from the entire family. Getting on the bad side of some unsupervised children would have been a bad move even if the whole family was grown up and mobile. While this lead Sinopa's parents to frequently pick their young up by the scruffs and ferry them to new dens in order to avoid the increasing chance of human contact, the teenaged Sinopa saw their risky closeness to the reservation a chance to truly test her skills as a survivor.
A short descent down the ravine the family's territory had been built around brought her to the edges of the Reservation; it was here her career as discreet night-time thief began. Conspicuity grew over time along with her bravery, beginning by shakily edging into outlying shacks, abandoned for the winter, to root around old garbage for a few-months-old package of biscuits and to lie in wait for the pigeons and corvids which lighted down in the morning to scrounge as well. Sinopa became very good at what she did; she progressed to slinking in through dog doors and eating from the bowl... then taking the bowl... then trying to drag the whole bag of dog food out through the significantly too-small door. It was in this way she was caught, sharp teeth dug into the thick polymer of a Royal Blue Holistic Dogfood package. This was her first face-to-face encounter with humans... and the last. She was chased off with loud sounds and clapping hands and shouting that left her ears pinned to the back of her head; her days as a community thief were over, Sinopa leaving a trail of livetraps and rat poison in her wake.
Since then she has found herself a more suitable territory for her species higher in the mountains, past the ravine of her childhood. While it may be surprising that it had been thus far left unclaimed any shock should be dampened by the fact that the territory borders an infrequently occupied campsite and has low but noticeable human traffic. The lesser human concentration brings Sinopa opportunities to practice and learn her unhealthy skills, but it also brings with it the safety of being on protected land and of impermanence. For now she is content to live a solitary life of opportunistic scavenging and hunting, a slightly stunted young vixen with a benignly delinquent disposition.
"You know what I fear, the end is always near."
