Amur Tigers

[brotherbear]

Continued from post #346... A crow spotted the carcass and flew over. It sat on a branch above Bloody Mary's body and craned its neck.
"Shoo!" Stefanovich threw a stick at the crow. "There's nothing for you here!" The crow cawed a few times and flew away. In the far corner of the sky, eagles, small as black dots, dove and swooped right back up into the sky, which stretched infinitely. They drew great, overlapping circles in the sky, as free as could be.
Spent and weak, Bloody Mary had lain here in the snow. She had kicked the snow with her hind legs and scraped it with her front paws. She must have been kicking right up until her very last breath. The struggle and pain of her last moment were apparent in her wide-open eyes. It wasn't the kind of death that nature brings like a gift of eternal rest at the end of a fruitful life. I stroked her head and whiskers. Her whiskers were soft. I remembered how They'd felt on the back of my hand. I closed her eyes. 
Tiger tracks circled Bloody Mary's body. One set was small, the other large. It wasn't clear if they had been there when she died or if they'd found her body later, but brother and sister had stayed by their mother's side for a long while. The surrounding area was full of their tracks and there were traces of the two lying in the snow waiting for their mother to wake up. 
The tracks circling Bloody Mary finally departed. The small paw prints were sometimes superimposed on the large ones. White Sky led and White Snow followed. Their tracks headed straight up the range, then paused on the mountainside. White Snow had lain in the snow like a sphinx, facing her mother on the slope. White Sky's prints circled the sphinx, perhaps urging her to hurry. They had set out again. The tracks disappeared over the range. The siblings had bid their mother goodbye. Reply