Saithe was feeling annoyed and bothered. The lab was getting a little bit too stuffy for her liking, even with the windows open and the temperature outside at 15 degrees Celsius, complete with a cool sea breeze blowing in. Glaring down at the dissected body of a mountain goat, who was found dead at the edge of a cliff with mysterious, small bite wounds on its neck, she said to it (or rather, to herself), "Geez, you just had to get yourself killed by something weird. Now everyone is abuzz and it's giving me even more work than before!" She prodded at its snout with her fingers, and its lifeless head lolled towards her. Its round dead eyes stared back vacantly, but she didn't seemed the least freaked out.

"Hah! So you know I'm talking to you, eh?" she said, grabbing a scalpel from the tray of dissection tools. "Very good. I'll give you a piece of my mind then!"

She started to pull out bits of the organs, slicing through flesh with the scalpel and spilling blood all over her un-gloved hands. Guts and innards slipped onto the floor with an unpleasant squelch. The young wildlife researcher mumbled to herself disgruntledly as she started to sort through the bloody mess. "If I manage to find out that you killed yourself by eating something wrong, then praise the heavens. My colleagues will suffer my wrath... How do you explain these bite marks? A squirrel attacked you and you died from infection?... What did you say? No?... Of course not! The wound's too shallow. I don't see how they came to that conclusion of you dying from those measly bites..." She hacked open the small intestine, digging out its contents and scrutinizing them. At that moment, the goat's tongue rolled out and it looked as if it were mocking her. Angrily, she pushed it back into the mouth. "This is not a joke, Miss Goat. You've just robbed me of my lunch time... I'm starving like a buhbillion pack of wolves... You are so gonna AHAH!"

Interrupting herself in her flow of mumbling, Saithe pulled out a long, thin metal object from deep within the mountain goat's small intestines. She held it out triumphantly and pointed it at the goat's face, grinning, "Miss Goat! I was right all along! You ate something weird and died from internal bleeding. Just look at the state of your insides - scratched and ugly. You were not killed by those tiny bite wounds on your neck." She placed the metal on the dissection tray, suddenly looking confused. "But what in the world this piece of wire is doing in your innards is beyond me. Must have been the heartless hunters' wire traps. Why are you so stupid to eat them, Miss Goat? They're not food." She threw her hands in the air, exclaiming in an annoyed tone, "Those hunters will pay for taking your life! Do you think I'm not aggrieved by the fact that you're here, lying dead on a dissection table when you should've been frolicking on the cliffs?"

The goat stared at her sightlessly. She sighed, slumping over.

"Wait till I tell the others, they're so gonna regret scolding me and locking me in the lab with you for saying that those tiny bite wounds are not the cause of your death..."

Picking up the slippery intestines and stuffing them back inside the goat, she rapidly mopped up the blood, covered the goat's body with a large white tarp in case they needed it for further research, and washed her hands thoroughly with disinfectant. Her friend, Tazzin Epsilon, a wolverine researcher, had told her to wear gloves whenever she was dissecting or handling dead carcasses, but she just couldn't be bothered. "It's a total waste of good gloves," she would say. "And, the environment would be better off with one less pair of plastic gloves polluting it."

Yes, that was how she is. Adamant, stubborn and does things her own way. Thankfully, she had a wonderful gut sense that always told her to do the right things at the right time. It had told her to not cave in to pressure from her parents to become an engineer. It had told her that her one true dream was to become a wildlife researcher and look for the beast in Alaska that everyone had thought extinct. It has told her, just recently, that the goat had not died from the bite wounds. And now, her gut sense told her that it was high time she ate something before she went mad. Anything.

But she had to wait for her colleagues to come back first before she was released from the locked-up lab. She loitered around impatiently, straightening the tools and apparatus, cleaning the surfaces, sweeping the floor... anything, really, to keep her mind off the gnawing hunger in her complaining stomach. Heck, she probably wouldn't mind eating the goat. There were Bunsen burners in the lab and some sodium chloride in a corner. She can easily cook up some meat, but then she imagined the look of horror that would be plastered to her fellow researchers' faces and banished the idea. It would make her seem even more of a freak than she was now.

Albert Einstein... she muttered under her breath as she swept the floor with much fieryness, I hate your theory of relativity...

Twenty minutes later, the lab was in tip-top condition. Nothing was left to clean up, not a speck of dirt was on the floor. Sighing from joblessness, she trudged over to the dead mountain goat and pulled back the tarp to expose its head. It was staring up into the ceiling, one monoscopic eye trained on her. "Yup, Miss Goat. It's just you and me. Fancy chatting with a strange nineteen-year-old who is too young to be a serious wildlife researcher?" she said, looking into its brown eyes. The goat remained silent.

"Of course not. I guessed that much."

Almost bored to tears, Saithe glanced at the wall clock to check the time. Only half an hour had passed since she got locked up. And it had took her barely ten minutes to find out what killed the goat. Curse her colleagues. Wait till she locks them up one fine day. See how they like it, being trapped in a foul-smelling lab with only a dead ungulate and pickled animals for company.

With nothing else much to do, she decided to investigate the bite wounds on the goat's neck. She pulled the tarp down further to reveal the neck and its tiny marks. Creases wrinkled into her brow. It wasn't deep enough to even cause serious damage, let alone reach the bubbling life source beneath - the jugular vein. It wasn't venemous, because if it was, she would have detected foaming at the mouth and curdled blood.

Nothing bigger than a super large hare could have caused it, yet it was obviously the work of a carnivore and its sharp incisors. She puzzled over it. What could be in the forests that is a carnivore that would attack a fully grown mountain goat, yet is the size of a wolf cub? It couldn't be a weasel. They don't kill goats for food. It couldn't have been a mink. They wouldn't even think about assaulting a large, hooved beast. It can't be wolf cubs or lynx kittens, they were too young, and their mothers wouldn't leave the goat alive if it were to attack their offspring. It wasn't a wolverine either, for they were scavengers rather than hunters.

It was a mystery. Try as she might, she could not think of any animal that may have caused the bite wounds on the goat's neck.

Saithe got up and walked over to the window, her red eyes (which often times freaked out new acquaintances) scanning the taiga landscape below her. If only she were on ground floor, she would have jumped out of the window already. But no, she had to be three storeys high up in the air. Sulking, she picked up a hare's skull and spun it in her fingers. Her superior, Pierre Rodriguez, would surely scream at her if he saw that, but he wasn't here now, so who cares?

They're probably pigging out on spaghetti and woodland trifle, and drinking cool tea while laughing at the new inexperienced researcher, she thought to herself furiously. Wait till I show them that piece of metal, and then I'll see what they say...

Still stuck in her murderous thoughts, she suddenly caught a small movement at the edge of the trees out of the corner of her eyes. She quickly glanced in that direction, and managed to glimpse a small orange-ish animal with stripes slink away towards the east.

A trembling sensation of indescribable excitement overtook Saithe. Straining her eyes to find it, she was very much tempted to jump the building and chase after the creature, but thought the better of it. She didn't want to have broken bones and miss work in the beginning of the second month of her job. It disappeared into a tall copse of conifers, limping slightly.

Placing the hare skull back on its pins, she took out her small notebook, which she always kept in her lab coat pocket, and flipped to the very last page. On it was an illustration of a wolf tiger drawn by herself, a thought-to-be-extinct species since the 1950s. She glanced at the sidenotes quickly, taking in the scribbled bits of information like a computer processor.

Fully grown adults : Largest one recorded up to 1.3m from nosetip to tailtip. (Damn large. So cool.)

Orange-gray coat with black stripes. (Sounds like a tiger... Wait, they're not called tiger wolves for nothing... haha, stupid me.)

Was once very widespread. Near the last few years, only present in Alaska and Canada. Can grow thick coats in winter. Primary prey : elk, moose muskoxen, bison. Would eat wolves, wolverines, small mammals, eggs, insects, fruits...etc as well in dire times. (Not very picky I see.)

Reaches maturity at two years of age. Pup litters up to a max of three. Opens their eyes at two weeks. (^0^)

Eye colour ranges from light amber to dark umber. Fur colour ranges from light orange, dark orange, gray and brown. Has stripes that are unique to each individual. (Like zebras and tigers)

She stopped as she reached the bottom, eyes sweeping automatically to the-next-page-which-was-not-there. She groaned. It was torn off by her little brother and used as a snot collector. Trust her to lose a page of vital information about her most loved animal to the fury of mucus. Anyways, who needed the notes? She had it all in her head since she was ten.

Adults and pups have serrated teeth like great white sharks.

Belongs in the canidae family, although they have traits of the feline lineage as well.

Solitary animals. Highly territorial. Only meet up during spring for mating.

Can live up to nine years of age in the wild.

Hunted to extinction for their remarkable pelt... Or so they thought.

Stuffing the notebook back into her pocket, she swiveled around just in time to see the lab doorknob being turned. The sound of chains rattled as her colleagues took away the bounding lock. Heaving a sigh of relief, Saithe hurried over to the door, feeling hungry and angry and happy at the same time.

"Had a nice afterno-" began Pierre, her superior, in a very superior tone. He was abruptly cut off by a storm of red hair that pushed past him and sped down the stairs, calling out, "No, it was not nice, thank you. And I told you the goat didn't die from those miserable bite wounds." And then she was gone.

"Why that little red-headed dev- Come back here, Saithe Vivana! I'm not done with you!" yelled Pierre, making as if to chase after her but was held back by Einhart Sargon, a wolf researcher.

"Calm down, man. She has a right to storm off like that, you did lock her in with a dead goat for more than 40 minutes at lunch time," said Einhart reasonably. "She's just hungry. She'll come back after she's eaten, you'll see."

Pierre pouted. He could be very childish when he wanted to be. "Fine," he mumbled, picking up the very same hare's skull and spinning it in his fingers. "We'll wait for her."

But Saithe had forgotten her hunger. The small beast by the forest had roused her curiosity, and she was not one to fold her arms and lay back at such a grand opportunity. She ran to the canteen, paid for a large sandwich (just in case the creature was hungry) and stuffed it into her knapsack, then sped out of the building, heading towards the place where she had seen the animal.

She will find it. It must have been the tiger wolf; no other beast in these forests had stripes like that. She will find it and prove everyone wrong.

Hey guys, how was the chapter? ^^ Saithe is actually from another story of mine, and so are all the other characters mentioned in here. She's really smart, actually, thus gaining herself a job at 19, but she also seems a bit... weird. She has this habit of talking to animals, dead or alive, and seems to get what they're saying (for the live ones of course).
Before you get any ideas, I'm not as crazy as her lol (though you can say I'm slighty crazy haha). I just use her name as my pen name XD
Some people might think the tiger wolf is like the tasmanian tiger which went extinct decades ago, and you're actually not far off. Its just that tiger wolves are larger and more predatory ^^ (I'm spewing animal facts)
P.S. Teravfon101 and Jadenite_12 you'll be appearing soon.
P.P.S. The drawing above is my own, I imagined what her notebook would look like ^^

~SaitheVivana