After having spent hundreds of years with nothing to call his own and finally an entire clan under his possession, it was clear why Beck was territorial. All the wayward creatures that happened to loose their way and stumble into the bog might as well been invaders to the poltergeist, dead-set on tearing away all he had worked for from his clammy grasp. Paranoia was what drove him to circle the perimeters like a predator closing in on injured prey, lingering in the high branches of looming cypresses and willows. And when he couldn't lurk on the far edges of the swamp, he rigged traps to do the work for him. Brutal and primitive as toothed legholds were, their crude designs had rewarded him with struggling victims or their abandoned severed limb in the past, and even now the method rung true.

    If only sheer luck didn't save the girl from a gruesome set of jaws clamping around her leg.

    He was perfectly willing to take matters into his own hands -- paws, now. A frigid nose twitched as a distantly familiar scent drifted on the wind, a red flag of his predominant fear. Another slimy wanderer from a different clan waltzing right onto their land. The same aroma of frozen earth and earthy caverns as the bumbling husky leader -- Snowbound couldn't take the obvious hint, huh? Snapping his attention away from scenting the air to pursue the unwanted guest, the mangy feline departed from the overgrown trail cut through the foliage and began his hunt.

    Creeping over brambles after the clouded leopard with a limp to his nimble gait, his lantern-like eyes bore fiery holes into her blinding pelt. At every step, his apparition was stabbed through with wrathful razors, angered thorns coiling tight around his brain stem and infesting his skull until their tips scratched at bone and pushed against the backs of his slitted eyes. If he wasn't furious enough, Beck was livid by the time he noticed the comfortable apathy glazing her movement. She wasn't concerned at all that this swamp was a home to a large sum of beings.  London had just barged in through the front door without knocking and continued to ransack the bedrooms. Claws hooking into a gnarled cypress root as he remained a safe distance behind her, his notched ear flicked upwards at the faint breathing of not one, but two of his peers lying in wait. He would be able to identify them later -- now, he had to act on his opening. While he would have preferred to have some form of weapon on hand, it seemed Beck would need to improvise once more, glancing down at his poorly bandaged paw. His impaled wrist had closed up, leaving the internal damage to be repaired discreetly; the only reason the gauze had remained was because he had forgotten about it. There was no hesitance as Beck hastily unraveled the worn gauze from his paw, keeping the battered fabric in a clenched grip. A moment or two of complete stillness from the boy as he silently urged London to inch just a little bit closer, stalking forward despite the bandage in his grasp to close the gap even more.

      What finally prompted his attack could have been anything; Beck lurched forward as if his recreated muscles were nothing more than tightly-bunched springs, aiming to ambush London from behind and sling his stretch of bandage over her snout. Gripping both ends of the bandage and pulling it taut against her muzzle, he swapped the ends to hold it with one paw behind her head, while using his freed paw to smother her with the bandage until she fainted.