"Holly and Juniper did everything they could to help me!" The words left Hawthorn's mouth before Riko was even beside the wolf. The gash in his side burned. His third hunt, and he'd already made a grievous mistake. "They hunted valiantly, the failure was mine and mine alone-"
"Kid," said Riko, inspecting the open wound. "You have a martyr complex. Relax." His blue eyes lingered on it for a few seconds, before meeting Hawthorn's, firm, yet reassuring. "Tell me what happened."
-------
He values all the lives around him even more than his own. Born unwanted, he and his two siblings were sent off to a wolf colony in the tundra, where the young, infirm, and those whom the stray life had broken laid their heads down to die.
The rumors of the pack being a plague colony had turned out to be true, and yet when a pregnant mother named Papaver ailed in her nesting bed, Hawthorn did not shy away from helping her fight through it. He fetched food, stealing it nimble-footed from the royal guards' quarters when need be, and pieced together scraps of herbalism from a former healer wolf gone senile, just enough to find the plants to treat and reduce the symptoms. He encouraged his sisters to help the ailing mother too, and they did, for the mercy gave them a sense of purpose in a world that had seemed to have thrown them aside, just as it did him.
When his sister Holly caught the strain of the deadly disease, it was he who ventured as an adolescent of 6 months into the wild and pleaded impassioned for her life to the Scarborough scout Goldenrod. Not once did he think to ask for shelter himself, his own life was less important than saving his sister in the throes of fatal illness.
When a month and a half later, wracked with sickness and squinting into the light, he came to just make out the silhouette of Packleader Amaranth's looming over his ailing body and felt her teeth grab his scruff, only then did he realize how much Holly had loved him in turn.
Now grown, he and his sisters form the backbone of Hunting Team Winter.
Overgrown Cave
Hunter 
Hunter