second litter: 6 total, one died while they were still young due to coyotes picking it off while it was sick and moving very slowly. i believe i had very little health at the time and wasn't willing to risk going near the coyotes to grab her when they would probably leave after killing one pup.
affinity has been the bane of my existence. until they're very large in the fall, it drops drastically even if you leave one parent at home with them. i picked fun parent as a perk to try to mitigate this, but i could usually only boost to around 54% before cooldown kicked in.
i learned to go grab a hare and bring it back (usually one was hungry enough to eat it) and then howl and emote a few more times to boost it up again.
while they were small, i hunted solo, because they didn't need much food anyway. once they were larger, i would boost affinity to 100% and then i would go hunt together with my mate. i ended up moving to another rendezvous site after they hit 25 lbs because i knew they could reasonably keep up with my run speed at that point -- just a spot closer to where we had been regularly hunting elk, so that we had less distance to cover when bringing back food. i would then leave my mate with the pups and sleep somewhere out of the range that registers to the game as "at home" but still able to see their nametags in case one wandered off. when i woke up, they'd be around 50% hunger again, and we'd go hunt another elk calf. became sort of like clockwork.
when i was low on health, i would circle around the area without triggering the "at home" activation to smell if there were any predators; downwind only shows me so much information, so i would usually check the perimeter beyond where i could smell. saved me from MANY coyote attacks to chase them off WITHOUT activating a pup raid by entering home range. i knew i couldn't afford to defend them if fighting aggro predators... especially canines. bears and cougars can be fended off by pulling aggro until they're out of range or get bored, but canines won't give up until you fight them off.
i learned the hard way that contesting a carcass was pretty much never worth it, because i'd often lose with one good hit taking away half of my hp, and then also not have enough health left to hunt down another elk. this time i would the same tactic as anti-bear maneuvering and lead competitors away from the carcass by forcing them to chase me a short distance, then sprinting past them and eating part of it, rinse and repeat until i was full or the carcass was gone. it's risky, but not nearly as risky as trying to fight for it.
i ended up also using a riskier hunting style where i'd just lunge for the nearest calf at the edge of the herd. in the fall, they're all so high health they have no problem trying to fistfight you, and they could frequently outrun me. considering my pups would start taking damage if they went hungry for too long, wasting time chasing a calf down to exhaustion didn't seem worth it, and i was usually riding on fumes in terms of wakefulness, so they'd run ME out of stamina before i ran them out of stamina.
the low point of the year was when i didn't realize the baby ungulates had gotten old enough to stop hiding in the grass and hunted everywhere for an easy meal. then totally sleep deprived i had to chase down a healthy calf with its mom for like 30 minutes because i had NO stamina.
probably the best decision over the last litter was just not skipping forward to the "reach 50 lbs" part expecting a free meal lol. also i think i hate slough creek--
