He came crashing through the underbrush because Boomslang didn’t believe in stealth, or wariness, or concern for how his sudden thrashing among the hip-high grasses would startle or alarm whoever he was heading for. The Prairie had been mostly empty, anyway, so when he plunged between the trees on his way to the beach, Boomslang was startled to find he’d come crashing into the presence of a mumbling mare. His feet clattered on old bones and a cloud of decaying flesh and startled insects rose up. The dust irritated his nose and he heaved a wet sneeze down near his knees. “Kaow!” he said, and threw his head up to peer at the golden mare.

His dark eyes dropped to the bones and leathery skin under his hooves. “This’s gross,” he confided to the mare. “This is really nasty.” The grullo stallion raised his forehoof and stepped gingerly out of the pile of bones. Each step was exaggerated until he was once more standing on good, clean earth-and-sand. Once there he twitched the skin of his barrel and twitched his long, knotted tail. He swung his gaze back to the golden mare.

“You weren’t gonna eat that, were you?” he asked with a jerk of his nose toward the old, dry corpses he’d unintentionally mangled. The dead were dead; the only remorse felt by Boomslang was that he’d stepped in something that might have been crawling with maggots and worms and other unpleasant things. So gross, he thought to himself, and shuddered.