ASHA
The filly and her sister had spent the larger part of a season in the forest now, but it had been a season spent in solitude, in the darkness of scratchy thickets where the sun could hardly penetrate. She did not understand why her mother had kept them away from the others for so long; she could already hardly remember what the other island they'd lived on had been like, or what the faces of their dwindling herd had looked like. All she remembered was that everything - the land and the herd both - had seemed so large and vast to her. Here, everything seemed smaller and more closely packed together. She had grown like a weed since they'd arrived, of course, which explained that some, but the small cluster of trees her dam had kept them hidden away in had, as a result, slowly but surely become stifling.
They had been born in the long daylight of summer and had left the arch before the first snows, so she did not know anything else. The regular darkness of night had slowly become a part of her life, so gradually she had not noticed, but the winter was something else. She did not know the piercing winds, blizzards, or months of blackness that her mother knew. Thus, the forest's first frost, then its first light dusting of snow, came as a shock and a delight to her. It seemed to coincide with the pale freckles she saw appearing on her face when she looked at her reflection in the local stream. It was around this time, too, that Nymeria had begun to let her and her sister explore, which was a mercy; she could not remember a better thrill than playing out in the open in the snow with her little sister. It had felt like freedom.
She was free again today, but her sister was sleeping, as she seemed to always do. Her mother was occupied too, off doing something or other with the rest of the herd, so the spotted filly was lost for entertainment. The snow had already become old news, and she had not seen any others her age hidden among the multicolored bodies of the herd. So she wandered. The rotten leaves beneath her hooves were wet and soft with snowmelt, which she liked; ice was still something she had not grown comfortable with yet, for all the slipping and sliding it made her do. She had her nose to the ground like a dog, snuffling for tasty morsels or interesting little treasures as she strolled, so it was quite suddenly that the body appeared in front of her. Startled, the filly halted in place, jerking her head up to stare with dark, confused eyes at the pale stranger. The mare's eyes were closed and she lay quite still on her side with the boughs of the evergreen sheltering her, but she was breathing.
The filly remembered how her mother and sister disliked being woken up from a deep sleep, but she felt daring today. She was about to erupt into a purposefully loud nicker when she noticed the dark stains on the mare's side. How curious! She came closer, lowering her snout to sniff carefully at the unusual patches of color. The scent of mud she recognized, but there was something else there, something sharp and bitter in her nostrils that tugged at a faint memory in her brain and made her feel uneasy. Maybe the mare was hurt? Now it was her duty to wake her up, surely? She stepped back and took a moment to look around, but the spaces between the trees were all empty. No one else was nearby, no one that might know what to do. A little scared now, she hung her head between her front legs, watching the body carefully, and whickered ever so softly.
7 MONTHS; DRAFT MUTT; GREYING BLACK BLANKET; 17'2HH WFG; SHIVA |