The girl slept lightly, having rolled too far away from her mother in the night in a churlish show of independence to be entirely comfortable in the brisk autumn air. The cold crept in opportunistically, stealing up her black stockinged legs and tipping the ends of her fetlock feathers and tail in faint traces of frost.

Even so, the girl would have continued sleeping - and happily so - if it weren't for the rumbling of her belly. She and her mother had gotten into an argument the night before, and Dee had gone to bed without her customary supper of milk. Her mother had been slowly but surely weaning the demanding filly, but a final meal of her dam's milk had always helped her sleep and so Siobhan often relented. Sometimes it was worth it for the peace of the red mare's brood of children to just… encourage Dee to sleep a little longer.

It wasn't that Dee was naughty, not really. She just had a wild and irrepressible spirit. One that sought novelty in everything she did. When combined with her general distaste for the rules of the adults around her, it often led the little dun filly into more than her fair share of trouble.

So, when the combined torments of hunger and cold drove the weanling awake, she did not immediately rouse her mother as she might have as a younger girl. Now, at a whole six months old, she felt entirely capable of taking care of herself. After all, wasn't she eating grass? Couldn't she find water on her own? Didn't she know the whole shape of the Inlet and what faces to avoid?

She was grown. In fact, her independence had been the very topic of her argument with her mother the night before. So when Deirdre rose onto her sturdy little limbs and shook her coat off, she spared only a singular glance of longing at her dozing mother and the warm meal she might have been able to coax from her... and then trotted off with a wicked grin curling on her lips.

Dee was rarely able to give her mother the slip. Even with a brood of four constantly circling her, Siobhan always seemed to know exactly what Dee was up to and where. And on the rare occasions when her mother was distracted or otherwise incapable of corralling her, there was always her Da or Queen Tigerlily to stifle her fun.

It was frustrating for the girl who desired nothing more than to break free from the yoke of her parent's control.

Once beyond the earshot of her mother, Deirdre broke into a fast trot that quickly devolved into a canter as the sun broke over the horizon and bathed her childhood home in a beautiful array of pinks and oranges. Giggling to herself, she angled away from the rest of the sleeping herd, fully intending to race down to the beach to watch the tide roll in. She knew alllllll of the warnings her Mum and Da had given her, but she so rarely was awake early enough to see the little animals come out of their little homes that she just had to go watch.

However, unfamiliar hoofprints with a stranger's scent captured her interest immediately and she quickly grew suspicious. She was supposed to tell Mum and Da if she ever came across a stranger's scent, but they were sleeping, weren't they? Plus, it was just one stranger. Surely it couldn't be too hard to beat them up if they wanted to do her family harm? She usually managed to win her scuffles with her siblings, and almost always these days with her parents. Clearly, she was strong enough to take care of herself.

Like a tiny little cougar, Dee hunkered down low to the ground and followed the scent of the intruder. With her tiny little ears pinned beneath the unruly fluff of her mane, she resembled more of an angry dog than the cougar she was impersonating, but there was no misunderstanding the purpose in her gaze. When she came upon the stranger - his coat painted in greys and blacks and whites - she immediately stopped and drew herself up to her full height with her neck thrown proudly up and her tail held straight out. In her biggest, big-girl voice she shouted at the stranger from some ten feet away, clueless as to their relationship and to the reality that he had, in fact, been invited.

"You're not s'pose to be here! This is my Da's land." And then, just in case he hadn't gotten the message, she stomped one little black foreleg down in emphasis. "You better leave, or else."