09-07-2016, 08:59 PM
His tail should be curled around his nose;
He wakes up, his nose is cold and his tail is strangled by knots and brambles.
Woodrow is surprised to discover that he is a horse again!
He had bedded down for the night in a comfortable thicket of dry grass as a coyote and morning found him shivering cold, alone, and of another species entirely - the one he originated as, from birth to now.
The bay dun roan had climbed to his feet, almost shaky and newborn, as he looked around. Why did it all seem so different now? He had hunted the miec and the voles, and now his stomach clamored for grass in fits of hunger that left him stupid and weak. Woodrow did not hate himself as a horse, but he preferred the scavenging nature of his other self and his four hardscrabbling paws. He has spent so little time as a horse that he has forgotten how to be; he tries to sniff scat, scent the air, and paw at the dirt but his hooves and weak horse-nostrils are nothing like his coyote self.
What he does smell is a mare nearby and that is no extraordinary thing, because there was always a horse nearby. It has just always been easier to grin up at them around a lolling tongue and half-parted jaws that showed the neat rows of his sharp teeth. Now, he is just a stallion and this shape feels cumbersome and bulky. He can smell days’ old blood on her and as he nears her, he can see the pink puckerings of scars along her side. Stranger still is the confused expression on her face, as if she doesn’t know how they came to be there, or she here. To be honest, he has no idea either.
“Maybe,” he mutters casually to her.
“Anything is possible nowadays.” He is clearly taken by this notion, because something surely must explain how he has lost his other more familiar shape.
(he can hear it yipping to the moon for release from underneath his skin)