be humble, for you are made of earth
Love, beasts like her are not always privy to the likes of love.
The doe-mother loved her, to be sure - and feared her (or feared for her, she could never be sure which) because she was not like them, no wholly anyway. She was too much Other, too much horse, but she could never remember if there was an Other-mother before the doe-mother. It never bothered Fur anyway, she knew her place amongst the fawns at the flanks of the does and she had been happy there.
Until --
Until --
She started to appear less like them and more like the Others, heavy and big and too noisy in the forest. Even the antler-nubs had been cause for strange looks and distance; does did not grown antlers, it - she, - was an aberration and the herd knew it. That eventually lead to them casting her out as she lay under the blanket of a heavy sleep in their shared thicket. One by one, they arose silent and shy and flung themselves away from her in the predawn. Fur woke hungry, cold, and alone beneath a pale rosy morning.
Since then, she chased after them but they were always too quick, too graceful to catch anything of them but a glimpse. Spirits, she thought, maybe they had never been more than spirits made up by her imagination to keep her going through every hardship that clawed and stalked her: hunger, thirst, predators imagined and real. No, they couldn’t be spirits because she could smell them. Ghosts, maybe, she thought as she always gave chase but never caught more than the sight of a magnificent rack of antlers or a fawn’s hide spotted like her own. Never more than, never more…
Ahead of her is a beast, skull-faced and strange because he is stalking a squirrel until the snow proves too deep to pass through. She tilts her head to the side, curious as he roars from a throat not made for such animal noises as that - small chuffs, sharp whistles, loud neighs maybe, but not catlike roars. It stirs something in her blood - fear, instinctive and sharp, it has both an odor and a taste that leaves her shaking her antlered head in disbelief and distaste; both horse and deer in her are intrinsically afraid, but Fur - she is currently fearless, pushing through the bilious taste of alarm that creeps up her throat to stare at him.
Staring is impolite, but Fur knows nothing of manners. She lacks them; continues to eye him as he tries to stare the squirrel back down the naked branches of the tree.