Moonlet feels a bit like a thief stealing about in the night. She steals mouthfuls of grass from the lands she invades during her explorations and sips of water from their rivers. Thieving minutes and hours as she dabbles on one side of a land’s border than the next. Until the cliffs start calling in a granite singsong voice of hard stone, cold sea, and fierce gales.
The hair lifts up off her neck as she pauses, one foreleg curled high in mid-stride and inhaled the sharp scent of sand and sea on the air. There is nothing tropical to that scent; it is harsh on the nostrils but somehow clean and invigorating. It makes the blood rush through her until a shiver becomes a full-body shake that sets her loose from her pose and she off again, like a small brown rocket.
In a full fledged gallop, she flings herself reckless across the dunes, slipping and sliding in the sand and all to peaks of laughter and challenge. She is dauntless in her task and spurred on by a flagging night that has begun to pale at the easternmost edge. It can’t be morning already! shouts the blood in her and the adrenaline. She is not yet ready to be snuffed out like a candle from morning light and exhaustion.
Or discovered.
Sometimes, it is better to be left alone and easier for her to explore that way without interruption. Friends are good too, but she thinks there is potential there for them to get in the way, or her way. Better to hold them a leg’s length away. No relationships, no reason to get hurt, physically or otherwise.
It seemed like a smart idea to her, lonely but smart. Besides, how could she ever be truly alone when there were stars in the sky, grass underfoot, and wind on her face? That was all little Moonlet needed. Even now as she flung herself onto that gray shore and came skidding to a halt just before the tide that turned over on itself.
She made it just before the sun came up and she grinned, rather pleased with herself and her stealthy (so she thinks) success.