Keeper-
The grizzly sow lumbers here and there.
She can smell them, the newborns that drop from their mothers’ bellies and they smell like a sweet easy meal. But the bear balks at snatching a foal from a mare’s side - something inside hesitates, questions the familiarity of that shape and makes the bear shake her head from side to side in anger, a roar stifled between her thick jowls.
Spittle flying, lips peeled back from her teeth; she mauls and marks the trees around her until her rage has begun to die within the forest. Eventually a squirrel is her unsatisfying meal but a meal of meat nonetheless that quells enough of the hunger in her gut for the time being. She thinks back to just before the winter and the river that teemed with salmon leaping upstream. Now there’s a thought… and the sow is lumbering off towards the river.
But somehow, along the way, the bear loses herself and becomes a mare that shakes off the lasting accoutrements of savage tooth and sharp claw, and the little stub of a bear’s tail becomes a mare’s tail, only instead of silken and long, it is of varying length and rife with twigs and tangles.
Keeper is just becoming herself again and pushing the bear back into the depths of her skin as she nears the river. The roar of it is loud in her ears. Loud enough to drown out the bear’s protest at being denied it’s chance at a heartier meal. The wild little mare has spat out the taste of squirrel, somehow both gamey and nutty at the same time, from her mouth that lacks its usual smile. The bear and her still have a long way to go before reconciliation is achieved. Each tries to deny the other the right to rule but Keeper is determined to prevail over the bear’s much baser instincts.
Still, the bear has brought her to the river of all places.
The river, at night. Where there is moonlight all around the first thought on Keeper’s mind is to check her reflection. Not out of some foolish mare’s sake of vain preservation but out of the sheer fact that she’d be horrified if there was still blood on her mouth, like that one time when she’d woken up to find she had devoured some poor pitiful beast. Or the time she’d had fish-scales and fish-bones in her mane and glistening like raindrops on her pale dun neck.
The bear did love her salmon! Keeper would acknowledge that much and the fish was preferred over the more furrier things the bear might hunt down. So without much ado, she hastened her way over to the angered rush of water and peered over the earthen lip of the bank to look upon herself. No blood! She breathed a sigh of relief and upon her next inhale, found a tantalizing thread of something familiar - cave, and the memory that flew to the forefront of her brain hot on the heels of that particular scent. Only one other had smelled so thick of damp rock and earth, lacking the musk of wind and rain and openness. Could the blue roan stallion have been bold enough to venture forth at last, and without her?
Incredulous, Keeper turned to the source of the scent and her look became muddled with confusion. This was some other, not him - not Balto, of the trembling flesh and look that had come to trust her at the last minute when the sky pearled with morning’s first light and their time came to an end together. Her love of mushrooms had led her to that cavern he’d haunted and he’d tried to warn her of other things that go bump in the night but Keeper had brushed it off. But this one smelled like that cave and a wave of apprehension washed over her.
He looked not at all approachable but Keeper had a bit of boldness inside her that refused to be silenced in moments like these. She took a small hesitant step towards where the dark stallion blended into the dark absence of the moon in the night by the river, and took a bigger sniff of his scent from the air, her nostrils sucking and squelching loud as buckshot but quiet compared to the roar of the river at their backs. “Hello,” she said with a brave air that did not quite reach the black shine of her eyes though her voice did not waver or warble.
not knowing how deep the woods are and lightless
@[Faulkor]