be humble, for you are made of earth
She had the taste of something strange in her mouth --
A shadow; black and slithering.
It was fear, bilious and dark. Fear that crawled up her throat and silenced her tongue, made it thick and dumb with a debilitating dryness that no manner of lip-licking or chewing could negate. Saliva and sound had simply dried up. Or maybe, her fear had eaten it for dinner as it slowly paralyzed her limb by limb until she stood frozen in a pantomime of step - one hoof raised, as if to plow forth on its intended course; ears pricked at a sound that should not have been; eyes, dark and glossy and flicking around. Some instinct had cautioned her to freeze, one made in the marriage of horse and deer blood.
In that moment, she could not say which was the heavier - the growing antlers atop her head, the thick meaty thud of heart in her wild breast, or the way the silence seemed too loud in her eyes.
The taste in her mouth began to leave, and the air seemed to come back into her lungs with a forceful heave of her breast. Slowly, one by one, her limbs began to loosen and the raised hoof fell back to the dirt with the tiniest puff of dust to show that it had ever dared to take a step forward. It seemed that in that moment, she forgot the very thing that had first driven her forth - the flight, the fear, the freeze. She forgot too, that she had been cast out of the herd, too unlike them now that she produced her first set of antlers still in velvet - only the bucks did that, few does could lay claim to such a feat and they found her strange enough as it was!
It had been doe’s milk that had suckled her up from a tumultuous beginning. Doe’s milk and love that had held her fast to life, and though she had learned of horses (some more fanciful than others!), she had never thought to cast her lot in amongst them - never thought that her hooves left the same mark in the earth that a horse’s did, and not the cloven print of a deer. Never mind that her shape was all wrong too; too thick, too tethered to earth, and she had not their leanness and grace. She often lagged behind, saturated with meat and blood in ways that they were not. These differences never occurred to her until now, the moment that fear slackens her jaw and leaves it loose, almost dumb in its still befuddled stupor.
Fur could not believe it - she had been scared of a mouse.
Her dark eyes took in the scurried path as it crossed the trail behind her, and a look of consternation vexed her young face. A mouse! She shook her head, bits of forelock tangling in the brow tines of her antlers; she had become so timid, so terrified, of mice and shadows it seemed! Fur guffawed at herself for a moment before stamping the earth with feet heavy with anger, mostly at herself for being so afraid of the forest! The forest, that had always mothered her as best as it could given that she was a mutation of a species meant more for places like plains and mountains, deserts even but not the dark crowded reaches of a forest choked with the moss and bracken and thousands of trees, half of which she could not even name. How foolish!
It was this foolishness that spurred her forward; drove her out into their midst in a manner of cracking branches and haste until she drew up short, surprised, breathless even.
Fur then, was at a loss --
She had stumbled into the field in her mad dash from the forest.
It smelled; like what, she could not even think, only that it held not the scent of moss and branch, but something of staleness. Her eyes rolled; she did not like it here!