As much as she loved their ragtag band of her cougar-mate and their beloved roan friend, she longed for something else to fill her days. Not that the days of looking on as the babies grew and played and came into their own was not interesting enough. Her own daughter was some prehistoric mix of mother and father that Keeper adored and admired. But something in the wild blue yonder kept calling to her.
So, Keeper answered it.
Not as the lovely dunskin mare with the wind-knotted hair but as the lumbering grizzly bear that she had come to favor so much over her horse shape.
The bear knew what it wanted and sought it: salmon in the river, plentiful and deep; honey in the forest, buzzing hives and happiness; mushrooms beneath the moonlight and a cave that was visited often with vines at the entrance to it. She’d slumbered there once or twice just to be near his scent. How or why it still lingered was never asked just assumed as part of memory and magic.
Keeper covers a lot of ground until the forest comes into view. Her piggish eyes squint as her mouth opens to let loose a happy roar. Honey, and more, lie in this forest and she is happy as can be as she barges into it. There was no grace in this form, just brute strength and little stopped her as she found a hive to bother. She swatted at the bees with a big paw and knocked the hive loose, barreling off with it until she found a clearing near the familiar cave to settle into.
The grizzly sat down and leaned back against a tree with her prize. It didn’t take long for her to get sticky or sleepy, and before she knew it, the bear was stretched out asleep and snoring. The snoring woke Keeper sometime later and she wasn’t all that surprised to find herself back as a horse. That happened often during sleep, the shift as subtle as the blink of an eye. All around her lay the smashed and broken remnants of the hive, honeycombed and a few lifeless bee-bodies.
She climbed to her feet and felt honey on her lips, delicious of course and knew that she’d be just as sticky in this shape. Keeper almost turned her head to go home until she sniffed the air - something on it shook things loose from deep inside her. Before she knew it, she was standing before the vine-covered mouth of the cave with her breath caught in her throat and a single name trembling from her lips, “Balto?”
@[Balto] so I did a thing ❤️