Murdock had spent the better part of his day running between three rabbit holes in the snow. He'd been able to scare them out by barking a few times, and by digging when that didn't work. But while he was at one side, they came out the other, fleeing the two-dozen yards that separated each hole. The warren did not appear to be large or deep, but he thought he could smell at least five or six in there.
A few hours in, and he'd started to dig in earnest. Dirt and mud covered his brown fur, caked all up his legs and up to his belly. That was fine, though - he'd have a nice roll in the snow to clean up later on. For now, he was intent on getting to these rabbits.
Ever since she'd realized she'd been getting bigger, Clary had taken to checking her height against a particular tree on the edge of the Pando Forest, one with particularly identifiable branches so she wouldn't forget which tree was hers. The once pristine tree now stood with crude yet identifiable scores in the wood, jagged and sloped. Today she drew away from the bark and spat the taste from her mouth before she turned a scrutinizing gaze upon her work. She beamed - a whole pebble taller than last week! Feeling bigger and very much adult, a skip filled her step and a hum, her throat, and Clary turned to make her way further into the territory, and maybe find Steph or Ezra or ma to tell them how much she'd grown!
But the sound of scuffling brought her to a stop, and the girl turned in the direction with a tilt of her head. She spotted Murdock almost instantly - brown and muddied as he was - and she trotted over without a hint of hesitance she might be interrupting something important. After all, she was bigger now, and surely that meant she could do adulty things like whatever he was up to.
"What'cha digging for?" She asked, and eyed the pit he was digging and shuffled around his side to try and peer into the hole. "Can I help?"
He was glad, when Clary spoke, that he'd identified her by scent before she came to greet him. Her voice was close enough in sound to Steph's the he might've thought it was her. But he'd been prepared, and when he turned to grin at her, his expression was without disappointment, though there was a misty wistfulness to his gaze that she probably wouldn't pick up on.
"Hey, Bug," he greeted. "Just some rabbits. Wanna help me?"
He tilted his head at her, wondering if she was small enough to be shoved down the rabbit hole. That'd scared them out for sure, but at this point, the kids were already almost half his size. They none of them were gonna fit into a warren anymore.
She glanced up at the turn of Murdock's face toward her and returned his warm grin with a broad smile and a cheerful sway of her tail. Anything else the man might have felt past the mask he wore for her was lost in the ease of his welcome, and the obvious want of her presence there.
"Yeah!" She chirped. Clary scooted up to the man - disregarding any personal space - and craned her neck forward to try and gain a reading of whatever activity burrowed down in the warren. She couldn't see much anything except overwhelming darkness, but the scent of rabbit reeked from the pit - a factor she clued into only once she remembered that most of tracking was done her nose, and not her eyes. "Are we digging to make it bigger? Are we going down there?" and then, because it seemed an important thing, "I don't mind getting dirty!"
"Good!" Murdock cheered, glad to have Clary's full commitment on this project. "Here's what we'll do," he decided, moving to the narrowest of the holes and pushing dirt and snow into it, so that they couldn't get out that way. He should have thought of that before, but it would work better with Clary here, anyway. "I'm gonna sit in front of this hole and dig, and you're gonna sit in front of that hole and dig. We're gonna make as much noise as we can to scare the bunnies out. And then we'll snatch 'em when they run."
He looked expectantly at Clary, waiting to see if she had any questions. It seemed like a pretty straight-forward plan, but kids were dumb as hell sometimes. "Got all that?" he asked her.
Clary circled the hole with Murdock and eagerly drank his words. The plan sounded like nothing hard, but she beamed at the simple chance to finally be involved in an adult thing. Sit and dig, and make lots of noise. Pfft, of course she could do that! Clary turned to the man when she felt his eyes upon her, and looked back with a twist of mischief, and eyes that reflected the most hardcore look she could pull off, which she imagined looked pretty cool. "Let's rock this rabbit hole."
She bounced over to the hole Murdock had motion her toward and took her position, glancing once more to Murdock to see that he was ready. Then, with the quickest strokes she could scramble, the girl bent down and began to dig, while every noise she had ever learned or imagined cascaded from her mouth in a cacophony of sound.
He was momentarily shocked by the weird look on Clary's face. There weren't really words to describe it, but as quickly as it appeared, it was gone, and Clary was down into her own hole. With a whoop of his own, Murdock renewed his efforts at digging, deciding to ignore Clary's odd behavior entirely.
Kids were dumb as hell, sometimes.
He dug as furiously as he could, barking incessantly into the wide channel he'd created. Clary's own noise-making abilities were both echoing to him from the hole and reaching him aboveground as well. He'd pay for this lack of foresight with a headache later on, but for the moment, the joy of digging overshadowed this unfortunate truth.
And then, when he'd almost forgot why they were digging in the first place, a whole damn rabbit came scrambling into existence. He made a grab for it, but before his jaws could snap shut, it was flying back down into its hole. "Shit! Get it, Bug! Comin' right at ya!"