Den-digging! Open to anyone from Morningside or Maplewood.
There was an odd feeling deep in Easy's chest. Daddy had put her in charge of something.
Her. Not Dawn or Pema or Dauntless, but
her.
And she didn't like digging. It was a pain, it was dirty, and the mud got under her fur and made her
cold, but he'd given this task to her, and she wasn't going to let him down. She was going to dig until her paws froze off, and they were going to have a new den for Catori in no time at all.
Large, powerful paws scraped against the frozen ground. Easy's breath came out in puffs of silver-white as she worked, digging a narrow channel
up into the side of a tall hill. She'd thought a den was something you were meant to dig down for, but Daddy insisted on up. When the snow melted, he said, a den dug downhill would flood. That made sense, she supposed.
But it was still a pain, and she hated it.
"Stupid mud," she muttered under her breath.
Easy's digging waned at the sound of another's approach, but when she realized that it was Catori watching her, she continued on as she had been. It was important to her that Catori saw that she was working toward a common goal; like her brother before her, it was in Easy's nature to make proud her parents, and like her elder sister, Easy felt a deep, burning need to do for the sake of doing.
But the tension in her shoulders broke at Catori's comment. She laughed, and turned to face her pseudo-mother with a wagging tail. "I'm gonna miss the catfish pond," Easy admitted, looking around the open, empty landscape. It was breath-taking in its starkness, but something about the landscape made her feel oddly alone as well. Daddy had assured them all that there would be good hunting in the summertime and that the brush around the area would make itself known as the snow melted away, but for the moment, Easy wasn't quite sure how to feel about the plains. "But the ocean isn't far, either. And there are river and streams to the east."
Did Catori know these things? Easy wasn't sure she'd ever been out this direction. In this way, she began to feel slightly older than she had previously felt; it was strange to have knowledge that her parents did not.
Easy turned back to digging, shuffling to the side so that there was room for Catori in the narrow opening. A bit too narrow, perhaps... "Does it look okay so far?" she asked, feeling a little anxious, all of the sudden.
Easy backed out of her digging a second time to greet Pema, her tail wagging as she regarded her mothers with an air of satisfaction. They didn't often hang out together, but it always made Easy's heart do a funny little flip to see them standing side-by-side. She had to stop and squint, however, when Pema brought up needing a den of her own.
"Are you going to have puppies, too?" she asked, wondering if she'd be getting a double helping of younger brothers and sisters. The thought caused her tail to start wagging once more, and she looked excitedly between the two for confirmation, ignoring Catori's words about making this den bigger completely.