Oystercatcher Tide Pools Sits on his Picassso

It was peaceful here. With the gentle lap of the waves caressing the rocks, worn smooth from the endless ebb and flow of the ocean, it was easy to appease his imagination. Of course, he couldn't see what beauties lay around him but he could feel. There was a certain aura of serenity portrayed by tiny vibrations that coursed through the stone and, as he let his paws guide him round little niches and pools, he peeled back his lips and let his own hum to the mix. Satisfied and purely relaxed, he continued onwards until his paws hit sand, it's surface warm to the touch from the autumn sun.

"Jolly and fly

The waves do sing

A soothing song

For those who

Embrace.

O ocean fly!"

His humming grew to a jubilant holler as he sat amongst the sands, his milky periwinkle eyes closed in delight as he sang out his soul for all ears that were kind enough to listen.

Perhaps the ears of another audience might've been kinder to the caroling beachbum, but he had unfortunately drawn forth the attention of a mad, and tarnished wolf. The storm could have just as well passed, but Furiosa's testiness tended to correlate to with her degree of hunger— and as distant humming crescendoed suddenly into pouring song, her annoyance peaked and her intended path changed.

Exorbitant noise couldn't be tolerated on an empty stomach.

She followed his voice, a harpoon-weilding pirate hunting the siren calling from the swell, and when she found him a snarl rose from the cavernous pit of her stomach. The sudden and cacophonous roar sent a score of startled seagulls wheeling in the opposite direction, as the bristling she-wolf called upon curled lip to the prone stranger. "I'll only ask once," the pale witch offered, her feet set firmly in the sand and her tail lifted threateningly; "shut the fuck up."

With eyelids still merrily glued shut, the fellow was lost in song. Whether or not his simple mind had found the greatest comfort in the words or the melody, his auds almost missed the low undertones reverberating between the mellow lines of his voice. Lowering his muzzle, he let his tune fade into the ocean breeze, tail twitching in curious swishes as her curses were spoken.

Maybe fear, or at least submission, was what the storm was expecting yet instead he showed pure excitement. It was time to open his eyes.

With every part of his body still humming from his uplifting carol, he parted his lids, wishing, no, willing himself to see an outline of this passer by. But alas; his efforts were met with a milky white fade. Not even a blurred figure, just emptiness. "I'm sorry, m'lady," he spoke, his nose pointed vaguely, dejectedly, in the direction he had first heard her low tones speak from. "I have ceased my singing."

Almost immediately there was an attempt on Furiosa's part to detect the weakness of her target. It was fairly easy to find, and most obvious when he didn't look directly at her. The wolf slithered forward, taking advantage of his momentary obedience so that she might come to stand nearer. She looked at him, with her black eyes which could very well have been just as unseeing, and surmised that he had come to inflict his misfortune on everyone else. Though clearly not fond towards perceivable weakness, Osa was cautiously aware that she was not well fed, or at all energetic enough to try and murder anything but something smaller and weaker than herself. She wasn't keen on wolf meat either.

"You tell me what's there to sing about, and I'll let you continue," she declared, continuing to stand near with her tail arched and waving expectantly. Since there was no good hunting to be done in at least a five mile radius due to his singing, she could at least entertain herself with some appreciatively submissive company.

It was not by instinct but by mere practice that Tide was able to track her movements to near pinpoint accuracy. With a dampened swallow, his ears were trained directly on the minute scrapes and snags her pads made as they travelled rather noisily across the sand. Oh, there is plenty to sing about!" He quipped, his mood immediately picking up as she spoke upon a subject he was rather familiar with. "The ocean, the cries and laps of the waves. Even the sands themselves can be expressed upon in melody!" His thoughts were plain and innocent, like a small pup that does not know much of the world around them and so did not pick up on any traces of danger that the strange woman could be conveying.

"But I do not have to continue," he chirped, his tail quivering in solemn honesty. "I can offer you company and tunes to pleasure your mind if you could provide me with protection and food. Carcasses and crabs become sour after many daywalks of eating."

The subjects he gave as an answer were nothing less than appalling to the very practical and, moreover, cynical Osa. "Those topics don't mean anything," she scoffed while being intensely aware that it was an opinion-based question to begin with. Perhaps one day, when her blazing fire had been sated, she would find the pleasure in nature's melodies, but for now it was all physical for her, all: "hunts! Battles! Sex! Those are affairs worth singing about." It was all she could concede to him at any rate, given that Furiosa would never be caught doing something as fruitless as singing. In fact, she felt slightly insulted that he would offer his fairy songs to her in exchange for her own hard labor.

"How've you survived all this time?" she snapped, without bothering to mention how stupid the trade sounded to her. "Sing until the rabbits swoon and die at your feet, huh?" She was mocking him really, because she had the idea in her head that his other senses had sharpened in the deprivation of another. But this was only something she had heard before of the deaf or blind, not something she considered fact. She noted mentally, however, that though his eyes did not track her, he seemed aware of her exact proximity.

"Sex?" he repeated rather dumbly, bringing his rumb to the grains. The tasks she mentioned were all but foreign to the ears of the odd fellow. Yes, he had heard them mentioned from time to time by his siblings and respective guardians, yet he had never had the chance to participate in not one of them.

"Never mind that then!" he spoke, overriding his inexperience with more enthusiastic tones. "My nose has helps me live longer," he explained with a delighted laugh. "I don't know what a rabbit is, but many carcasses of felled fish and seals can be detected by me. And there are these things called crabs," he paused, drawing in a breath as he rambled on. "Their scuttling makes them easy to locate and from there I can detach their shells from their meat. They get wriggly after a while, but they keep me from starving."

Unaware her words were of a taunting demeanour, he continued to answer her queries, or what he thought were questions, with the simplicity of his open thoughts.

She could not find an inkling of interest for his ignorance, and had begun to view him as more lamb than wolf. Despite this, Furiosa's urge to manipulate him perhaps kept her from attacking, and then a general disinterest in everything about him kept her from manipulating him. At least the redundant cycle in her head kept him from harm, for the time being.

She found herself listening, itching to depart but unable to take deep, soulless eyes away from the wolf would could not see the storm-witch before him. Her botched tail was wagging, plaintively in the air. He had survived on seafood, which was reasonable, she supposed. Her own clan had been forced to do the same every winter, but she couldn't imagine surviving on Orca's Beach without the use of her eyes. "Well for those of us who hunt prey that can hear, I need you to keep it down."

And then, maybe out of sheer curiosity, she took a sharp breath and tersely asked: "what else can you do besides be noisy and sniff out crabs?"

From the sound of things, she was not moving her body any closer to his. And, though he didn't really care much for distance perception or awkwardness, he was glad her tail was buffing the air a little way away from his own snout. "Are you hungry then? Is that why you wanted me to silence my tune?" With the innocence of a child, he spoke his thoughts, answering her query with a piping question of his own before noting his mistake with a small "oh" and continuing to launch into yet another long winded explanation.

"Well I can hear, feel things, walk and talk." he began, his muzzle crinkling in thought as he tried to process exactly what the storm was asking of him. "Sometimes I try to will myself into seeing things, but it all looks white. Oh, and I've tried swimming too. The fruits of the sea are easy to catch in shallow waters."

It took maybe a few moments for the gentleman to catch his breath, his tassel brushing against his side in a listless sort of way as his ears turned to catch the foaming voice of the sea as it rose and fell against the stones.

He understood without her scathing reply, which was probably for the better, as Furiosa was quickly losing what little patience she held for this particular brand of pathetic. Had she been raised to enjoy life, rather than merely survive it, she might've been more pleasant company to the sightless male. But as things were, as he continued to show her how unremarkable he was otherwise, the frigid wolf found herself debating at last between her last two options: put him out of his misery, or let Nature take its course— which it had clearly failed to do so far.

In the end, she decided not to waste her own energy in the struggle. "I don't want to have to come back and shut you up, got it?" The last syllable had barely left her tongue before she was turning to travel upwards and onward from the scene. His reply didn't matter. Even if he did start up his song again, Furiosa was not likely to come back.

Not to say they wouldn't meet again.

Too busily engrossed in the tune of the tides, the gentle sir almost missed her reply; a staccato bark quickly lost to the winds before he even had the change to twizzle his head back around. "Oh," he began as he felt a passing breeze rustle gently through his whiskers. The storm must have left, confirmed by the telltale scratches as her pads touched bare rock. "Live long and prosper, mysterious lady."

Like a dog with a lost bone, the fellows snout was tilted in the direction her scent began to fade in for a long while after her departure. And, though her company had been brief and full of puzzling queries, he found himself emitting the occasional soft whine as the sound of her footfalls faded back into the swell of the ocean.

Nevertheless, his simple mind would most likely turn her appearance into a folk tale as time went on; of how storm can come too and fro, sometimes even without warning at all.