Redhawk Caldera the felled giant

The pup stared at the tree a while longer, and startled when he heard his father's voice. Eljay calmed as soon as he identified the voice and stared at his father for a moment, almost forgetting about the tree that he had found, and didn't respond to the posed question. He tried to think: he was expected to answer in some way, but Eljay didn't have a clue just how he could nor should. He couldn't find the word he was looking for -- looking -- and since he wasn't sure how to say it, he just said nothing.

Eljay's attention was drawn back to the tree and, since it had done nothing strange as of yet, Eljay approached it on clumsy paws, wobbling over to it and sniffing it. "Wee," Eljay concluded, unfortunately mispronouncing the word 'tree' into a different word, and he looked back at his father for confirmation. The thing that interested it most about this tree was not that it was a tree, though, nor that it was laying down. The thing that interested him most about it was that it didn't smell like a tree any longer, just as the rest of the world smelled different after the storm.