Blacktail Deer Plateau A sailor went to sea, sea, sea

@Kisu and @Peregrine (if you want this one)

"Maybe she's sick," the adults might have murmured quietly to one another, looking down on the smallest of the pups with lips pursed in thought. "Maybe she was too early," another might remark, but a sidelong glance to Pura would reveal a success story. "Maybe in the womb she was weaker," they might suggest, a conclusion which might shed light on why Pura was thriving while Saēna remained smaller and sluggish.

None of these conclusions were correct. The truth was that Saēna, being the smallest of the puppies, was not targeted so easily. Being the smallest had its perks, after all, and one of those was being largely unnoticed by her competitors. She was able to remain close to Hawkeye's teats at all times, a tiny body orbiting around her surrogate mother with little concern for the jostling and fighting of the larger bodies. This reality meant that Saēna barely had to move at all. She could lift her head to her favourite teat, the one she almost always suckled from, with only a mild kick of her legs to shuffle her forward.

In a word, she was lazy.

But being premature still had disadvantages, and one of those was that Saēna's appetite wasn't as large as it should have been. Unless she was cuddled into Hawkeye's belly close enough to knead her paws in the fur, chills stole over her and sapped her energy, and subsequently her desire to feed. She fed once less per day than all the other pups in the den, and spent the rest of the time being still and silent, conserving her energy for the next inevitable chill. She wasn't conscious of these efforts. They were instinctual.

Next to her true sibling and her cousin-siblings, Saēna was tiny. Next to herself from five days prior, when she'd been first born, she was positively gargantuan. None could claim that she wasn't growing at a similar rapid rate, but she was always one step behind the other children in size, and so that, coupled with her lethargy and her silence, perpetuated the illusion that she was doing worse than the rest of them. Her head at times bobbled in the direction of scents that seemed familiar, but as she had days prior, Saēna encountered smells, forgot them, re-encountered them with a vague sense of deja vu, and re-forgot them in an endless cycle. Today, she was situated away from the three other cubs, still as could be, but snuffling noisily at the dirt beneath her snout with a feebly wriggling tail.