Horizon Ridge Yeah she's there all right

*sneaks in*

Whittier had been aware of it the moment the faint sound of buzzing had reached a simply unnatural decibel. He'd lifted his head from his paws with a yawn, blinking the sleep from his eyes while his ears and nose tuned into the world around him. Soon enough his gaze had gone skyward as the prickling of anxiety ratcheted up his spine. Something was coming, and the mystery of what its actual identify was quick to gnaw at his nerves.

The boy pulled himself to his paws shortly after he'd awoken - actually a record in response time for him so soon after a nap. He walked slowly for about thirty seconds, trotted for ten, and was running at breakneck speed in less than five when he finally spotted the swarm that billowed up over the woods. His effort was futile of course, for there was no direction in which he could run that would take him away from the little creatures. But still he ran, blindly, with a pounding heart and a screaming mind for it seemed that, though he'd never before realized it, Whittier Frostfur was terrified of bugs.

There would be time for introspection later, if ever he managed to survive this. For now, his path wove a jagged, chaotic trajectory through the landscape. He crashed through countless thickets; smashed his shoulder into an alarming number of tree trunks. When his nose tried to tell him he was approaching a few of his own species and that he should take a quick turn away lest he trample them, he was completely naive to his brain's wisdom until he was crashing into the ground in a tangle of limbs just a few yards away from where a new mother was curled with her young.

Whittier flailed back to his paws and bucked about like a wild mustang to fling the critters from his fur. "Fuck fuck fuck fuck please no," he whined frantically to himself as he spun. His whirling stopped only when he saw a shock of pale alabaster a dozen or so yards from where he stood and was so surprised by it that he forgot to be terrified. He canted his head curiously at the bundle, but only managed a few seconds of staring before he felt and saw a locust land precariously near his eye, at which point he collapsed in a trembling heap upon the ground where, he assumed, he would probably die.