Bearclaw Valley we rush the west in silence

All welcome (: Trying to get Nanook out of social isolation. That moment you dig a character a pit you really regret digging.

She had followed the light of Polaris; she had struck for the North. The myriad of colour that danced at night joined her sometimes, and the stars too, when the skies were clear and she could see the host who watched her. Under their eye, she ran, until her legs grew weary and her body cried for rest. Then she would sleep, until the sun blinked away and the night claimed its crown once again.

And the land had rolled from valleys and vales, to hills and streams, to mountain ranges too steep to climb and rivers too vast to cross. Her paws grew calloused, and her angled body weathered and wild. She met others on the way, some like her, and many not, and learned from those who were willing to teach her, and from those who were not. Nanook had seen the world - but she never found the North, the acres of white her father had once spoken of, when the days were simpler and kinder, and when her only concern had been that which she could reach with her squirming limbs and milk teeth.

She had never found the North, but she had found something else, a need that pressed her to return.

From the Maplewood she remembered the way. The landmarks burned with a vividness knit tight with the the turmoil of her family's upheaval, and her ears canted against her skull, as if she expected to still hear the ghosts of her mother's voice, and her own cries to turn back. But she moved each quaking leg forward, until she reached the meadow freshly spotted with the colours of spring. A few more steps and she would be in the Valley, but her mind skipped on the spectres she would find through the twisting path like a record too broken to play. A sudden urge to vomit overwhelmed her, and even the cool morning breeze through her wayward fur felt stifling in the face of Bearclaw Valley.