Greatwater Lake the vagrant rover life

It was the creature’s obsessive hypervigilance and not any particular lack of stealth on King’s part that caused her to notice the little fissures of motion in the tall grass. Panic warred with a weighty sort of exhaustion that turned the creature’s limbs to ununseptium. She jumped to her paws, tufted ears perking like two inverse, block letter exclamation points, and retreated — but only by a single step. The moment her feathered hind paw broke surface, she lifted it, and she stood there on three legs in the mud for a time before she slowly folded in on herself. She was aware of the other female, the dusky bulb of one ear twisting to catch the muted lap of her tongue, but she kept her eyes trained on the storm-and-blush agouti male.

You scare me, bespoke the thin crescents of white that bordered them, stay away. To her feralized mind, the long-limbed loner was a threat, so the bridge of her slim muzzle wrinkled, velveteen flews curling to reveal the very tips of her canines in a virtually indiscernible flicker of alabaster. It wasn’t a snarl — it couldn’t even really be considered a warning. Her sodden tail fluttered anxiously, beating uneasily against the ground as her natural desire to submit and appease grappled with a learned behavior: to ward off and to isolate.