Sunbeam Lair leave it all out there

Today was a day to see what the mountains had to offer in the way of entertainment. The pika that went peeping in and out of their rocky burrows up here were quick, but not quick enough; Nynka had dragged one that had only made it halfway down its burrow back out into the sunshine and feasted well. It was a fat and sassy rodent, and Nynka had only eaten about half of it before shoving the rest carelessly into a small cairn of stones that toppled over to partly-cover the remainder of the carass. With a couple of quick kicks of her feet, she tossed some dirt atop it too, still not really burying the thing well in all honesty but, as she was growing bored and didn't particularly want the rest of the critter at this moment, she didn't really care. If some other creature who was too slow and sad to catch their own meals was going to scrounge her discards, oh well. Right now she wanted to keep exploring. And so she bounded onward, and was intrigued to find herself in short order approaching the entrance to a bigger and rockier burrow. No, not a burrow...a cave, the sort of "burrow" Mother Nature dug all by herself.

It smelled only a little musky, and there seemed to be plenty of room for a little weasel like herself, even with her belly still somewhat distended from her meal a short while ago. She popped her head in, blinked at the seemingly deserted narrow entryway, and then the rest of her followed in short order. Beyond the gritty slope that led inside, there was still a fair bit of light; Nynka saw as she scurried along that this was largely the result of several small holes higher up, which led back out into the great outdoors and had allowed a few cold puddles to collect on the floor of the long cavern, to boot. She skirted to the left of one puddle and to the right of the next, a wider expanse of water that almost merited the name of pond. A few hardy little bits of greenery had found its edges hospitable to colonize. Nynka jittered along, and stopped only briefly a few times to sniff; she wondered how far this hollow would lead and why all the scents inside it seemed to be old and dusty things. Admittedly, it might not be ideal to be rained upon by every storm in one's own burrow, but otherwise this place seemed hospitable to animals as well, not just the odd venturesome mosses and mushrooms and things. The small cavern seemed to be beginning to slope upward again now however, with a couple of larger patches of sunlight that raised the temperature a few degrees. Nynka sped up, smelling a waft of fresh air and eager to see where she might emerge from here— and then suddenly stopped, whiskers aquiver. In a flash she turned back around, back to where one of the increasingly large swiss-cheese holes in the widening burrowlike cave's sides had flashed off of a shiny bit of rock that had caught her eye among the encroaching spring-budding greenery. It put her in mind of the gleaming, shrilly bleeping box-thing she had found at the wolf-infested crash site not that long ago—but smaller, and much less polished. She skittered up to where she'd espied the gleaming speck, and gleefully placed her tiny paws on either side of a nice wide vein of intermingled mica and pyrite. Some small pieces of it even seemed to be coming loose, as a bit of experimental scratching showed her.

As her claws grabbed at the shining specks she was delighted to see one chunk of it flashing even brighter in the fortuitous shaft of sunshine as it was worked free— and then she squealed indignantly, as a sudden large shadow loomed somewhere behind her and darkened the whole expanse, leaving her once-glittering treasure merely a small bit of dull rock for the moment. Hey, you! Watch where you're walking why don'cha! She spun half-around and danced in place in irritation. Oh great. It was another of those blasted high-and-mighty interfering wolves, wasn't it.