The Heartwood Why Did It Have to be Thunder?

@Ptarmigan I always check the weather thing on Wolf before starting posts, to reference it ICly, and I happened to refresh the page and saw “Thunder” and went “YES. PERFECT.” Also, this was partially inspired by me feeling really bad for all the poor dogs that people decided to bring with them to go see fireworks because everyone forgets that dogs can hear way better than we can.

Red found herself that night in the Heartwood, though she didn’t know it was called that. She wasn’t really paying attention to where she was going. All she knew was that she needed to get away from the thunder that was suddenly assaulting her eardrums. Had she known that the sound of thunder was caused by lightning, and that lightning liked to strike at trees in order to be absorbed into the ground, and that lightning-struck trees often caught fire, she never would have decided to charge headlong into a place full of trees. However, being a wolf meant that this knowledge would probably never be known to her, and so she ran to the Heartwood in the hopes of finding somewhere to block out the noise. She felt like her ears were bleeding (though they really weren’t).

It wasn’t that she was scared, Red thought as she looked around desperately for some sort of burrow or den to stuff her head into. She had been in plenty of thunderstorms before. And all of them had been just as bad. Maybe she just had extra-sensitive hearing. She didn’t know. All she knew was that anytime after a thunderstorm was fair game for the worst headache of her life. If she had known what cannons were, she would have likened the sound of thunder to being the same as a thousand cannons going off all at once.

Finally, she found what she had been looking for. Well, kind of. It was a massive oak tree, whose roots were so large and sprawling that they broke up the ground around them like a mini earthquake had taken place only right at that tree and nowhere else. This meant there was plenty of space to make a temporary den for the night and shove her head beneath her front legs, only to wake up in the morning like a dumb teenager with their first hangover. Hopefully there would be a water source nearby. Drinking lots of water usually helped the headaches she got.

She began digging out a little bit more room in the roots system, as the cannons thunder went off around her.