Heron Lake Plateau it's easier than just waiting around to die

Raleska jumped and turned on him with wide, accusing eyes, which made Owen startle back in turn. He posed stiffly there, leaning back from her fiery yellow eyes with one ivory paw clutched apprehensively up against his chest, with his mouth open in a tiny voiceless "o." Why was she so... so... fierce? And not just towards trees, but also toward perfectly innocent pups who came up to ask her perfectly innocent questions! After a moment's consideration of him she raised regally herself up with haughty pride and looked down upon him like a condescending know-it-all cat. Owen cowered a little closer to the earth and wracked his brains trying to figure out what he could possibly have done to deserve this treatment.

He was granted a sudden and unexpected reprieve from the loftily proud girl and her snooty opinions however when she leapt up and away, while a black and brown furry cannonball came thundering down out of nowhere to run her down. What in the...?! Owen jerked back, and his eyes also followed the tree—the spindly and thoroughly-splintered little tree that thankfully he had had the wisdom and foresight to stand well clear of, because now the plant seemed to have become a whippy and enraged thing as it reared itself up free of Raleska's punishing teeth. Owen winced and shrank back even further as a thick splinter came shearing off from it and whapped into the ground some several feet away from him. At this point Owen was practically clutching the ground up to him in a desperate hug, as his eyes followed the tree's arc in horrified fascination. The scent of the thing that was rumbling towards it in a flying tangle of fur and mud and limbs hit him square in the face—saints and deities had Tywyll gone and gotten himself yet another filthy stinking mud bath again, really, in so short a time?! How had his mother not made a rug from his filthy pelt, at this point—right at the same instant he too realized the most likely trajectory of the enraged sapling. Ohmigosh Tywyll look out Raleska made it mad an' now it's tryin' ta chomp you! he squealed in a shrill and likely not-entirely-coherent warning, its words tumbling over and into each other in a panickily babbled keening pitch, one that he hoped despite all appearances would not reach the incoming youngster's ears far too late to actually do anything about any of it.