Heron Lake Plateau not looking for a confession

Seems sensible enough!  ;)  Though sadly, I ttly have way older Owenthreads than this, too... Thanks for the thread! And best of luck in battling that dastardly writer's block. One never invites it in and yet it always seems to find one eventually regardless... alas.
*PPs momma a bit  <.<  >.>;  *

The adults were both being awfully vague and noncommittal in actually supplying him some up-front answers here, and between this question-dodging shrugging and these mischievous but silent grins being offered on his elders' part Owen was getting rather suspicious. And paranoid. Though really...that was often par for the course for him, a realization he was willfully attempting to avoid admitting to himself. He wasn't the crazy one here; it was the rest of the world that kept going batty all around him, and Owen was just trying to parse it out like any reasonably sane and intelligent youngster.

In any case, Phox seemed very eager to escape the continued befuddled interrogation Owen was trying to conduct, and with a quick wink dropped toward Mother he lit out like his tail was on fire. Gosh, was it something that terribly embarrassing that Phox an Camilla had been up to among all this "claiming" business? And ugh, did Owen really want to know the details or not, if that really was the case. Owen gawked after Phox's disappearing white tailtip for a second before he turned his head toward Raven to half-mumble, Uh, that's okay, never mind, before she could start in on some boring lecture again on how Grownup Business worked. Adults got so squirrelly around the subject of mateship, or almost-mateship, or not-really-exactly-mateship-but... Or, y'know, whatever the hell this "claiming" nonsense was about in Phox and Camilla's case. Rather than have the details painfully laid out for him, though, Owen decided he had far more interesting things to do and places to be today. Think I'm due t'go practice my hunting, actually, he offered up hastily to his mother, and then beat his own expedited retreat, stage left. Owen had been getting some heavy hints dropped from certain others here and there that he ought to have some sort of sudden fascination with girls starting up, and obviously desperately needed to know every intimate detail of what they thought and how to talk to them and all this other stuff that he really didn't quite understand. In fact, if you asked Owen this whole mateship business was a huge nonsensical distraction that kept the adults from paying attention to anything really interesting or important in the world. That was a morass Owen had zero intentions of letting himself get trapped in; now, the moment he suspected another of Those Conversations might be in the works, his eyes glazed over and he tried to make himself scarce.

Raven looked from her brother dashing off to her almost-as-quickly retreating son as he hopped up and over a small grass-tussocked rise and disappeared. She shook her head woefully, but couldn't keep the small smile from lingering on her lips. Boys would be boys, perhaps—but Raven was wise enough to know this mercurial stage wouldn't last forever. In Owen, anyhow; for Phox perhaps it might be a little late to much change.