Grouse Thicket We are not pissing on the corpse of Joan Rivers.

Aw thank you!! <3 I hope this makes sense, aah.

The chaos of the botched hunt, from the tittering of the stupid bird with its cacophonous wings unfurled down to the indifferent rustling of the trees, it all faded away when she struck that stump. There was a momentary blankness as her nerves reacted to the blow, and then the thumping of her heart; it felt as if each beat grew more painful than the last, and she lost some time to it. There was a swarming silence that became a ringing, and as the pitch increased in her ears the drumbeat inside got deeper, until they somehow mirrored one another.

Only a few seconds had passed from the blow to the aftermath. It felt like longer - or like time ceased to matter. It hurt. The dog staggered and sank to her haunches, at least partway, and lost her balance as she gasped for air. Her chest would swell with a fresh bruise and she would ache for a while, however, it was not serious. The air had been knocked clean out of her and that was the real issue; she tried to inhale and could not. Her lungs spasmed.

Something took notice of her and was crunching its way through the foliage, but she could not hear it for the ringing; she could not see it as a white blank sheet pulled across her vision. And then all the sights and sounds came rushing back in around her: the tumult shaking the trees overhead so that they became deafening to her ears, like traffic in the city screeching all around. The pounding of feet on the pavement - no, steps that cut through ferns and scratched the surface of the soil.

Blackheart tried to steady herself around the pain in her chest and focus on some part of the forest, but she couldn't make sense of all the green and the black, she couldn't single out any sound that was familiar. She turned her head and felt a strain in her neck (having probably wrenched it at an odd angle after her collision) and punched the dirt as she rose up again, her haunches trembling. She saw a glimpse of autumnal fur and then those warm whiskey eyes.

If she had managed to catch her breath even for a second, it whooshed out of her again when she saw him. Bronco? Blackheart managed to rasp. The feelings ebbed a little bit. She studied his face, watching him draw closer but not too close, and slowly came back to herself. With a sputter and a cough she wheezed: You came back.