Wheeling Gull Isle certain to tell you, confusion has its cost

for my own reference, because puppies grow like weeds... vesper is 6 weeks in this thread, and about to speak her first ever word!! @Blueberry is 3 weeks, and likely teething/will start to stand soon— i'm going to assume that she hasn't yet.

for her part, vesper was less and less interested in milk; she didn't want to drink, she wanted to bite. a primal urge to soothe and distract from sore gums. it had taken only a small nip (of the nip) for mother to harshly correct that behavior some weeks ago as her milk teeth had first begun to come in, and now vesper only returned to her mother's breast when her hunger grew great enough during mou's patrols of the territory.

she spent more time awake, now, as did her littermates. they play fought often, and vesper often put herself between them and their smallest sibling, who couldn't stand like the rest of them. she couldn't describe her feelings yet, but she felt an anxiety and concern when it came to blueberry— something about her didn't seem quite right to vesper, who assumed they were all the same. it was her tiny mission to help her sister, to encourage her and help her learn the skills that came naturally to the rest of them (and, of course, would in time come naturally to blueberry).

but for now, everyone appeared to be sleeping— even mother— and vesper extracted herself carefully from the pile to search for something to chew on. once, she might have chosen a sibling, but she learned from experience that that would wake them and she knew if she found some other treasure, it would cause a clamoring and war to steal it from her. she scooted up against a wall of the den to begin chewing on an exposed root, eyes dolefully watching the light of the entrance. there were so many interesting smells coming from that direction, and she weighed her desire to chew against the desire to test her boundaries.