Redhawk Caldera Strawberry Season

She pictured it too, for a moment, but Meerkat shook her head at Njord's question. "I've never known dead things to come back to life, have you?" she rejoined with the slightest ruefulness. She had intended it as an entirely rhetorical question, though even as it hung on the air between them, she blinked her amber eyes and laughed lightly, thinking aloud, "Except for all the plants in spring, I guess."

But that was an expected turn of the seasons, an annual cycle of dormancy. Her eyes swept up the nearby slope as she speculated: was it possible? She couldn't see the water from down here but she could easily picture it in her mind's eye: placid, sometimes rippling if the wind found its way inside the basin. Meerkat shook her head, sure there would be warning signs should anything like that ever happen.

"C'mere," she said in the next moment, motioning for Njord to follow her as she led the way along the caldera's foot, pausing in the shade of a tree. "Look," she told her guest, tipping her head back to peer up at the boughs, "it's an apple tree! Have you ever tried one?" Her gaze dropped to the ground, to see if any had fallen from their perches, and she lucked upon a single fruit.

Turning it over with a paw, she observed, "It has some rotten spots, though you could nibble around them, if you'd like to try it." Her eyes drifted momentarily to the dark forest looming just over Njord's shoulder to the south, then found his face as she wondered if he would imbibe.