Lion Head Mesa Doves and the boy

The seer whimpered at the sound of Maggie’s gasp for air. Crowfeather wished he could run away. His mind played tricks at him, willing him to flee from the injured woman and all the hurt she caused inside of him.

Dead trees, he whispered and raced from the mouth of the den to the catacomb entrance. Crowfeather’s breathing was quick, panicked in a way that he had never felt before, but all that he could see in his mind’s eye was the image of Maggie’s blood spilling into her eyes.

Crowfeather all but dragged the dead tree back with him. He was so tangled with webs and spiders when he arrived again at Maggie’s resting place that he thought they might begin to burrow into his ears.

The boy struggled for a moment, working to wad the webs into something thick, something he could stuff over her head like a cap. The first few layers were quick to bleed through, soaking red almost as soon as Crowfeather had placed them on her skull. It was not until the third and fourth that the webs began to hold.

When Crowfeather had finished with all the webs on the tree branch, Maggie’s skull looked like a snout with a hive of spiderwebs on top of it. One of her eyes was covered up entirely, but it seemed like the bleeding might have stopped.

The dark wolf stepped near to her and bent his head, his whiskers twitching to see if they would catch her breath or if he had failed entirely.