Phoenix Maplewood first star I see tonight

Deep in the maplewood, Dusty froze to listen to that distant howl. He recognized on some level that it was different than his own — and he could, for instance, identify that the caller was almost certainly a wolf, but he was so accustomed to hearing wolf and coywolf and coyote calls together that he didn’t consider how strange his singing voice might sound to others.

Of course, he called back again, unconsciously smoothing his voice to better match the strangers’. It was a question to the spirit of, but soft, what light from yonder window shines?

Dusty didn’t wait for an answer before his paws began to carry him in that direction.

The Maplewood was an explosion of red and gold all around him, though the colors were darkened and muted in the night. Violet and burgundy under an indigo sky — a good rainbow, perhaps, for one who’d seen only white for so long. For Dusty, however, the real intrigue was in the vegetation itself, and in the creeping thyme and detritus under his paws, so very different from the gritty sand and smooth, red clay he’d grown up trodding upon.

He was very close when he lifted his head again, this time to shout, ”Hello?” into the thinning trees. He’d traveled some distance by now, and the branches before him were more and more barren, and there was more and more of the strange white snow that Dusty had only heard stories about, up until a few months ago. He still hadn’t see the great, white fields of it that he’d been told of, and what snow he did run into was hard and sharp instead of light and soft. But it was still novel to him, and it made the night seem all the more strange to see such a landscape before him — a desert of an entirely different composition.