Greatwater Lake buck moon

All she had ever known was darkness, warmth, and crowding. To come to learn upon being expelled into the cool evening air that there was more to existence left the girl's mouth agape upon hitting the earth. The sensation of life itself a shock to which she found her voice upon her first breath. Loud, unabashed, did she cry. A roar into the world she would eventually come to know.

Taliba would never know the same moonlight under which she was born. She would never know how that light would glint off her own mother's teeth. Her own life under threat for her very existence.

Taliba would not so easily yield her claim on life. She squirmed and writhed and cried and cried. She knew the cool night air, the wetness that clung to her body, the flattened grass, and the prickly detritus strewn upon the soil. These things, these sensations, were hers. And she would fight for them.

Puppy paws would wave wildly, battering the arms that held her as she was cleaned and eventually her mother's side as she granted her first opportunity to nurse. A new sensation. A warm belly. Her earlier battle was soon forgotten as she came to learn that her brothers were in this new world too. But Taliba would not share that teat, and would soon pick a new battle: batting her brothers away as she held her place.