Dawnlark Plains caught in your riptide

her paw kept steady, just barely for him to breathe. and the boy spat defiance through bared teeth. all bark and fire, as if it may sow doubt.
but he had too much pride for one so thin. regret requires expectation, and she had none for the whelp. clinical gaze swept over him, unrushed.
the hollow beneath his jaw. the jut of his hip, the gauntness beneath scruffy fur. even the spit he flung at her barely wet the earth, "small boys shouldn’t bare teeth they can’t afford to lose.”
she spoke it like fact.
but beneath the stink of dust and sweat—something coiled in the back of her nose. and again, it came. storm-touched, bitter-spined. 
the voice cut through her calm like the crack of a tree splitting under ice. something that only showed in the flick of her tail.
mother?
heart threatened to leap from her chest. her son. her baby.
a boy's voice once, hoarse from training in the snow, softer when he’d curled against her belly, when his temper had not yet grown teeth.
she remembered his cries when he’d broken his first blade, and how he’d thrown it into the river with a child's fury she found endearing, because he was hers.
remembered too the quiet complaints whispered into her fur when the world would grow too large for him. and how she sang his woes to rest.
but that voice had vanished with the thaw, and for months it had existed only in memory.
what the fuck is going on here?
"a question i should be asking you, son." her focus remained fixed upon the dark male beneath her,
“i was stalking meat when your lítill skuggi sprang from the brush like a child from his blanket, and frightened it off.”
finally, her eyes turned to him—slow and sharp. gods above, he looked just like his father.
how she wished to run to him. to gather her boy in her arms and hold him so close. to feel his heart and warmth so that she may never be apart from it again. but it would need to wait for another day. 
"er hann þinn, eða eitthvað sem þú gleymdir að tauma?"