Heron Lake Plateau find the mom quest

hoping for a mom-adventure w/ the stevie?! :D tags for reference.

"Mommy?" Eljay called out as he poked his nose around the rendezvous site. Now that Tywyll and Cinder were mostly old enough to fend for themselves, it was a lot harder to get a hold of @Finley whenever he was looking for her. But then, she could be pretty much anywhere. No longer being a leader had given mommy a lot more freedom but it also meant that there weren't as many go-to places to look for her in, like the borders or the rendezvous site (now that this year's batch was a bit older).

His last conversation with daddy kept being on his mind, but Eljay tried not to get it get to him too much. He just needed to accept that he would likely never have pups of his own, and maybe that would be okay. Maybe it was just his destiny to help others in the pack look after their pups and that'd be enough. Lately he had been working on trying to teach @Owen, @Kite, @Vasa and @Phoebe to hunt but it was a challenge for sure -- luckily they had the whole pack to help. Eljay remembered well how he had failed when he'd taken last year's Blackthorns for their first hunt and he was nervous at the thought that leadership may ask him to take this year's children to hunt some time soon. He had no natural authority, and he was afraid they'd just ignore his directions like his siblings had last year. They'd been lucky that time, but what if he'd screw up even worse this year? It wasn't a rare sight to see Eljay lost in thoughts as his find-the-mom-quest had been sidetracked into a pondering-about-things-activity.