Lost Creek Hollow Immaculate

Jet was growling under her breath and muttering nonsense to herself as her unsteady stubby paws dug uneven furrows in the dirt of the floor. Her senses had been growing keener by the day, and she had watched in fascination as the play of light repeatedly changed, enchanting sunbeams reaching long warm fingers in past the entryway and then shyly receding again before disappearing each night. Her increasingly sharp nose was catching an overwhelming bouquet of scents wafting in from the outdoors, a dazzling rainbow smorgasboard she couldn't yet put a name or picture with. Her upsprung ears too were growing keener and entranced by the things they were hearing not just in the damp echoing earthy enclosure that formed the confines of her world but in the great beyond from which all the really fascinating and mysterious noises emanated. With every new snap or whoosh or twitter or clang the perky black triangles would eagerly swivel to catch every nuance: what was that? And that?! And ooh boy how about that?!

But she was adamantly prevented from investigating any of it! Mother was such a spoilsport, and neither whines nor innumerable pokes nor beseeching looks from baby blue peepers seemed to budge her one bit. Jet thus slumped sulkily in the middle of the den and moodily relandscaped small patches, smudging her paws brown and kicking up dust where she could. Just now the dug-in tiny black claws on her formerly-white paw snagged on a luckless root, which with a much louder puppy growl she ferociously tipped forward and attacked with her itchy newfound teeth, as if that root was the reason she was stuck here in this tiny stupid den where nothing ever interesting happened and hardly anyone visited and all the wonderful smells/sounds/glimpses only stayed long enough to taunt her before fleeing, and even her tormenting of her brothers was growing boring. ...Except as she wrestled with the fraying rootstub it gradually dawned upon her that the light had changed again quite suddenly, and the most important scent that was so thickly, smotheringly familiar to her world had rather suddenly diminished. Jet turned her head—awkwardly since she was still holding the rootlet, and it in turn kept her skull tethered near the floor—and saw that the entryway where the great immovable black and white sphinx that was Mother always lay, now all of a sudden was sitting there wide open.

Jet spat her shredded rootlet out in record time and hightailed it for the exit, not even looking to see which brother it was she had just shoved aside in her excitement. While they might be some of her only playthings right now they were nothing more than speedbumps. Jet stumbled several times in her jittery haste but inevitably made it up out of the tunnel and into the blinding sunshine at last, where she tripped over her own feet one final time before stopping dead with her hindlegs still crossed and half toppled-over atop each other. She planted her forefeet akimbo and gawked at the wide world all around her with a tiny buzzing whine of excitement, sun-dazzled eyes wide with delight. Now that she was outside, outside at last! she found the sudden array of choices before her paralyzingly overwhelming. (Though that didn't manage to stop her irrepressible black comma of a tail from lashing her legs frenetically in excitement.) What to see, what to do, what to sniff and poke and taste first?! She gave voice to her dilemma of indecision: Hwwaaaaahh...eep! and then suddenly lunged in one direction completely at random. Forgetting her legs were still entangled however, she didn't get very far. Jet did a sudden faceplant. Immediately she wriggled and struggled her way up and lurched forth on a different vector, not really caring so much where she was going or what she blundered into so long as it was someplace Not the Den and something more interesting than her immediate family who'd been her only real company for ages and ages.