Bearclaw Valley starving in the belly of a whale

I apologize for the wait.

Nunataq had found a new outpost to fulfill her daily guardian duties - it was a nice flat piece of rock, low enough for the five month old pup to jump on it effortlessly and high enough to give her a great view over the meadows outside her forest. She had much promise to become a great mercenary one day, but no one cared to teach her properly, therefore, when she was not play-fighting with other puppies (which was very rare nowadays), Nuna had her creative ways of, how to be a good guardian.

A lot of, what she did, came from spying on Xan, Indra or Laurel, when they did patrols. She tried to mimic them as much as she could and was under impressio that she was doing really well. But a bystander, instead of seeing a trained soldier in full outfit and gear, would see a kid in dirty and worn clothes marching back and forth, liftig his feet comically high and with a broom over her shoulder pretending that it was a rifle.

She had tried out the marking thing as well. Naturally, she did not read the yoga-book from the beginning, but opened it right in the middle. Metaphor aside - all her attempts to lift her hind leg as high as she had seen her father doing - ended up in her losing balance and falling over. She also did not have that iron-clad control over her bladder. If she weed, then she weed until that stash of marking-material inside her belly had depleted to null. How her dad - for example - managed to pee in small portions, not have his bladder burst in the process, was beyond Nuna.

Therefore Nunataq decided that her contribution to marking borders would be a particular landmark - a big toadstool that Merrick had discovered the other day. And ever since she went there to wee all over it (and it did not matter that this mushroom was nowhere near the borders). The good thing - no one claimed that mark as theirs. The bad thing - after a week of effort the toadstool died from unnatural death of being drowned and choked by an assortment of inorganic salts and organic compounds, including proteins, hormones, and a wide range of metabolites, varying by what was introduced to Nuna's body diluted by 90% of water.

And this was the reason, why Nunataq was lying atop her observation-rock, chewing on a piece of a what had once been the left femur from a rabbit and was contemplating, what landmark to choose now, when she spotted a dirty white wolf, nearing the borders. Duty!!! Nuna sprang to her feet and with the bone still lodged between her teeth (and giving her a look of an underage-smoker) she focused on the figure and barked. As she did - the bone flew out from her mouth, made a curve in the air and landed not too far from the old she-wolf.