Heron Lake Plateau guiding light

Eljay went on to track Kite out -- Owen was generally fine in his experience, so he was more concerned for Kite in the moment -- but it was no easy task. Vasa and Phoebe kept getting distracted with one another. Each time he called them to follow they would follow for a few steps before one of them would pounce the other again. And each time when he called them to follow they would start arguing about who started it in front of him, almost as if they really expected him to punish the starter for it. Eljay knew it was a different one each time anyway.

"It doesn't matter who started, you should follow," Eljay said, though there was a softness to his voice that was probably the reason that the pups didn't take his authority very serious at all and continued their wrestling matches.

It was when he heard Owen's voice that Eljay's interest was piqued. His head turned to the source of the sound and so did Vasa and Phoebe's, who had been wrestling again by then but suddenly fell silent to look. "Stay here," Eljay instructed the pups and he quickly hurried in the direction of Owen's voice, where he saw Kite running towards the lake with Owen behind her. He hadn't heard precisely what was going on so it looked to him like Owen and Kite were both trying to go to the lake, which it was far too cold for and they should learn to swim better first, anyway. Eljay wished that he had more authority so that he could simply command the pups to stop in their tracks, but he knew that calling out would fall to deaf ears anyway. He did call quickly — "Kite, Owen, stop!" — but his voice was completely lacking any form of authority. It was panic which had the upper hand at that moment.

Eljay started to run towards Kite to try and stop her, as she was at the front of the little group, while hoping that they heard him. As he galloped forward - though he wasn't very fast, never had been - Kite did look at him as he called out. However, her paws didn't stop running. Distracted, Kite's paws ended up in a tangle and she fell, then tumbled even faster towards the cold water now. Eljay was too far away to stop it from happening, but he hoped that at least Owen would see what a terrible idea this going-into-the-lake-thing was and that maybe he would be fast enough to stop Kite's fall to doom (and Eljay's, if he had to get himself wet and cold by pulling her from the water).