rollin' in the hay

Dixie-May Jackson · 03-04-2012, 03:31 AM

[html]

BLEH, wrote this at 2 am AFTER writing an essay...sucks. she isn't at the barn yet, a little ways out and pretty much passed out. >.< sorry. Arrival on the 5th early, gets back to Casa on the 8th late.

Word Count → +5

Dixie had been seeing a bit of thinness to some of the horses while she was on herd duty. Either they weren’t finding the right types of food, or there wasn’t enough growing around the fort anymore. A few days after first seeing the signs, she approached Anann with her concerns and confirmed a trip to AniWaya. There she would meet with someone that apparently worked with their horses to strike a deal, a wagon-full of their hay for stud rights of Casa’s stallions in the spring. She didn’t think that anyone would want to have Duke as a stud, but she’d stick him out there and make him available. The poor boy needed to get some action in before he was too old to move!

After informing Wayne about her task, and fending off his offers to go with her by making sure she had her knives and new bow and arrows, she fetched Duke and hooked the mare up to the wagon. Two baskets of dried foods were set in the back, along with a few furs to keep her and the horses warm at night when they made short stops for rest. Fern caught up with the wagon as Dixie was steering Fern out of the front gates of the fort, and following not fifteen feet behind the mare was the rapidly growing colt, Bark. He refused to be left behind without his mother. After a few minutes of trying to make him stay, the small woman tossed her hands in the air and got back up onto the seat of the wagon, frustrated and wanting to get moving already. The colt wouldn’t hurt anything, so she just decided to ignore him for a while.

The traveling was relatively easy, soft snow sprinkled the ground every now and then, moreso as the sun began sinking in the sky. When night finally fell, roughly six and a half hours after she left the fort, the temperature dropped sharply. Dixie let Duke go and draped the largest skins over the horses’ backs, trying to keep them as warm as she possibly could. Scraping some of the snow out from under the wagon, she spread a smaller skin out on the ground and slowly shifted into her secui form. The added mass and thicker fur would help keep her warm through the night, especially after she jumped up into the wagon and ate almost all of the stored food. After that little mistake she hopped back down and curled up where the snow couldn’t touch her and fell into a light sleep, resting for only four hours before waking and calling the horses back over.

That schedule kept up for the next three days, small amounts of sleep caught every now and then, only when it was most needed. Dixie made Duke pull the wagon most of the way to the friendly pack, as it was lighter and Fern needed to keep her strength for when the thing was piled high with hay. Finally, exhausted and stressed out, Dixie noticed that they’d actually passed the borders of AniWaya and were now trespassing. Cursing softly, she made the horses stop and tossed her head back to howl as loud as she could. The girl wasn’t really scared that she’d get in trouble with the luperci here, as she was friendly and knew quite a few of them…however they could possibly tell her alphas and THEY might be mad at her. Whimpering nervously, she curled as small as possible on her side, shivering roughly and drifting off to sleep within moments.

Image courtesy of PNNL@Flickr; table code by the Mentors!

Login




Remember me Lost Password?