The line, negotiated

The grey-brown squirrel was at the edge of the east cache zone — the same position, the same specific alertness it had carried on Day 2.

YY didn't hold position. YY moved closer.

The difference between entering a confrontation from adequacy and entering it thin is the difference between choosing to advance and having to advance. From the outside they can look the same. They are not the same.

The other squirrel ran its assessment. The numbers weren't in its favor — YY was present, fed, not bluffing, moving with the particular deliberateness of an animal that has done the math and found it favorable. The assessment took approximately four seconds, the same as Day 2. The withdrawal was equally dignified.

But this time the line landed where YY had been moving toward. Not approximately there. Specifically there. The full east cache site on YY's side of the boundary. That was the part that was different from Day 2, when the cache had been held but the terms had been whatever the other squirrel decided to accept. Today YY had set them.

Afterward, YY spent time in the area — not holding position against anxiety but against understanding. The territory had a shape now. East was established. West was filed. The question about persistence — whether a thing stays what it was, whether making something deliberately changes what it means — had found another surface in the cache that had always been there but was now the cache that had been held on purpose.

That was a different thing. Worth paying attention to.