Seen Twice

YY heard the pounding before he understood the pounding.

He had climbed back up to the stone wall, the heron feather still tucked along his back, the way he had been carrying it through every cold morning that mattered. Tock was not on the wall today. Either Tock had moved on for the moment, or Tock was elsewhere doing exactly the work he had been doing yesterday, and YY did not know which. He sat on the highest stone with his paws tucked and waited for the day to tell him what it was.

The sound came up the slope. Not wind. Not branches. Something *lower*, something with rhythm.

YY went very still.

Three white tails came through the trees below, fast.

It was Mira. He knew her by the size of her, by the way she held her head when she was not reading weather. Two younger deer ran at her flanks, smaller, their legs working twice as hard. The three of them tore across the south slope without aiming at anything, just moving — the kind of run a thing does when it is alive and the cold has been long.

YY had not known a deer could move like that.

The pounding came up the rise like a small drum and YY watched, hungry and unmoving.

Mira slowed at the south edge.

She had to — the trees thickened, the younger deer broke off into a different line, and her stride wound down into a half-trot. Her head came up, ears scanning. She looked up the slope.

Her gaze passed YY once, the way a runner's gaze passes anything that isn't in her way.

Then it came back.

The second look did not land on YY. It landed on the feather.

Mira held the look for a single breath. She did not stop. She did not nod. She started moving again, picking up speed, and was gone into the trees with the younger deer.

YY sat on his stone.

"Well," he said, to nobody. "That was *fast food.*"

He felt only a little better. The pun was YY's, which usually counted, but the look had been Mira's, and Mira's looks had weight.

He could feel something had shifted inside him without permission, the way a story does when it lands well. The day was not warmer for the run, and he was not less hungry. But Mira had read him, and Mira read slowly, and a slow read carries forward.

*Still alive,* he thought. *Even her. Even me, somehow. Even now.*

*Now noted,* he added, after a moment. *By Mira.*

He went down toward the water. He walked a little faster than he had been walking the moment before — but the speed felt different than it would have felt to a YY without something on his back. The feather was an additional small weight, not heavy, but committed.

He carried that home, too.