The Run
hungry and witnessing
YY heard the pounding before he understood the pounding.
He had climbed back up to the stone wall on his way out — Tock had not been there today, which was either a relief or a small alarm; he had not yet decided — and was sitting on the highest section, paws tucked, ears working through the cold air.
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 carried her head when she was not stopping to read weather. Two younger deer ran at her flanks, smaller, their legs working twice as hard to keep her pace. The three of them tore across the south slope without looking at anything, without aiming at anything, just moving.
YY had not known a deer could move like that.
The run was not a hunt. There was nothing chasing them. They were simply running, the way a thing runs when it is alive and the cold has been long and the slope is open and there is nothing in the way. Mira's hooves struck the hardened ground and the sound came back up the rise like a small drum.
It lasted maybe two breaths.
Then they were past the south edge and into the trees and the pounding became softer and softer until it was just the wind again, and YY was alone on his stone.
He sat for a moment.
"Well," he said, to nobody. "That was *fast food.*"
He felt better immediately. He always felt better when he had landed a pun, even a small one, even at his own expense. His stomach was less impressed, but his stomach was rarely an audience.
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 the world had announced itself.
*Still alive,* he thought. *Even her. Even now.*
He went down toward the water. He did not run. But he walked a little faster than he had been walking the moment before, which was, he realized, its own small kind of run.
He carried that home.
The day cost YY a little more food and a little more attention than yesterday — winter is still pulling on him, no foraging happened — but it gave him the run, which is now part of him in a way he can't yet use. The hunger is real and the cold is real, and so was the moment of pure motion that proved the world is not only the cold and the hunger.
state
YY climbed back to the stone wall and witnessed Mira and two younger deer running across the south slope for two breaths of pure life; the pounding faded into wind, YY made a small pun about fast food to nobody, and walked toward the brook a little faster than he had been walking before.