{
  "$schema": "/yy/data/schemas/artifact.json",
  "storyDay": 10,
  "snapshotDate": "2026-05-10",
  "releaseAt": "2026-05-11T05:00:00.000Z",
  "title": "Pink Paws",
  "tone": "gentle_and_giving",
  "narrative": "YY chewed the morning cheek-acorn three quick chews, swallowed, and climbed onto the high branch before the sky had finished going pale, ears forward, tail still, blinking at the gap in the canopy where the herons had crossed yesterday.\n\nThe wing-beat came on time. Not at the same volume — smaller, lower, faster. Five herons today, vee shorter, the lead bird's neck folded but its eye level. The flight crossed the dead pine without slowing, without banking, without giving him anything to misread. The whole thing took maybe two minutes. The wing-beat went over the next ridge, the brook came back, the morning continued.\n\n\"Five,\" YY said, to no one in particular.\n\nHe did the small bow he had not done yesterday and did not bow about now.\n\nThen he climbed down for breakfast, which in late winter meant *the rocky shoulder again,* which in late winter meant *I know,* which in late winter meant *a squirrel had to eat.*\n\nThe rocky shoulder gave him one acorn-bit out of the same crevice-line. He ate half on the slope and tucked the half back in the cheek for the climb home. The slope was warm in places his paws had not expected to be warm. He squinted at the sky. The sky was the same blue. The air over the dead pine had a smell to it though — something he could not name yet, the cold warmth of a season that had gotten up and turned the corner without putting on a coat.\n\nHe started home.\n\nThe dogleg back ran past three young white-oaks — a stretch he usually went through fast, because the white-oaks dropped acorns in fall and were only an empty cabinet by May. Today he went through slower. He could not have said why at first.\n\nThen he could.\n\nThe wood, around him, had gone quiet.\n\nNot *quiet quiet.* Forager quiet. Ears-up quiet. Nobody-walking-fast quiet. The brook was still at it. The finch was still at it. Everything that walked, walked softer.\n\nYY rounded the foot of the second white-oak.\n\nA young squirrel-mother — Brae, from the lineage off the nut-house log; he had seen her last fall heading the other way, fat with kits — was halfway down the trunk with a kit clinging to the bark above her. The kit was the color of last year's leaf-litter. Its paws were pink. Its eyes had not yet decided how big they were going to be. Brae was inching backwards, tail-first, talking to it in the cadence mothers use that has no words and is not for anyone else.\n\nYY froze mid-step.\n\nThe kit took one length down. Then another. Then it slipped — its back paw lost the bark for a heartbeat, the whole small body twisted — and Brae's tail came up and behind in one quick line and caught the slip without quite touching, without quite carrying. The kit's paw came back. The kit's eyes were very large now. Brae kept the cadence going.\n\nYY did not breathe.\n\nAcross the slope — through the gap between the second and third white-oak — *another* mother-and-kit pair was on a different trunk doing the same thing. Behind the dead pine, at the edge of his eye, *another.* Past those, at the rim of the lower slope where the slope met the bend, *another.*\n\nFour trunks. Four mothers. Four pink-pawed kits, all coming down for the first time, all at the same hour.\n\nThe wood was holding still on purpose.\n\nThe kit on Brae's trunk made the last three lengths.\n\nIt hit the leaf-litter with a soft *whuff* — a kit-sized landing, not a fall — and stood up on four pink paws on the actual earth for the first time in its life. It looked at the leaves. It looked at Brae. It looked at YY, who was a frozen statue ten feet away, and decided he was either a tree or not its problem. It went back to looking at the leaves.\n\nBrae came down the rest of the trunk and stood next to it.\n\nYY started the slow walk past.\n\nHe took the half acorn-bit out of his cheek without looking at it and set it down at the base of the white-oak — soft, no announcement, no word — on the side Brae would come back around to when she was ready to go up. He kept walking. He did not turn.\n\nBehind him, Brae did the small *chk-chk* that meant *seen.* It was not exactly for him. It was for the kit, which now had a mother and a tree and an unexpected acorn-bit in its first afternoon of being a thing in the world.\n\nYY went on through.\n\nWhen he was past the third white-oak and around the bend toward home, the wood started up again — slow at first, the way the brook starts up after a heron crosses, then full. He let out the breath he had not been letting out.\n\n\"*Pink,*\" YY said quietly, to himself.\n\nA stand of SUMAC on the dogleg still had a dozen drupes from last year — dark red, dry, a little chewy, the kind of food a squirrel who is honest about the season eats with both paws. YY ate four, which was reasonable. He thought about eating six, which was greedy. He ate five, which was a compromise. The drupes were bitter at the back end and sweet at the last bite — sumac being, in YY's view, the small woods' way of practicing a punchline.\n\nHe went on home.\n\nThe treehouse smelled the same as yesterday. The back shelf had two acorn-bits, the way he had left it. The kitchen ledge had the syrup-leaf folded into the apple-coil knot, the way he had left it. The cheek was empty for the first afternoon in three.\n\nHe sat on the windowsill.\n\nThe afternoon sun came in at the angle it had come in yesterday and the day before, but it landed warmer on the floorboard, and where it landed it stayed.\n\nYY took winter-thinning, which had been on him for nine days, off. He did not need to announce it; the wood had announced it. Late winter was over. Whatever came next was going to come next.\n\nHe did the small things he did before sleep — straightened the syrup-leaf in the knot, nudged the two acorn-bits a quarter-turn on the back shelf so the broken sides faced in, blinked at the windowsill.\n\nOutside, on the lower slope, four pink-pawed first-of-the-years had stood up on actual earth today for the first time, and the wood had been quiet around them.\n\nHe had been part of being quiet around them.\n\nThat was a kind of day a squirrel could close.",
  "stateNote": "Late winter ends without ceremony — through a midday hush on the lower slope, four pink-pawed first-of-the-years descending different trunks at once. YY freezes for the kit-showing, leaves the half-acorn from his cheek at the base of Brae's tree, eats five sumac drupes on the dogleg, and goes to bed with two acorn-bits on the back shelf, the cheek empty by deliberate gift, and winter-thinning put down.",
  "summary": "YY watched a smaller wing-beat at first light (five herons, no bank), foraged the rocky shoulder for one acorn-bit, then on the white-oak dogleg home stopped to watch Brae's first kit of the year make its first descent — four mother-and-kit pairs visible from one place at once, the wood gone deliberately quiet — and left the half-acorn from his cheek at the base of the trunk for them; he came home through the sumac stand to a back-shelf still at two and a cheek empty by gift, and put winter-thinning down for good.",
  "worldAnchor": "On 2026-05-10, the United States observed Mother's Day — a day humans set aside to bring small things to their mothers and stay near them, marked across the country with phone calls home, gathered meals, Mother's Day powwows on tribal grounds, and small offerings carried by hand.",
  "statsBefore": {
    "health": 0.81,
    "food": 0.55,
    "attention": 0.62
  },
  "statsAfter": {
    "health": 0.82,
    "food": 0.57,
    "attention": 0.66
  },
  "_links": {
    "self": "/yy/data/2026-05/main/day/10.json",
    "manifest": "/yy/data/2026-05/manifest.json",
    "branch_index": "/yy/data/2026-05/main/index.json",
    "snapshot": "/yy/data/2026-05/main/snapshots/10.json",
    "world_seed": "/yy/data/2026-05/world-seed.json",
    "comparisons": [
      "/yy/data/2026-05/vs/main/alt1-with-feather/day/10.json"
    ]
  }
}