Username: All Along Watchtower
Cat Name: Doespring
Gender: Female
Rank: Kit-parent (part time hunter and healer when no one is in the nursery)
Clan: Clan of the Sea BreezeAge: 49 moons
Prompt: She's been on the island for only a moon when it happens. With no kits in the nursery to care for (yet), she'd taken on odd jobs in the meanwhile - catching prey, finding herbs, tending to the injured. Today's task was finding herbs.
Had been finding herbs.
What she finds instead is a family of foxes, dead and bloody in the forest by the volcano. Doespring freezes at the sight. What could have done this? What predator, big enough to threaten foxes, could have made it this far into the island? And where had it gone after?
Her thoughts are interrupted by a pained cry, and her head whips toward the sound. There is one kit left, still alive but bleeding, whimpering and crying. Doespring's heart goes soft. They're an orphan now, and too young to survive without parents. For a moment, the mystery of what has happened here is forgotten, and she darts toward them, licking their head as a comfort, before assessing the wounds. Again, a chill runs through her, as she wonders what sort of predator could have left such injuries-
She needn't have wondered long.
There's a sound that chills Doespring to the bone, the sensation of eyes upon her. She barely has the time or the sense about her to pick up the fox kit by the scruff and
run, but she does just as - something - bites down on the empty space where she was.
She does not ever see it properly. She does not dare look back. The creature, whatever it is, stops pursuing her, but she does not stop running until she's back in camp, half forgetting about the fox kit she's brought with her. Some of the cats draw back in alarm, but Ravenmask doesn't even wait to let her explain herself before retreating to the medicine den to fetch herbs for the kit. Heatherstar bounds across the clearing, demanding to know what happened, and Doespring tells it all, the dead fox family, the kit left behind, the creature that tried to eat her. Heatherstar seems shaken by the end, and turns to Haywing, telling them to alert all current patrols of the danger.
Haywing has already vanished from sight when Doespring, curled around the fox kit and occasionally licking their head as Ravenmask treats them, recalls another detail of the location. "It was right on the edge, right where the forest meets the volcano," she says. "Near one of the tunnel entrances."
There's a stir, like a breeze. Heatherstar gets a faraway look in his eyes, like he's seeing something only he can. He looks very, very alarmed by it, whatever it was.
Doespring tries to put it out of mind. "Can I look after the kit?" she asks. "There's no one else in the nursery, and they won't survive on their own, not without parents at this age..."
Heatherstar startles, looks back down at her like he's just been shaken from a trance. "Oh," he says. "Yeah. Sure. Why not?"
With that, he turns tail, heading to the volcano. Doespring worries - but there isn't much she can do, for now.
She's gotten a kit to care for. Shouldn't she be glad?
