just around the riverbend

Artur had spent the morning off in one of the various side dens. The excitement of exploring the rest of the dens had long since worn off, after two weeks of being able to toddle around and having nowhere to go. Sometimes one or two of his siblings would go with him, or they'd run around en masse, but for the most part he slipped off alone more and more often. He had started by working obsessively on just walking until he stopped toddling and gained some measure of control of his oversized paws, paws that his mother had assured him meant he would be a very large wolf one day. That pleased him - what didn't make him so happy was that they were very clumsy, and tripped him up in humiliating ways when he played with his siblings. Now he'd moved on to running from one den to the next in the dark. He hit walls sometimes, not being able to see, and he tripped over his paws on the uneven ground more often than not, but he was getting better and his little puppy body was already surprisingly sturdy for a pup still in the den. It was starting to get pretty boring though, since at this point he had pretty much memorized every inch of the dark world they had inhabited since birth.

He heard his mother's voice, quiet and muffled by the earthen walls but still distinct enough, and hurried through the dark - and briefly, through the patch of light illuminated by that fascinating bright portal that his mother entered and left the den through - and back into the sleeping den. He ignored his sister's inane question (he had missed Geoffrey's question) to make a wary comment of his own. "I hope you don't mean another scavenger hunt." She'd had them go on a scavenger hunt through the den system a week ago, which had been a lot of fun for a bunch of babies who were barely toddling around but they were much too old for a boring old scavenger hunt in the dens now.