Salvage efforts

If the Archer-Lyall had wanted to be petty, she could have argued she was just a warrior, but that was no way to pull herself out of this slump and nobody would recognise her if she didn’t start making an appearance more often. It was a fact of life that packs were fluid and no matter how she craved stability, she knew she needed to accept (even if her mother never had), that people move on. She couldn’t keep taking it personally.

They had been taking note of what was left in their little storage den. Large swathes of shelves had been flooded, her garden was flattened. Chips was already busy gathering what seeds could be salvaged, and Otis was digging up what tubers could be stored to replant once winter was done. The opossum had taken a leaf of bark and drawn a picture of each herb that remained, just in case the names she knew were different to the others and formed a crude tally next to each. It would have to do.

Mud caked her belly and her legs, the underside of her throat and her muzzle from the salvage efforts, but she wasn’t about to stop for a bath now. Shaking off what she could, she left her companions to continue their work in the garden and gathered up her tally sheet, making her way across the tall grass plains to where the call had come from.

She was surprised to find herself the first one there. That hadn’t happened in a very long time. The silver woman presented her tally to the lop eared trauma specialist and let her monochrome gaze slip over the stepped gardens, her muzzle wrinkling in annoyance. "Weather really did a number on all o’us eh?" She had never been much of a one to make small talk, but she knew she should at least introduce herself. "Sedna."