i guess we can pretend we've never been here

Inferno deliberately ignored the emoting of her packmates - something she'd a good deal of experience doing, given the melodramatic nature of much of her family members - and followed the scent of fresh water across the dark sands until she came across a trickle of a stream coming down from the dunes to terminate in the salty water of the bay, mixing into a brackish mess before washing away. It wasn't much, but she turned to follow the trickle up into the dunes. While much of the vegetation was the sparce grasses typical of sand beaches, around the trickle of fresh water there was a wider and less sparce variety, and when she finally came to the source of the trickle it was like an oasis of vegetation. She dipped her muzzle down to examine it - a natural cold spring bubbled up in the tiny pool, hardly anything but it was there. The spring could be dug out easily, lined with stone and clay to keep most of the water from soaking away into the sand and the overflow either allowed to continue in a bigger creek to the ocean or redirected somewhere more useful, maybe another pool or further along to water useful trees and shrubbery they could grow behind the dunes. She nodded sharply to herself and flagged the spring with a bright orange strip of fur taken from a fox fur so it would be easy to find again, then headed back down onto the beach itself to continue to explore.