Rekindling the Fire

Family. It was something that he didn't really understand in a way of words, but he knew that it was important. He knew who they were, and in an empty naive sort of way he loved them. Bi colored eyes blinked, and he wiggled his somewhat floppy ears. Not quite old enough to leave the den, but more than capable of doing so anyways, he wandered from where he was supposed to be, nestled in a little cluster with his siblings, and after the missing warmth. The last of his siblings, his family, was a little bigger than him but not nearly as massive as the presence that he knew as his mother. When he stepped out of the den, his breath caught in his throat for a moment, and he wasn't really sure what to think about it all. Everything was so large and unknown, he faltered... before taking that first hesitant step outward.


Followed by another, and then another, each more confident than the last.


Finally he had a wobbly puppy stride about his steps, that still had him tripping over his feet from time to time, but something welled in his chest and he would someday get to know it as pride. He was proud of his first endeavor into the unknown. The gray pup wiggled his nose as something... cold and... wet, landed on his nose. It was falling from somewhere above him, and he stared at the flake as if it had wronged him, and then watched it trickle into nothing. What is it? His thoughts were a messy mixture of French and English and things that he was experiencing and didn't have words to connect them with yet. It was hard, being so new to the world... Twitching his little nose, he then sneezed.


He immediately cued in on the stranger's voice once he spoke, and he stared at him oddly, the first lupine that he had ever seen that wasn't his. He wasn't family, he was a stranger, and he wasn't really sure what to think of those he didn't know. Honestly he was a bit flabbergasted that there were others out there that seemed to be like his mother that weren't his mother. "Cold." He whispered, his voice devoid of emotion - but it was a fact, a realization, that snow was neither good or bad, just cold. Cold like when his siblings moved and his mother snuggled him closer - but different, there was something that made his skin prickle and his bones shake. It was a different sort of cold, but he knew that was the word for it.