RainbowFoxxy

Journal of Astrid Valksdóttir — Field Expedition, Entry 91 I am writing this flat on my stomach in the snow with my elbows and fingers going numb and I would not change a thing about this situation. I had been following the herd's trail since the morning prior. A Drakehest herd in winter does not move carelessly. They choose their ground with the passed down knowledge of generations and the snowpack here in the high northern pastures carries their decisions like a ledger, every hoofprint there to read. The herd had moved northeast, toward the lower windbreak of the ridge where the spruce stand thickens and the snow does not gather as deeply. This is sensible and expected. What I had not expected was the single trail that diverged from the group's track, heading south and then curling back again in a wide, unhurried arc. The prints of one horse, alone, navigating back toward the others by some private event. I found a low drift on a rise above the trail and I went down onto it

Journal of Astrid Valksdóttir — Field Expedition, Entry 84 There is a particular kind of feeling that a body of water creates in the hour after dawn. The lake had its own language, the small lapping at the reeds, the creak of waterfowl somewhere in the shallows, the wind moving across the surface in long, low drafts. It is a contained silence. Each muffled sound felt like it had been chosen to be there. It was all quite deliberate in nature.  I had come to this lake because of a farmer's wife two valleys over who described, with the kind of blunt certainty that I have learned to trust above almost any other source, a horse that came to drink at the eastern clearing every few mornings. She described the colors with her hands more than her words, spreading her fingers and moving them in a way that I understood before she had finished speaking. Of fire, and water, and the sort of life you learn when working with nature all your life.  The eastern clearing opened out from the tree line

Journal of Astrid Valksdóttir — Field Expedition, Entry 78 I have been in this tree for four hours. I want that recorded first, before anything else, because when I am old and reading back through these entries I want to remember that the work is not always the romantic thing it sounds like over a fire with a cup of something warm or a cold beer. Sometimes it is four hours wedged between two branches at elevation, with pine resin on both hands, a wind off the high peaks that has no interest in being merciful on extremities, and the very real possibility that the creature you climbed up here to avoid being seen by is simply not going to appear. I had a good reason for the tree. The accounts from the mountain settlements above the timber line described a stallion. A stallion of the feline mutations is an entirely different consideration than a mare. Not dangerous, or not necessarily dangerous, but heightened. Alert in a way that makes the ordinary caution of an untamed Drakehest

Journal of Astrid Valksdóttir — Field Expedition, Entry 61 Three days without water that was worth drinking. I want to be precise about that, because when I look back at this entry I want to remember what my body felt like before I found the watering pool. The flat metallic taste at the back of my throat that never left no matter how hard I swallowed. The way the horizon trembled at the edges no matter how many times I blinked. The sound of my own heartbeat, thick and sluggish in my ears, like a wading beast. I had been rationing since I crossed out of the scrubland and into the open plains. Where the earth cracked in long, pale lines like old pottery and the grasses stood silver and brittle in the heat. The waterskin I had refilled at the last settlement ran out somewhere on the second afternoon. What I found in a shallow depression on the morning of the third day I cannot call water. Sludge is by best description for the slimy, buggy, remnants of something life giving.  I kept