Yay

Four (2/2)

Captain turned cold eyes on Quiet. She shrank beneath the looks that the pack gave her, feeling her paws tremble so hard that she feared she would collapse. Her shaking did nothing to help their accusing looks, but surely they wouldn’t think that it was her who had slaughtered Gentle? Why would she do such a thing? Gentle was purely the only one of her pack who generally tried to communicate with her. Why would anyone kill her? What did she do?

“Let’s bring her out of the camp,” Captain ordered, looking away from Quiet finally. “The smell will attract other scavengers if she stays here much longer.”

Soft looked towards Quiet, her eyes calculating as she stared at her niece. Both of Soft’s daughters, Elegant and Grace, eyed her disdainfully, as if Gentle’s death was purely her fault. Quiet knew that her cousins despised her, simply because of the fact that she couldn’t speak. It wasn’t fair. She couldn’t help her disability- she had been born with it. Believe me, if I could fix myself, I certainly would have by now.

“Quiet,” Captain announced suddenly, eyes snapping back to look at her. She winced at his words, simply because of the harsh way that he spat her name- as if it was a disease that was infecting his tongue. “Take Gentle’s corpse away from camp. Rough and Giant will accompany you.” He nodded to the two coyotes that he named, both of whom stepped forward. Within moments the three of them were padding through the eerie, moonlit trees, milky light cast from the stars turning the auburn-colored leaves an ominously fiery color. Quiet was at the front, padding with her shoulders drooping and her head low, while Rough and Giant carried Gentle’s corpse along behind her. She was too weak to even help with the job at hand- why had Captain sent her out like this? Was it some sort of punishment? What had she done?

After a while of trailing silence, Giant gruffly announced that underneath a tall, flowering tree would be a proper place to bury Gentle. Quiet moved to help scrape out a subsequent grave but Rough shooed her away, his and Giant’s large paws working to dig far faster than Quiet could have. Sighing, she turned her back to them and padded a bit of a way along the trail that they had just created, back in the direction of their camp. When she could just barely see her counterparts she sat with her back to them, breathing out through her nostrils and bowing her head, closing her eyes. What am I supposed to do now that Gentle is gone?