in the backcountry; longear or any

[woodrow]

One mare comes from the meadow. One mare comes from the Deserts. They meet in the middle and they touch noses, trading breaths. They are the same size, though the one from the meadow is more rawboned than her mother, and she is seized by contractions that are both quick and painful. She goes down in the grass with a groan, lies on her side and snorts in between the spasms of her womb. The other mare looks on, unable to assist but nearby nonetheless; this is something she knows her daughter must do on her own, as all mares before her have had to do and there can be no interference but Scalped is concerned - she hears a familiar yammering in the distance and wonders why the trickster-god is making his presence known now after having been quiet for some time. The birth is quick and nasty as births are wont to be; Americus catches her breath before looking back at her damp-dark flanks where the foal lies still and she momentarily thinks it is dead until instinct bids her to climb wearily to her feet, tells her to turn around and break the birth sac with her teeth and administer mothering licks to the foal that turns out to be a colt. Scalped stands nearby still, concern banding her eyes in white as she hears that faraway cry of a coyote and knows that something isn’t right. She is tempted to move closer to her daughter but Americus has bared her teeth at her mother before licking the rest of her son clean and encouraging him to stand with a couple of unkind nips. Grandmother and mother can only look on as the colt tries his legs out for the first time; the first few attempts are pitiful and then he is standing! He is searching for his mother’s milk when he finds it and latches on; Americus lets out a shriek of pain that has Scalped swinging her head around wildly to find out what is the cause of her daughter’s distress. “He bit me!” Americus exclaims, surprised and Scalped can only shake her head and say, “That is to be expected.” But Americus shakes her own head in annoyance at her mother’s lack of understanding, “No, he bit me!” and both mares crane their heads around and down to where the colt should be but all they see is a coyote pup hanging by his teeth from the mare’s teat, suckling away and Americus feels sick while Scalped can only stare and say, “Well, Coyote sure stirred the pot this time.” She placates her daughter with a nuzzling touch but can’t stand to see the horror in her daughter’s eyes, “It can’t be helped child but I’ll raise him as my own.” Scalped can see that this is really too much for Americus to handle so she offers to raise the colt as her own. Americus hastily agrees and allows the coyote-colt enough time to finish suckling and as he lets go, his butt hits the ground and jolts him back into his foal-form. She has enough time to name him, plant a motherly apologetic kiss upon his fuzzy brow, and then she is gone as if she had never been and Scalped becomes his whole world. The medicine-hat mare nudges her new ward up, encouraging him to make the long trip back to the Deserts with her but he begs off, asking if he can go play. She affords him this opportunity to enjoy himself considering all that has just befallen him - the uncontrollable shifting, the already forgiven departure of his mother, and off he goes with a swish of his bottlebrush tail! He gambols as a colt does, free and happy, then it happens - he slips into his coyote shape unaware of how it happens and how to shift back just yet. Yellow and small, he is quick to scamper about and dirty his four paws and it is such fun to chase and leap after the bugs! He eats what he catches, his hunger different in this form but no less present than if he had been in horse form, but then his nose starts to quiver and he knows he is onto something. The coyote pup puts his nose to the ground and starts sniffing, he spins in a circle before picking up the thread of scent fully and he begins to track it. Woodrow is in full hunter mode now, and his jaws slaver at the thought of what lies on the other end of the tantalizing scent he follows…

[Longear]

Suspension. The gentle, soothing rocks – back and forth, back and forth. Her hum, like a lullaby, reverberated through her rib cage and uterine walls. There was nothing. But it was a kind nothing. A nothing she will never remember, but for months had been her whole world, the only thing she knew. And so they all come from a soup of nothing, amniotic fluid and nutrients; but not all of them are left in absolute peace there. 
One day maybe, on the knees of their parents and guardians, they might be told the tales of their interfered-with beginnings.

She had worked to turn herself all day, shifting in her membrane home to make herself accommodating. Not, she would say if she could remember, because she wanted to – instinct. The drive to survive, and her survival could depend on her front feet and head being exactly where they must. Her mother had been restless; she could not have known then, but in part because of her shifting. Her body was readying them both for something difficult and ordinary. Forced, sweaty and accompanied by the familiar throes of contractions, to wander the folds of land around their hot and heavy home. Now and then, her mother laid down for a moment or two. They worked together, her mother and her.

And then she bumped! Heaved up with such haste, and it was violent in that nothing. This place had been a slow and steady home, and her mother’s jolt and panic had unsettled the quiet. She’ll never remember it, but if she could, she would say she had been scared and confused. For what seemed like forever, she tumbled and thumped. Then her mother stopped, though the beat of her heart – that constant and compelling song – was still loud and fast in her ears. The spook may have helped, in its own way, to quicken the process of parturition. Calm again. The enduring rock of her mother’s hips, the faint purr of her voice from outside. She would only been disturbed one more time before the greatest disruption of all: delivery, that roiling and trying journey.

A strange sensation, that for the days and short weeks after, she has been sure she can recall in the nerves of her nose and neck and belly. A voltaic crack; it was not something done softly, or serenely. The transferal of a soul cannot be accomplished with coddling hands. The sting of that shock touched her nose and knobbly knees. She couldn’t cry out, but she would have, if she could. That sensation slipped down her legs and neck, pricking every hair and cell on its way down – all the way to the tip of her tail hairs. And then she felt a burn, as her tailbone was sundered from her and replaced with a scut.
Mother had only felt the tiniest of shocks, but then, she was not the one being merged. The Mother is merciful, now and again. When she was brought into the wider world on the floor of a great rainforest, impossibly tiny and hairless, she could remember none of it at all.

“Be careful!” She knew what her mother meant when she called to the backside of her always so eager daughter. Not to slip into the body of that other self, so unwieldy and vulnerable. “I will, mum! Or... I won’t mum, promise! Bye!” Her response was eaten up by the incredible din of the jungle, and so will give Vineine no comfort. She has worn her mother thin, usually a wellspring of jolliness and delight. Her new child is as test. A mysterious test from the Mother. Their tropical home is not a place for a rabbit. So her mother hovers over her and shows her orchids and jewel beetles, and when she shifts into that tiny body, she is there to corral her into the crook of her legs and stand over her. It is fortunate that the other-form grows fast. She was born pink, sightless and deaf. As a foal she has been as hardy as any of Vineine’s others, but for weeks, when she became her other, she was defenseless entirely. 

Against her mother’s wishes, she is shoulder-high in grass. She tiptoes, unsure on her paws, around the edge of a thicket. Now and then, she stands up tall to look around, her nose tirelessly wriggling. She lopes a step, nibbling selectively at the grass and forbs.

Her nose blinks. She thumps her foot hand on the bare earth, once. Twice. Her eyes can see all around her. Nearly a full panorama of the playground! So when that pup peaks a hill to her right, she lowers herself, creeping forward towards the safety of a raspberry bush. Maybe it is because she is sure he has seen her, but in a flash she abandons the idea of hiding, and rips across the edge of the thicket and then plunges in, her tail a flash of white. ’No, no, no…’ she thinks, ’come on, come on…’ She knows he must be on her trail, though in her wild panic she cannot quite tell. She is advantaged by her size, and she can navigate paths that he cannot quite as easily. She has found, sometimes, that panic foments the shift to her filly-self.

Maybe it is because she is so vulnerable like this, that the fusing of their souls has been a hurried process – she has a cursory grasp of this strange duality. Without sound, and with barely a perceptible shift in flesh, she no longer weighs a measly pound. Longear pants, stumbling a bit with the new ungainly length of her legs, unsure of whether or not to keep running or to turn and face the canine. With his teeth and her size, they are at a stalemate. She stops, ever the bold girl, and whips around, “I'm big!”

LONGEAR
Fiero and Vineine's little bunny.