Willow Deer's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Willow Deer pressed her nose to the murky pond and smelled rot. Three timid rabbits watched her from the ferns, ears flat, too scared to drink. She had promised to lead the shy animals of the woodland to safe water. But every pond she found was foul, or ringed with the tracks of larger predators. A young deer with spotted fur could not make a promise true on bad water alone. Her father stepped from the trees. Oakley stood tall, his great antlers brushing the branches. "You keep leading them to ponds you don't know," he said. "A buck learns the land before he trusts it." He lowered his head toward her. "I know the open streams. I don't know the hidden ones. The timid creatures need hidden." Willow's sister trotted up beside her. Lila Fawn carried a cloth pouch of small wooden cups shaped like acorns. "I brought your testers," Lila said. She dipped one cup in the pond and sniffed. "This one's dead water. I told you." Lila was younger, but braver, and she never let Willow forget it. The rabbits inched backward into the ferns. "Then I need a water source no one's spoiled," Willow said. A honeybee circled her ear, then hovered over Lila's pouch. It landed on the rim of a cup, drank a drop of clean dew, and lifted off again. It did not fly toward the pond. It flew the other way, up the slope, past a line of stones. "Bees always know good water," Oakley said quietly. "Follow it." Willow climbed after the honeybee. Lila followed, cups rattling. The bee slipped between two mossy boulders and vanished. Willow pushed through a curtain of ferns and found a cave mouth, dark and cool. Water trickled somewhere inside. The ferns hung so thick that no wide-shouldered predator could force through without tearing them loose. She stepped in. A thin spring bubbled from the stone into a clear shallow pool. Willow took a cup from Lila's pouch, filled it, and sniffed. Sweet. She touched her tongue to it. Clean and cold. "This is it," Willow said. "Narrow mouth. Hidden. Nothing big fits through those ferns." Her chest filled with something warm. She finally had a place to bring them. Lila peered deeper into the dark. "Willow. The water goes back further. And there are tracks in the mud. Big ones." She pointed with a trembling hoof. Pressed into the wet floor were paw prints, broad and clawed, leading toward the back of the cave. Willow's warm feeling froze. The spring was safe from predators outside. But something already lived in here. She had found her watering hole. Now she had to learn what shared it, before she led a single frightened creature through those ferns.