Welcome to Gaia! ::

Sambar walked slowly and carefully as the homemade satchel of cloth clinked against his side whilst he ventured over the uneven ground. He’d been rummaging through the stores of the healer’s cave and had managed to find a few unbroken bottles and clay bowls which he thought would be useful in his experiments he had planned for today.

Thankfully the pack, generally, was a very healthy bunch and the services of the healers were limited to occasional injuries or welfare check ups on the newest pups welcomed to the pack. This left Sambar caboodles of time to watch, learn, and study different conditions of nature. Today he intended to recreate an incident where he had observed a rabbit had eaten some rather ripe berries held onto over the winter season, to the point they would be considered rotten by most. The result was the strangest behavior, to the point that Sam had begun to think the berries poisonous or at least impaired vision, hearing, or orientation. He’d now set out to collect various berries, including the type the rabbit had eaten, and study them over time and examine their effects.

Who would the test subject be, the reader may ask? At this stage in the study, such details are unknown. Ideally, though, Sambar would find two volunteers: the first volunteer, a rabbit, given that was the original observation. If the rabbit revealed consistent, non-life threatening results… he would like to see the effects it had on his own species. Preferably, someone other than himself. For the sake of accuracy, of course.

In his earnest, it had yet to occur to Sam that the seasons had yet to be mild long enough to see an abundance of berries formed on the vines. Because he knew the berry eaten by the rabbit had been a summer berry, he would have difficulty finding such a item on his excursion today. Instead, he was able to find and distinguish a few red-colored berries, and even a greenish-white looking berry. The next difficulty proved finding the means to remove them from the tree…

Sam was your averaged height wolf, though he may have been leaner than most; this likely was due to his early youth in which he was “raised” by a doe. She of course wasn’t going to hunt down meat for him when his little sharp wolf teeth came in, and so she supplemented nursing him with vegetation and fruits rather than meat. This resulted in him being, generally, “smaller” than those his age… a side of effect also thus being his was lighter than most wolves.

Placing his cash of supplies and satchel down on the ground, the wolf circled the tree in hopes of a branch which offered a nice selection of the berries. Finding a limb which had several smaller twigs with red berries, Sam hunched to the ground near the trunk. Springing upward, his teeth briefly bit the tree branch before being dragged down by the weight of the wolf. The result was two to three berries being shaken loose, tumbling to the ground in a soundless bounce. Noting where they landed, Sam tried again. And again. And again. Eventually, there was an abundance on the ground, despite his best efforts to bring down the branch.

Undeterred, he repeated this process until he had gathered a selection of three different fruits, stored in the bottles which he replaced in his satchel. Happy with his progress of the day, Sam trotted merrily back to the caves, being extra careful not to clink his new stash too much in his exuberance.