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 Posted: Sun May 22, 2011 9:28 pm
 Bronislawa had, in the tradition of all cubs everywhere, wandered away from her mother to find something more interesting. And what she found was a dead bird. A fresh dead bird. It didn't even smell bad yet.
Still, it was her first encounter with a dead thing that wasn't brought to her and her siblings to be eaten, pulled apart by her mother, and filling up her tummy. And this bird was too feathery to eat. What were you supposed to do with all the fluff?
What was she supposed to do with the bird?
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Posted: Tue May 24, 2011 8:04 am
 Odd hadn't exactly been following his sister. That would not have gone over very well, he suspected, as the lions in his family did seem to value their privacy pretty highly. However, he did happen to be going in the same direction, and so it wasn't entirely coincidence that they found themselves occupying roughly the same space at the same time. However, their attention was definitely held by different things.
Odd had been following a trail of markers which were leading him...somewhere. The markers had been grass stalks bent at a certain angle, each pointing to the next one, and somehow these stalks had led him to the exact place where his sister was contemplating a dead bird. Proof for the young cub that there were spirits in the world and that they did have something to do with a body's everyday life, if one just paid attention. So it wasn't really coincidence that he and Broni's paths had crossed. The spirits had wished it to happen.
"Hello, Broni," he greeted his sister. "Nice kill."
He was legitimately impressed by her having brought something down. He'd not yet tried his paw at hunting, but when he did he doubted he'd be ready for birds right away. Birds could fly, and he would have bet anything that made them much more difficult to catch and kill.
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Posted: Tue May 24, 2011 10:28 pm
Broni pondered this for a moment. She didn't bring the bird down, but Odd thought she did. Still, there wasn't anything to be gained by lying about this, that she could tell. It would end badly, especially if her siblings wanted her to get more birds when they were hungry and mom was out hunting herself.
Besides, her brother was a lot better at the spirits their mom said was all around them, and she wasn't very good at all. So who knew what her brother could actually tell about this, by way of the spirits?
Broni turned from the huddled black bundle by her feet.
"Hi, Odd. I didn't kill the bird, I just found it like this. Do you think we should take it back to Mom? It's got an awful lot of feathers all over it."
Feathers. Yuck. She had tried to eat some when she was really little. They tasted funny and they felt funny and as far as she could tell all feathers were good for was for looking pretty, but that wasn't doing the dead bird much good, was it?
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Posted: Wed May 25, 2011 4:04 pm
Odd might have been better with spirits, but that didn't mean he was a magical lie detector. Not yet anyway, and probably not ever. If he ever learned to tell when people were lying with any sort of accuracy, it would be because he had learned to read people, not because he was getting inside information from the spirits. It might have amused him to know that his sibling was unsure about his abilities in that area though.
"I...think no. We should probably leave it where it is. I'd guess it was here for a reason, or perhaps it was someone else's sacrifice to the spirits, and disturbing it would not be a good idea."
When it came to the spirits, Odd always chose to err on the side of caution. He wasn't afraid of the spirits, but he did have a healthy respect for them, as he had been raised to do. He also preferred not to mess around with things that had been dead for indeterminate amounts of time, he realized quite suddenly. It could have something nasty about it, and that could be why it hadn't been carried off or eaten by something else.
"We might tell ma you found it though. She might be interested." He wondered if he should mention how he had found Broni and the bird to their mother, or if he should just let Broni have all the fun of telling the tale. After all, she had found the bird first.
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Posted: Sun May 29, 2011 2:42 pm
Broni continued to look down at the sad little carcass. "Yeah, mom will be able to tell us what to do when we find dead stuff around." Dead things had always made Broni feel a bit queasy. Not the stuff they ate - she always felt that was just meat. But dead frogs, this dead bird, other things you didn't eat . . . it made her wonder. What was supposed to happen to them? Where did the bit that was them go?
Broni knew about spirits and all from her mother, but they had never really . . . clicked for her. And the vacant eyes of the dead bothered her.
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Posted: Tue May 31, 2011 6:09 am
Odd wasn't yet so perceptive that he could really observe and interpret his sister's attitude toward the carcass, and the way she felt about dead things. As far as he was concerned the only reason this carcass might be different from the meat their mother brought home for them was that it had died for another purpose, likely, than feeding lion cubs. Though, perhaps if he had been hungry when he began his game of following signs he might have thought that the signs had led him to the bird so that he could eat it. Signs and spirits were tricky things, after all, and very subjective.
"Calder would probably tell us we should just take it home and show to to ma," Odd mused. His brother was always one for adventures and pushing boundaries. Odd enjoyed their games of pretend, even though sometimes they could be really scary, but he would not have been in support of removing this bird. The more he looked at it, the more he thought it likely it was not meant for him and his sister.
"Probably then the spirits would get angry because we'd stolen their sacrifice and follow us home, and then ma would be mad at us, too." He didn't doubt that their mother would take the spirits' side in all this, as long as the spirits weren't bent on lethal vengeance. He didn't think a dead bird would warrant that kind of reaction, but then, spirits were spirits and not lions, so maybe they saw things differently.
"But maybe there'd be a really amazing battle between them," he continued, warming to the subject but then stopping himself as he realized that he was rambling. "Sorry. Just thinking aloud."
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Posted: Tue May 31, 2011 2:07 pm
"I think we probably ought to just tell her about it then, cause I don't know if it's hard to fight spirits or not and there are a lot more spirits then there are of us. Mom'd be outnumbered and it would probably take a long time and then she'd be grumpy cause she'd be hungry when she got back."
Broni also didn't know how a spirit fight actually went on, but she assumed it would probably be better not to risk it, especially when her mom had all these cubs to take care of.
"Plus that way she won't get mad at us for messing with stuff that belongs to the spirits."
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Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2011 5:13 am
Odd looked a little startled by Broni's suggestion. He'd figured they should tell their mother anyway, but he hadn't really expected his sister to take any of the rest of what he said seriously. He'd just been imagining things. Making up a story.
"I'm pretty sure it won't happen like that," he said, hoping he hadn't scared his sister. Calder said girls scared more easily, which always confused Odd, who hadn't noticed their mother being particularly easy to scare, but maybe Calder meant younger girls, like their sisters.
"Our mom's very good with the spirits. Probably she would just explain to them what had happened and then yell at us for a while. And maybe let the spirits yell at us - or whatever spirits do that's like that - just to make sure we don't do it again."
He had no illusions about the fact that if they were to get in trouble for bothering the spirits, their mother would protect them from real danger, but would probably not be averse to letting them suffer a bit for their transgressions. To teach them a lesson.
"So...yes. Let's not mess with it."
He was going to say something else then, to ask what they should do next, but then another thought occurred to him. He didn't speak it aloud, though, because he didn't want to worry his sister. What if he had been led here, and she had been led here, and they were both here as part of a test devised by their mother or the spirits, and whatever they did they would be judged on? He couldn't think why that should be the case, but he couldn't pretend to understand the spirits, either, and their mother was pretty incomprehensible, too, when you got right down to it.
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Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2011 2:26 pm
Broni moved away from the corpse, back along the route Odd had taken to find her. In her own way, she was more superstitious then her mother or her brother. She didn't understand the spirits, she didn't ever see evidence of them, she didn't really know anything about them except the vague and sometimes confusing information her mother gave her. Spirits were beyond her grasp.
She tried to make sure she never gave offense, never did anything to anger them, but the idea of being yelled at by spirits or punished was a bit too much for her. Broni was ready to get out of there and let her mom handle the spirits.
"So . . . I think you are right and we can leave it alone and tell mom and not get in trouble at all then. So we should go now. I don't want to get yelled at by spirits, or by mom, even if it won't be that bad."
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Posted: Fri Jun 03, 2011 2:46 pm
Odd nodded and said amiably, "All right. Let's go."
He was generally an amiable sort of lion who tended to avoid confrontation whenever possible. For that reason he also was not in the gabit of giving voice to his opinions unless specifically asked for them, and even then he tried to phrase things in such a way that it would sound like he was agreeing, even when he wasn't. He wasn't very good at that particular skill yet, but he would get to be at some point in the future, with practice.
In this instance, however, he was not required to pretend to be in agreement with Broni. He had another idea about the path he'd followed to reach her, and he decided that he had been led here by the spirits so that he could offer her advice which would cause her not to disturb the bird, the spirits' bird as it may or may not have been. That explanation made the most sense to him, and so he was ready to go home and tell their mother what Broni had found and how they had both been good and left it alone. His task was accomplished.
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