Another day.
Another night.
Another dawn.
Another dusk.
Time moved on. So, so very slowly. And so fast too. Time was a funny thing, so scarce as too be treasured, so meaningless as to be forgotten with ease. Hinote had little patience for time anymore. Little value of time. Time just. It just was. And that was all. It dragged on, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, though never so slowly as it had when she had first begun to wait. And after, when time began to seem so very long, it had begun to move more quickly. Hours turned to days, days to weeks, and time blurred. Became frightening. And then…then she forgot. A promise broken, and she would forget. She would. In time. Just a bit more, there was plenty of time around to slip between her claws.
The young maned wolf snorted, pawing at the earth outside her den. There was an urge to dig, to expand, to change. Sometimes she wanted to change something. The feeling never lasted long though. Not anymore. It was too difficult to bother caring for long. Things like a desire for change could not last, not when they did not matter. Not when illogical things were simply dismissed. It was nothing but foolhardiness to invest in emotions, trivial and fleeting things. Somehow this had made sense to her at one time, but that time had passed.
Time always, always passed. It never lingered, never slowed or hesitated. Not for any beast. Not for any one. Not a one. So why worry about it. Why worry about anything? Take ‘now’, and make ‘now’ what it needed to be to ensure that there would be another ‘now’ to come later. It was a simple motion to go through.
Motion to go through… Slowly her light pawing grew stronger, Hinote’s paws digging into the dirt. It welled up between her claws, cool and thick and soft from her pawing. Digging was a motion. It changed things, changed the earth, changed the landscape. Not much. A meaningless little hole dug by a purposeless little creature could hardly do much of anything to, well, anything. But it was a thing to be doing, and she could not help it. She wanted to do it. It was strange to want to do something, and stranger still to want to waste energy on meaningless things like this. Hinote did not need a hole. There was no point in making one beyond making it.
It was something Kasai would do, she determined as she batted at the fresh mound of dirt she had made, her gray paws browned by it. Her brother was full of useless silliness like that. He did senseless things because he wanted to. Walked for days to see her because he wanted to. Worked himself to exhaustion for another, for no reason other than that of… well. Wanting to. It was foolish. Her brother was a fool. A soft hearted, sentimental, nonsense spouting idiot. Kasai would understand the digging. It was part of what made Hinote so certain it was silliness. He was always being silly like this.
And his foolishness was contagious, or so it seemed. Just the thought of what he would do, how he would act, it had her mind turning in circles. Around and around on itself. There was no purpose in that. In fact, it was ‘silliness’ to allow herself to dwell upon his silliness. Foolishness. Sentimentality. To have come all this way to tell her goodbye. To have traveled all this way just to see her. To see if she were well. To see if she missed him. Well he knew the answer to that now, certainly. And that was that… she did not miss him. She did not need him. She did not need anyone. Did not want anyone.
Hinote was independent. Self sufficient. Solitary. And what she wanted was to be left alone. It was something her brother had not understood. He had worried, but that was just his sentimental silliness again. He should not be worrying about her. Nor anyone else for that matter. A person needed to look after themselves. No one else ought to be important. And no one else was going to look after them either. Well. No one reasonable. Kasai seemed inclined to do just that foolishness. He seemed happy to do it. Silly brother of hers. He was only going to get hurt.
She did not care to tell him that she had told him as much, had warned him. Or tried to warn him at the least. It was no longer her problem though. Time passed, time moved on. He needed to move on as well. All the others she had met did. They knew to keep moving along. The young lion who nearly drowned himself in the flash flood near her den just recently. The little wild dog pup who had wandered away from her family, the little white and red puppy must be grown by now. Time was a funny thing, was it not? That she could recall so easily watching the gangly-legged little one bound off, and if she saw the same one again they would be an adult and likely larger than she herself was. Perhaps even with little ones of her very own.
Strange it was. Just as her desire to dig and dig that had come out of the blue skies today was strange. Time was strange, Hinote decided, settling back on her haunches to survey the mess she had been making. The hole was moderately shallow, but spread out and large enough that she might lay in it if she liked. Perhaps it would be cooler, out of the hot savannah sun. But she already had her den for that. She had no need for a hole. Not for being cool. Not for hiding things. Not for any single thing that the maned wolf could think of.
Strange and silly. Kasai might have understood. She could not understand why her thoughts kept running back towards him. She did not need him, and so she did not need to think of him. Nor did she need to think of the inept gray lion with the white markings on his shoulders, like little wings. Nor the splotchy red and white puppy, with the heart shaped mark upon her chest. Nor any of the others who had disturbed her solitude in the past. The little brown wild dog of the mountains swam into her mind then, utterly unbidden. Hinote had forgotten that one. Despairing, she had given up. It was a sensible thing to do, but at the time…
…at the time Hinote had disagreed. She had called out a teasing remark, a playful encouragement, and then there had been a… something that bloomed when the little pup sprang to her paws and bounded off with new determination. The maned wolf frowned down at her muddied paws. Yes. Yes there had been a… a something there. It had been before. She had been up the mountain, exploring, indulging in curiosities and adventures with…
But that had been before. When she had also been silly like her brother. “...the fool,” she growled, roughly pawing the dirt back into the hole she had made. She did not need a hole. And she did not want these thoughts. There were more important, more necessary, things that she might be doing. Not sitting here like a fool.
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