Murkcrow slowly picked his way through an unusually treacherous area of the swamp, carefully stepping around rocks and roots hidden under murky water. Though the path was dangerous, it lay between Murkcrow's home and his mother's, part of the reason he had opted to settle where he had. He knew the route by heart, but his mother, and more importantly his sister Midnight Sun, weren't likely to venture down it without good reason. Admittedly, it did make visiting his mother, Shadelight, a good deal more difficult, but moving straight through the deep swamp was faster than going around it. The buck jumped carefully up onto the first of several trees that had been knocked over in a massive flood some time before he was born. His mother had recounted the tale to him once, when he was young, and the thought of all that rushing water made him cringe. The trees were easy enough to walk on, for a kin with good balance, but they weren't the most stable, and Murkcrow had to jump lightly from one to the next to avoid dislodging them. As he paused on one log to catch his breath, he looked around. A spot of vivid color caught his eye. Purple...? He squinted. There were a lot of flowers around this time of year, but there seemed to be way too much of that one color for just flowers. Thinking about it for a moment, Murkcrow decided to climb down and investigate.
Much to his surprise and amusement, what he found as he walked closer was a doe most bucks would describe as striking (but simply not his type) with long, purple hair that had somehow become tangled in the roots of a fallen tree, on an unusually jagged rock, under a dead stump...She was trapped so completely that the hair had somehow ended up wrapped around even her legs. She looked like she couldn't move. Murkcrow barked with laughter. She glared sharkteeth at him.
"You look like you could use some help," Murkcrow said when he was standing over her.
"Don't need any help," the doe muttered, still glaring at him as she struggled to stand up. Murkcrow ignored her and started freeing those violet tresses from their snags.
"You're going to have to stop struggling if I'm going to get you free," Murkcrow said as he unwound a lock of hair from the uprooted tree. "Or you'll just get stuck again. That's probably how you ended up like this in the first place."
"Leave me alone," she said, a bit louder this time. "Or I'll kill you when I get free."
Murkcrow shrugged. "Suit yourself, then," he said as he started to walk away. He didn't get very far. Somehow the doe managed to grab his tail in her teeth. She did not hold back. He noted with some dismay that her teeth were sharp and pointed like a crocodile's. His tail was going to need some medical attention.
"Alright, alright...ouch," Murkcrow said. "Just hold still and then we won't ever have to see each other again."
The doe settled down, glaring at Murkcrow whenever he got a bit too rough with her hair or pulled it by mistake. Murkcrow tried to make conversation while he worked.
"This part of the swamp is really dangerous, you know. You're lucky I came through. You might have been stuck there until you starved to death."
Silence.
Murkcrow tried telling her about his family, but he inevitably lapsed into silence again when she did not reply. She's not much of a conversationalist, he thought.
Finally the doe was free. Murkcrow sighed with relief and sat down to rest before heading back home.
"Could you at least tell me your name? My name is Murkcrow."
"Thecrocodileseeksherprey," she said, a little too quietly and a little too quickly.
"I didn't quite catch that..."
"Just call me Stalker," she said, surprisingly loudly, before turning and strolling off as casually as if she hadn't been trapped by her own hair for hours.
"Not even a thank you," Murkcrow muttered, but he was surprised to see her glance back at him once before she disappeared into the forest.
