[indent][indent][h2][i]Nanook[/i][/h2][/indent][/indent]

Gently nuzzled into the thick, silky snow, Nanook quietly watched the village. Muffled breathes immersed from him. His eyes were no longer droopy with sleep and slumber, and swept in the sky by the soft bristles of the wind’s brush strokes were small ghosts, sprinkling their tears from the sky and keeping the yeti good company. He could hear their supple voices cooing the resting animals in midnight lullabies, yet Nanook was not tempted by their musical silhouette, berceuse drifting through the air. He was older, now. He was no longer a kit. The web of protection that the mountain had spun to protect the youth from all the dangers the wilderness had to offer no longer worked for him. He had lost his first tooth, after all. 

His body shook and frosty tears shed from his fur and landed invisibly and scattered amongst the padded snow that surrounded him. His movements were calm even if the barks of the trees noted his excitement. However, Nanook had no time to hush their twisted gossip, whispering into the roots and through their wrestling leaves, stirring in the commotion of Nanook’s sudden curiosity. Rumors were never guaranteed to be true, and the cause for his sudden delight could have been anything.  This time, the curiosity was just beyond the village, which he had been admiring on rare occasions through the years. The young yeti had only stopped to watch this same batch of humans and blanket himself in the snow for several hours, now. The rituals of habits seemed to be differing than usual — and on his birthday no less!

Large, white paws wadded into the snow and guided the beast forward down the mountain. His nose sniffed the cold air, breathing small lucid, frozen ghosts from his nostrils. They were fun to huff and puff as he moved forward in his elated sense of interest. The sound of the human’s voices whispered through the star-tears, much like the rumors that shook amongst the branches and leaves of the forest’s trees. Nanook was quickly drawing a preference for the messages being assumed in his ears by the star-tears. There was something more gentle and humble about them, like a familiar sound he once knew but had long ago forgotten.  

The hairs on his body rose in eagerness as he traveled closer. The humans’ scents were beginning to spread in the wind, now, as well. It lofted in the fumed ghosts that resonated around his breathes, and if he concentrated hard enough, he could see their scents interacting with each other. There were relations of which he knew nothing.  They hung around each other so oddly, like playthings toying carelessly with each other.  Something else was dwelling amongst the way they waltzed together in the twirls of smoky white, but Nanook was not concerned in his breaths telling him their stories. He wanted to see these tales for himself.  

Their voices were now looping around his collar and pulling him, yet. The curious sounds were so intricate and diverse with such meaning behind their melody. He wished to hear longer the noises they made and to watch how they moved and vibrated from their strange, hairless instruments. The music they seemed to make by simply — by simply [i]being.[/i] 

However, as Nanook gingerly moved in monstrous fancy, a shift in the air curled and cut through the light banter that was chuckling from the humans. He stopped in his tracks cautiously. The ghosts began haunting heavily in front of him like a cloud of haze. There was a different scent. It was much different. It smelled like the fear that roared quietly from behind his father’s teeth when the word [i]human[/i] was ever mentioned. The smell was still unfamiliar and foreign to Nanook, but there was something more tangible about it, now, like an instinct that had been contrived into fruition. There was too much stir now for Nanook to divide the workings of his surroundings. All he knew was something was [i]not[/i] right. He could hear it the loudest from the moaning of the trees as their leaves tussled against each other for intimate warmth and comfort and shelter.

His charcoal gray claws extended as his body arched upwards from being on all fours to being monstrously taller on two. Placid waves of vibrations grumbled disturbingly from snow and perverted through Nanook’s spine. There were multiple fears bending his ears back against his soft head, still sprinkled in the sugar of midnight snowfall. A youthful yearning for his mother began beating in his chest, aching for strength of knowledge to suckle him older and more mature. Even the wind was shifting courses, and as her painter lifted his wrist and silently removed the brush from his work, Nanook felt as if he had been pushed into an icicle. Time had frozen for him as he watched dark mute noises of nothing hold hands and dance sorrowfully around him while his mind began placing pieces of his puzzled disposition together.

[indent]Silence.[/indent]
[indent][indent]Darkness.[/indent][/indent]
[indent][indent][indent]Sickness.[/indent][/indent][/indent]
[indent][indent]Death.[/indent][/indent]
Silence of a single star-tear landed on his nose and broke the void of the foreshadowing disaster, shattering the unearthly stillness. As the moment crumpled rapidly in front of him, a boisterous avalanche of awareness and passion jolted into his body like a bolt of lightning, piercing through his naïve soul, and for brief moments, Nanook could see through the small, frail eyes of another being like an over-encompassing empathy beating energy and life through his own existence. He was for that immaculate instance not just a yeti, but he was also a human. It was as if he was wearing a disguise or a suit; but it was real; and like a spirit being drawn by the strongest gust of the wind’s breath, he was pulled from this corporal instrument and pushed through the mountain tops, blinded by all means of light and dark; but he could hear the echoes of future memories pulling through his mane, locking instinct and adrenaline into his desire for safety; and he could feel the branches of the trees scratching at his essence as they beat and tore long sentences of waft admonitions against his ears like a drumming pulse; and finally, he was thrust into his own furry apparatus -- tensed by tremoring compulsion and shock of muscle and mind:

[i]The mountain is sick, again.[/i]

There was not much thought put into the next course of Nanook’s actions. Not even the reoccurring remembrances that glimpsed his father’s angry eyes disturbed the duty that had unexpectedly embroidered itself into the weave of his soul. He could not stop the drumming desire that was now beating inside his chest, pounding his body swiftly through the wintry terrain. His body was back on all fours, flexing muscles and dashing over the upset stomach of the mountain, ill by raped contrition. The young yeti understood his father’s anger towards humans very well in his madness of sprint, but at the same time, still racing headfirst, he could not understand why his father would ever choose the path that he had chosen. There was something unforgivable about it. Not just the gray ghosts were crying out in the sky, now, but the yeti, as well, could feel his own tears drifting into place on his face as a fear he had never known erupted inside of him.

Fumes of panic and courage surrounded the yeti as he burrowed down the mountain, now retching her snow in giant waves of murder. There was more than one of them, and Nanook regretted not being able to help all of them. However, he knew and understood with full mind-body-and-soul, that if he did not rescue [i]his[/i] then no longer was he truly anything, anymore. His life would be for nought.

Large woolly arms swept an orchard body, limp from one of the mountain’s heaves having forced him unconscious. The whitecaps itched against his young, beastly legs and physique, but Nanook took little notice of the sharp pain cutting through his coat. A soothing comfort had swelled in his chest that [i]his[/i] was in his arms, and with willful forces, he plunged himself forward through rocks and thorns, riddled in the avalanche.  The tremors of shock he had experienced only seconds before the fall were keeping his senses clean and awake, even if his mind was black with only a single light guiding him to shelter. He had but one goal in mind that whined soothingly and hastily at the limp human under his protection.

Nanook’s grunts nestled in disdain as his body felt the mountain’s sickness uproot its hands and arms to pull his body under its star-tear ocean. Nanook had no will to give-up, though. It was no longer his own life, he was protecting. It was [i]his[/i] life. The warmth that was beating through a pale fire in the supple body’s chest was stilling in faintness, and the gray scissors of death, already having stretched forth to cut the ribbon that tied the two’s souls together, had begun to gnaw its stinging teeth against the seams of their unity. Nanook would not see that the end should be like this, and with rage and sorrow that was bitten back by ferocious bravery, he knew he would never forgive his father for what he knew and had done to their pack.

Especially not, if [i]his[/i] died.

A pained growl bellowed from the beast as his body slammed against a dark tree's muscular upper chest. Its leaves softened the blow and reported to him about a temporary haven as it desperately tried to hush and console the young kit, scratched and injured from the mountain’s man-made virus. It was not often that Nanook took advice from the gossiping trees, but in their emerging, nurturing suggestions, he caved to their rumors and dragged [i]his[/i] body and himself heroically beyond the drama that was belching from the mountain top. 

Time had slipped away from it's pendulum, and the yeti had no consideration for how long his body had muscled through the raging avalanche, nor did he have much mind to recall what anything was like aside from the wounds, which decorated his once soft, kept tresses in dark red. What seemed like only one breath of wind had actually been a time that lasted hours, and as Nanook closed his dreary eyes against his resting fur cold and chilled but safely secluded within the naked insides of a hollowed rock, he kept a small window of alertness over the ghosts that fluttered from his human’s body like timid phantoms as his own furry, crocheted body kept [i]his[/i] warm. 

Nanook did not care for how much pain he felt. He was most thankful for his birthday gift – the first piece of his totem had been drawn, and if there was any more tears to fall from his eyes, they were of happiness.  He finally found [i]his[/i] meaning.