Starsong

The black creature before me rose on its hind legs kicking the air in front of me with its hoofs as if to prove that it would not hesitate to use them on me.

In fright, I took a step back and waited a while before I summoned enough courage to regain my ground.

The creature had frightened me, but it was a fear mixed with curiosity and father had told me not to back down.

Now that it was standing on all of its four legs again, I took a closer look at the creature it wasn't completely black. It had a speck of white on its forehead in resemblance of a star and small white streaks just above its hoofs on all of its legs except its left front leg.

Once again curiosity gave me courage enough to advance another step, and I raised my hands intending to make me look bigger, I had seen my father do the same when he herded this creature and its mother into the enclosure, a mother who by the didn't seem to care about anything but the lush grass beneath her.

The mother didn't even seem to care about the predicament of its offspring.

In response to my advance, the creature folded its ears backward, elongated its neck and opened its maw to show me the whites of its teeth.

"River!"

Both I and the creature startled by the sudden commanding baritone voice of my father.

"As much as I'd like to stand here watching the foal of a man and the foal of a mare having a contest of wills, I'd like to have today's tasks done before the ancestors claim my presence amongst them in the sky. Let it be clear, both of us will be visiting them if the food is not done before your mother return from her council meeting."

"But!" I objected with a sullen look on my face. "He's so pretty, and I really wanted to pet his forehead."

"He will be pretty tomorrow as well, and it looks like he's not gonna let you get anywhere near him today."

My father pointed with his cheek towards the black foal, who now glared at me hidden behind his still unconcerned mother.

I let out a small sigh, then I went to pick up the two sacks of wild rice and blueberries before I ran laughing towards our cottage.

"I won't have to worry about meeting the ancestors anyway. If Mother comes home hungry, there is enough meat on your bones to last her and a pack of starving wolves for at least a week." I jeered my father while leaving him behind.

***

I've been running for as long as I can remember, Mother always said that I learned to run before I learned to walk. She usually followed that sentence with 'if you only learn to think before you act.', which of course is nonsense, I always think before I act.

I like that feeling of having the world rush me by, and I love to challenge the endlessness of the horizon. Before I befriended Starsong, I used to run towards that thin white line fusing the endless green below with the boundless blue above, until I fell to the ground of exhaustion.

I turned my eyes on Starsong the young black stallion who was drinking from the creek a couple of short steps away from me and reminisced about our first meeting. Both of us had the same height then. We've both grown taller these past three years, the same amount to be exact, both my head and his withers ended five and one-third of a foot above the ground.

I let my self sink down into the creek. The cooling water rinsing away the filth and sweat, a production of the day's long ride, felt refreshing.

The ripples subsided, and I beheld my reflection on the water surface.

It was a thin face that the water showed me. A skinny face with freckles covering the entirety of the nose and cheek areas, and fire red hair flowing down my left shoulder in an unkempt braid. The eyes were the shade of grasslands, the nose was long but thin, and my mouth was petite, not for kissing, Hawk had informed me, not that I'd like to kiss him anyways.

After I got out of the creek and wiped myself dry with a towel, I put on a new set of clothes and reached into the saddlebags for some dry meat to eat before starting to collect some dead wood, for a fire, from the sparse trees surrounding the creek.

When I had gathered enough and split it into fitting pieces I put them in a pile inside the ready-made fire bed then I sat down, closed my eyes and started to concentrate.

"Let the spirits roam through you, and let their energy course through your veins" I murmured the teachings of my father. First, nothing happened, but then, a slight tingling feeling permeated my body. In response, I opened my eyes. The world before me was now very different from previously, all varieties of colors swirled around, some moved with the wind and the creek, others shone out of living matter, there were even faint colors glowing on and above the stones and the ground.

In my mind, I reached out to seize a patch of red floating past and willed it into the dead wood, where I tried to focus it to a single point.

I had to redo this multiple times and was ready to curse my paternal grandmother Fire, for not blessing me with her skills but leaving me with her read hair and damned freckles.

A few moments went by where my connection with that now small red dot wavered until it suddenly exploded out to cover the entire fire pit.

The smell of burning wood caught my nose, and I let the world fade back to normal.

That's when I heard the sound of hoofs in the distance.