Whitetail Wood could boast in addition to its well known running track a series of meandering trails to walk. The area was much given to breezes and the gentle swaying of stately deciduous trees while the occasional conifer sprinkled throught added a dash of crisp fragrance to the air.
The trails had no given name, nor any particular course to be adhered to. Rather, the winding series of pathways intersected, doubled around, and looped upon themselves with all the self-evident pleasure and aimlessness of a pegasus in flight. All throughout the boughs of trees makde for an ever shifting kaleodoscope of green and blue, of yellow and white, of light and shade.
Rainbow Dash was aware of the trails. Once a promising slalom course for her training, quickly abandoned in the face of compliants for upsetting the atmosphere of this peaceful place. Crashing into ponies as well as trees had not helped matters any, and Rainbow Dash had been quick to forego the potential here for better pasture. Even now, a faint, acute and lingering embarrasment stirred in her whenever these walkers’ trails of Whitetail Wood were brought up in her mind, leading her to somewhat unconsciously avoid them.
As such, she had never actually walked them as intended. And Rainbow Dash never walked where she could run, and never ran where she could fly. Even at that, she flew always faster, the fastest she could go in her ongoing battle to push back the edges of talent and possibility.
But today she walked. A strange mood had taken her from the very instant of waking and had been omnipresent in her every thought and action since. Not unpleasent, not anxious, but unusual. Normally one to tear through breakfast like an obstacle, today she ate it in contemplative slowness, as if the assorted letters in her highly literate cereal might spell out to her some deep wisdom if she could but decipher their seeming and obviously feigned randomness. More vowels would have helped, but she was not so eccentric as to go fishing them from the box.
She might instead have picked up a book and so wiled away the morning until her usual spirits reasserted themselves, but the high-flying adventures of that arch archeologist Daring Doo - as loved as ever - were quickly set aside after just a few pages.
“Tank,” she said as she brought the tortoise his food, “hi.”
He smiled slow, and blinked slow. Dipped, chewed, and swallowed slow. Dash watched with absolute and uncharacteristic focus.
Slow, that word being such anathema to her nature, more vile an insult and offensive a slander Dash could not imagine, yet that is what she felt today, what this unusual mood was bringing out in her.
And it did not feel bad, she was quietly surprised to realize. Surely, if it had been a matter of having to be slow she would have reacted in a most volatile manner, zipping about in a raging bid to prove to everyone and everything otherwise. But the simple matter was she didn’t have anywhere she was needed today. She could choose to be slow.
It feeling a good idea, she took her pet for a walk. Not a flight, but a bona fide easygoing walk. At his pace. The trails that to her usual self were slightly repulsive in this mood and thoughtfulness became attractive without themselves having changed in any fashion at all, as if some internal magnet of Dash’s had been switched in its polarity temporarily so that all else was as it was not.
Tank, his expression one of pleased surprise, set out at a brisk and determined pace over the well treaded path. After a few seconds Dash took a step and caught him up. “Oh look,” she said, “there’s a bee.”
That such a heavy, bulbous thing could fly at all was impressive in its own right, and she tracked its fitful, erratic motions with an expert's eye. “Kind of like Bulky Biceps, don’t you think?” The unwitting object of Rainbow Dash’s observation settled on a wild rose. Unlike the romanticised and much cultivated variety this was more modest in its design, more humble in its scale and more practical in its application. The slim flower bent and bowed as it struggled to accomdate the sudden guest, whom wasted no time in rooting about for nectar and pollen upon which it gorged with everything of delight and nothing of civil manners. “Definetly him,” said Dash. “Oh, there he goes now.”
After a pause and a bee’s departure, Tank ate the flower. Three full-mouthed chewing motions and a swallow later he resumed his intrepid adventure onwards.
After some minutes of peaceful woodland quiet, they rounded the first corner together. Dash occupied herself with watching the scenery. A tree was so much more than a tree, a leaf so much more than a leaf. And Tank was definetly so much more than a tortoise. The way his shell rocked side to side, the creaking stretch of each leg and the slow manner in which it took his weight so that the next limb in procession might swing forwards; Rainbow Dash wondered what he might be looking at, what aspects of detail one discovered in slowness that, new to her, were utterly familiar and sagely in him. All this she took, thought and feeling and inclination, compounded it within her head and compressed it into her mouth as a deeply moving utterance:
“Huh.”
She tried again.
“You know,” she hazarded, “going slow ain’t all that bad. It’s different, yeah, not really what I’d normally do, but...” Dash stopped and turned to the tortoise. She smiled. Tank smiled too, albeit slowly. “It has its good points.”