A mare and her dog

by cammera

Night 22: As destinies are neared.

Applejack woke up relieved.

Calm mornings were something that she had definitely come to appreciate. Not a single...

Winona stood in front of the entrance with her ears raised.

Not a single sound.

"Aw damn it" Winona gave her a quick look, ears lowered and tail moving, and returned to her previous seriousness.

Applejack stood and opened the zip of the tent as silently as she could, then watched outside. Most of her range of vision was covered by bushes, so she walked the small path she had cleaned before in silence, Winona following.

The first thing she noticed was the amber glow, making it seem like the clearing where she had made the fire was alight. But there wasn't any smell or noise, so she advanced.

She barely caught sight of the ember wasp before it disappeared with a tingle. Shaking her head in annoyance, she went back to her tent to pack it before an idea came to her, that she had been getting far too sidetracked recently, so she entered the tent and grabbed the maps from her bags.

Oh.

Really?

She rummaged the deepest reaches of her bags for various minutes before finding a thick notebook. Granny had insisted in it being made of tarp, so it had only a few dozen pages, but it had paid off with time and the first pages had only slightly blurred ink. What mattered to her, however, was the very first thing written in it, by a hoof far older than hers.

"Huh," she took various tools from her bags and used them with the map for a few minutes "Yeah"

She put them all back, a small smile forming in her lips, and went through the motions of disassembling the tent and then folding it into a small package, the few telescopic metal rods of it tightened into what resembled ovals more than anything else.

-º-

Hours later, Applejack walked happily. As happy as one can be when walking in a forest filled with leg-breaking holes and dead moles, at least.

Winona regarded her curiously. They had been advancing northwest rather than straight west without nothing forcing them to, and Orange horse hat seemed happy rather than irritated about it.

Had dogs shrugged, she would have had. She'd find out soon enough.

A few minutes passed in silence. There was a tingle, and she looked around until her eyes fell in a small fire that followed them from a distance, nearly covered by the grass, before disappearing with another tingle. She would've shrugged at that, too: the fire had been chasing them for days now, and a quick experiment of its edibility had only resulted in her tongue feeling numb for the rest of the day, so it held no particular interest for her anymore.