Alone in the Shivering Dark
The first thing Chip felt was wet.
Not the warm, familiar dampness of her mother's tongue smoothing down her fur, but a cold, seeping wet that clung to her like a second skin, sinking through fur and flesh until it seemed to touch her very bones. She blinked her eyes open, one and then the other, and found herself staring up into a canopy of broad, dripping fern leaves, each one trembling under the weight of fat droplets that fell in a slow, irregular rhythm — *plip, plip, plip* — onto her upturned nose.
She sneezed.
The sound startled her almost as much as the cold did, because it was *her* sound, small and sharp, and it had no answer. No warm bodies stirred beside her. No low rumble of her mother's chest rose and fell against her side. No tangle of brothers and sisters pressed their paws into her ribs the way they always did when the pack slept in a heap beneath the big roots of the mother tree.
There was only her. Only Chip. Only the cold.
She pushed herself up onto trembling legs, her paws sinking into a carpet of rotting leaves and soft black mud. Everything ached in that strange, hollow way that came from sleeping wrong, or sleeping somewhere she had never meant to…