January 18, 2018
Meet Tawny
On Devonia, a world far from here, but more deserving of the name Earth’s Twin than Venus, a dengee (a strong, wolf-dog-like creature) female birthed a litter of pups. One of those tiny, sightless, nearly deaf, fluffy balls was a tan-brown female with black rings on her tail and black markings. Her first two days of life were normal for any dengee pup. She shoved her way to her mother’s warm belly and warmed herself inside and out with her mother’s milk and thick soft fur.
But then something unexpected happened. She was too young to understand, but the lead pack male was forced out by a trio of incoming younger, stronger males. In the dengee world, those males would then destroy all of the previous male’s young. Although some of the mother dengees had been wounded while trying to fight them away alongside the pack male, others resigned themselves to their fate. The new trio of males, one lead pack male and the other two his cohorts, hunted down and destroyed all the six dens with the old male’s pups.
What the pup knew was that mean teeth snapped at her and a rough angry paw tossed her out of the warm den and into the cold early morning where it was just as dark to those with open eyes as it was to her blind self. Miraculously, the tiny female pup, now heavily injured, managed to elude her pursuer and slide into the edge of a frigid creek. She called for her mother. She cried will all her might.
Her new mother heard her cries.
Alena Summers, a human child fishing on the bank of the Ice Cube Creek that early afternoon, heard the pitiful calls of this lonely baby and followed the sound. Joseph Taylor, another human child, swam into the cold water to rescue the blob of tangled fur from her prison in the bushes on the edge of the water, and there Tawny became a ward of the humans.
This little three-day-old dengee pup whose eyes had never seen her own kind was rescued from drowning by two children and warmed in her new mother’s soft apron. Tawny’s life had already been so full of turmoil! Even on the bank after being rescued, the other children considered tossing her back because dengees were deadly foes to the humans – attacking their livestock and more than once, even the humans themselves. Thankfully, Alena wouldn’t have that; she took full charge of this tiny creature.
With slow, tender, loving care, Tawny’s wounds will heal. Four days later, at only a week old, and without yet opening her tiny eyes, little Tawny will face another challenge as the council of elders on Devonia has to decide if Alena can keep this dangerous animal. Of course, Alena and her friends will swear that this pup is nothing dangerous – but that remains to be seen.
For now, Tawny, the newest member of the Devonian settlement of Covenant, is resting with warm Brown-Sheep milk digesting in her belly laying on a soft rag-blanket-bed on straw in the Summers’ barn listening to the sounds of Alena’s pretty lullabies, Brown-Sheep ewes, and baby lambs and dreaming of new warm sun on her body and the soft, warm love of her human mother.
If you want to read about how Alena, Joseph, and their friends find and rescue Tawny, you can read A Foundling Furball!
Thanks for reading!
Type at you later…
~Nancy Tart
