Night settled over the lands and brought with it a briskness to the air. Perhaps it was Reed's imagination, but it felt like the winds grew stronger as the night grew longer. Above, the sky was overcast with stars sprinkled in between the dark clouds that stretched across the sky. There was little sound outside of the running river as the night shifted into the early hours of the morning where even those who were nocturnal began to settle down for the day. Reed called this time of day the in-between.
Reed struggled to stay awake. Saying you were going to do something and actually doing that something were two very different things, one much easier than the other. In truth, Reed was exhausted from the happenings of the day, not to mention her past moon of travel. She was a burly wolf, and with a guard layer to help keep the salt of the seas away from her finer undercoat, it meant that the heat and the walking got to her more than it might others. She fought away the soft lullabies of rest, however. She kept her mind busy instead of letting it fade and drift off.
'Eleven, twelve, thirteen,...' she thought to herself as she counted the boulders scattered about the bank of the river. She tried to keep an exceptionally close eye on the berries, but she'd lost track of exactly where they had been pretty much as soon as darkness fell. Oops. Just as she was moving her gaze along the riverbank, using the glow of the moon on the waters in the river as a backdrop, she saw a figure outlined in dark shadow.
Suddenly, Reed wasn't feeling so tired anymore. She focused her gaze on the shadowy figure as it slowly picked along the edge of the riverbank. Slender legs, thick body, slender neck and a narrow head. It looked to be some sort of deer, but it's size didn't make any sense. Reed expected a deer to look smaller at this distance, but this one looked really small. "Hey" Reed whispered at Larkspur, her tone hardly audible with how quietly she spoke. Then she remembered Larkspur's words. "Wake me up if you need help". Well... she didn't need help exactly. It would be nice to have, but she didn't need it, so she shouldn't disturb Larkspur, right? Had she already woke them up with her first whisper? She didn't dare take her eyes off of the shadow to check, afraid that if she did, she wouldn't find the creature again. With careful, quiet steps, Reed crouched and moved down the river towards the small deer creature.