Ace

I am just a lonely doe... My fur is blue and gray... It is thickening for winter... My eyes are green... Because the grass is growing shorter... I am not small... I am close to the height of most stags I am not weak But only the young are worth fighting for

All of my own have gone... As has my mate... I'm so alone

So I will find the lost fawns...

And lead them back all back home...

The evening forest is a quiet place. The air is cool and the sounds few; squirrels and birds are making their ways to their trees and nests. Trees creak and a few fall with the gentle push of the wind. Their cries can be heard all throughout the forest. The surviving trees reach up toward the sky, as if praying to the heavens so they extend invisible hands to help their brothers up. No such thing ever happens...the mightiest trees all fall.

There is however, one tree that seems it may never break and fall like the others. An oak, large and powerful, hollowed through br hands unknown. Here many deer sit and sleep, in the company of one another. The does all stay close to their stags and nudge their fawns even closer.

A heap of blue and gray fur stands up from their midst. She is so much larger than the other does, she even challenges stags with her size. This doe, smooths out her fur with her tongue and the fluffy heap is calm again. She has left a sleeping fawn behind, not hers, never, but she has just returned him to his true mother.

This blue doe is Ace. The first and last of her kind. She looks back at the tree a and then her green eyes look away as she trots off to the pond.