A cold wind blew from the north, piercing straight through Nauxha’s thick fur and chilling her.  She sat alongside the other adults from her tribe, watching an elaborate ceremony unfold before them.  A muscular bull was decorated in the colours of their people, accompanied by a few similarly-dressed attendants.  He was speaking to them, words which had been spoken by others in this same ceremony generation after generation, but Nauxha wasn’t paying much attention to him.  She’d seen this before, and it was not so captivating that she wanted to listen to it again.

     Their last leader, Ngare, had died a half-season ago.  In her prime, she’d been sure-footed and strong, but by the time of her death that had all waned, leaving her a wise but feeble elder.  All it had taken for Ngare’s life to come to an end was for her to take one wrong step navigating the mountains of Rekes.

     Nauxha remembered that moment with great clarity.  A whelp of their tribe had gotten quite ill, and Ngare had taken her and a few others with her to forage for medicine.  Distracted by her search, the old doe had stepped too close to uneven rock near the edge of a steep precipice.  It crumbled underfoot as easily as though it had been made of sand, and Ngare tumbled along with it.  One of the nearer tsabhua made a grab for her, but it was too late.

     The hike down to the valley below to retrieve Ngare’s body for a proper burial had taken hours, but no one complained.  She’d been well-liked, and Nauxha herself had looked up to her.

     Losing her had stung.

     Nauxha blinked away the memories and turned her gaze to the young, copper-coloured buck that her tribe had chosen as their new leader.  As a physical specimen, Ekavan was peerless; as a person, Nauxha found him wanting.

     Younger does fawned over Ekavan; even now, several of her juniors stared with rapt attention at the way the paints of rust-red and black accentuated his muscles.  Nauxha was neither young nor old; his grace would not have attracted her, regardless of other factors.

     And there were, indeed, other factors.

     Ekavan was young.  That was not itself a crime, but he remained as bull-headed as he’d been the day Nauxha had met him.  Was she the only one who recalled how, not so long ago, he had led a group of his tribemates to quarrel with a neighbouring tribe?  He’d won, but Nauxha firmly believed that the conflict could have been avoided if someone not so hot-headed had been in charge.

     And now he would be steering the whole tribe.  They were doomed, weren’t they?

     Once the ceremony was finished and Ekavan formally marked as their new leader, Nauxha retired to her quarters.  The camp was a temporary thing, set up in a valley between mountain peaks that was far enough away from the cliffs to be safe from most rockfalls and avalanches.  She had chosen a spot beneath a stand of tough Rekes trees as her space, the boughs providing some shelter from the wind and rain.

     Now that Ngare had been replaced, it wouldn’t be long before the tribe packed up and continued its wandering.  She slipped into her tanned hide tent, and began to consider what she wanted to pack away now, and what she would still want to access before they departed.

     As a whelp, Nauxha had collected anything that interested her; rocks, oddly-tangled clumps of roots, suns-bleached bones she stumbled across in her wandering.  Though her tastes had become more particular, she’d kept up the habit.  Her great passion was learning.  Now she kept woven blankets she’d traded for from other tribes, to compare their weaving practices and dyes, and gathered their stories into her memory, and collected bones not because they had simply looked interesting, but because she wanted to compare how the shapes changed between different species.

     Ngare had encouraged her habit, and would sometimes consult Nauxha when a topic came up she thought the doe might know something useful about.  When there were tensions with a tribe Nauxha had encountered before, their old leader might have asked about them, and she would have shared what their textiles and legends told her of their nature.  It didn’t always prove vital to saving the day, but sometimes Nauxha’s knowledge informed Ngare of just what the best gift for peacemaking might be.

     Ekavan had never shown an interest in such things, nor in Nauxha.  The doe paused over her collection, tapping her fingers on the temporary shelves and racks she’d put up, and then slowly began to pack everything away.  The most fragile items were wrapped up in spare bits of cloth, while the sturdier stuff was put away bare.

     She suspected she would not be consulted again for a long time yet.