Okay, so he had to hand it to that Slaiter fellow – he knew a good meadow. He hadn’t been to sure about this ‘Helovia’ place when he had first arrived in that forest. Yeah, okay, he liked a good forest. But that one was just so prickly and there was nothing comfortable about it. Wilibald liked open forests, filled with clover and lavender where he could waste away an entire day lying down and eating and eating while he was lying down. It was a little early in the year to figure out whether there were any places like that here, but in the meantime there was plenty of snow.

And snow was wonderful for napping.

In fact, that was precisely what Wilibald had been doing for the past few hours – recovering from the trip here and wondering if he had been gone from home for long enough. Maybe not. It really had only been a couple days, which was the longest anyone had ever been away from the herd since his great-uncle Ferdinand had gotten lost one winter and showed up the next summer twice the size and strangely enough completely black from head to hoof when he had been brown before. He also demanded that they call him Padfoot from then on and he actually looked more like a wolf than a pony.

But it was totally his uncle and from then on, they all knew what happened when you left the safety of their valleys.

Curiosity was the greatest sin, and yet here Wilibald was – lying in a bank of snow that had formed to his chubby sides – and pondering just what he would transform into before he returned home.

Lying on his side, for he found that curling his legs up underneath him wasn’t altogether comfortable in the snow, he looked up at the grey expanse of afternoon sky – it rather looked like it would snow soon. He should move on, find some shelter. His coat was thick – already there were little balls of snow caught all underneath his belly and his chin. He felt at least a hundred pounds heavier because of it but still; the chill would get in before long. He should move on.

But instead he stayed where he was, a happy little pony lying in the snow, and decided to hum himself a little song. For all the strangeness he had seen (one horse with a protrubance out of his forehead was enough for him) at least he could still be relatively satiated (winter was terrible for keeping bellies full) and fully rested. Not a bad day if you looked at it that way!