Patrick has been working his way back southward from the westward beaches for a few days now.  Maybe because he has grown board with roaming or maybe because he is feeling guilty about not checking in at home lately.  Still, guilty or not he is certainly in no hurry to get where he is going.  His hooves step with a surety and purpose but his pace does not grow beyond an energetic walk.  Some nights he stops to sleep and others he does not.  The most recent night was one of the later kind.  Though that time it wasn't by choice.  He'd come upon a nice sheltered dip at the base of a grassy knoll and settled himself in, still standing of course, only to get rained right out.  Patrick has not in the past appeared given to bad tempers but that rain sure seems to have done it.

So it is that, distracted by his unnaturally foul mood, the sandy-coated lad overshoots his destination and ends up going much farther east than he likely intended.  Now the boy has come to the edge of a deeper, darker wood than any he has ever seen.  He stands at that edge peering tentatively in at the thick blackness and dancing his weight left to right as he presumably considers whether or not to enter.  Once he turns to begin retracing his steps back to the trail he knows but this doesn't last long before he is again gazing almost hungrily at the unknown place.

In the end he enters and travels cautiously along until he finds yet another meeting of mostly adults and some children centered around a small group of non-horse creatures... spiders to be exact.

Oh, no, no, NO! Not again!  I've just spent time gathering nasty, filthy bones at the command of the weird water thing.  Sure, I went at the task with the same gusto that I do every task I put myself to but I didn't like it.  Since then, I've decided I will not do anymore gathering without finding out why because I always ask why about everything else and why shouldn't I ask why about gathering too?  Even though I really like gathering...

Of course, I will still help Big-Horn and Gold-Crown because I said I would and their gathering is a good kind of gathering... I think.  Also, all those shiny rocks I like to find aren't bad things I don't think so that is probably OK too.  But gathering ants for spiders?  No, that I wont do.

One, they are icky, sticky, spiders....

Two, ants live in dirt and I am already dirty enough from that stupid rain.

Three, these spiders want to eat the ants don't they? I don't ask other people to bring me my food, well not anymore, so why are these spiders doing it?  Are they babies?  They don't look like babies...

For a short time the boy just watches looking between the active horses and the plotting arachnids.  There are some among the horses that he recognizes but none that he really knows, yet.  After studying the productivity of the others he weaves his way through the crowd trying not to disturb their work, he may have grown cautious and questioning and even momentarily grouchy but he is still not the type to maliciously ruin someone else's project.  At least not on purpose. Coming to stand off at the side of a web he narrows his soft blue gaze on the nearest spider, flips his ears back belligerently and voices just one word.

"Why?"