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Summer kills by heat and drought, winter by icy frost and burning cold. Only autumn lets the landscape waste away by neglect. No suffocating layers of snow, but neither much warmth from the sun. It had been a long season already and the weather showed no signs of changing its mind any time soon.

The moon hung full and bright in the sky over but the light it cast was a weak blur, making the shadows of things clearer to make out than the objects themselves. Trees were tall dark smudges; only the shadows they cast on the nearly bare forest floor clearly showed how scrawny and silly they looked without their leaves.

A scruffy young owl perched calmly in one of the trees and watched. Several hours rolled smoothly by before its patience paid off in the form of a tiny dry rustling noise. Some of the dead leaves on the ground shifted slightly as a little brown mouse scampered out of a tiny hole in the dirt and made a dash for a thorny bramble bush that still had a few blackberries hanging on it. Its run was awkward, as if there were something lopsided about the little thing keeping it from moving properly. Not that the owl cared. It launched from its branch- a little clumsily, grace would only come with age and practice if it lived that long- and swooped in perfect silence for the little creature.

The mouse sensed the shadow overhead and looked up, far too late to run and hide again as the owl brought its talons forward to catch and crush it.

The mouse sprang straight up at the owl- mice are quite fantastic jumpers, have you ever seen?- and the owl flailed and flapped back while screeching in surprise with the sharp little twig the mouse had been carrying stuck in its side. It was a very shallow and harmless prickle, caught much more in feathers than flesh, but this kind of thing had never happened to the young owl before and he decided pretty quickly that if this was how the food acted in this particular area he could go find someplace else to eat. It landed to regain its balance and then flapped away. The little twig fell harmlessly to the ground.

The mouse kept running until it was hidden in the middle of the thorny berry shrub and glared up through the branches at the silhouette of the bird as it flew away.

"Yeah! Go on, you... you...." He couldn't think of anything, so he just finished with shouting "GAAH!" and had done with it. The little mouse was so agitated by this that he twisted back and forth looking for something to lash out at and ended up gnawing angrily on one of the blackberry shrub's branches, mauling it like a very small version of a lion tearing into a carcass.

"Nt lik anone cn hear mmn anway," it growled through the mouth full of twig. After a minute of that such activity seemed to tire the mouse out and it let go to flop flat on the ground with its sides heaving from exertion.

Once again all was quiet and still.

"I MISS FLASHLIGHTS," the mouse wailed as loud as it could manage.
Considering how loud this was... all pretty much remained quiet and still.

It took quite a while for the mouse to get a grip on himself, climb around the shrub looking for berries it could reach, chew the stems in half so the fruit fell to the ground, and then finally to drag the little harvest back across the clearing to its hole.
This latter part was a pretty big undertaking. The berries were bigger than his head, and every couple inches he had to stop and look around and be ready to run for it.

With all of that taken care of the mouse flopped on its back in the bottom of the hole and had another fit, flailing his legs around in the air and rolling back and forth, but he was so tired from all the work that this tantrum only lasted a few seconds. Giving up on that, it sat on its haunches and stared straight up through the burrow at the circle of sky above.

Yes, straight up at the sky. The fact that normal mice dig their burrows at diagonal angle into the ground, thus making it simple to climb back out to the surface, hadn't occurred to him until it was too late and he didn't really know how to go about fixing it. But he had dug this hole, dang it, the thing had taken forever and no way was he starting all over again. There were little divots scratched into the sides of the tunnel where he had started going about making handholds.

"Strike out on my own, 'e said. In the middle of the night without telling anyone where you're off to, 'e said." The disgruntled tone shifted gears into a high pitched mocking whine. "Find my fortune, don't want any help, 'e said. Idiot! You are an idiot, Biard!"
He was too depressed now to have an appetite for the berries that he had gone through so much trouble to get. He just sighed miserably and lay down on the cold dirt floor.

"How was I supposed to know this was what would happen? This is stupid. Stupid and not fair." He curled up in a tight little ball and closed his eyes. "I'll fix it. Will. I will I will I will."

"I refuse to have whiskers forever."