Spring was in full flower

Spring was in full flower the day she decided to hunt ptarmigan for Creb’s favourite dish. She thought she would look over the new growths and begin re-stocking Iza’s pharmacopoeia while she was at it. She spent the morning ranging the nearby countryside, then headed for a broad meadow near the steppes. She flushed a couple of the lowing flying fowl, brought down quickly by swifter stones, then searched trough the tall grass looking for a nest had hopefully some eggs. Creb liked the birds stuffed with their own eggs in a nest of edible greens and herbs. She uttered an exclamation of joy when she spied it, and carefully wrapped the eggs in soft moss and tucked them into a deep fold of her wrap. She was delighted with herself. Out of sheer joyful exuberance, she sprinted across the meadow in a fast run, coming to a halt, out of breath, at the top of a knoll covered with new green grass.
Flopping to the ground, she checked her eggs to make sure they were undamaged, and took out a piece of dried meat to lunch on. She watched a bright yellow-breasted meadowlark trilling gloriously from an open perch, then taken to wing and continue his song in flight. A pair of golden crowned sparrows, warbling their woeful tune of descending pitch, flitted among the blackberry canes at the border of the field. Another pair of black capped, grey coated birds named by the chick-a –dee- dee of their call, darted in and out of their nesting hole in a fir tree near a small creek winding its way through the dense vegetation at the floor of the knoll. Small, vivacious, browns wrens scolded the others as they carried twigs and dried moss to a nest cavity in an ancient, gnarled apple tree, proving its youthful fecundity with its flock of pink blooms.