Porla 🌱✒️

The first thing she remembers was the scent of the fir tree, and the first thing she saw was the long hanging branches of the fir tree tickling her nose as she opened her eyes for the first time. Of course, she doesn't remember this, but she spent her first weeks there under that fir tree.
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Despite their different coat colours - her mothers being blue-ish and calm, while Porlas was firey - the resemblence was striking. Their eyes were the same shade of blue. Porlas mother was named Nypon, and Porla assumed it was from the Nypon flowers being bueish like her mother. But Porla was named Porla? It had nothing to do with herbs or plants, and Porla wasn't really interested in herbs and plants anyway. She didn't care about her mothers garden, but she did like the location and would sit and listen to the water fall, or follow the stream. Her favourite place ever was behind the water fall. The sound would become so loud it blocked out everything else, and she could sit back and relax. She did not care for her mothers patients, she actively avoided them, maybe she was even scared of them.
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The branch didn't crunch when Nypon snipped off the end of it using her front teeth.
"What are you doing?!" Porla shouted at her mother for hurting her favourite tree, a small fir that grew close to their den. Her mother placed the sample in her herbalist pouch.
"I'm going to use it to make some soothing tea," she responded calmly.
"You're making potions from a tree?" Porla was less angry, more curious now.
"Yes, trees are plants too, little puppy," Nypon smiled. Porla didn't want to admit it to herself, but this sparked an interest in her. At first he would sit next to her waterfall and peek out at what her mother was doing, placing leaves, berries and goo in a bowl and mixing it. Eventually she would sit closer, to see more clearly, but still hide. She would watch what her mother did with the potions, how she treated her patients. Soon, she was right up there with her mother, placing in the ingredients and putting it on the patients. The patients didn't scare her anymore, their sicknesses or their wounds had somehow become interesting to her, because she could figure out which plant would help them. To be honest, their suffering didn't phase her. She wanted to cure their illnesses, and of course she didn't mean them any harm, but she was never scared for their lives or their health. This somehow made her better at the job, as she faced every situation with a great calm, just like her mother.
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Porla knew what was happening, Nypon was prepping her for taking over the job. Even though Porla had a more charismatic younger sister now, Nypon seemed adamant on her decision.
"Listen," Nypon said and Porla stopped in her tracks. But there was no sound.
"What are we listening for?"
Nypon didn't answer, but led Porla further along the tracks. Porla understood that she wanted her to hear something. Porla turned her ears left and right. A bird chirping. The wind rustling.
"It's extremely important to be able to locate this when you have a sick patient," so Nypon was testing her. Porla thought harder. Something important to medicine. Herbs didn't make sound, you had to smell them out. Prey made sound, but that's too obvious, she knew that Nypon knew that Porla heard that bird chirping, it was a meaty bird so not the wrong answer if the answer was food.
"I can't hear it, mamma," Porla sighed.
"I think you can hear it," Nypon smirked and led her out through some bushes, to the shore of the river.
"Oh," Porla hadn't thought about it, the river roaring was something she heard every day, all day, it's like listening for the wind blowing. Nypon led her to the edge of the water and they sat down facing eachother.
"Why is water important?" Nypon quizzed her daughter.
"To not get dehydrated. To clean things. It's an ingredient in some potions. To soothe burns," Porla knew her stuff.
"It's time for a little story, is that okay?" Nypon smiled as Porla nodded. Her mother knew her well, Porla wasn't all that interested in sories; she was interested in facts.
"Close your eyes," Nypon instructed, and Porla did as she told her, "listen. Listen to the river porling."
Porla heard her own name, as if her mother had used it deliberately, but she didn't, it was the correct word for the sound the water makes as it hits the rocks on it's way to who knows where.
"Even herbs need water to grow. It's the basis for everything we do. It can't just hydrate you and soothe your burns, water has an ability to calm us down and help us relax. All on it's own, it is a great potion for mental health. I'm a herbalist, my mother was a herbalist, my grandmother and great grandmother and so on, they were all herbalists. The profession has been passed down from mother to daughter for generations, similarly to how an eye colour is passed down, or how the river creates a lake and from there then flows on to create another," Nypons lecture paused, " I want to teach you about the different waters that we have around here, so that you always know where you can find the source of life."
They were interrupted, someone came looking or Nypon to get help with something. Porla stayed behind. She looked at the water next to her paws, stretched her leg out to touch it gently. She felt how it poured around her paw pads. The lecture Nypon was teaching, it was a bunch of philosophical drabble, is what Porla would've called it. But she couldn't this time. Porla. Her name, she wasn't named after a herb that could help wolves not be sick. She was named after the very thing that gives life to all beings. Something you simply cannot live without.
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Craggy valley was far up in the mountains to the west. It wasn't all that far from the big lake in the mountain biome, but it had some smaller lakes that Porla visited first. Shit, she thought, because all the lakes in these mountains were empty, they had too little nutrition for anything to grow there, and Porla needed some water clovers for her feverish patient. As she reached the big mountain lake, she was in awe, it was beautiful. She decided to go back there some day when she wasn't in such a hurry.

Moonpond lake, Porla wasn't sure why it was called that way, seemed unnecessary. Why not just moon pond or moon lake? The lake was perfectly round, and the wolves were living on the banks of it. It was late autumn, and the water in the lake wasnt yet frozen, but very very cold. Perfect, because she was treating a wolf with a swollen eye and the cold water would help.

The next logical location would be Ember meadows, but she liked to take that one last, and if she travelled from Moonpond lake down to Sinewy river, she could stop by Somnolents seat and see if the alpha needed her to go somewhere, if someone was in dire need of help and she had to diverge from her usual path they would contact the alpha. Usually, wolves with medical issues would just wait until the set day of the week that she would visit their territory. This week, she didn't need to go anywhere else, but the alpha gave her food and Porla stocked up on some medicine that she was getting low on. She prepared big batches and stocked them here in a deep and cold cave, in the side of the mountain, that the alpha was in charge of. Porla also checked on the water quality in the pond she dug for the alpha, and she slept there for the night. There was no safer place to rest.

In Sinewy river, she was greeted with fish to eat. The woles sang to the tone of the river, Porla really liked it. But she couldn't stay here. One of the wolves had sore and stiff limbs, and Porla knew that could only be remedied with a bath in warm water. While the water around here was definitely warmer than in moonpond lake, it wasn't exaclty warm either. If it had been summer, she could've found a crease in the lake where the water was shallow, preferrablt one with a lot of rocks, and the sun warming it up, it would do pretty well. But it wasn't summer, and the sun wasn't enough to warm this fresh water that ran straight from the mountain. Well, nothing else to do but to escort the wolv toward the tundra, far above moonpond lake, to the warm springs. It was going to take at least four days to get there, so Porla went through the same way she had come, so she could tell the alpha that she'd be gone for some time. Of course, the alpha immedietly offered to take the wolf herself, but Porla knew the alpha had no medicinal knowledge. The situation became trickier, because appearently someone needed her help elsewhere, a much more serious issue. The sore limbed wolf admitted defeat and was ready to be escorted back to Sinewy by the alpha and hope that his limbs would soon feel better. Porla looked at the small pond she had dug. If only it was a warm spring. Porla wished that they had all moved somewhere more nortern, but then again, the aquatic plants up there die off too early in the year, she would have to make long journeys to find herbs. Then, she looked at the fire on the other side of the territory. There's no way you could heat up a big enough bowl by the fire, but.. And just like that, the alpha and her guards were using a big log to push some big rocks from the fire into the pond. The water actually warmed up! Porla knew it wouldn't stay warm for more than an hour, so she instructed the guards to warm more rocks and get the old ones out of the pond somehow while Porla helped her patient do some exercises in the water.

As she came closer to Ember meadows, she knew this one would be trickier. The name itself tattled on the situation; they had no natural water bodies close by. One of the residents there had a nasty wound and the fur was filled with dried up pus that needed to be cleaned up for her to take a good look. The wolf didn't seem to have an infection yet, and no fever, so Porla told them to keep their fastest wolf on a standby to send her word if the patient got worse, And Porla started travelling east. She knew there was water to the south, west and north, but they were so far, Porla just simply hoped to stumble upon a marsh that maybe she had missed due to it being dried up during summer, or something along those lines. She had several chalices with her to fill with water. When she had walked for a day with no luck, she couldn't hear or smell water, she sat down to rest for just a bit. Then she continued for half a day and realized that if she doesn't stop now, she could have just as easily walked to one of the waters that she thought was too far away. But she felt a weird scent. It felt like water, but not like she was used to, and she couldn't hear it yet, which was weird. Maybe a bog? No, no bogs didnt smell like this. She had no way of knowing if this water was fine, so she turned around. Almost three days later, she had finished washing the patient and gotten him back to his home.

Exhausted from this stressful and long trip around the territories and some more, Porla needed a break. She found her little sister, Ebb, and told her to manage the herbalist job for a bit. Ebb looked confused, but Porla knew she was smart enough to put on a few bandages. Porla left the territory. She was planning to go have some rest by the big mountain lake, but something pulled at her mind. She needed to find out what that strange scent was. She started travelling east along the big river, since it would be at least three days to walk she'd rather take a scenic detour than get there fast. She had been in the grasslands and the decidous forest before, but it was still nice to see them there on the other side of the river as she passed by. Along the way, she collected herbs and plants in her pouch. It was time to part from the river, to get far enough away from it that she couldn't scent it. So she started walking north-east. Slowly the scent of fresh clear water disappeared, only the scent of the forest remained.
-
She felt like she should've known something was wrong with this place. Its beauty coupled with the emptiness, no animals around. The waters crystal clarity tricking her, it wasn't clear at all, it had a weird taste and she should've known. Good things taste good, if it tastes bad it's bad. But she remembered her hike to the mountains many moons ago when she had run out of water and she had to drink out of a muddy puddle. The muddy water tasted weird but was fine. This time, she had run out of water a day and a half before. She was good at keeping her cool in these situations, but she was very thirsty and when she finally reached this huge body of water, bigger than any she had seen, she couldn't help herself. When she realized it tasted bad, she did go out to try to find a different water source, but her headache was growing and she decided to use the gross water to drink until she felt better. It's like nature had set her a trap. The water wasn't drinkable. She curled up into a ball in the sand, shadowed by a hill next to her. So this was it, what a stupid way to die.
She woke up to someone holding something up to her face.
"Here, drink this," she heard but when she saw the clear liquid in the container, she smacked it out of the wolfs grip. She didn't want to drink any more of that evil water.
"Fuck," the wolf cursed as he scrambled to catch the container, but he was too late, its innard spilled out in the sand. Porla felt satisfied, having eliminated her enemy, but the wolf seemed very displeased, "do you want to die? Ugh, alright, eat this."
He pulled out a bowl and poured something into it, something slimy with little black dots in it. He pushed it towards her mouth, she was too weak to lift her head but she sniffed the bowl and started lapping up the slimy mass, because it smelled like fish.
"That's a good girl," the wolf said and she was too exhausted to protest being praised like a child. The wolf took out some snippets of a plant and muttered something about it being his last, then he put them in the bowl too, "eat this as well."
Porla lapped at the plant. It was smooth in some parts and had thorns on some parts. She tried to gnaw at it with her teeth, but her whole face hurt too much. The plants were removed from the bowl and soon replaced with a greenish mush. Porla sniffed at it. He had chewed the leaves for her.