Tail wagging!

The rest of the night is quiet.

She will tentatively sleep curled up next to the dog, in part so a surprise like this doesn't spook her again.

The dog has no complaints about this.

Songbirds wake her up with the sun again.

It's a good way to wake up. She checks her surroundings to make sure nothing has been particularly disturbed since last night.

It looks like the crow got a few good wing-flaps in before the dog cornered him, scattering her tinder again, but no harm done.

Sigh. She decides to leave the tinder be. And check on the friendly dog. It might have been hurt. And she should use her purification on him, just in case.

The dog seems to be fine, albeit not very happy about being held to be checked over.

Does the dog's mood is improved by scritching?

Yep!

What a good dog. Like all dogs. Scritch. Okay, she should eat something and then figure out what to do for the day. The weather has been nice (not that she would mind being rained on), but does it look like it's going to rain today?

There's a few clouds in the sky, but it doesn't look like rain.

Good. Since she has a new companion, she should figure out how to feed him. Dogs can eat not-meat, but she figures that it's time to figure out how to hunt?

She is not happy with this prospect, but that was going to happen sooner or later. Sigh.

There's rabbits back in the spot she saw them before, if she gets there before the sun gets too high, or squirrels, commonly, and other animals, less so, in the woods.

She will actually go for the rabbits first. Since, she knows they are around. Hopefully observing the dino-crow taught her something about being able to sneak on them. Despite being at least fifty times larger.

They're very alert, though not so cautious of her as to run as soon as they spot her.

They do scatter when the dog emerges from the tall grass at a run, but the unfortunate one she picks to chase isn't fast enough to get away from her, and soon she's trotting up to Phaidra with her prize.

Poor bunny, but what a good dog. Phaidra pets him and - presumably the dog lets it - she picks up the "prize" to remove the skin.

The dog allows it, and watches with interest as she works.

It's much easier to do it a second time. If not necessarily less icky. Well, it's less icky because she knows better when to use her power to turn blood into water. The skin ends up more intact as well. Phaidra gives a large portion of the meat for the dog, it feels only fair.

The dog is pretty happy about this!

When she gets back to her campsite to cook her portion, the fire has been blown out and the tinder scattered again, seemingly more purposefully this time.

Okay, crows, you win this round. She eats her rabbit raw while contemplating magical theory.

The dog sits with her while she does, but gets restless after a while and wanders off.

She might eventually get up to play with the dog a little or forage some more. Or maybe trying to figure out how to take notes. She has plenty of materials to work as a some sort of ink, but not a lot of paper substitutes or other surface area. The rabbit skins and her tunics wouldn't do, the ground is vulnerable to furry and feathery friends. Maybe she can experiment with sufficiently large rocks or skin bark? She will give it a try.

There are a few boulders here and there in the woods, and even a couple of spots with a handful of them clustered together, but none of them are very convenient to her campsite, and smaller rocks tend to be too round to make a good writing surface; she could move her camp to one of the groups of boulders, maybe.

She won't move her campsite just yet. Clearly, she can't take long term notes, so she will just use the boulders to help her visualize the magic when the theory gets too big for just one brain to hold.

Which all adds up to her scratching larger rocks with a smaller rock to pin down some of her ideas.

She's mostly uninterrupted at it - at one point a turkey stumbles across her, leading to a brief chase by the dog that ends with the turkey escaping up a tree - until late afternoon, when she has a sudden intuition, similar to the crows' communication, that someone is nearby.