Her stomach hurts so bad. Insistently, it grumbles, as if it thinks that she is withholding food from it, as if there is any to withhold. She is so so hungry, but one look at the pitiful prey pile tells her there is someone else who needs it more than her. Leaf-bare has not been kind to them. Her ribs just out of her small frame, her pelt, once silky and full of life, is dull and dirty. She does not have the energy to wash it. She does not have the energy to do much other than occasionally go and look for more herbs and then to curl up in her nest and sleep. Some of her more worried clanmates will insist she eats, she knows. But they need it more.
Her green eyes dart down to the water mint she had just collected, her paws numb from the cold snow and ice. She had no idea what these were good for, what most of the herbs in her den were good for, but she recognized them and so she had picked them. Her stomach rumbles again and she groans from the hunger pains. It feels like her stomach is eating itself from the inside out. Desperation is what causes the black and white she cat to bend her head down, to lap up a leaf and chew. For a moment after what she has done she is worried. What if it was poisonous? Something in her head was begging to reveal itself to her though, something that told her that she knew what water mint was, what it did.
Water mint is good for belly aches the thought enters her head at the same time her bellyache disappears and her eyes alight with the newfound knowledge. She is excited to have learned something, to have remembered something, without Bonejaw's help. "Water mint is good for bellyaches!" she declares weakly to no one at all. Beesong had told her her first medicine cats gathering, how could she have forgotten?
