She brought her wandering mind back to the situation at hand. She was in no real danger of starvation. In a crisis she could contact someone in the outside world, but she would not activate her beacon unless she truly thought the end was near. Instead, she thought about the meaning of the bird, where it might be spending the end of the afternoon and whether it had come in greeting or more likely, as a warning for her not to fail in this, her journey.
As the sun lowered in the sky and the heat of the day was replaced by the cool of the evening, she began to hear the sounds of the desert dwellers stirring. As the nocturnal creatures emerged from their secret places to bring the land back to life for the night, she thought she saw the same small bird perched on a shrub, using its beak to reach between the spines and pick free some small bits of plant. She thought of how she, too, seemed perched precariously in this dangerous place, hoping to avoid painful thorns and take away something nourishing.
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