Filth continued to explore the garden as Pride informed his granddaughter of recent circumstances. Some plants were hard to spot, but its nose did well enough to find them. The foal gathered a small pile of interesting-smelling things, fruits and berries that tickled its senses with sweetness or sour tangs, and shakily settled down to try these with a little more method than it had heretofore shown. It understood, after all, that eating was something that everyone did and that it might have to do for a long time, so one might as well learn how to do it properly.
It was halfway through these, pondering the taste of something that had looked like a smaller pench, when its teeth crunched against something that was not fruit. Out of curiosity it carefully spat the food back onto the ground and nosed at it. Something small but alive - alive in a way the fruit was not - had snuck along. It was a flat and shiny thing (later, Filth would learn the word was beetle) and it had tasted, on the whole, quite decent, though it was nothing like a plant. The foal picked up what could be salvaged from the from the fruit and resumed its meal.
Fruit, it decided, was rather nice. Berries even more so. A certain kind of hunger nibbled at its insides, however, and now awoken, it demanded attention.
Filth listened.
This time the sounds resolved into a clearer picture, each with a proper source. Its own pulse was keenest, closest, determinedly churning at its core. Other beats matched it all around; Pride's was strongest, a comfortingly steady rhythm. Vivilene's heart fluttered and danced prettily. Both of these creatures, however, were too big to eat, and the foal did remember that Vivilene had called it rude to bite people. Filth was quite certain it did not want to upset her, so it ruled them out.
Around them, though, were a thousand tiny flickers. The garden was alive with minuscule creatures flitting between flowers and fruits, doing whatever they were made to do. Filth did not need to see them now; its head whipped out, catching an insect in its mouth, silencing the impossibly fast and light heartbeats. At this point, it noticed not only the hunger, but a certain absence of something that it could not name but was certain it ought to have - some fundamental instinct of horseness that lay beyond its grasp.
There was an instinct that would have told it that this was not something horses did. That horses did not hunt, and that they were, rather, typically on the other end of such activities. This base knowledge never entered that cavity in the foal's psyche, however - and so it leapt gleefully around the garden in a burst of speed to nip at unfortunate lessers, spurred by the feeling that it was discovering something true about itself, something it was meant to do.
"I'm not hungry now," it announced eventually, trotting back to the cervines. "What's a zizos?"