:) Thank you for letting me peep into your process of writing this story. I found myself in there. It happened to me to that I started out with a tempting idea and had a sense of great coherence but in the course of letting it come to life, some errors sneaked in and it started to get lame here and there.

had really wanted to push the boundaries.

Oh, I totally get it. When I intend to push boundaries, the exact opposite is going to happen. I lose my spontane momentum and become too eager in pushing it. The best lines produce themselves, as the saying goes, and happen in moments of ease but really get stubborn, once you push them. Once the ease leaves me, for this is also a guarantee when I am not faster (LOL), I call myself stop writing. Short stories are so great because they can be born in an instant, in one fluent go. While a book takes a lot more planing and brain juice.

I think you did really great with your easy lines and they certainly come across!

Ah, the bloody cow - didn't even cross my mind to think of how I was gendering him/her.

HaHa, this gives me again a good laugh, the way you formulate it!

I had no specific bird in mind, just the feeling that a bigger one might do the service to me as a reader, for I ascribe less humanly properties to smaller birds for whom my minds eye does not reserve any observational language but which might sound like so: tick, fly, tick, chirp, tick, danger, tick, warmth, tick, cold, tick, companion, tick, tick, tick ...

So, call me full of it, but I see a raven, maybe because of the movies I've watched or when I watch them outside behaving like they've got a real thick brain :)

When you see large water birds and you get all excited and easy going again, that might be the moment of another momentum.