What about a deer?
“I like deer!” Nod bounced, “they’re great big, and not very fast, but they can go really far in a day and they don’t try to eat you. They eat leaves and bushes and grass and sometimes mushrooms.
“If you’re nice to them they let you sit on their head and ride them places and it’s really fun when they have antlers in the summer because then you can ride way up high. Their antlers fall off though in the winter and Ronin has a knife that has a handle made from deer antler and he says when I’m older I can have one too and I’m older now than I was when he said that so I think I’m old enough but he says I’m not and that’s not how it works, but I think...”
“You were talking about deer, chickadee,” Ronin interrupted the on-going argument about what “older” really meant.
“Oh! Deer have spotty babies,” the boy smiled, “and they’re soft and warm and sometimes there are two of them and the spots go away when they get older, but I wished they stayed because the spots are pretty.”
(Thank you for the ask! Nod likes deer and could sit and ride on their head all day if he didn’t have other things he needed to do.)