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A girl and her cat - Corsair - 11-18-2010
This is the current draft of my Novel-In-Progress, currently titled 'A Girl and Her Cat'. The title will obviously changed later on, but I can't think of a better title right now. The premise is that a girl is kidnapped on her way home from school but escapes her captors, deep in the Montana wilderness. This story is her trying to survive, and along the way, acquires a strange companion. Current Word Count: 4,394
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A girl and her Cat
Novella by Alexander Sexton
As much as I was annoyed at my mother for it, I loved her to death. Since she diviorced my father and “won” the lawsuit to keep me and my brother under her roof. Wasn’t hard, since my father was a drunk and meth-head. He wasn’t always like that, though. I remember him before the drugs, when I was about ten years old. He would pick me up and swing me around, until we both collapsed on the couch to watch Dora the Explorer, calling me his “favorite daughter in the whole world.”
Six years later, he’s just a violent and broken husk of a man, leaving two terrified children behind. Mom tries to keep us together with regular wilderness outings. And I mean WILDerness. We might come across a trail during our travels, but we only follow it as far as it’s convenient. Then we’re off again, forging our own trails and whatnot. We learned early on how to take eighty pounds of camping equipment and make it quiet by strapping down the loose bits and walking carefully.
I sometimes think my mom is part Native American, because she makes illegal camping an art, and sometimes, a crime movie. Hiding in the bushes as forest rangers try to pick up our trail when we get clumsy. While we’re trying to be one with the ferns, mom’s grinning. Not a huge, crazy grin, but a sly one that makes you think she sees it all as a game instead of a crime. When the rangers pass, we strike off after them, staying a distance back. They usually turn one way or the other, and we are able to slip past them.
It’s a risk every time we go out, but our mom always seems to have a plan for whatever may arise. Once, it was a cougar. And all of the sudden, she draws a crossbow of all things from her pack. Me and my brother, Oscar, watch with fascination as the cougar creeps forward, and then, twang! It falls over dead with a bolt lodged between its eyes. And then out came a skinning knife. “Looks like we’re getting some variety to our MREs tonight, kids.” She said, advancing on the corpse. We ate cougar that night. I think my mom is ex-Spetznaz or something.
Our expeditions always take an excess of a week to complete, since once we’re good and lost in the woods, mom stops giving directions and tells us to find our way back using a compass and natural geography. Whenever Oscar is in charge, we always end up following a river to a fishing hamlet of some sort, and then walking sometimes dozens of miles back to our car.
When I’m leading, I like to think I use a more efficient and intellectual method. I take us to the peak of the nearest mountain and use a compass to locate North. Since we’re in the Wild Mountains of Montana (trademark), north isn’t the direction we want to go. Getting lost in the Canadian tundra doesn’t appeal to me.
We always get home, though. Sometimes there’s a period of panic where even mom doesn’t know which way to go. Once we spent three weeks out there, having to fish and hunt and trap for our food, since we had run out of our MREs. It was fun, but I always had this sarcastic “When will I ever need to do this” thought in the back of my mind.
Sooner than I thought, it turns out. When I really WAS lost in Canadian tundra, fighting for my life. And more than just the local fauna was trying to kill me. Humans are worse than any hungry wolf prowling the night.
It was about a week after the latest family expedition. Summer was over, school was back in session. Due to unforeseen complications I had missed my first two days of school. Mom explained it as a “overdue vacation”. Nonetheless, I reunited with friends, showed off my latest bug bites, and it was calm for a few months. It was back to the usual routine of social manipulation. But it was hard to find a boyfriend when two thirds of your summer is spent on some remote mountain. It was fun to show off my wilderness-tested muscles. Some of the guys teased me about them though, saying that I was more buff than some of the guys in Weight Training class.
Walking home became a game for me. There was a road that ran almost directly from school to my house, but I never took it. T here was a scenic route that ran down the back of the school into the woods. The woods wrapped around most of the town, conveniently to my backyard. I began charting routes that would get me home fastest. I felt remarkably primal, dancing through the trees like I did. Leaping of tree stumps, weaving through thick trunks, ducking under low branches. I almost didn’t see the club someone swung at my head one day. It swished through my hair and I heard a confused grunt belonging to someone who didn’t expect my reflexes.
Screeech said my shoes as I dug into a halt. I spun around and dropped into a low crouch. The man standing behind the tree was still recovering from his missed swing. I didn’t take time to ask what he was doing. Mom had warned me of rapists. Dirt sprayed from my shoes as I charged at him, and jumped up, driving my knee into the base of his ribcage. I surprised myself with the power of it, because it lifted him off his feet and slammed him into the tree. I pushed off the trunk with my hands and landed on the pine needle covered ground with a crunch. The man wasn’t looking too good. He was coughing, holding his chest, and groaning. “Kill the bitch.” He said, and I too late heard the soft snapping of branches as his accomplice attacked me from behind.
For a while, I wasn’t aware of anything. White spots danced on my eyelids that contantly changed colors. Red swirled into green into blue and back into red. My ears were ringing with a vengeance, and it felt like they were bleeding. My head felt like someone had drawn a line down the center and said “Put the axe here.” My body was numb, but I could feel movement. I could feel being carried, being put down on something, and then movement. I opened my eyes to more darkness. I thought I was blind, and panic began to rise. I wanted to rub my eyes, feel the damage, but my hands were tied behind my back. I painfully rubbed my face on the floor and felt the distinct chafe of fabric. So it was a blindfold.
My feet were bound as well, and I could feel that my shoes had been removed. Now that I wiggled around more, my clothes were all gone, save my bra and underwear. That was when my panic rose to an all-high, but I forced myself to stay calm. First thing was to get the blindfold off. I found a loose spot and rubbed that on the ground. The blindfold slipped off and I could see where I was. There wasn’t much light available save the evening light slipping through the cracks in the door, but I could tell it was a van. I was alone back here, but there was a visor, on the wall to the driver’s area. It was closed, but I assume that they would open it now and then to check on me. I had to move fast. My hands were tied clumsily, with more emphasis on causing pain than staying together. With the right wiggling, it was loose enough that I could grab one of the knots and tug it loose. My hands came free, and I sighed with relief, rubbing my wrists, which were now red and slightly swollen. My feet were tied better, but I was able to subdue the knot and move my legs freely. I looked around for my clothes and found only my jeans, which were muddy, but as I inspected them, clean from men. My pockets were empty, which I had expected. You don’t kidnap someone and leave them with their cell phone and wallet.
I slipped back into my jeans, glad for a little more coverage. I looked nervously at the back doors to the van. I could try for a jump, but I’d probably just break legs and cut myself up. And then they’d just turn around and grab me again. Guess I just have to wait for them to slow down.
The road became bumpy, jostling me from side to side. Every now and then, we would swerve, so I got the picture of us driving through more woods. I balled my fists up and began to think about utilizing a weapon. There was nothing back here. The visor was the only thing I could grab onto.. The visor.
I crawled over to the wall, and felt around the visor. It wasn’t designed to be opened from this side, but if I pushed on it slightly, then I could scoot it over slightly. I slowly opened the visor and probed with my finger. There was no bar or mesh that would stop me from reaching through, and the opening was just large enough for my hand to reach through.
I quietly slid the visor open. The two men were chatting, and I listened in.
“-and when she kneed me? God, it ****in’ hurt. I was ready to kill ‘er.”
“Can’t have fun with a corpse.”
“Damn straight. I’m gonna’ make her scream.”
I grit my teeth and moved fast. My hand shot out and grabbed the drivers’ hair. I shoved his head into the window, and drew it back, and did it again. The effect was instant. We swerved, and I barely pulled my hand out of the slot and retreated from the wall before we slammed into a tree. I tried to curl up into a tight a ball as possible. I slammed into a wall, then fell to the floor. The van was quiet.
I felt energy flow back into my limbs when stirring came from the front of the van. I tried the back of the van, but the door was locked. I backed up and tackled the door, which left bent pieces of metal lodged in the door. I landed on a forest floor completely unlike the ones back home. The ground was covered in twigs and brown leaves, not pine needles.
I could hear groaning from the van. I rooted around on the ground for a short, sharp stick. I found one to my satisfaction and took a few shaky steps to the driver’s side of the van. The door was jammed, but the window was broken. The front of the van was bent like an accordion, and as I looked in, bent around the tree. Both men had their legs pinned by the metal. The driver looked to be unconscious. I didn’t take much time to wait for him. As I looked at the bruises on my bare body, my rage flared again. I blacked out.
When I regained my senses, I was running through the forest, and I tripped on a large, gnobbled root. I sprawled in the dirt and leaves, my body heat being leached into the ground. Cold began to set in as I wondered what had happened. I pushed myself up, and let out a yell as I saw my hands. They were covered in blood. I wiped them on some leaves, to find my hands were not cut. It wasn’t my blood. I looked back the way I had come, but I couldn’t see any trace of the van. But as I sat on the ground, memory began to trickle back. It was sporadic and loose, but I can remember the sensation of plunging stakes into two screaming throats.
I was shivering by the time I motivated myself to get back on my feet. Daylight was about gone, and night had already descended beneath the trees. My shivering turned into sobs as I sat on the leafy ground, lost and confused, hurt and cold. I was still half naked and I had no shelter.
The first thing I thought of was my mother. I should have been home a long time ago. How long had we been driving? Hours? Days? But it was hard to think of her as the weak, weeping mother. In my mind, she was berating me.
“Get up, lazy girl. You can’t just sit there and feel sorry for yourself. I’ve prepared you for this day, now get going. What’s the first thing you need to do when you’re lost in the woods?”
I sniffed, and replied, “Find shelter. But where? It’s dark, I’m cold and have no shirt!”
Mom snapped back, “Build one. There’s building material just lying around. Make a lean-to for tonight, and gather leaves as your bed. It won’t be warm, and you’ll have a hell of a bug problem, but it’s better than being completely exposed.”
I stood. My legs were rubbery, but I commanded them to obey me. I set about finding long, straight branches and boughs. I kept my ears perked for the sound of a stream or river. What I found instead was a huge oak tree, with a conveniently flat face, which I used as my wall. I began to stack the sticks against the tree, and within an hour, had a functioning lean-to. I began to look for bedding, but the oak leaves were rough and uncomfortable. It was pitch-black, and I had no choice. I used my jeans as a blanket as I slept on the grass, curled into a tight ball.
Stiff. That was my first thought. My first sensation as I woke up. Fragmented sunlight peeked through my lean-to branches, filtered already by the oak leaves. It was cold and damp. My skin was damp with dew. I struggled back into my jeans, which seemed to have shrunk overnight. I crawled out of my shelter, blinking in the sunlight. I looked at my shelter and laughed. In the darkness, it had seemed adequate. In the light, I could see that if my foot had nudged it slightly, it would have fallen on me.
I need to find water my dry throat said. Not hard right now. Water was dripping softly off the treetops. I gathered up as many wet leaves as I could into a pile. I cleared a patch of dirt that was only slightly damp, were I put dry sticks. She was lucky to find a branch that had fallen recently enough that it wasn’t rotten, but long enough ago that it had dried in the summer sun. I broke this into several smaller pieces of wood.
Now came the tricky part. I had to climb the tree to get to the acorns and wet, green wood. The gnarled oak tree was easy to scale, and was soon throwing down plenty of green nuts and branches. I climbed back down, and made piles of each of these new resources.
I began to weave the sticks together, sometimes splitting a stick in half to make it fit. I ended up with a flat ‘plate’ after about two hours of weaving. I began to work on the fire, putting dry twigs on the broken branches, and dry leaves all around that. Dry grass was hard to find, so I had to make due with a strip torn from my jeans. Taking a sturdy stick and one of the logs, I placed the stick between my palms and began to rub them back and forth, the stick drilling into the log.
My arms began to get tired as the first hints of smoke were spat out. I rubbed harder, and the smoke grew more intense. I shoved the first scraps of dry leaves in and gently began to blow on it. The leaves began to smoke, and for a moment, flared. I fed this small flame with more leaves, coaxing the fire, begging it to come out. I moved it to my small fireplace and fed it small twigs, encouraging it to grow. The fire licked and began to consume the kindling, reaching out for a more satisfying meal. It grabbed the dry branches and spread underneath its bark, the unlucky insects inside sizzling and popping. I sat back and watched the fire as it grew warmer. I stuck four green branches in the ground around the fire, and placed my green stick plate on top of that. It held.
I piled my wet leaves on top of the plate, and soon they were sizzling, spitting out steam. I held my strip of jeans in this steam until it began to drip with a cloudly water. I pulled it out of the steam and put it in my mouth, suckling out the water. It tasted like smoke, but it was refreshing. I was able to get two more jean-strips worth of water before the leaves ran out of water. I piled some more leaves on the plate and got another three mouthfuls of water.
I fed my lean-to into the fire, waited for it to die out before I began walking. I had been watching the sun move, from the East as it trekked across the sky. It was dipping into the afternoon time, and so I turned to follow its path. If that’s West, and behind me East, then turning left will take me south. South will undoubtedly take me back to civilization. I don’t know what stretch of Montana I’m in now, but South will take me closer to somebody.
I walked south for about three or four hours when I got hungry. Like my hunger had been biding its time and waiting to hit me all at once when I was tired from walking. Finding food out here wouldn’t be terribly difficult. I’d been grazing on berries that I’d come across, and picked up the occasional chestnut that wasn’t rotten or green. But I craved meat. Back home, I climbed to the tippy top of moral high ground with my pesco-vegetarian diet, but this wasn’t back home. I had the savage urge to find the nearest rabbit and bite its head off. So I set off to making a trap.
Snares and such were drilled into my memory. This was a basic noose snare, that would grab the hapless critter as it tried to snatch the morsel of berries and nuts I had laid out as bait. With luck, I’d get a wild bird such as Turkey or Pheasant. As the sun got lower, the air chilled and began to feel heavier. Damper. I felt my hair experimentally and felt drops forming in it. It was going to be a wet night, and a lean-to wasn’t going to cut it this time around.
The sound of gurgling water distracted me from setting traps, and I followed it until I stumbled across a small brook, a few feet wide and about three feet deep. The water flowed slowly, but it was crystal clear. I took a couple of experimental sips. It didn’t taste like there’s anything dead in it, so I took some longer swigs, pacing myself so I didn’t puke.
I felt like a thin rubber balloon filled up with water, ready to burst at the slightest jab of needle- or in my case, twig. I sloshed back to my traps, and was pleasantly surprised to see that a rabbit had already wandered in and had its neck snapped. I removed it from the trap, and moved back to the stream. This was as good a place as any to set up shop and camp.
Today I wanted a more elaborate shelter, but light was waning fast, and I had to make due with another lean-to made from sticks and stones driven into the dirt. I had to import some boughs from the forest to cover the ground, which was strewn with sand and rocks. I crawled in as the last of the light stopped glimmering on the stream. I slipped into another exhausted sleep.
Small noises brought me back to my senses. Scuffling, and a faint crunching. My growling belly told me that I had forgotten to eat my rabbit. I almost groaned. Some scavenger was now eating what I hadn’t. I peeked through my lean-to walls. It was a.. Cat, of some kind. I didn’t study wild cats too much other than they’re big, have sharp appendages, and are usually hungry. This one had white tufts on its cheeks and from its ears. It watched me through my lean-to. I didn’t move until it had finished eating. Panic began to rise as it circled the lean-to. It didn’t find an obvious way in, so it started nudging the boughs, forcing them open. It pawed at the rocks holding them in place, and they fell away easily.
I was sitting cross-legged in my shelter, watching it the whole time. Now that it had an opening, it lay down, crossing its paws, watching me as well. Its amber-yellow eyes blinked regularly, and slowly. It wiped its slightly bloody muzzle with its tongue, enjoying the flavor of the rabbit all over again. I don’t know how long we stared at each other. But the silence was broken by my stomach, which gave a rebellious groan. The cat perked its ears. Then it stood up, and padded away, apparently having lost interest. I watched it slip through some bushes and disappear. Bizzare. I thought. But the cat was gone, and I was hungry. Time to check my traps.
Before I left, I used one of the longer- straighter branches and rubbed it briskly on a large stream rock until it was slightly sharp. With a panicked thrust, it might scare a smaller predator away. I hefted the rock as well. It would likely do more damage than the spear. As I did, I shivered. I needed a shirt, and fast. It was cold out here, and I was losing my “safety fat” quickly.
I set out at a jog, going from trap to trap. But each one was either empty, or empty with blood splattered around the trap. I really shouldn’t have gone to sleep without checking them. I thought miserably, my stomach giving another whine. I returned dejectedly to my camp, and there was the cat again. It was sitting in its way, with its back legs sprawled to his left, and his front paws crossed. It watched me as I approached it. It licked its chops smugly. Fresh blood was decorating its muzzle.
That was too much. I would rather die from this thing’s claws than being consumed by hunger and exhaustion. The cat saw my weight shift, and was already up and in a fighting stance. It started a low growl in its throat, and its eyes closed to slits. I leveled my spear at it, my feet digging into the dirt as I watched the cat. It wiggled its haunches slightly, and I recognized the gesture. My housecats did it whenever they were about to pounce on a mouse. But this wasn’t a housecat. This was 175 pounds of wild muscle, and I was the mouse. I ducked and dove as the cat sailed overhead. I landed with a summersault roll, and pushed myself onto my knees as I finished the maneuver, and turned in time to see the cat recover from its miss. It turned towards me and pounced again. I swung with my spear, and it connected mid-shaft with its head, which didn’t do much damage, but diverted its flight path. It slammed headfirst into a tree. It collapsed to the ground, dazed.
I got to my feet and pointed the spear at its neck, ready to finish it, when it began to growl again. But this was different, it wasn’t a harsh, angry growl. As it got louder, I could hear that it wasn’t a growl, it was a.. purr? The cat was purring! It got back on its feet and looked up at me, and something close to amusement twinkled in its eyes. A trickle of blood ran from a cut above its right eye. It ducked its head and pawed at the ground. It dug up three rabbits, all perfectly intact and frosted with ice. I saw the red marks around their necks. These were the rabbits from my trap, that the cat had taken and buried so that they didn’t rot.
I dropped to my knees, suddenly dizzy. This cat was more than it seemed. I hesitantly reached out, so that it could smell my hands. My cats did that at home. This cat followed the routine, and brought its muzzle to my hand, sniffing it, identifying me. Then it pressed its muzzle to my hand, and I began to pet it. Its purr got louder. I could feel a canvas of scars painted all over its neck and body. It lay down again, and I could see this cat was a female. I said to it, “Well, do you want to keep me company? I’ve got a lot of work to do.”
And it was true. Three rabbits would be a good start, but she needed to create some tools before she moved any further. This was a good place as any to build. Plenty of clay, wood, water, food and stone. But I had the knowledge, and now, as I looked at the cat, a companion.