Stranded With The Snow Leopard

by Jade White

  “Oh, mind if I text you for a walk home after? With Smiley around I don’t want to walk home by myself,” Kim asked

  “Sure, if I don’t answer I might be asleep. Junior can fill in for me in that case,” Tony said with a grin.

  “Yeah, that works,” Kim replied with a warm smile. She hoped that Tony would be able to make it, but if not, Junior would make sure nothing happened to her. He might be deaf and mute, but he wasn’t an idiot.

  CHAPTER 11

  Eight o’clock rolled around and Kim made her way to Betty’s house once again. She felt nervous flutters in her stomach regarding the coming of age talk the girls were going to have. She had no idea what to expect, and it concerned her.

  She was undoubtedly an outsider. The girls knew her pretty well, but not as well as they knew Betty. Would they be able to open up like they need to with her there? Would she be the one that would hinder their first transformation?

  Crickets chirped in the bushes as she approached Betty’s house. She walked up the driveway and inhaled the spicy scent of the flourishing herb gardens. Rusty was at Tony’s that evening with the boys for their coming of age talk. The ceremony was slated for next week, and they will all be shifting together in one night, contrary to how it traditionally occurs.

  Kim politely knocked on Betty’s front door and waited. The door slowly opened and Betty’s wizened face peeked from around the corner. “Come in, come in. We’ve been waiting on you!”

  Kim smiled and stepped inside the warmly lit house. There were lace doilies on the two end tables on either side of the floral couch. A mahogany coffee table was set with a vegetable platter and a bowl full of dip for the girls to snack on during the meeting.

  Kim sat down on the couch and looked around. She saw two pre-teen girls sitting on chairs, stiff with anxiety. One girl had her short dark hair cut in a pixie style, and wore a baggy hooded sweat shirt to hide her slightly overweight frame.

  The other girl was slender and had long black hair which was tied in a ponytail low on her head but offset. She wore light makeup, and a tight Hello Kitty T-shirt and shredded jeans.

  Kim sat nervously on the couch as the two girls shyly eyed her up. She had no idea what to say to them so she just awkwardly sat in silence, staring at her hands.

  Betty came bustling in from the kitchen carrying a pitcher of iced tea. “I’m sorry I forgot to introduce you three,” she began. “Kim, this is Jennifer and Mary. They’re the two girls that will be going through their first shift next week. You need to know about the mating ceremony. Those two are tied together. Even though you won’t be shifting, you need to know about the mating ceremony,” she explained.

  “I see,” Kim said, understanding as the two girls nodded in agreement.

  “Now, it means I’m going to be doing most of the talking. These girls have heard most of this before from their mothers and grandmothers, so most of it won’t be new to them. It will be new to you, so feel free to ask any questions that you need to, dear.” Betty’s wizened face smiled warmly as she pushed one of her braids behind her ear.

  Kim reached out and grabbed a carrot stick and dipped it into the creamy looking dip. She took a bite and was quite pleased it was onion. Her favorite.

  The girls looked at Kim with thinly veiled contempt as she munched on the vegetables. She was starving since she didn’t have much to eat earlier that day. They didn’t even say a word to Kim. No greetings, anything. They were clearly uncomfortable, knowing what the subject matter would be that evening. Their discomfort transmogrified into titters as Kim dropped a gob of dip onto the front of her shirt. She scooped it up with one finger and licked it clean. The girls were clearly grossed out by the display, and giggled even harder.

  Betty sat down next to Kim and cleared her throat. She grabbed a piece of broccoli, dipped it in the onion dip and bit into it. She gave the two giggling girls a sharp look to silence them. The two girls looked down at their hands, ashamed of themselves as they were silently reprimanded by the elder woman. No one messed with Betty.

  “Now,” Betty began, “tonight is just an informal little gathering for me to tell you girls about your first shift. You’ve probably already have had your first periods...” She looked at both girls who were blushing furiously at such an intimate detail of their lives being revealed to a relative stranger. “Since you both are well into puberty, you need to know about the next phase, the shifting phase.”

  “You see,” she continued as she reached for a carrot stick, “most girls just have to deal with their human body changing and morphing into a woman’s. A shifter’s body needs to both grow and mature in the human form, and learn to morph and control into the animal form.”

  Betty took a bite of the carrot as she mulled over the next part. The two girls were still blushing and giving Kim dirty looks. “Now, both of you stop that foolishness.” Betty snapped. “Kim needs to know this stuff as well. She might not be able to shift her form, but she’s to mate soon and with mating comes younglings, and she’ll need to know this to pass on to her children.”

  “So, let’s begin, shall we?” Betty continued on. “Firsts shifts are extremely dangerous. More so for girls than boys.” She noticed the two young girls staring at her with rapt attention. “We have different hormones than boys. That and our first shifts have to occur during our periods. During that time our emotions are all over the map, and we need to learn to focus on the here and now in order to come back to our human bodies. It’s incredibly difficult for young girls to keep this focus.

  “Now don’t get me wrong, we women carry the power of life inside us. We’re powerful in our own rights. Just that menstruation and the reproductive hormones play havoc on our emotions and our ability to stay rational some times.

  “It’s sort of difficult to stay rational when you have a vice around your insides and are bleeding like a stuck pig for five to seven days, trust me I know, I’ve been through all that for more years than I can count.” They all chuckled at that statement. Kim poured herself a glass of iced tea while Betty continued on with her monologue.

  “During your first shift, your thoughts and feelings will change into that of the cougar. The Cougar chose our people to don his form so we could defend the land from those that might harm it. Due to this power, we have selected to isolate ourselves from the rest of the Cree nation. We moved far away into the Rocky Mountains, where the cougar prefers to roam. We had to fight other people to eke out our existence here, but the great Cougar Spirit would not live anywhere else. We had to be here.”

  Betty poured herself a glass of iced tea as well, since the talking was drying out her throat. “With the Great Cougar Spirit leading our people to the mountains, it decided to grant one brave shaman the power of its form. It couldn’t be around all the time, but its people could. The shaman went mad for five days and five nights as the cougar spirit tried to subdue him.

  “He ripped all his clothes off and ran out into the wilderness. No one knows what went on between the shaman and the Great Spirit, but when he came back, the day after the full moon, he was a changed man. He demonstrated his newfound shifting power to the rest of the village. They were in awe of the shaman’s power and wondered if the Great Spirit would grant them a similar boon.”

  Kim was on the edge of her seat, finally hearing for the first time the legends of the village. Her grandfather never did tell her much about this place. She had chosen it for its isolation due to Smiley wanting to take her life. She came to the community to hide, and now she was being embraced into it fully.

  “Over the course of years, the cougar spirit decided to grant more and more people of the village the ability to take its form, men and women alike. The one thing the spirit didn’t think of was the fundamental differences between the sexes. It didn’t take into consideration the ones who were two spirits in one body, now known as transgender or gender fluid. The gift of shifting was given; it was up to the person to figure out how to deal with it. The young girls had a hig
h rate of not being able to shift back.

  “For some reason they lost focus on the drums and got taken away by the Great Spirit, forever locked in their bodies. The transgendered and gender fluid children had similar difficulties, but their rates of being locked in were less than the female children, probably due to how their minds worked compared to their female counterparts. Anyway, this is where we come in.”

  Mary spoke up. “I remember hearing about Mellissa Dunn, how she got stuck on her first shift a few years ago. She was all kinds of crazy, though, like, I heard she was the type to eat glue in school and had a hard time tying her shoelaces. She really had some serious problems going on upstairs.”

  Betty looked at the young girl with a thoughtful expression. “Yes, she actually did get stuck in between. Part of the reason was her mother drank pretty hard when she was pregnant with her, despite us telling her not to. Was kinda difficult for her to stay happy, though. Her mate beat her mercilessly every day, and being drunk was the only way she knew how to cope. After Mellissa got stuck, Jane couldn’t take it anymore, so she shifted and went off to look for her, never to be heard from again. John, her mate, took his own life not too long after that. Was really tragic.” Betty filled in the story for Kim, who was new to the community. “Now, let’s start our focus exercise.”

  Betty reached behind the sofa and pulled out a CD player. “Now, we need to practice keeping our thoughts centered, and focus on the drums. This needs to be learned and perfected before you go through your first shift. You need to remember to stay in the here and now. You two have been doing your mindfulness exercises these past few months?” she asked the two girls.

  They both nodded vigorously. They knew if they slacked off even a little bit, the existence that they had known for their entire lives would end, and they would be locked into an animal body for the rest of their lives.

  Betty looked at Kim. “You can participate in the exercise if you wish. It’s just basic mindfulness and meditation, you could benefit from it either way.”

  Kim nodded and settled into the couch. She took a deep breath and then another. She tried to center herself, but the slight pique of anxiety that the tween girls sparked with their nervous giggling stabbed into her brain. She tried to settle, knowing they were still children; they were tackling subjects that were uncomfortable for even grown women to talk about, so their discomfort wasn’t totally directed at her, despite her being the outsider. She was just an easy target for it.

  Betty hit play on the CD player, and the sound of drums and chanting filled the air. “Okay ladies, close your eyes and breathe in through your nose for three beats of the drums, then breathe out for three beats. Keep your focus on the drumming. Concentrate on your breathing and the drums. It is important that you keep your focus on the sounds of the drums because they are what will bring you back from your first transformation. Etch the sound into your brain.”

  All three closed their eyes and breathed in deeply to the rhythm of the traditional drums. Kim breathed deeply with the thrum of the drums that steadily beat from the CD player. She tried to focus on the sound, but little rabbit trails of thoughts began to spring up inside her mind.

  Thoughts of her pregnancy and who the father could be darted through her head. She didn’t care about staying focused that much, since her life wasn’t on the line, so she followed the trails. She didn’t have much opportunity to really think about which man she was going to mate.

  She focused on Keith. His soft, chubby face and body were familiar, nonthreatening. His serious expression sometimes cracked with a shy smile when she was around. She felt instantly drawn to his earnest nature. He was withdrawing from her. She didn’t like that one bit. After she came back in from her gardening, she had found Keith gone, along with his game console.

  She felt tears welling up in her eyes at the recent memory. The sting she felt at his departure still was fresh. She tried to push the emotion down so she could bring her focus back on the drums. Focus... here and now, that is all that matters, she thought to herself.

  Her breath matched the beat of the drums. Deep rhythmic swaying began to take over her body as the rhythm overtook her. She breathed in and out, focusing on nothing but the sounds from the CD player. A flash of a cougar leaping sparked in her mind’s eye, she tried to shake it off, but it kept coming at more frequent intervals. She kept following the sounds of the drums and felt her hair on her body grow longer and her teeth becoming more pointed. She felt her face morphing into a more feline shape as she was taken under by the trance.

  Betty looked at Kim as she was beginning to shift and slammed her hand down on the boom box, startling everyone out of their trances. Kim felt her face and body revert to normal as she was jolted out of her trance.

  “OK, everyone; let’s talk about something else now,” Betty announced, visibly shaken by Kim’s near transformation.

  The girls looked around, confused as to why the meditation exercise had been cut short. They looked at Betty, then to Kim and then at each other. They didn’t know what to make of it, but whatever. They wanted to get home anyway.

  Betty cleared her throat and shot a sidelong glance at the confused Kim. “As I was saying, let’s talk about something else. We all know that you both have been paired with a boy.”

  The two girls shifted nervously in their seats. Arranged matings were a thing in the village, it was no secret. The two girls genuinely cared about the boys they were slated to spend the rest of their lives with, so it wasn’t a problem.

  “This ceremony will seal you to your chosen mate for life. There is no breaking the sacred bond. If you do, both of you revert to your wild forms, and stay like that until you die. Now, if a match hasn’t been made for you, you can freely choose a mate, such as in the case of Kim, here.”

  The girls smirked and giggled, knowing Kim had both Tony and Keith to choose from. It wasn’t any kind of secret, after all.

  “Now, when a non-shifter gets exposed to the pheromones of a shifter, he or she starts to form a pair bond. It gets stronger when the two have sex.” The two girls were blushing and giggling even harder at the mention of the word sex.

  “Stop it, you two,” Betty snapped. “You’re both mature enough for this conversation. Give it up. As I was saying, once the two have sex, the bonding process begins. It can be broken at this point, but if the woman gets pregnant, the two are considered mated for life. The ceremony would just be for public recognition at that point,” Betty stated.

  Kim sat up, alert. She was pregnant. “What if ... ”

  Betty grinned slyly. “What if you had been with two? Well, the father of the child is the one you are mated to, dear.” Betty had a feeling Kim was pregnant, and this confirmed her suspicions.

  “Like, not that I am or anything,” Kim lamely deflected, “but just, what if?”

  “Well, usually there’s no way for one to know who the father is until the baby is born. Sometimes that uncertainty makes things...complicated.” Betty stared pointedly at Kim, knowing full well she had until the Autumn Equinox to choose either Tony or Keith, but she had to know who the father of her child was before then, to make sure the right man was mated to her in the ceremony. “But there are ways if one really needs to know in a hurry,” she finished.

  Kim gulped down some sweet iced tea and looked around the room. The two girls were looking bored, since they already knew about all of this, and Betty was giving Kim an indecipherable look which made her decidedly uncomfortable.

  “The mating ceremony is a rather quick affair; there is plenty of celebration afterwards, at least.” Betty had a sip of her iced tea. “The man and the woman walk up to the shaman, that’s my Rusty right now, and they repeat the vows he says before them. Then there is a leather thong that is tied around their hands, binding them together. Then they walk around the circle three times to seal their union and they sit down. It’s rather straightforward.

  “They aren’t allowed to cut the knot either. To sever the knot is
to sever their connection and doom them to their animal forms for the rest of their lives. The great mountain lion spirit has made it so the bond between mates is absolute. In the wild they don’t mate for life, but in his wisdom, he knew that it was important for his people to form a strong community. Concrete pair bonding was his answer.”

  Betty’s wizened eyes took in the girls around her. She noticed the younger two were starting to lose interest since they’ve been taught this since day one, but Kim, she noticed, stared down at her hands nervously while taking in the information.

  “After the ceremony, there is a feast and then the two steal off for a newlywed’s night,” Betty said with a wink. “It’s all similar to a traditional marriage, except it’s done in a group setting. Not the sex part, of course, but the tying of the knot.

  “However, many couples need to go up and get it done, and they do it on that day. It’s usually on the autumn equinox, because the earth is aligned just right and the night and day are of equal length. We also have one on the spring equinox if there are enough couples, but usually there aren’t. We just have the autumn one and that’s it.”

  “What’s so special about the autumn one?” Kim asked.

  “Well, the long winter after the equinox gives the couple a good chance to get to know one another and adjust to the mated life. They have no choice but to cooperate and get along during the harsh winter. Some days, we are literally snowed into our houses, unable to even open the doors to get out. Because of this, the couple experiences a type of honeymoon period.”

  Kim nodded silently. Being snowed in with either Keith or Tony wouldn’t be that bad, she thought to herself. She really wasn’t looking forward to the winter due to the amount of snow there would be because of the high altitude of the community, but it was better than being dead at the hands of Smiley.

  “Anyway, I think that covers it,” Betty said while standing up. “You girls can head on home. Kim, can you stay here and help me tidy up? Rusty won’t be back for a little bit, but it’s getting late and I’m not as young as I used to be.”