by Janean Worth
Chapter Six
Climbing the tree had been a battle, and her fingers still ached from clinging so tightly to the ridges and knobs of the tree’s trunk as she had pulled herself inch by inch up the side of it. It was a good thing that she was both small and strong, because otherwise, she wasn’t certain she would have made it.
Midway to the top of the tree, she’d found the perfect branch to spend the night on. It was wide enough to hide her body, yet it grew almost horizontally from the tree, providing a resting spot where she could lie down.
With her back aching fiercely from the weight of the bag, she was happy to do so. She tried to use her mother’s shawl to tie herself to the tree again, but the branch that she rested upon was too thick, and the shawl would not go around it and Kara both, so Kara did not feel comfortable falling asleep upon the branch for fear she’d roll off of it. After twisting and turning upon the branch to try to get into a comfortable position, Kara finally decided that she would get no rest that night, and lay there looking up through the thick canopy of leaves at the stars in the sky. After several moments of staring through the leafy shield, she realized that the tree was full of acorns - and acorns could be eaten, if they were properly soaked and boiled first. She made a mental note to gather as many as she could after dawn arrived, and to try to remember the location of the huge tree should she need to come back to it later to gather more.
Listening to the sounds of the forest was frightening. Every sound, even the soughing of the wind through the branches of the trees, was foreign to her. No trees grew behind the massive wall in GateWide, and she’d never been outside the wall before, so she hadn’t realized that they made noise when the wind touched their branches. The creaking and sighing were only mildly frightening though. The forest was also filled with a myriad of sounds that, she guessed, were from animals, both big and small, that prowled the forest floor. It was the sound of those beasts that caused her the most anxiety. She could not see them from her perch in the tree, but she could hear them as they moved around below, and some of them sounded quite large as they passed, crunching branches and swishing noisily through the bushes.
Several times, she was sure she heard the hooting of an owl in the night, the distinctive who-who sound which had been described in detail in the book that she’d read that had said they had gone extinct after the Fall of the days of Tech.
Idly, trying to keep her mind off of other things, Kara wondered how much of what she’d read in her tutor’s books had been true, and how much had simply been something that the Sovereign thought should be real and learned by all children and adults in the settlement. There had been many books about the effects of the Fall, but few about the Tech that had caused it. Books describing the trades of the settlement, such as weaving, baking, smithing and caretaking, had been plentiful, but books about what was left of the world in the wilderness outside the Gate had been nonexistent. Only verbal warnings of the horrors that existed in the wilderness were given.
The night passed slowly, and every time Kara’s eyelids slid closed, she’d immediately jerk away because of the sensation of falling caused by the creaking branch beneath her. Although exhausting and annoying, this kept her from falling to her death, but by morning her eyes were gritty with fatigue and exhaustion tugged at her legs as she climbed down from her high perch to the forest floor.
The day passed much as had the day before, except that she heard no more sounds of pursuing Enforcers. They’d probably given up, thinking that a beast had eaten her by now, and gone back to tell the Sovereign that another worthless Stray had died.
The Sovereign would be angry, and he would punish someone, possibly another Stray or one of the Enforcers who brought the news, for Kara’s escape and supposed death. The thought of that punishment made Kara’s stomach feel sour, because her mother had told her of several such punishments, and they were gruesome indeed. The Sovereign was cruel when he handed them out too, often drawing out the pain and anguish as long as he possibly could, just to get the most enjoyment out of the suffering of the victim. And his next victim would suffer because of her actions.
Kara pulled a couple leaves of wild mint from her bag and chewed upon them to calm her roiling stomach, and to moisten her mouth. Only several swallows of water remained in her water bladder, and she was saving those for when she could no longer bear her thirst, or for when she found a safe source of clean water, whichever came first.
Her head had already begun to pound from dehydration, so she knew she didn’t have long to find water before the problem got serious. The small guide book, For Gatherers, How to Survive in the Wilderness if You Become Separated from Your Enforcers, written by her tutor for those who braved the world outside the gates to gather plants, had been required reading if one had wanted to pursue that profession in their adult life. Thankfully, she’d been so eager to become a Gatherer that she’d read the small book two years before it was required. Though, with all that had happened, it seemed like a decade had passed since then, when, in truth, it had only been a handful of years.
Kara tried to recall every detail of what she’d read, mentally going over the material again and again in her mind. Even then, she could remember no instructions on how one should find water if they became separated. The book, as she remembered it, had contained only rudimentary instructions, such as how to hide until the Enforcers arrived to rescue you, the symptoms of dehydration, the symptoms of frostbite and a rather long chapter on how to build a large fire to signal your whereabouts to the Enforcers.
The snap of a branch underfoot startled her out of her thoughts, and she stopped in midstride, startled to realize that she’d wandered into a small clearing. The area wasn’t large, but it was quite picturesque, with the towering trees overhanging an almost perfectly circular area that was carpeted in old leaf molderings and thick layers of bright green moss. The area under the trees contained almost no underbrush, but Kara noticed that where the brush surrounded the area on the perimeter of the rough circle it was bisected in several places by narrow trails that led off in several different directions into the forest.
Cautiously, Kara changed direction and headed for the nearest trail. Hopefully, the trail had been made by the animals of the forest as they headed toward a water source, not by groups of Fidgets on their way back to wherever they called home.