The forest had gone mad. The bear had not been the only thing to attack Samantha as she attempted to follow the tracks. She had escaped the bear easily enough, confusing it by leaping branch to branch until she was out of its sight and away from its sense of smell.
At first she assumed that the men she was tracking had cast some sort of magic over the woods, but then she rejected that idea. They had no reason to believe she lived. The mortal world would have forgotten about her in the past hundred years of living here. Not only that, but the bear had quickly lost interest in her once she had gotten away. She could hear it for a time, crashing through the underbrush and bellowing in rage.
The bear was not the last forest entity to threaten her. Deer came at her, tree roots grabbed onto her ankle, hanging mossy strands attempted to choke her, and a plant she had never before seen shot poisonous thorns into her flesh. She had spent days in delirium, on the brink of death but never quite reaching it. During that time, a rainstorm had opened up, pouring down in massive torrents. By the time she recovered, the forest had practically become a swamp.
Samantha retreated to a small cave during her delirium. Confused, frustrated, attacked at every opportunity, she pounded her fists against the jagged rock walls of her temporary prison and screamed into the darkness. Tiger prowled within her mind, seething and ineffectual.
Once the rain slowed down, Samantha cautiously left the cave. Weakened from the venomous plant and the hunger that gnawed at her gut, she lost more time tracking down food and regaining her strength.
Finally full, feeling stronger, she sat and contemplated her situation. The tracks were, by now, long gone. She had two distinct possibilities on which direction her quarry had gone. But once out of the forest, she would be completely lost in tracking them down. She had already wasted so much time, and she would waste even more before she found her quarry. The guilt of the child's suffering weighed on her with every breath that she took.
"What do you think, Tiger," she said out loud as she stood in the mouth of the cave and looked out at the swampy madness that had become of her beloved forest. "Does it matter which direction I go in?"
In response, Tiger sniffed the air, questioning paw raised as though to say she could not tell which direction to choose either.
Samantha nodded. She reached down and picked up a small, flat rock. One side was smooth. The other rough. She tossed it into the air, caught it in her fist, and the turned her hand over and opened it to reveal the stone lying flat in her palm. The rough side faced her. In her mind she pictured the wide, smooth edge of the forest to the south that bordered settled farmland. Then she pictured the rocky, narrow path that led out over steeper hills and to the desert of the southeast.
"Southeast it is, then," she said. "Come Tiger, let us follow where the path leads."
Tiger sniffed disdainfully but otherwise remained silent.
The forest had truly been transformed into swamp during her time in the cave and the rain had only slackened by degrees. It was a miserable journey toward the hills. Still not at full strength, hindered by the mud and muck and deep standing water, assaulted here and there by crazed, mutated animals or plants, it took Samantha two perilous days to get through. She came close to death twice during that time. Tiger was a constant presence in her mind, eyes smoldering, mien glowering.
Eventually she passed through the worst of it and made it to the forest's edge. A feeling of renewed energy surged through her as she ran up the path. The joy of unhindered movement returned to her and for a few precious hours she became lost in the raw physical pleasure of running uphill. It challenged her, but it did not try to destroy her. Tiger became lost in the pleasure of the movement also, forgetting for those moments the rage she had been feeling.
