She decides to run away the year she turns 13. There's nothing here for her. She knows her family won't miss her, not really - they have more mouths than they can easily feed, her half-siblings hate her, and Dad - isn't mean to her, but she can tell she makes him sad. 

She doesn't do it right away, of course. Being miserable and scared is no excuse for not having a plan.

She doesn't want to go somewhere with people. People don't like her, and she doesn't like people. She'll go into the Forest. They say monsters live in there, of course, but they call her a monster, when they think she's not listening.

She spends what feels like an eternity preparing. Months of scavenged hours spent gathering and stockpiling nuts and other dried foods. Short trips into the Forest, learning the lay of the edge region. When she can, she trails the old lady who forages in there during the long summer days, taking careful note of which plants have edible roots and berries. 

The winter before she runs away is horrible. It's colder than usual, and as the frosts arrive, her youngest half-sister catches ill and, after a horrible week of coughing, dies in the night. It's not the first time, of course, but something about losing little Imesah breaks her father's heart, and his wife's along with it. He pulls away, cold and distant - she lashes out, and Kaitiaki bears the brunt of it.

(In the privacy of her own head, Kaitiaki mourns, too. Out of all her half-siblings, Imesah had never flinched at the sound of her voice, had let Kaitiaki hold her, had giggled and gurgled in her arms...)

She sleeps as much she can get away with. Pretends she's a squirrel, sleeping through the winter, pulling inward and conserving energy. 

After what feels like an eternity, spring comes.

The butcher's sons have always been horrible to her, especially the eldest. He's quick to anger. She only has to stare at him for too long for him to decide that she needs to be put in her place. 

He doesn't know she's stronger than him, now. Has been for a year and a half, actually. But she lets him win the 'fight' anyways, screeching in pain as he rips a feather off her arm as a trophy, because all she wants from him is his copy of his father's key, and it's clutched tight in her fist, pulled from his pocket in the struggle. 

She stays curled up in the dirt until the sound of his footsteps fade, and then pops to her feet, smiling faintly. She's so close. 

That night, once everyone else been asleep for hours, Kaitiaki bundles herself up in the warmest clothes that fit her, and sneaks out, still clutching the butcher's key. (The butcher's son won't have reported it - his father has a horrible temper, and he doesn't need the key regularly, so he'll keep looking. She'll be safe.)   

Monster that she is, she can see in the dark, better than anyone but the village cats. The town is silent and empty, at this time of night. She likes it that way.

She makes her way to the butcher's shop, all locked up. It opens with a sharp click, and then she's inside, gently closing the door behind her.

As quietly as she can, she ransacks the place. She takes an axe, a vial of oil, a block of salt, 2 long knives, a few large sacks, a waterskin, several lengths of rope, and some dried meats. She also grabs his waxed apron, to use as rain-cover, and lucks out big, finding a flint and 3 silver coins in the big pocket. (She breathes a quiet sigh of relief when she finds the flint. She was ready to take her father's, but she - she's glad she doesn't have to.)

She locks the door on the way out, and leaves the key under a rock. 

The axe isn't as good as shovel, but it's much better than her bare hands. She digs up the waterskin full of nuts and dried tubers that she'd buried in the fall. And then, with all her supplies clutched tight, she makes her way into the Forest.

She carefully makes her way through the thickening trees in the pre-sunrise hours. She needs to get deep enough into the Forest that nobody will find her. She isn't exactly sure how deep that needs to be (it depends on how angry the butcher is, she thinks.)

She pauses to snack on some of the dried meat - she needs the energy. But it's still pretty cold, this time of year and this early, so she needs to keep moving. "Stop to rest in the cold and you'll freeze to death," she remembers the hunter saying. 

By the time the sun starts to rise, Kaitiaki is a few miles into the Forest and still going. She's scared a couple deer and several squirrels, but she hasn't seen any monsters, yet. 

...She's starting to get tired. She needs to find a good place to take her first nap. She slows down (and eats a handful of nuts, omnomnom) and starts looking for what she needs. 

A huge tree towers above its neighbors. It's got a thick trunk, thin green leaves, and strong, sturdy branches going all the way up. It's older than anything Kaitiaki has ever seen in her life. 

It's beautiful. It's the most beautiful thing she's ever seen.

She wastes minutes just marvelling at it, circling the base, her hand touching the bark reverently. 

Ok. Time to get set up. She removes her big coat, puts down everything she's carrying besides the rope, and climbs the tree. It's not hard; she's strong, she's tall, the tree is stable, and she loves to climb.

Soon she's at the height where sunlight is peeking through the leaves, the warmth of it welcome on her skin. She ties one end of the rope around the trunk, climbs back down with its help, and then bundles up all her stuff and ties the bag to the other end of the rope.

Fifteen sweaty minutes later, she has her bag of supplies pulled up and tied to the trunk of the tree, and she's getting to work on a makeshift hammock, made out of one of the giant hanging bags the butcher used to store hides and bones. It's hard work, and she's definitely running out of steam, but she keeps herself focused. She can rest soon, once she's safe. 

It's actually kind of obnoxious to get into the hammock, but she manages it. She turns away from the sun and falls asleep, alone and free for the first time in her life. 

The sun is setting by the time Kaitiaki wakes up, which suits her just fine. She eats a bit of her food, and then packs a waterskin, the flint, and the bigger knife into a bag, and then drops herself out of her tree.

 The river can't be far from here - in the silence of the evening, she can hear it very faintly, in the direction of the setting sun. She follows it. 

The river water is very cold, but she's thirsty! She drinks her fill, then fully fills the waterskin, and starts hunting for those edible tubers she remembers learning grow near the riverbank. 

Her obsessive observation of the village forager pays off, as does the fact that she's deeper into the Forest than the people of the village usually dare to venture. The tubers are numerous and juicy-tart.

Careful not to take too many from any one area, she wanders north by east along the riverbank for almost an hour, until her bag is nearly full. She sings quietly to herself as she does, revealing in the sheer freedom of being alone. 

When she's finished filling her bag, she eats a lunch of tubers, and says a prayer of thanks to the Forest for letting her partake of its bounty. 

... but she gets lost trying to head straight from where she stopped gathering back to her tree, which makes for an increasingly stressful and panicky hour (if she can't find her stuff, she won't be able to survive out here, and she can't go home, they'll never take her back after what she's done, she's going to die out here-)

Then she takes deep breath, decides to stop being an idiot, and heads back to the river.

 From there, it's a simple matter of backtracking southwards (river to her right, it was to her left while she was harvesting) until she stops seeing the holes left by her dug out tubers, and heading back the way she came when she gets there. 

When she finally sees her tree, towering high above the surroundings, rope hanging down invitingly, the knot in her stomach melts away. She climbs up with her bounty (it's harder, carrying a full waterskin and a sack of heavy tubers, but she's strong and has excellent stamina for her age - gifts of her monstrous blood, her father used to say).

After taking a while to breathe (and to eat another small meal), she heads back down again, this time with just a spare length of rope and the knife, and starts searching the immediate area for fallen sticks and small, smooth stones. She has no desire to get lost again. 

As she gathers, she thinks.

She doesn't want to spend much time any further south of here. The risk of someone running into a villager is too high. If they catch her, they'll probably kill her. 

The river is a really good landmark - the rocks and plants along the bank have enough variation that she isn't likely to get confused about where along it she is, even without the tubers. And she can hear it from pretty far away - noticing that she couldn't hear it was part of how she knew she needed to turn around.

What she wants, at least for now, is to explore due north from her tree and make sure she won't overshoot when heading back from the river. Exploring the area will help, but what will help more is if she can leave a trail for herself, or at least a boundary. 

Once she's gathered as many sticks as she can carry in her bag (each snapped to be about the length of her arm), she pulls out the knife and starts sharpening the ends. She's not very good at it, at first, and ruins a few sticks, but she picks up the rhythm and finishes before the sun starts to rise again. 

With her bundle of stakes, she sets out north from her tree. Her monster eyes let her see about thirty paces with no light - she stops every twenty-five and drives a stake into the ground until it's about halfway in, and also stops for a minute to look around and try and find something of note. Interesting bushes here, some unusual trees there, and - oh, a berry bush!

She only eats one, just in case she's mistaken about it being a safe kind of berry - she remembers that bit of advice from the hunter, too. But it cheers her up immensely, and she spends the rest of her boundary-marking journey with her songs on her lips and a warmth in her heart. She loves it here...

The sun is peeking through the trees on her walk back, and the daytime animals of the forest are waking up as well. She moves more carefully, trying to avoid startling anything (or letting anything Dangerous find her), and makes it back to her tree without incident. 

She falls into a rhythm - waking up, climbing down the tree, exploring the area around her for food and getting the lay of the land, heading to the river for to refill her waterskin and snack on a few tubers, gathering sticks and branches into a big pile near the base of her tree. She wants to use them to make a less precarious shelter before next month's rains start.

She also needs to learn how to hunt before she runs out of dried meat. She's getting better at sneaking up on squirrels, but she's yet to get within grabbing range before they bolt. 

Her days are busy, and she's had the occasional scare where she needed to hide from wild boar or the biggest beetle she's ever seen, but so far, things seem like they're going well.

She's on her way to the river to try out spearfishing when she notices the smell of blood. 

She follows her nose north. 

She hears it before she sees it - ragged breathing, the sound of something in pain. 

It's coming from - that set of ferns, which does seem like it has been disturbed from the other side.

She reaches out and pulls the leaves aside to get a better look.

!!!

grrrrrooooowlllllllllll SWIPE

owowowowowowow!

She cries out.

She hears a soft, pained whine, in response. (Then there's more of that ragged, pained breathing.)

Oh no, the poor thing... 

She backs away a bit, pours fresh water on her arm (shallow cuts, thankfully) and then holds her other arm over the wounds until they stop bleeding. She makes quiet soothing noises with her mouth as she does (and winces when one of them comes out as more of a screech than she intended. Normally it's fine, but...)

Then, carefully, she uses a stick to push some of the fern aside and peer inward.

The wounded cat there is both too small to be fully grown and also bigger than any cat she's ever seen with her eyes before. 

It's also bleeding from a wound on its side, and another on one of its back legs. 

She's done first aid on farm animals, before. They didn't like her much more than the people did, but she was good at wrestling with them, which was one of the only ways to bandage a wounded sheep.

The cat is hurt, pretty badly, but it doesn't seem like it's lost too much blood. Looks... probably survivable? With her help, at anyways.

She (slowly, carefully) opens her waterskin, and then pours some water from as high as she can hold it down into the feline's mouth. It flinches at first, but then starts to drink.

She makes soothing noises at the poor thing, then backs away slowly, and then empties the contents of her bag on the ground and hurries as fast as she can back to her tree. She needs it to trust her, and she also needs some cloth to cover the wound. 

(Climbing the tree with the claw wounds on her arm hurts horribly, but she barely notices. It's not what's important right now.) 

She returns to the creature's hidingbush about 20 minutes later, armed with a bit of spare clothing and the rest of her dried meats. She carefully offers a piece to the poor thing.

(It's doing a bit worse, but still breathing.)

sniffsniffsniiiifffffffffffffffffffff CHOMP chewchewchewchewchewchew...