A Purr-fect Save
by Gaeladrya Teimaran
I was a silent child. Not that I could not speak, oh, no, but I much disliked making sound, as it disturbed that white wondrous silence of the snowy mountains where I was born and raised. And while my parents were thankful to have one child who did not make for a noisome eve, it sometimes created difficulties.
But sometimes...
Sometimes with that silence comes revelation.
My father was a hunter, a tracker, one who ranged far and wide to bring in furs and meat, to take wares to the city and trade for what we could not make ourselves. When each of my siblings were judged old enough to follow on his trading trips, he would invite us along and teach us the ways of surviving in the harsh,cold world we lived in, always keeping to the well-trodden paths to keep out of danger.
I was silent, and attentive, and as a child, sometimes as now, I seemed to watch the world and soak everything in. And so my father deemed me ready to take to the trails earlier than any of my siblings had.
The first part of our journey was quite familiar, as the path was worn smooth by many feet, my father's, my sibling's,even my own as my siblings would escort me out in the snow to play or to watch over me as I sat enjoying my silence. As the distance between ourselves and out home increased, my father began teaching me the things that I should know--how to find fuel for a fire, how to start that fire without flint and steel, how to find food,how to identify animal tracks, and so on.
As the trail ran on, however, it grew rougher, harder, as only my father and the rare stranger had ever used it on recent occasion. Animal tracks grew more and more common, and my father began to doubt his choice in bringing me along so young. But we had reached the halfway point and he judged it safer to go forward than go back, and we trudged on through the snow and ice and stone.
We were but few hours' travel from the closest adjoining trail, and heavier traffic, and relative safety. Or so my father tells me; the memory of how it started is somewhat blurred and colored with fear and horror. Memories from childhood that will not match with present-day landmarks.
Something...horrid, terrifying, without name even now as it has become a thing of nightmares, attacked, thankfully on the side my father was walking on. I only say thankfully because otherwise I would not be here to tell the story, and my father survived--injured, but alive and able to travel enough to get to help.
But this terrible creature attacked, and my father turned to fight it and either drive it off leaving us in fear of a repeat occurance, or, more hopefully, to slay the beast. He cried out for me to stay clear, and I backed up, well away from the battle, my eyes wide with horror as I thought this to be my last sight of my father.
The trail there had snow-covered rocks and boulders on one side, and a steep incline on the other, and as I did not know the trail, I stepped into a snowbank on the edge of the incline and fell through, sliding down, and down and down the slope into an old thicket of winter-hardy bushes.
Dazed from the fall, it took me several minutes to get my bearings. My head throbbed, and I was hesitant to move, or even open my eyes. I was covered in snow, wet snow, and freezing cold. The stuff had gotten into my furs, wetting my clothing on the way down, and wet clothing is a dangerous thing in the mountains. I had to get warm, and fast. This I knew before having left home.
But something strange happened then.
My silence was broken--not by the battle that I'd left far above me and could no longer hear even with my keen ears, not by my cry as I fell, because I hadn't, such was my dislike for speech or sound.
But by purring.
This deep, comforting rumble had started--or maybe had never been stopped--somewhere close by. Close enough that it shook me and vibrated in my bones.
Slowly I lifted my head, and opened my eyes.
The most beautiful eyes I have ever seen stared back at me. They were sapphire-blue, as blue as the summer sky high in the mountains of my home, just when the night is stealing over the edge of the peaks, as blue as...well...you get the idea.
And they belonged to a snowcat that apparently made its home in the bushes I'd crashed into.
My father tells me I should have been dead. Maybe I should have; maybe that snowcat was a god or goddess come down to protect me until my father could find me, for protect me it did, warming me with its body and keeping me soothed with its steady purring.
But my father found me hours later. He'd survived his fight with that monster, wearied and bloody to find me gone and had started searching.
I heard him calling my name, over and over again as he drew closer, but was too pained from the fall to yell back and had to wait until he drew closer to crawl out of the bushes."
But he did, and I called back, and the cat merely stood up and let me go.
And the last I saw of the snowcat were those so blue eyes shining through the branches of the old thicket I'd crashed into.
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