Chapter 75: Rescue Detail

Tamara had a dreamless night; at least she had no memory of any dreams. After breakfast Thursday morning, she took out the map she had been using and looked at the trails which led north. About two miles north, there was a small group of houses with a through road nearby. The terrain to the north of the cabin was very hilly with steep 800-foot elevation changes in places. Hiking that way, she realized, she would need to be very careful and stick to the trails. Packing her knapsack with several sandwiches, four water bottles, and a few energy bars, she set out mid-morning, after mapping out about a four-hour hike. She found these hikes to be very calming to her spirit and allowed her to let her thoughts roam freely.

The scenery was incredible, especially when she topped a ridge line and looked out across the steep hills and valleys to the north of the ridge where she stood. She hiked on and had gotten about half-way in her planned route when something disrupted the peacefulness of her surroundings—it was the unfamiliar sense of the presence of emotion. The emotions were ones of fear and exhaustion, and they were strong. The source seemed stronger in the direction in which she was heading, so Tamara continued along the trail, which ran parallel to a ridge line as it descended into a glen where her map showed that a creek flowed.

She walked carefully here because the terrain dropped off steeply to her right and the vegetation to the left was dense and, she noted, was dominated by hawthorn bushes with their long, sharp thorns. When she got to the creek, she looked around.

Someone’s around here, she thought. Close by. But I don’t see anyone.

She walked a short distance further and could definitely sense that she had passed the location of the emotional source. Turning around, she carefully crept back, scanning the area both visually and with her empathic sensitivity. There, concealed under a dense hawthorn bush, she could barely see a small figure hiding. The fear pouring from the figure became intense as Tamara stopped at the bush.

“Are you hurt? I mean no harm,” Tamara said softly. “I’m just a girl on a hike and I’m alone. You’re terribly scared, I can see, and I can help you. Are you injured? Hungry?”

Two eyes appeared, peering at her from inside the bush. Tamara realized that this person had the same chameleon ability to disappear in plain sight that she herself had; that’s why Tamara couldn’t visually see the person until she used her empathic senses too.

“You can come out. I can tell that there’s no one around here anywhere except us. Watch those nasty thorns! How did you get in there without getting stabbed, anyway?”

Gradually the person carefully slid out and Tamara saw numerous little cuts on their wrists and hands.

“You’ve got a bunch of cuts and scrapes,” she said. “I have some antibiotic cream I can put on,” she said as the person began to stand.

When the person pushed back the hood of their sweatshirt, Tamara saw it was a girl, about five feet, four inches tall, and she couldn’t be more than fifteen years old.

“C ... c ... can you really help? I’m s ... s ... so scared...” she said, trembling.

“Oh, you poor thing!” Tamara exclaimed, taking out a tube of antibiotic and handing it to her. “Put this on those scratches. Tell me what’s wrong.”

“He’s chasing me. I ... I think he knows this ... this area ... and it was the only way ... way in here.”

“Okay, sweetie. I can tell that no one’s within maybe a mile of here right now, at least,” Tamara assured her. “Are you hurt anywhere? Can you walk?”

“Y ... yeah. Th ... thirsty though. I was g ... gonna get a drink from the creek but heard you coming.”

“Oh! I have two water bottles and some energy bars.”

Tamara got them out of her pack and handed one each to her.

“Don’t drink it all at once, drink a little as we walk, sweetie. Let’s get you back to the cabin where I’m staying. And let’s go quickly; it’s a two-hour hike back and we’ll talk later. Save your breath for the hike. Oh, I’m Tamara. Tamara Alexandre. What’s your name?”

“It’s Awinita Nelsey. ‘Nita’ for short but Papa called me ‘Winnie,’” she said and began crying.

Tamara hugged her, and as soon as she made contact, Tamara immediately knew why she was crying. “I’m so sorry ... you lost your daddy, right?” Tamara asked sympathetically.

Winnie wiped her eyes. “It was Granddad—Papa. I don’t remember my dad. Papa raised me.”

“Nita, I kinda sense that your name ‘Winnie’ is special to you. Can I call you that?”

She smiled weakly at Tamara and whispered, “Yes, I would like that.”

“Let’s talk more later. Walk now, okay?”

Winnie nodded, took a sip of water and a big bite of the energy bar, and the two set out.

The route Tamara had planned was a little shorter on the leg going back to the cabin, so they arrived back in less than two hours. Then, while Tamara began to put together a meal for dinner, she had Winnie sit at the table with a cup of hot soup and tell her story.

“First, sweetie, and most important, who’s chasing you?” Tamara asked.

“The group home witch sold me to this evil man,” Winnie began crying again. “I got away from him when he stopped at a convenience store so I could use the toilet there. I climbed out the window and got into the forest right behind the store. Then down a very steep hill. Then I followed the low areas till I got to where you found me.”

“Jeez. When was this? The closest store like that must be five or six miles from where you were.”

“I was in the woods two days,” Winnie told her.

“And two nights?”

Winnie nodded. “I know woodcraft. I ate berries and some mushrooms I found. Papa taught me all our traditions. I’m Cherokee. But Papa was the last of my family here and I have no relatives.”

“Oh right, your name. It’s Awinnie or...?”

“Awinita. Cherokee for ‘dove.’”

“Ah, pardon my ignorance, but don’t the Cherokee mostly live elsewhere? I thought they were in Oklahoma,” Tamara asked.

“My people had a very bad treatment by the government. Did you ever hear of the ‘Trail of Tears’?”

“Oh! Yes I did. That was your people?”

“Yes and the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Winnebago, Muscogee, Seminole nations, and others I can’t recall, were forced too. They were forced by the Army to walk to Oklahoma and maybe 50,000 people died on the way there. Some of the original Cherokees, families who escaped being forced to walk to Oklahoma, still live in places in our original territory—it was big, from Alabama to West Virginia, mostly in the Appalachians. Papa told me the Cherokee names that we use now for what happened then. One is ‘nu na da ul tsun yi’ which means ‘the place where they cried.’ But he said most Cherokee call it ‘tlo va sa,’ that’s ‘our removal.’ Papa thought that it was the Choctaw that first used those terms for being forced to leave our homes.

“I know that I have no relatives at all left in West Virginia although Papa knew of a couple other Cherokee families in the county. I never met them, though. Oh, there’s a Cherokee reservation in North Carolina; I recall him telling me about that.”

“All right then, so your papa passed away? That’s so sad. What happened?” Tamara asked as she came over to take Winnie’s hand.

She sent a small amount of a silver healing taste and a green calming taste to her and Winnie startled.

“Tamara? What did you do just then?” she asked, suddenly frightened.

“Oh shit. Did you feel that? I’m so sorry; I was trying to reassure you and calm you; you’re still on edge. Still scared deep down.”

“I am. But you did something that Papa taught me how to do and he said that it was a tribal secret, passed down by the medicine man. No white person was ever told the secret ... um, you’re not white, but...” Winnie ran down.

Tamara pulled up the other chair and sat right in front of Winnie.

“True, I’m not a Caucasian. My ancestors are African, but I’m from Haiti—Caribbean, you know?”

Winnie nodded.

“So we have a religion in Haiti; it comes from Africa, and some of our priestesses know how to project certain emotional feelings. That’s what I did just then. Other cultures have people who can do that too, and when we have time, we need to talk about what you learned ‘cause it looks like we learned the very same things, but as taught by our own native cultures. Deal?”

Winnie nodded again and began to cry and Tamara got up and held her.

“Sorry for all the crying ... It’s been an awful two years—more than two—and now finding someone who’s like me is overwhelming,” Winnie whispered.

Tamara urged her to get up and sit on the edge of one of the beds with her; then she put her arm around Winnie’s shoulder.

“Tell me what happened when your papa passed away, sweetie,” Tamara urged. “If you can.”

“It’s okay, I think I can. He was having indigestion for two days but wouldn’t go to the clinic,” Winnie said. “We lived in a little house and had an acre of land. Raised vegetables and that and Papa’s pension was our support.”

“Where was this?” Tamara asked.

“Randall County.”

“West Virginia?”

“Yeah. And the next morning, he wouldn’t wake up,” she sobbed.

“Terrible. Heart attack?”

“That’s what I heard. The county took me over and put me in a temporary home. The social worker said that they’d sell the homestead, we had no savings that they could find, and use the money to support me in a foster home.”

“I wonder whether that’s legal to do,” Tamara said.

“It couldn’t have been worth much. We weren’t near any town, just on the road through a holler. Our place was on a lick, a little wider, with three little farms along it.”

“A remote area.”

“Yeah. But most of West Virginia is remote. All mountains. Then I got sent to a temporary foster home while they looked for something more permanent. After getting sent to another temporary one, I got put in this group home in the county and the case worker told me that the home had a good record of placements—what a crock.”

“Is that adoptions?” Tamara asked.

“That, or permanent foster homes with a real family. Anyway, the group home manager was a real witch. We had to do all of the housekeeping and cooking. When we came back from school, we got searched for any contraband—anything that she didn’t want us to have. And those placements...” Winnie shuddered.

“What? What happened there?” Tamara asked, alarmed now.

“We—the other girls—thought that they were selling the girls. Ones who were ... the witch said were ‘placed’ ... they didn’t come back and we didn’t hear about them. Every month, the witch lined up us girls...”

“The group home was all girls?”

“Yeah. She took thirteen and up. So we were lined up and couples or sometimes single men would come in and look at us. They’d pick a girl to talk to, and sometimes, maybe a week later, that girl would be gone. The witch said she got placed. We thought the right word was ‘sold’ ‘cause none of the adults who looked at us were family types. They all had a evil feeling about them.”

“Damn, this sounds like a sex-trafficking operation,” Tamara mused.

“Or a slave? That’s what some girls thought.”

“I need to get the details from you, Winnie. Where the group home’s located, stuff like that. But what happened with you?”

“Yeah, this creepy guy picked me last week. We hadn’t seen him before—oh, not every one of the adults did select a girl. That only happened, um, six or seven times in the two years I was there. This guy picked me—must have been with my picture ‘cause he just showed up. He came to the home a few days ago and I swear that I could hear him discussing a price with the witch. I have really good hearing. So I began thinking about how to get away and if I had to get into the countryside, I needed layers of clothes. That’s what I’m wearing now—four layers.”

“That’s very resourceful, Winnie,” Tamara told her. “So do you think that he’ll try to find you?”

“I heard him shouting when I was climbing down that steep slope behind the store that he was gonna track me and that I couldn’t get far in these hills. He was right; there’s lots of impassible terrain here, and when I tried to use the road, I didn’t see any cars other than his and some locals. I didn’t want to chance their finding me and kept to the woods, but the terrain forced me to stay along that run—stream. Then this morning, I thought I heard hounds barking, so I think he is gonna try to track me. You found me as I was trying to head south to find a road into any town to the south of there.”

“Hmm, okay. Hounds are good at tracking, but we crossed two streams coming here, and your path joined up with mine. That should confuse them.”

“I crossed a stream too, several times.”

“That’s good, it helps. I’ll be moving from here on Saturday morning. I think that they can’t track us to here before that. Will you come with me? I know people who will be able to protect you and I have enough resources to make sure you’ll have a much better life. Please come with me, Winnie.”

She began crying again. “You can protect me? You promise?”

“Absolutely.”

“I can’t thank you enough, then.”

“I want to help those other girls in the group home too, Winnie. We have to stop terrible things like that from happening. Anyway, the owner of the cabin will be here on Saturday and that’s when we’ll leave. I live in the Baltimore area and that’s where we’ll go on Saturday. I’ll bet that the law says that you’d have to return to that county ... no, don’t worry, I wouldn’t do that ever ... I think that there’s a real problem in that county, so we’re getting you out of there.”

The rest of the evening after dinner, the two girls spoke and exchanged their stories, Tamara telling her about her life in Miami and then in college. Winnie spoke about her life, but especially the teaching her grandfather had done with her. He had been a game warden for almost thirty years and for the past ten or so, the state had renamed the position a “natural resources police officer.” He had taught his granddaughter the traditional woodcraft skills of living in the wild. Winnie’s grandfather’s own grandfather had been a medicine man and he had learned much about those traditional practices, passed down through his grandfather to her father, who taught them to Winnie. Tamara found out that Winnie, like her grandfather, had a superb memory; cultures with no widespread writing traditions tended to value good memory skills. Thus Winnie had been a very good student. They talked far into the night.

Tamara had a blanket in her SUV and Winnie went to sleep on one of the beds, wrapped in it. She was amused that Tamara still chose to sleep on the floor, but recognized something similar to her own traditions, in seeing Tamara following that practice now.

The following morning after breakfast, Winnie convinced Tamara that she should do her last planned day of meditation and Tamara told her that she meditated while hiking.

“I did that too, Tamara,” Winnie told her. “The lesser spirits live in the woods and I’m their friend. If I’m quiet, can I walk with you?”

“Oh sure. Oh my, we have so much to share about our traditions, Winnie,” Tamara said as she hugged her.

About two hours into the hike, they could hear the hounds.

“Shit,” Tamara hissed. “They must have run them all night long; I never expected that. That’s coming from the direction of the glen where I found you.”

Winnie began to tremble and Tamara took her arm.

“They’re maybe a bit more than two hours from the cabin,” Tamara told her. “We’re forty-five minutes away from there. If they do come, I’ve got a nasty surprise waiting.”