Wolves and Cougars: Tales from the Eastern Shore, #1

By Warren Adams-Ockrassa

The year is 1722, and Greta Brücke can no longer tolerate life in the American colony of Karlsburg. Having been abused by her cousins once too often, she flees into the wilderness and discovers a way of life she hadn't ever conceived.

Girl-in-the-Water is a visionary among her people, though she leads a lonely life — not just because she has visions, but because she is also an orphan, and is two-spirits. Her life is soon to change; for she is about to encounter a European colonist whose ways are, perhaps, not so different from her own.

But what will happen to their friendship if Greta ever discovers Girl-in-the-Water's deepest secret?

Set 300 years in the past, "Wolves and Cougars" is a novella that's pertinent today. Compact and evocative with vividly-drawn characters, this story will stay with you long after you've read the final page.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Warren Adams-Ockrassa
• Release date: Sep 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386339649

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© 2017 Warren Adams-Ockrassa. All rights reserved.

Portions of this text may be reproduced for purposes of promotion or review.

This is a work of fiction. The persons and events described in this story are inventions of the author’s imagination. Any similarity between them and actual persons or events is coincidental.

Part I

Early Summer

Girl-in-the-Water was the first to see the Loud People girl, and that was why she was the one to follow her along the Little Snake until she had arrived at the Great Drink. The Loud People girl was making the racket which was normal for her people, calling out to the sky and the grass and the trees in a discordant combination of sounds that made Girl-in-the-Water think of the chitter of squirrels, the huffing of foxes, and the scolding of ravens. She could not tell by the sounds, but she thought it must be language, after a fashion. Prayers, perhaps, but the tone suggested curses more than sacred words.

The Loud People girl continued her litany for a time, then fell silent and plodded noisily through the undergrowth along the bank of the Little Snake. Girl-in-the-Water had no trouble at all in following her; even if her own feet had not been bare and knowing of the way, the Loud People girl made too much noise to know she was being followed, too much noise to not be easy to follow.

The girl was dressed as standard for her kind, in a long garment of heavy cloth that hid her body from her neck to her ankles, with coverings on her arms that went to her wrists. Beneath the dense hem of her garment, her feet were also covered, in a heavy shodding that made her gait and progress both ungainly and audible for well more than the distance of a good bowshot. Her hair seemed to be cropped close or tied up in some fashion, though it was hard to tell, for her head was covered also, in something that appeared to be a hood fastened under her chin that obscured her face behind a deep, curving bill. A terrible choice of headdress; it would block her vision to the sides and above, and probably made it harder to hear clearly, also — not that the girl seemed to care much about listening.

Despite the walking nonsense of the Loud People girl’s wardrobe, Girl-in-the-Water was intrigued, for she could tell that this girl was of an age close to her own, and she knew the Loud People were not adept at making do in the world, and that their striplings were particularly helpless. They needed the proximity of their own kind or they quickly perished, often of hunger while surrounded by abundance. This girl must either have wandered astray from a traveling group of her own kind, or — more worryingly — from a settlement which was just beginning to establish itself nearby.

With time, Girl-in-the-Water realized that the Loud People girl was weeping steadily, and it surprised her, for all she had ever seen or heard storied of the Loud People was that they were excessively jovial, excessively angry … or excessively cruel. Sorrow was not mentioned except as, sometimes, a consequence of meeting the Loud People.

This, then, was a mystery atop a mystery, and Girl-in-the-Water loved little more than she did a mystery. What choice did she have, in the end, but to follow and watch?

* * *

Greta Brücke had never felt so lost. The worst of it was that she had sought out this being lost; she had made the decision herself to leave the walled compound of Karlsburg and vanish into the brooding forest the evening before, concluding that the one thing she could tolerate least was another night in the same house with her cousin and his three sons and their regular demands of her.

At first her flight had been exhilarating and terrifying. She’d filtered herself into the trees, sure that at any moment she would be fallen upon by ravenous wolves, or cougars, or bears, or even marauding Indians; and in those first few hours she might almost have welcomed it — not the attack itself, so much as an opportunity to vent her fury. But as the twilight gave to full night and the utter dark reality of the forest settled itself around her, she felt her boiling anger subside to the regular low simmer it most often was, both at her cousin for being the man he was (if man was the right word for it), and her father for having voyaged back to Austria these several months ago, promising to return before winter, leaving her to Jakob and his get (all of them bastards, two of them literally).

Instead of allowing herself to turn back to the relative safety of the colony, though, she only strengthened her resolve. Yes, it was almost certainly foolish to run away as she had. Yes, she was almost certain to die if she went on. No, she would not accept one more day of her body being violated by the people whom she should have been able to trust. She’d had little use for boys before coming to live with Jakob — she felt they were generally inane, insane, or astonishingly stupid, if not all three at once — and had steadfastly refused to accept the implicit fate that awaited her in a scant few years’ time, being married to and bedding with anyone so unappealing as a male of the species. Now, after her experiences under her cousin’s roof, that impatience had curdled to overt loathing. If I die, I die, and may God have mercy upon me, she murmured, and walked on into the darkness.

The forest was old and well-established, which meant the ground was relatively even. The only places where roots were prominent were near the trunks of the trees, and the dense canopy overhead had discouraged most plant growth underfoot, so even in the fullness of night there was little risk that Greta would be tripped up by anything. Her stride was reasonably steady, and by the time she knew the gate to the compound was drawn against the perils of the night, she had progressed a dozen or more miles away from it into the wilderness.

That was when the simmer became a low moil of something else, something deeper than fear, something not quite as enervating as dread; still, she squared her shoulders and carried on through it. She had made her choice, and there was no possibility now of changing it. She had a crust of bread and some cheese in the pocket of her pinafore and made a light supper of it, and once that was finished, so was her store of provisions. Pinafore, blouse, skirt, petticoat, undervest, bloomers. Bonnet, stockings, boots. This was the total inventory of all she had in her possession now — that, and her resentment, and her wits.

Mayhap you’ve lost those, she murmured to herself.

But no … she would not turn back. Now, of course, she could not, because she no longer knew the way back to the colony. She’d made roughly south-southwest at first, but after several hours in the gloom of the forest, having to turn sometimes to pass trees or thickets of denser undergrowth, she was no longer sure at all where any of the cardinal directions lay. Earlier she would not turn back, because back at the colony — she refused to think of it as home any more — were her cousin Jakob and his sons, Hans, Georg, and Bertl.

Of them all, it was Bertl she despised the most. He was her own age — in his twelfth year — and of the three boys, his hands had been the most active, his demands the most urgent, his needs the least satiable. Oh! the ways he had groped her, and Oh! how he’d thrust and grunted, heedless of her distress, of her cries of pain, at his flesh’s invasion of her. She knew her body from her own explorations of it. Given time, given soft words and gentle touches, she thought she might have been able to accommodate him, though not likely willing to. But he didn’t know or didn’t care about that, and always fell upon her unexpected, when she was dry and unready, and his stiff little plaything was too small to yield to resistance; he drove it into her like a wooden peg.

The others, while older, were not much better.

None of it was good.

The trouble was that Jakob was the nominal leader of the colony until her father returned, so she had no higher authority — save God — to entreat for justice, and on that front, God had been conspicuously absent.

Sometime late into her night of flight, fatigue at last asserted itself. She had been acting almost entirely on nerves since resolving (after Bertl’s most recent sally into her girlhood, when he’d not been merely forceful, but overtly sadistic) that she would tolerate no more. Now those nerves had ebbed, and with their departure, her energy flagged. She became aware that she was sleeping as much as she was wakeful in her ongoing directionless trek — drifting into slumber on her feet — and settled herself against a likely trunk. She was too exhausted to weep and had fallen into sleep even before her backside had settled against the loam of the forest floor.

When she woke, dawn was just beginning to hint in salmon highlights amid the canopy overhead. She stirred and lifted her head from the pillow of her arms to see a faun standing nearby, its hide dappled in hues of cream and chestnut, its oversized ears pointing straight up, its large, dark eyes wide on her own. She and the faun regarded each other for several long moments; then the animal whuffed quietly and turned away, walking with a spindly but graceful gait farther into the trees. Greta saw, with some surprise, that a doe was standing near the edge of the little clearing, watching both her and the faun. She stared at them in quiet wonder as they disappeared among the trunks.

She understood enough of the wilderness to know that the presence of a doe and its faun suggested a lack of wolves, big cats, and possibly Indians, and this gave her some comfort. On the heels of that came the understanding that she would very likely die in this forest, and the only comfort to truly be had was that she would probably not feel the teeth that rent her body asunder, as by then she would have perished from thirst or hunger.

Almost, almost, the despair welled in her again; but then she remembered the mocking face of Bertl, the smirk of Hans, the foul breath of Georg, and the total indifference of Jakob to what his sons did to her, again and again, night upon night. The sensations of their flesh probing her. The flavors of their fluids, forced upon her tongue.

She stood and smoothed leaves and needles from her clothing, and resumed her walk into oblivion.

She deviated from her objectiveless journey only when she came across a small stream of clear water. Its flavor was sweet and she slaked her thirst in it, but all it served to do in the end was re-awaken her hunger. She began following its course, since she had nothing else to do.

Through that day her walk continued, and she began to give voice to her sorrow and her fury. There was no one to answer her and no one to bid her be silent, and her venting soon became a lengthy and blasphemous diatribe against all sons of Adam, beginning with that patriarch himself. She cursed him, cursed Moses and Aaron, cursed David and Solomon, cursed Abraham and Paul. She did not hurl invective at Jesus Christ — as abandoned as she’d felt by Him, that seemed like a step too far — but she most certainly heaped pejoratives on Joseph, on John the Baptist, and on the Apostles, naming them all from Peter to Judas, and cursing them all with equal venom.

Her fulmination tapered into silence, and Greta didn’t even feel the tears running down her cheeks as she half-stumbled into the first full clearing she’d encountered since the small one that morning, and when she stopped to stare around, blinking, she felt all her cares vanish momentarily in a flood of awe.

It was sometime after midday by the sun, and she could see it fully and unobstructed now,