In Search of Home

By Lynnette Maus

The speeding taxi’s right front tire hit the deep gravel on the shoulder and started to skitter toward the embankment. As the gravel sucked at the tire, the driver desperately spun the wheel to the left, trying to gain control and get the taxi back onto the pavement. In the next moment, the tire that was cranked to the left caught in the dirt, and the taxi lurched up onto its side and flipped up into a roll. At this point, there was a huge flash of light. When the taxi finally came to rest at the bottom of the hill, it landed on its top, skidded twenty feet in the grass, and was still. Nothing moved inside. The driver’s door was gone. There was no glass left intact in any of the windows, and the trunk hung open like the mouth of a beast. Smoke slowly drifted from the engine compartment as oil dripped from the hot engine.

When Tess awoke, her shoulder hurt badly. When she tried to move, every muscle in her body protested. The last thing she remembered was being in a taxi on her way home. As she slowly sat up gasping with pain, she realized her arm was in a sling. As she looked around, she saw she was in a small cabin. There were just a few pieces of furniture. No television, no computer, not even a stove. In fact, she could not see any form of electricity at all.

Where was she? How did she get here? How was she going to get home?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662444982

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In Search of Home

Lynnette Maus

Copyright © 2021 Lynnette Maus

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2021

ISBN 978-1-6624-4496-8 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-4498-2 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

The Ride Home

A Ranger

New Beginnings

Understanding

Hope Anew

A Lion in the Woods

A New Weapon

On the Road

A Group Effort

Enlightenment

Reality

Escape

Familiar Ties

Caught

Despair

Flight

Bonded

Winter

A Score to Settle

1

The Ride Home

Tess hated riding horses. It was her father’s fault she was here at the stables at all. He believed a person needed to be well-rounded in many skills and knowledge in order to succeed in the world. Tess saw no good application for needing to be able to ride horses in her life. She was a city girl from New York, and she didn’t plan on being anything else.

The horse Tess rode today was a walleyed Appaloosa that kept looking back at her with a baleful eye every time she made a mistake. The instructor was in the middle of explaining to Tess again the necessity of keeping one’s heels down and back straight when riding horses. Tess was not really listening as she rode the horse round and round the arena. Her thoughts were on the new computer game she had just gotten for her birthday. It was a fantasy game with incredible graphics and a new theme that she was excited to explore.

Tess was jerked back to reality when her horse stumbled over an imaginary rock in the powder-fine dirt of the arena floor. She was thrown forward and grabbed frantically at the horse’s mane to keep her balance and not hit the dirt. Students who fell off had to stay late and help the instructor clean tack after class. As Tess got herself righted back into position, the horse turned and looked at her as if to say, Pay attention, slacker. Tess hated this horse.

Twenty minutes later, Tess was headed out the stable doors into the New York sunshine and back to freedom. She grimaced at the sky. New York skies in the fall were almost green like lake water. They always reminded Tess of the dirty lake they went to every summer when she visited her mother. Though she loved her mother and wished her parents had never split, she wished even more that her mother still lived in the city. Tess loved the city with its bright lights and never-ending noise of traffic that was the heartbeat of any busy metropolis. New York City was all concrete and steel. To Tess, it felt solid and indestructible, a haven of security.

When Tess was bored and alone, she would sometimes ride the subway just for something to do. Tess loved the subway as it whisked through its underground maze of tunnels like a mole in its home, blind to the outside world except for brief glimpses of daylight when it surfaced at some of its aboveground stations. Manhattan, with its never-ending heartbeat and towering steel structures and millions of people constantly scurrying from one place to another, was Tess’s home, and she could never imagine being anywhere else.

While Tess stood out front of the stable office waiting for the taxi to come pick her up, she changed out of her riding boots to her favorite pair of sneakers; she couldn’t help but think how different life would be if her parents had stayed together. They had been divorced seven years earlier one week before Tess’s twelfth birthday. She really couldn’t blame them. When her father wasn’t working and at home, her parents didn’t do anything but fight. Neither could agree on anything the other wanted, and Tess always ended up being the middleman and breaking the fights up with excuses of needing something. Her mother and father didn’t like to fight in front of her and would go to their bedroom when they started arguing, but the fights got worse and worse until one day Tess’s mother walked out and didn’t come back.

Tess visited her mother in the hotel she was staying at a few days after she had left the house. The two were sitting in front of the mirror, and her mother was brushing Tess’s long and silky auburn hair that her mother always said was just like her grandmother’s hair. As Tess’s mother slowly brushed her hair, Tess cried and pleaded with her mother to give it one more try, but too much damage had been done, she said, and she could no longer tolerate being around her selfish idiot of a father. Her mother said that anytime she talked about him now. Her mother had moved out of the city to a small town in the middle of nowhere, as far as Tess was concerned. She saw her on weekends and holidays and for part of the summer. She hated going to her mother’s house. It was surrounded by trees that moaned with the wind in the winter and dumped a ton of leaves in the fall that Tess had to rake into piles. There was nothing to do except play her video games and text her one and only friend, Abigail, on her cell phone. Her mother was always outside in one of her flower gardens pruning, weeding, or some other equally mundane task, thought Tess, who just didn’t see what possible enjoyment her mother could gain from puttering around in the dirt all day.

As the taxi arrived, Tess got out her tablet and pen. Though Tess looked like every other normal teenage kid at a glance, she was not. Tess was born a mute. She had never uttered a sound in her life. She needed the tablet and pen to convey to the taxi driver where she needed to go. Forty-Second and Sixth, please, she wrote. He just nodded and headed back out the driveway.

Being mute wasn’t the worst thing to have as a disability, but Tess always envied those that could express themselves with words instead of having to write it on paper. Tess did not make friends easily, and Abigail, her one real friend, was often busy with her family and couldn’t hang out or text. Tess spent many longs hours by herself.

When Tess was an infant, it didn’t take long for her parents to figure out that something was amiss with their new little girl. Tess’s mother was still in the hospital after having given birth to Tess, and her father was relaxing in a chair next to the bed. They were taking turns holding little Tess and exclaiming to each other how sweet and beautiful their newborn child was. As Tess was handed back to her mother for the third time, she started to cry. Her mouth opened, and her eyes squeezed shut. She took a huge lungful of air and started beating the blanket she was wrapped in with red wrinkly arms. Her mother smiled at first to see her daughter throw her first tantrum, but as both parents looked on, they realized something wasn’t quite right. She looked just like a baby screaming, but there was no sound. Tess’s father went out and came back in momentarily with one of the nurses in tow. The nurse took one look at the child and excused herself to go and find the doctor.

When the doctor arrived, he took the child and disappeared for over an hour after many assurances to the now-worried parents that all would be well. Tess’s father sat on the side of the bed and held his wife’s hand and murmured over and over that everything was all right and the doctor would return soon with their baby. After x-rays and CT scans and blood tests, it was determined that Tess was a normal, healthy little girl that would never make a sound. She was born without vocal cords. There was nothing to be done except take the child home and raise her up with pen and paper in her hand. Tess learned to write by the time she was three years old. She also learned to sign with her hands, but so few people knew sign language she gave it up because it was too hard to get her point across when no one could speak her silent language. Her parents tried for years to get Tess involved with deaf groups throughout the city in the hopes that she could talk with those that also knew sign language. It never worked. Tess didn’t fit in. Not that she tried. She hated being different, and hanging around deaf people only made that more plain to anyone who saw them together signing with their hands and never making a sound. She didn’t have anything against others with disabilities; in fact, there were many that she admired greatly for what they had achieved, but the differences even there were so great that Tess always felt like an outsider.

Not being able to speak, her mother and father gave her every electronic gadget they could get their hands on as a way of appeasing their guilt of not producing a normal child, or so Tess thought. If there was something she wanted, all she had to do was point, and it was promptly bought and taken home.

As time went on, Tess’s mother and father grew apart. Tess’s father was always at work, and her mother lost interest in raising Tess by herself, so she devoted her time to her gin and tonics and the computer, where she studied day and night about plants and growing things. Tess knew that was an unfair assessment of her mother, but she resented her for paying more attention to a plant than to her. Over the years, the house became littered with potted plants. The moisture from the plants was ruining the wood furniture, her father always said. He and Tess agreed they hated all the greenery, so Tess took to hiding in her room when she was home and delved into the fantasy world of gaming. When her mother tried to bring plants into Tess’s room to brighten it up, Tess refused. She wouldn’t have a single one of those messy wet plants where it might ruin her equipment. Her mother stopped trying after a while.

The night her mother walked out of their lives, her father threw out every single one of her mother’s plants. When her mother came back to get her things a few days later, the fight that ensued over the plants in the dumpster was one that Tess would never forget. After an hour of screaming and throwing things, Tess’s mother found a paring knife she used to trim plants with and went after her father with it. The neighbors called the police, and they had to break into the house and pull her parents apart. They found Tess hiding in her closet. After a week in a foster home, she was returned to her father. The fight was never spoken of by either of her parents.

Now, seven years after the divorce, Tess’s mother was a recluse who never left the safety of her garden sanctuary, and her father was still a workaholic who was home just long enough to get a few hours of sleep every night. Since he wasn’t around for Tess, he insisted on her being involved with extracurricular activities when not in school. Tess was in her first year at the community college, and for the most part, she didn’t mind because the alternative was sitting at home alone in an empty apartment. She was going to school to become a computer technician, but her dad insisted she live at home while she went to college because he was afraid she wasn’t ready for the big world. Her dad was overprotective but didn’t have a clue where Tess was half the time because he spent so much time at his office. He was a lawyer, and someone always had need of his services. He worked at a large firm downtown, a place to which Tess had never been, and had been in the process of becoming a partner any day now. Tess would roll her eyes whenever her dad said that, because he had been saying that for the last five years. She was sure the partners were stringing her dad along because he never said no to any of their requests, but his success in court was only mediocre. Tess knew this because her mother would frequently talk with her friends on the phone about the idiot ex-husband, laughing loudly as she exclaimed how stupid he could be. A while back, Tess had gotten angry with her mother for always trashing her father. While her mother was on the phone and giggling over some piece of tidbit she had heard from another friend about her father, she had written on her notepad, I am mute, not deaf. Stop talking about dad like that in front of me! and slammed the notebook down on the table in front of her mother, making her mother jump and squeak in surprise. Her mother leaned down and read what Tess wrote. She paled and quietly told her friend she had to go. She had apologized quickly to Tess and promised not to do it again. Two weeks later, her mother did it again. Tess never said anything and would leave the room whenever she was on the phone.

As she settled into the seat with her earbuds in, listening to Phillip Phillips, she thought about her dad’s present. She’d received a new video game from her father and was anxious to get home and play it. As the taxi sped toward the freeway, she wondered what it would be like to be a heroine like the ones in the games she played. She imagined herself as a leather-wearing, sword-toting warrior riding into the midst of battle on her faithful horse. She smiled to herself. She hated horses in real life. Why were they an appealing part of her games? She figured it was because they didn’t give you horrible, walleyed looks when you screwed up in the fantasy world.

Just then, the taxi lurched to the side as the driver cussed and gave the finger to a passing truck that had cut him off from entering the freeway. The speeding taxi’s right front tire hit the deep gravel on the shoulder and started to skitter toward the embankment. Terrified, Tess grabbed the door handle to keep from sliding across the back seat. As the gravel sucked at the tires, the driver desperately spun the wheels to the left, trying to gain control and get the taxi back onto the pavement. There was no response. The gravel was too thick, and the tires were held fast. In another flash, the front tire that was turned to the left, caught in the dirt, and the taxi lurched up onto its side and sped into a roll. At this point, everything became a blur. Tess frantically tried to keep a hold of the door handle, but it was ripped from her grasp, and she was flung to the other side of the car. She felt herself being thrown around the inside of the car like a rag doll. Her shoulder burst into a blaze of pain as it hit something sharp in the back seat. The noise was deafening. Tess could hear parts and pieces of the taxi that were being ripped off as it spun over and over down the hillside. There was a huge flash of light and the sound of an explosion. Tess was sure the taxi was blowing up. The last thing that Tess saw before everything went black was a flash of autumn blue sky.

When the taxi finally came to rest at the bottom of the hill, it landed on its top, skidded twenty feet, and was still. Nothing moved inside. The driver’s side door was gone. There was no glass left intact in any of the windows, and the trunk hung open like the mouth of a beast. Smoke slowly drifted from the engine compartment as oil dripped onto the hot engine.

2

A Ranger

Vince was a ranger. He enjoyed being a ranger. Every day, he set out from his home among the trees to manage his forest. He never thought of leaving his forest and was content to spend his days wandering the pathways through the trees and brush, tending to all the things that needed to be done to keep his forest healthy and growing. Vince didn’t think about it in this way; it just was what he was, and he never gave it a thought to do or be anything else. Simple yet satisfying.

As he got ready to leave his house at the break of dawn, he first went up the ladder to the roof to take a good look at the forest around him. This piece of the forest was his to tend, but it was still wild and untamed, a dangerous place to be most of the time. Wild creatures of all kinds lived here. Some looked to him for help, most others avoided him, and a select few hunted him. He didn’t mind. It was part of the job.

As he scanned the forest, he noticed a strange smell on the air. It was a foreign smell to him. Vince knew every detail of his range, every boulder, hill, stream, and cave within his territory, yet this was new to him. He stood perfectly still and studied the forest to the south where the smell was coming from. As he tested the air, he tried to picture what would be making this smell. It was sharp, tinny and hinted of something burnt. It was not the smell of wood burning and not the smell of grass burning, both of which he had smelled often enough in the form of forest fires. It reminded him of what a forge smelled like, hot and metallic, yet there was something more to it. His senses were sharp and almost as acute as any forest creatures. He depended on them for his survival every day. Yet he could not place this smell, and it bothered him.

There was a small breeze coming from the south that stirred his shoulder-length brown hair and ruffled his beard. The more he studied this new smell, the more uneasy he became. The forest was quiet around him, but not unnaturally so. As he looked, he saw birds in the canopy going about their daily activities. He saw a squirrel on the ground at the base of a tree digging in the dirt, probably hunting for a cached treasure of nuts. Slowly Vince turned around and scanned the forest for any other signs of disturbances. This forest lay at the edge of the Desper mountain range. It ran for miles in every direction. Every section of the forest from the base of Torger Mountain to the plains of Gwynedd to the south was manned by a ranger just like Vince. Vince’s home lay at the heart of his territory, and it took him five days walking to reach the edge of his territory in any direction. His southernmost border was the edge of the Gwynedd Plains. Torger Mountain to the north was seldom seen by Vince unless he climbed to the highest point in his territory a day’s hike to the west.

After a few more minutes of study, Vince decided it best to investigate this odd smell better. He carefully descended the ladder; his muscles, toned and hard, carried him effortlessly back to the top floor of his tree house. A mechanical injury from a fall would most likely mean his death, being alone in the forest with no help for days and very few visitors. Vince was slow and methodical about everything he did unless he was in imminent danger and then he could move swiftly and silently, a deadly predator.

Upon reaching the top floor of the house, Vince ducked his tall powerful frame inside and scanned the room for his shirt. The top floor of the house was his bedroom. It was small with just a bed and a table with a chair for furniture. One wall had the bed tucked up to it, and the wall was rough bark. The bark was alive, and Vince paused momentarily to run his hand over it. He took pleasure in the feel of the ancient tree that was his home. Most rangers lived in caves or built homes on the ground. Vince had decided when he was first assigned this part of the forest that this ancient old oak was the best sanctuary he could make against marauding critters.

There was clutter filling the corners of the room. Books lay open on the end of the bed, and weapons of various sorts leaned against the walls, and drying plants of many kinds hung from the rafters, creating a plethora of smells from the rich and pungent to the fresh and spicy.

Vince grabbed his cotton shirt off the back of the chair and descended the ladder to the first floor. This room was equally cluttered, but it was not unclean. Against one wall was a set of shelves that were filled to capacity with jars of all sizes and shapes. Some were large glass canisters and held grains of different kinds. Others were made of clay and had cork stoppers; some were woven grass with a weave that was small and tight. Inside these were lined with a special type of sealer that was a mixture of beeswax and resin from trees that made them watertight yet flexible. Vince paid highly for these from one of the plains dwellers at the edge of his territory. Many rangers’ territories had small villages that they could get supplies from, but Vince’s territory was so far from Bathgor, the huge river that was the main source of commerce in the area, that very few people ventured out this far. There was a group of people called the plains dwellers who were nomadic and moved with the herds of great buffalo. When the buffalo came, Vince would venture out onto the plains and trade with the plainsmen for things he couldn’t make himself. Vince traveled to Bathgor once a year to get supplies for the winter.

There was also a large wooden countertop that held different cooking utensils, pot, and pans. It was polished to a high shine.

There was also a large wooden table that was neatly stacked with books and unfinished projects of one sort or another. Three chairs were tucked under the table. In one corner was a rocker with blankets thrown over the back of it. It was clean but pushed back against the wall and looked like it was rarely used. New morning sun peaked through the window and covered the chair in soft warmth. Along the eastern wall was a small cot. Occasionally, hunters passed through and stopped for the night to visit with Vince. Though he liked his solitude, he always welcomed them as they usually had news from the outside world, and Vince enjoyed hearing a voice that was not his own once in a while.

As Vince slid his shirt over his head, he pondered about the smell he had caught from the roof of his house. It bothered him that something was amiss in his forest. He was determined to track it down. He grabbed his pack from by the door and filled it with two days of dry rations that he always kept stocked and took down from the wall two more waterskins than the usual two he had in his pack at all times. He wanted to be prepared for whatever happened in the forest not knowing what he might find or how long he may be gone. He filled the grass water bottles with fresh water. His weapons had been gone over in detail the night before to look for any wear or damage that might have occurred during the previous day’s travel tending to the forest. Vince believed in being prepared at a moment’s notice. Life often depended on it. He swung his long bow and quiver full of arrows over his shoulder and buckled his knife on his belt. After a moment’s thought, he went back inside and took from the wall a small short sword that had been his father’s and buckled it to his belt as well. He also had two throwing knifes that were kept tucked into his boots and a sling with rounded stones in his pack for hunting squirrels, rabbits, and birds.

Vince didn’t like being so weighed down with so many supplies as every extra pound he carried meant that much more work his body had to do, and a tired ranger was often a dead range, as they often told him during his short educational stay at the rangers’ district office when he was learning to become a ranger. The smell from the forest had him worried though, and he figured preparedness was worth the extra weight today.

As he walked out of the house, he locked the door behind him. Normally, he left his house open for any visitors or passersby that needed a bit of shelter, but the forest just didn’t feel right and he was on edge. No sense in leaving things to chance.

Vince swung down the last ladder to the forest floor and headed toward the creek south of the tree house. He paused at a tree with an old woodpecker’s nest in the trunk that he could reach if he stood on the tips of his toes. He gave a soft whistle. From the hole, a small sleek head popped out, blinking sleepily in the morning light. Time to get up, Tam. We have work to do today, and I might need your nose.

Vince put his hand into the hole where the head had disappeared back into and pulled it back out with a small, slender-bodied creature with sable-colored fur. Vince opened a pocket in his pack, and the creature slid in, curled up, and promptly went back to sleep. Grinning, Vince said, Tam, you sleep more than any critter I know.

Tam was a marten, which is a ferret-sized weasel that is a ferocious hunter of small birds and small mammals. They are a prized furbearer species whose fur is soft yellowish brown shading to a dark sable. Tam had a buff-colored patch under his throat and chest, and the belly fur was lighter in color than the rest of the body.

Tam was Vince’s familiar, and the bond between the two was strong enough that each knew what the other’s thoughts were most of the time. Vince had found Tam on one of his forest forays two summers ago. Tam had been rooting a small mouse out of a hole under a log when the log had shifted and trapped Tam under it. Vince had been watching from a thicket of brush where he had paused to drink from his waterskin when the log had moved. He had quickly jumped out from his spot and easily picked the log up enough for Tam to scramble out. He was unhurt but had gotten a face full of dirt and took a moment to shake the detritus from his fur. As soon as that was done, he looked up at Vince, ready to shoot into the underbrush if he thought Vince was a threat, and in that moment, as their eyes met, the bonding happened. Two years later, and Vince could not imagine life without his furry little friend.

Moving out into a ground-eating trot, Vince headed toward the east away from the smell that was emanating faintly from the forest. His thought was if there was danger of some sort, he didn’t want someone to be able to track his route back to his home in the trees. Within a hundred paces of the tree house, there was a small bubbling stream. This is where Vince collected his water from every day. A bit farther downstream was a deep pool that held trout and crawdads. It was also the place where Vince bathed. The pool was lined with large flat rocks that Vince had laboriously gathered