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The Long Jaunt

By "cutting straight through," Mitch was referring to the self-same park by which they had entered Jacob's premises. By foot, it would be a straight shot through the park to get near the beaches, thanks to a defunct railway. While playing in the area when he was younger, he had found a route through the woods to a high ridge overlooking the tracks, and he remembered a way he could climb up it. There should have been plenty of time for he and Zeke to find their way home.

However, they were greatly slowed in their progress by the various stones and bits of metal that littered the path, and Mitch earnestly wished that he had brought with him a proper pair of shoes. It was painful treading over the uncertain, hazardous terrain in a pair of what was hardly more than a pair of gloves fitted to the big paws of his feet.

It struck him how much more easily his brother navigated the terrain. His four-pawed gait distributed his weight in such a manner that, if one paw were to encounter a protrusion or other hazard, he instinctively shifted his weight off of that paw. Furthermore, the increased surface area made it far less painful to tread over it, which was the same advantage boasted of by plantigrade walkers.

Mitch tried walking on a track of the ancient rail itself for a while, at a loss for any other means of keeping his feet safe. He found himself using the same gripping technique he used on his board sometimes, which was to allow his narrow heel, useless for actually resting on any surface, to to hang over one side to allow his foot to rest flat, in plantigrade fashion, against the beam. In this manner, he skittered along the track. That was part of what led to the onset of his problems.

That is, it is very difficult to prevent a full-grown cougar feral, especially if it be a tom, from bounding off to one side when one is walking along the track of a disused railway, especially if the same cougar feral's hunting instincts have suddenly been awakened by the sight of a small, furry animal scurrying across his path. In fact, it would be a good idea to let go of the leash attached to the rogue tom if one were to happen to fall down as a result of this sort of incident, for being dragged on one's side through extremely sharp rocks that were never intended for being walked upon without the benefit of steel-toed boots can be very hazardous to one's health, especially if there were larger hard and immobile obstructions in the vicinity.

Mitch's acquisition of several painful lacerations along his right-hand side and his subsequent loss of consciousness, as a result of not letting go of Zeke's leash, should eloquently demonstrate the value of the above suggestion pertaining to the keeping of one's health.

~~ *** ~~

Mitch groaned in pain as he came awake, spitting up a mixture of blood and grit. For the first several moments after his awakening, pain was the only thing that he could perceive at all. Mixed in with it was a feeling of wooziness and uncertainty of his surroundings that might have been pleasant if he were not already swamped with far less inviting sensations. Because of being overloaded with such sensory input, it took Mitch a while to remember where he was, and it took him even longer to get a concept of the time of day.

He was laying at the bottom of a rocky bank next to the disused track. He had a vague notion that he had been drifting in and out of semi-consciousness for a while, and he was pretty sure that the lighting was dimmer than he remembered it. Either that, or he had suffered retinal damage in both eyes, which still wasn't established.

As the strength to move came back into his limbs, he tried slowly getting up. The feeling of his gorge rising, though, bringing with it the taste of coffee and a few snapshots from his visitation with the fox, forced him to lay back down. It was too early to start trying to get up, so he just rolled on his back and tried staring at the sky to get an idea as to what time it might be.

He gave up on that pretty quickly, though. The sky had started looking confusingly like a storm-tossed ocean, and the sense that he was on a sinking ship drove him to close his eyes and roll over onto the side that wasn't covered in ragged scratches and gouges. As Mitch lay there miserably, he listened to his stomach gurgle and rumble for a while, but he decided after a while that it wasn't thoroughly insistent on voiding its contents. It would just demand rest, and it just tossed him a few healthy doses of reflux to make it clear that it was unhappy.

He ended up laying there for about an hour while his cuts slowly crusted over, having the sense to writhe himself about ocassionally to keep the blood from crusting up in ways that it would just open his wounds again if he moved later. At some point, he checked his cell phone and found it was either broken or completely out of battery, but at least it had somehow stayed in his pocket. After a while, his head had cleared to the point where he could think with some reasonable degree of clarity again, and he realized suddenly what was missing in this situation. Really really missing.

~~ *** ~~

"Zeke!" he shouted as he trudged his way down the track. He wondered if his brother would have the sense to find his way home. Mitch couldn't stand the thought of his brother running around out there, naked and alone, especially with patrols out there waiting to carry him off to the local shelter if he happened to get into any trouble. If Zeke ended up in one of those...well, getting him out "unaltered" would be costly, thanks to the eugenics laws.

"Ezekiel!" Mitch picked his way carefully along the grassy trail next to the bank, not wanting to risk another slide down those sharp rocks. Besides, he wondered if he had twisted his ankle on the way down because he found that its movement was strangely robotic and stiff. Another inconvenience for him to bear was that he had lost one of his paw-mitts somewhere and hadn't been able to find it, so his foot felt every patch of ground that it stepped on.

In time, the path he was on began to veer away from the track, and he was separated it first by a growing slope of rocks between him and the tracks, soon by boulders and bits of escarpment, and in time by forest. He had a muddled notion that, if he kept going in this direction for long enough, he would either find the beach or end up slogging through marsh. The only way to find out, though, was to keep walking.

~~ *** ~~

Mitch stared around him fretfully at the sundry saltwater flora that surrounded him. The ground around him was wet, and there were strange creatures skittering around just at the edges of his perception. Worse, it was getting later in the evening, and night was definitely not the time he wanted to find himself lost in such a place. If he remembered his geography lessons correctly, the marsh stretched for several miles along the river. If one were to walk along the edge of it, the rocks along the mouth of the river were covered in various crustacea, and the escarpment above them was impossible to climb. The water itself would be full of dangerous cross-currents and probably even more dangerous wildlife.

However, the young tom was pretty sure that the slope was shallow enough where he was that he could make it up to where he could get in sight of the beach. It couldn't be very far. Besides, maybe he would find Zeke running around somewhere in the rockier terrain. Of course, that was going on the dangerous assumption that a feral-born tom would follow the same behavioral patterns as a wild cougar, and Mitch's recent experience with the feral-born had suggested strongly that their minds were not entirely like those of animals.

~~ *** ~~

Mitch cursed himself for his stupidity. Several bad scrapes with the local flora, especially from sliding rapidly down steep bits of slope, had left his clothing torn to the point of being more of a problem than a help. His pants were in tatters, and he had finally taken his shirt off and tied it around his head to keep it from getting caught on everything. The smell of saltwater began to fill his nostrils, though, so he knew he was close to the water. He just had to keep trudging on. It couldn't be far, and he would be in familiar territory. At least he would know the way to go.

As the light faded, though, so did his strength. An injured body in the process of trying to repair itself didn't like being hauled senselessly around the countryside, and it tended to continuously demand rest and time to heal.

To Mitch's mind, the only thing that he could really think of was the course of amounted to a trail. All of the imagery around him faded, and the way forward showed up like a bright line in front of him, going up rocky slopes and weaving around various obstructions. Sometimes, it would split off into two or three different routes, and Mitch would stop for a while, with his tail twitching, as he decided which one to take.

He could never decide for sure which of the routes looked better, but he had picked up a way of getting out of these dilemmas. Instead of bothering his confused mind over what made one trail better than the other, he just mentally "plucked" each would-be route and listened to the sound of the note it played, and he went with whichever one sounded the clearest or closest to the right tone. Mitch just couldn't think clearly enough to do anything more.

~~ *** ~~

Mitch had been going slowly downhill for a while, and the smell of ocean had grown immensely stronger as he had crested what must have been a dragon-tail summit. His mind was very much on the outs with him, and he swore that the color tone of his surroundings changed to the sound of waves crashing against the shore. His breathing was growing labored, though, and it might have just been his heavy breathing pressing against his eyeball that caused the shifts. Whatever it was made him dizzy, and he. In time, he fought his way through one last patch of endless trees and undergrowth, and he crawled out onto a rocky escarpment overlooking the ocean.

To his complete amazement, he looked up to see three suns hanging low and bright over the horizon, standing on great pillars of fire and on the arms of a blazing cross with the flanking two forming the bases of a heavenly arch. He thought for a moment that he could see a smiling face somewhere beyond it, but he was interrupted suddenly by a bout of intense vomiting that was either followed or accompanied by the onset of unconsciousness.

~~ *** ~~

It felt just fine as long as he lay still on his back. The ground didn't pitch like a boat in a hurricane as long as Mitch just lay completely still. He found himself unable to get back to sleep, so he started counting the stars. Eventually, he lost count and just started counting again at random. This went on for a long while.

In time, Mitch's counting fell into a rhythm. He realized slowly that, no matter how far he got, he would always stop on a prime number, and they sometimes got rather high in digits as the time passed by. Then he started counting up by prime numbers alone, not entirely sure how he knew them but somehow...tasting them. The right kinds of numbers had a distinctive taste.

Eentually, he started looking closely at the distances between one individual star and the ones around it. Somehow, he got the impression that some stars were "near," and others were "far," even though his depth perception was incapable of determining the actual distances. Somehow, he could tell that even a lot of the brighter ones were farther away than many that were very close to him. That sense led to him refiguring actual proximities, and an image of the galaxy began forming in his mind. Then he found himself in the middle of it, and the stars were singing.

~~ *** ~~

As the young tom awoke, he heard ocean waves crashing against the shore. He had never ached so badly in his life, but he felt happy in spite of the pains. He even giggled a little as he did his waking stretches, arching his back and kicking his feet slowly out, observing surprisingly little tightness and only a few jolts of pain as he moved the injured foot. Apparently it hadn't been a full sprain after all.

Finding that his blood-soaked clothing binded at him and threatened to rub the scabs off of his lacerations, he took the simple measure of removing his clothing, not caring in his present condition about being seen by anybody. He looked like quite a mess, but he realized as he patted himself down that none of the lacerations or gouges were especially deep. Any scars they left would probably eventually just be little ruffles in his fur, nothing to remark on at all.

It suddenly struck him, though, as to where he was. It was the stone that forced him to the realization, actually; it was the same one that he had posed on for Michelle days earlier. It was a little eerie to think about how he had felt then about being stripped of all of his clothing. He had felt exposed and indecent then, and he had struggled to keep his arousal down just from the wind blowing against him. Now all he felt was the sun shining down on his fur, and he was glad to have the tatters finally off of him.

Experimentally, he tried going over to the boulder to pose on it as he had the previous day. He tried arching his back the same way and arranging his legs the same way. No feeling of a blade at his groin, no sense of emasculation. Just a wonderful feeling of the sun pouring down on him. Whether it was because he was alone or changed somehow, he didn't feel like a tom who looked like a queen at all. He just felt like...Mitch. Not "Mitchell Carver Puma Concolor," not "Mitch, the tom," but just "Mitch Carver," and that was all the name he would ever need.

His ears flickered as he heard a somewhat familiar voice greet them. He ran off to the edge of the escarpment closest to the beach, and he saw a silhouette standing on the beach, in the shadow of the escarpment, with waves breaking over his feet. No, wait...he was running back and forth, and he was throwing something as two other silhouettes ran and crashed in the waves. Unless he missed his guess, he thought he might know the hob that voice belonged to.

Getting down was looking to be a bit of a problem, though, because it was a goodly distance to get all the way down to the beach if he were to follow the escarpment all the way. He tried focusing his eyes in the same way he had done all the previous evening, getting no result. He just saw a steep drop, with only a very limited supply of places to put a questing paw.

Mitch knew that there must be something he was doing wrong, though, so he laid down on his belly with his paws resting on the edge, inhaling deeply and trying to wrap himself again in the music of his surroundings. As he let out a slow, feral-sounding growl, his surroundings darkened again, and sparkles floated around in his inner vision like before. There was a way down, but it was tricky. He "plucked" at it once, and he got a very discordant "sound." He tried "plucking" at it a little more softly, and he got a trembling, inconsistent result. After several trials, he found just such a way to "pluck" it that a roughly clear, consonant note emerged from it, and his nose itched with excitement as he began descending face-first.

Most of the drop consisted of sliding and bumping over various rocks, and his trajectory took him perilously toward the ocean. As he approached a narrow ledge below which there would be nothing but undertow and rocks, he bunched his legs and rebounded off of it. He wasn't sure how, but he found himself running rapidly down another ledge, and he let his momentum carry him up a nearly sheer face that must have went up a good ten feet. That is, it took him up just far enough that he could catch himself on a grassy ledge, and he heaved himself slowly up.

"Hello up there!" the voice shouted. The figure was waving at him, apparently having seen his acrobatics. It was that Gently fellow alright, and the hob had apparently thought little of the endeavor of getting this far down with the way he was smiling and waving. For Mitch's part, he was sure at this point that he was both crazy and exceptionally lucky, and a suddenly renewed and redoubled fear of falling kept him on all fours, slowly creeping his way feral style down to the beach. A laughing Mr. Gently walked upshore to meet him at the bottom.

"Hey there, Mr. Mitch! Carver boy!" the otter said as Mitch got to a part of the ledge that was only about a six-foot drop to the bottom. "I'm pretty sure I'm pointing out the obvious here, but you look a mess, kid. You didn't get all those scratches on the way down, did ya? And what happened to your clothes? Did ya get rolled somewhere?"

"Hey, Mr. Ge-uhh, Mr. Pete," Mitch said weakly. "Umm...if you were to help me down, I would be greatly in your debt." He wished that he could be more gracious and answer the string of questions, but he was really in no mood whatsoever for conversation as long as he was still up on this ledge, his wild impulsivity from before now completely dissolved.

"Sure," he said. "Look, just drop your leg, and let me help you get down here."

Mitch did so, and he followed the hob's further instructions. He was grabbed around his legs and slid carefully through the otter's arms, his fingers clutching at the ledge, down far enough for Mr. Pete to grab him around the middle. Very gently, with the usual unseen strength of an otter or any mustelid, Mitch was set upon the ground. Feeling again very weak, he let out a breath and looked up at the smiling face of his benefactor.

"If I keep helping you out, kid," the otter joked, "I'm going to start keeping a tab for you to pay me back later."

Mitch managed to laugh at that. He was brought up short, though, as a feral and very female version of Peter Gently came bounding up, with the other figure right behind her. All of Mitch's eyes were for the second one, though. "Zeke!" he shouted happily, getting up on his knees and reaching out his arms to greet his brother. The big feral nearly knocked him over as he reciprocated in his own way, squirming and turning himself around as Mitch's paws started petting over his back.

"So you two know each other, huh?" said Mr. Pete. "Zeke. Probably short for Ezekiel, isn't it?"

Mitch nodded as Zeke turned around and licked his face, something he had never done.

"Well, Mr. Mitch," said the otter, "I'd like to introduce you to my niece, here. Her name is Devi, my niece by my little sister, poor dear died giving birth to her." The being he referred to was a feral otter jill. Like all ferals, she was much larger than her natural counterpart, and she looked very vaguely like she could have been an ordinary person walking on all-fours. She came up to Mitch, sniffing at him curiously.

Mitch reached out and petted her on her shoulder. "Well, hello there, Ms. Devi," he said politely, feeling pretty sure she would catch the spirit of what he said if not the meaning.

Then Devi and Zeke did something extraordinary. Devi pressed her cheek against the big tom's neck, and Zeke bent his head down in an upsettingly familiar gesture.

"Mr. Pete?" Mitch said nervously.

The hob slapped himself in the head. "Oh!" he said. "I should have told you that straight off. You might not believe this, but I think these two have taken up as mates."

The young tom blinked at him, stunned. "Are you sure?"

"Caught them in the act."

"Zeke!" Mitch wailed. "She's not even remotely the same species!"

The two responded by bounding back off toward the waves, nuzzling and nipping at each other. This was bad. Very very bad.