FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

"Don't hurt her. She isn't dangerous. She's naked. Like a newborn child."

I woke up very slowly from some sort of coma or sleep. For all I know it could have been death itself I woke up from. I indeed felt like a newborn child. Naked, confused, angry. Wet. Sad, also, and with no explanations as to why.

When my eyes finally began working again I saw a lot of fur and a lot of leaves, and that was all I saw. Three furry things hovering above my fragile form laying on the soil, all of them looking down at me with great alarm, but not necessarily fear. "Are you okay?" one of them said, it was one with golden, creamy fur. "Please be okay." At the time I felt like I didn't remember how to speak, either. I was just angry at whoever these things were, even though I knew they didn't hurt me. But something did.

Eyes worked more and I saw human skin along with the fur. The one who asked if I was okay had golden fur on the head, the arms and feet, and around the waist, and some dark markings on his face like tattoos, but he was otherwise human looking. Now I was more confused and therefore more angry. The golden furred human helped me stand up, covered in dirt and blood.

I was there, now. Naked with tan skin, long brown hair, a chubby, ugly body, blood and dirt covering me. I ached in so many ways and still could not figure out what to ask yet. I simply wobbled back and forth a little, almost falling into the one with the gold fur that helped me stand up.

"Please come with us," golden fur said, not letting go of my hand. "We have a safe place for you to be."

Another of the things spoke up immediately, this one very angry and with red fur in the same places. He said, "No. Leave her here. It's a trap. She's going to hurt us."

"No she isn't. She couldn't. Look at her!" Golden fur said this to red fur, but he wasn't angry. Only trying to make him realize. "It's okay, I promise." Red fur tried to relax.

The other one had brown fur, she was a girl and didn't say anything, but helped dust off the blood and dirt from me.

"Will you come with us?" golden fur continued, "please, we can get you somewhere safe."

Against all reason and odds, I...Didn't necessarily believe them, but the only important thing to me was that the word "safe" was said and anything with even a small chance of such a thing was what I wanted. So I went with them, no fur on me.

-

The one with the golden fur had with him a very large moose that was completely white, which he rode. He let me ride atop of it, too, while we made it back to where it was they wanted to take me.

The creatures took me to a sanctity like place in the middle of this very vast forest I had somehow ended up in. There was a nice dug out in a mountain side we could get to once we went through a path forged only by repeated travel. There were more furry people here, some with the same color fur as others, most of them brown or red, some of them orange or purple. There was only one with golden colored fur, though.

The fur, it turned out, wasn't actually a part of the creatures themselves. It was clothing, and they were, truly, naked people just as I. They all had markings on their faces, all different, all painted on with what may have been blood, or mud.

The one with the golden fur gave me a throw of more fur to warm myself up with. "Thank you for coming with us. I am called Sotukura, and I'm a bear. We're all bears. Not the animal, but... bears still." The one with the red fur, called Takikura, came over to us. Sotukura continued, "do you remember where you came from?" Still too nervous to speak, I fervently shook my head 'no.' "Do you have a family, or a home?" I only stared blankly, for I did not know. One would think I should, but every thing in my body told me I did not. As if I truly were a brand new thing in this world, a newborn adult, twenty years old and with a knowledge of everything a typical 20 year old would have, except for anything about myself.

Sotukura waited for an answer that I could not give, and then he said, "If you like, you can also be a bear with us." Takikura then snorted at him, and said "No. You can keep her here until she remembers everything, but then she has to leave."

"I wouldn't do that to anybody else here, Takikura. We all came here exactly how she did, if not more easily. She will be a bear. If she wants."

Takikura left frustrated, and Sotukura looked back on me. I nodded nervously. I had no other option.

-

As time went on, I was explained by all of the bears except Takikura what I had become a part of. This group were a group of people all from different places who had run away from their homes and their families and their lives. By some strange fateful energy, there were about 13 people who all had ended up in the middle of this forest after running away, no matter where they originally came from. And one by one they were found by one of the bears, or a group of them, and brought back to their sanctuary where they could be safe, fed, warm, and most importantly, loved.

Sotukura told me love was the most important part of their tribe. Everyone here came from somewhere which was supposed to love them but did not, or worse, did the complete opposite. When Sotukura himself came out here and found the very first person to run, he vowed to love them forever. That person, or bear now, was Takikura and somebody else who came with him, but Sotukura would not tell me who that was.

"I would rather Takikura himself explain the other person. But please don't ask him. You will find out eventually.

After a few days I finally found myself able to speak again, and that was how I learned some of what I learned about being a bear; by asking other bears.

"How did you end up out here yourself?" I asked Sotukura. A smile slowly grew on his dirty, painted face, and he said, with hardly a care, "I don't remember."

I was still naked, and I didn't get any fur yet. Sotukura told me I would eventually. I did end up getting another kind of skin, I'm not sure which kind. It might have been leather. It didn't have fur, but it kept me warm.

The longer I stayed, the more I learned about each bear, and the more comfortable I felt. I still could not remember my life before the bears found me, but I didn't mind. I knew somehow I was better off here. The bears taught me how to hunt for fish and other animals, to find berries and fruits, to defend myself against other woodland animals, and everything else required to live out here in the middle of a furious but gentle nature.

I learned about the other bears, and they all knew their lives as humans before bears. All of them had very sad stories of abuse, neglect, poverty, among other things that eventually caused them to leave their own homes. Some of them were thrown out of their homes by force, by their parents. All of them were thankful to have ended up here. The only one who did not speak to me despite my efforts to try to was Takikura. I didn't know why he hated me. Sotukura told me he didn't hate me, and that this was how he was to all the new bears. He still would not tell me why.

Some time after I joined the bears, around four or so weeks, Sotukura took me, by myself, to the edge of a cliff of the forest. He told me he had something very important he wanted to convey to me. Looking over the cliff you could see the entirety of everything able to be explored in this lush, green area. It was clear that this entire forest had never been touched by any other humans except the ones that became bears.

Sotukura didn't say anything for a while. He only looked at all of the life with me. It was as if we were looking at all of the life in the world.

But then he held me, from behind, and squeezed me very tightly, as I looked over into the horizon. And strangely, he started shouting.

"I'll love you forever!"

His voice boomed over the country. "I'll love you forever!"

At first I thought he was telling the forest itself and all life within it.

"I'LL LOVE YOU FOREVER!"

But then I realized, as he held me tighter and made me feel protected, he was saying it to me.

"I'LL LOVE YOU FOREVER, AND EVER, AND EVER, AND EVER!"

The way he said it, was desperate and strong. He said it in a way which nobody could possibly doubt it.

I didn't know why he was doing it, at the time, but I knew he meant it. He loved me, as he loved his brothers and other sisters, and he wanted me to know it.