Abby II

As the men prepared to lock her in the stocks by the powder magazine, Abby felt something soft hit the back of her head. She smelled it almost as soon as she felt it: rotten tomatoes! She heard thunder overhead. She groaned inside. It was going to be a wet night, but she forced herself to look on the bright side- the rain was likely to keep any tomato-throwers away. Suddenly a huge crack sounded, and a blinding bolt of lightning flashed from the sky and hit the magazine. With an incredibly deafening roar, the magazine exploded, engulfing Abby in flames. She screamed as she felt the searing heat scorch her skin. The flames quickly ate up the ropes that bound her, and she frantically lifted the heavy beams from her neck with a strength born of panic.
She stumbled out of the flames with blazing clothes. A man nearby poured a great bucket of water on her, as she collapsed to the ground. The world went black in a haze of white pain.

Abby woke up to blackness. She tried to scream, but her mouth felt as if it were covered by bandages. She began to kick and scream, to wake up from the horrific nightmare, but then she felt gentle hands on her arms, and heard a soothing voice in her ear. She felt the tightness around her head and soon she could see light through what she had now discerned as cloth bandages. As the gentle hands peeled away the last of the gauze, she looked up into the face of the town doctor. She tried to speak, but found it strangely hard to move her lips. He shook his head and told her to quiet down. He said that she had survived the fire, but had been very badly burned. They wouldn’t know how bad her scars were until all the bandages came off and she was healed. He also told her that the reason she couldn’t talk was that her lips had been almost seared off in the fire.

      One month later, Abby had begun to live with her disfiguring scars. The superstitious people of the town looked upon the fire as a sign from God that she was justified. The fact that the three men who had been tying her up had perished in the fire only confirmed their suspicion that she was blessed, but to curb any further chance of fatalities, which seemed to happen in her presence, they gave her daughter back and sent her away from the village. They gave her ample supplies and a travois to carry them with, but told her never to return.
      The fires had burned her face so horribly, that children couldn’t bear to lay eyes on her for the fright. Her baby wasn’t aware that her mother was different though, and Abby managed to find enough berries and other things to eat so that her milk wouldn’t dry up through the summer. Thus she kept her baby fed through the long summer months.
      Abby was very thankful that what she had come to refer to in her mind as "The Fire" had occurred in the early spring, even while there was still a slight dusting of snow on the ground. She now had a chance to familiarize herself with the ways of the forest before the harsh Canadian winter blew itself into her life.
She quickly learned to tell the berries that were edible to humans by watching the bears in their feeding. The fruits edible to bears were also edible to humans. She watched where the deer dug up roots, and ate the ones like them. She quickly learned how to track animals, and even made a crude weapon she used to kill small animals.
      Abby built a crude shelter out of leaves and branches when she first began her life as the woman of the forest, and as time wore on, she fashioned a shovel out of a piece of hardwood she had found and began to dig a hole in the side of a hill. In a few weeks, she had dug a fairly large cave, which she fortified with spruce branches in the roof. There she lived with her daughter for the rest of the winter. She expanded it further into the hillside in the spring, and began a permanent life there.
      Abby avoided all human contact for the rest of her life. This was primarily because she knew it troubled people to look at her. They could see in her their own weakness and ugliness. Deep down inside herself, however, she knew that the real reason she avoided contact was that she didn’t want to deal with the pettiness and selfishness that all humans inherently possessed.
      As her daughter, who she had named Aurora, grew up, Abby taught her all she had learned of the forest. She kept little Aurora away from all human contact because she believed that it would corrupt her beautiful personality.

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