“Argh…” I was barely conscious, and a terrible scorching pain radiated from my hip. The agony was almost enough to steal consciousness away from me as my body reeled and my head spun around in circles causing nausea to overtake me and I nearly vomited on myself. I lied there, writhing in misery, unable to open my eyes from the pounding pressure behind them that forced me to keep them welded shut but for all that the pain I felt, I knew that I was alive.
How I had managed to survive the fall, I have no clue. No one leaps off a sheer cliff like that and makes it out alive. At least, not normally. Was I just lucky? Had I somehow managed to avoid the weathered rocks scattered across the ground? Or did these woods simply wish to take me slowly as I succumbed to exposure at the bottom of this stone laden hill, unable to reach out to anyone for aid.
“Help.” I managed to muster the wind in my lungs to move enough to plead. I shakily reached down to my pants pocket for my phone but I couldn't find it, or my pocket. I must have cracked my skull on one of those rocks and sustained some sort of brain injury because I swore my khaki cargo pants felt furry and my body felt strange.
I tried to get myself reoriented and open my eyes, but even the glow of the full moon above was too bright for the migraine to allow me sight. “Wait…full moon? That was over a week ago, right? The moon was waning tonight, or at least I thought it was.” I tried to move my legs in a attempt to make myself more comfortable in some way but the one I had injured argued against it and I screamed in anguish. My voice reached a pitch higher than I thought was possible for me, and I sobbed into the dirt and decaying leaves underneath me.
“Help! Someone!” I yelled in desperation as I hoped against hope that someone was stupid enough to take a night hike along the mountain trail and would hear my suffering cries but only the crickets responded to my wails. No one was coming, and screaming my voice raw wasn’t going to help me. I laid my head on the dirt and attempted to take stock of my situation, trying to think of what to do next. My throat was dry, and my brain still pounded against the inside of my skull, but I mustered the strength to speak to myself, hoping it would help calm me down.
“I fell…but I’m alive. I don’t hear any animals near me, so I guess whatever that noise was isn’t coming down here to finish the job, if it was even real." Thinking back, what had happened to me was surreal. I was thankful that the noises that chased me over the cliff were gone, but I was terrified that something else more tangible could now get to me. Specifically, any predator that decided to investigate the sounds of a terrified and injured hiker.
"I must have hit my head pretty hard…but I don’t think it’s bleeding, by some miracle, so dying of blood loss is out. I can’t move my legs very well either. I think one of them is dislocated. Popping that back in is gonna hurt...” I hadn’t taken quite as much damage as I could have. I half expected to find my head twisted around the wrong way considering how far I fell. I tried to open my eyes again but my vision hadn't returned well enough to see and I glared straight ahead through squinted eyes at TV static.
“I must be concussed. Everything feels so strange. I can’t see through this headache. I can’t seem to flex my fingers and toes either." I started to panic again. Concussions of that magnitude are no joke, and if I had hit my head or neck wrong the trouble I was having could be due to paralysis. "Ok. Just stay calm. Relax and let the pain subside so I can at least see what’s going on.” I said, trying to reassure myself that the strangeness I felt was from having been knocked unconscious and not from a newly obtained disability.
Eventually, the pain subsided enough that I was able to open my eyes and see more than just dark shapes. I immediately realized that the trees were different. Maybe it was because of the darkness of a predawn morning that I wasn’t seeing them right, but they didn’t look like the hardwoods I had been hiking through. Instead they reminded me of the scary trees in movies like Sleepy Hollow: gnarled, knotted, growing in random directions and half dead or leaf-less with rotten holes in their bark that seemed to form ghoulish faces in the shadows cast by their branches.
I looked up and found myself robbed of thought as I stared at the riot of twinkling lights that shimmered above me. The night sky was absolutely beautiful! There were so many stars in the sky that I had to blink a few times to make sure they weren’t due to my head trauma. The specks of suspended glitter and the full moon radiated so much more light than they should have, allowing me to see clearly as though it were nearly dawn. As I watched the stars above me though, I realized that none of them were familiar. None of the constellations were there, at least none that I could identify from the limited view I had through the gnarled tree limbs.
I found the air was warmer too, which was odd for this time of spring at night. It doesn’t just get warmer like this, and mountain valleys and hollows stay colder because of their limited time in the sun. Hypothermia sometimes causes people to feel as though they get too hot and they shed clothes, but I didn't feel hot. Just pleasantly comfortable as far as temperature was concerned, like I was covered in a soft blanket.
I ventured to move my head slowly, being careful in case I had injured my neck in some way, so I could look towards what I believed to be downhill, but the ground was flat. My hair tugged at my scalp as I looked around me, I must have been laying on it or something. "But my hair is barely shoulder length, not really long enough to lay on. Something's not adding up." That's when I felt my ears flatten atop my head...
My body felt alien to me, as though it wasn't mine, and I was right to be concerned. I thought I was simply mistaken; that what I was looking at was simply another effect of the impact but as I moved my arms from beneath my crumpled body and held them out to inspect I felt my chest seize and my blood run cold, “Where are my fingers…My hands!?”
I stared in disbelief as the human appendages I had known for thirty years of my life had been replaced by what appeared to be furry forelegs with soft hooves at the end. My panic was only exacerbated when I looked down to my legs which sat attached to my new hindquarters a little further back. One of those legs was grotesquely wrenched from its socket and sat higher than what looked natural on my hip and stretched the skin above it uncomfortably. It was strange to see such a horrid sight beneath such a beautifully colored autumn orange tail that draped my new pale taupe body.
“What the-” I said, realizing in the clarity that only a panicked mind can bring that my form had changed, and with it came a voice that was markedly different, higher pitched and spoke with words I knew but never heard before. I could feel myself going into shock, the realization that I was no longer in the body I had once known was causing my new one to shut down. My ears swiveled rapidly and rang as I started to quake, unable to fully process the transformation.
I didn’t know what had happened to me, but I was no longer human, no longer me, and no longer able to comprehend the world around me. Everything started to close in on me and my sight began to shrink as my breathing became ragged and my heart threatened to break straight through my chest in a strange irregular beat. I knew I had to do something before I had a heart attack from shock, so I did the only thing I could to stop my body from crashing. I reached down to my dislocated hind-leg, grabbed it, and yanked it back into place. A sickening, dull, wet thunk filled my entire being with an unbearable shock-wave of pain when it slid back into socket, and the world went dark around me as my ears rang and pinned themselves against my skull.
A shadowy figure, wrapped in a cloak of liquid starlight. A crescent moon. A soft voice. Curiosity and concern in it’s powerful, yet calm, words as they whispered in my unconscious mind, “Who are you, my little-”