Beginning VI-3-3-2e
I made my way down the track, alongside the stream. I following after the boy, who was already some way ahead. I ambled slowly, in the most relaxed fashion that I could contrive in my freezing and disturbed state, so as not to appear suspicious. I was suspicious myself...
I was still soaked, my hair plastered across my brow. My clothes sodden and shoes squelched as I walked.
I remembered my rent cheek, and bruised jawbone, but reaching up to examine them, found them unharmed. Uncanny. What had happened back there?
Voices became louder and closer. The boys companions I presume?
Turning a bend I almost bumped into the boy and a man he was leading. His father? Moments later a woman appeared, perhaps the boy's mother.
The boy was talking frantically in a strange tongue. His elders were obviously trying simultaneously to pay the youngster due attention and to understand what he said, but also trying to remain alert to their surroundings. The woman walked warily behind.
They saw me only a few moments after I spotted them. I must have been in deep shadows cast by the great trees.
There was a moment of fright, and the man pushed the boy behind him. The woman gasped.
No doubt I could have appeared to be some ghoul or wildman in that umbral light, bedraggled as I was.
I was resigned to my fate at that point, and put up my hands to show that I was no danger to them. I bowed my head and greeted them.
The boy tugged his fathers arm, and pointed at me, saying something rapidly, which included a word that might have meant 'man', and then pointed back the way I had come, and spoke more rapidly, emphasizing a word that sounded like 'oon-deen'. Then to my shock he began to sing a passable imitation of a refrain of the song I had heard while passed out on the turf near the river.
Had that singing drawn the boy to where I lay? Who was the singer?
Just then more folk came around the corner in the path, and there was hasty conversation back and forth, with much interruption. I just stood there, dripping water and shivering.
Not much later, an old woman arrived, hunched over somewhat, but with an intense face and eyes that seemed to burn in the moonlight. The group parted for her, and she came over to me. She looked me over quickly, and called out some commanding words in her strange tongue. In answer, another man ran back the way they had all come, and returned moments later with a large quilted blanket, which the man wrapped about me.
"Food? Warmth?", asked the old woman, and she pointed backward down the path.
"Yyyyes, tthhanks!", I stuttered for the cold. But I was grateful for the blanket and the offer of succor.
I was lead to their campfire, and made to lay down amongst them. One by one they then took turns to tell short stories in their unfamiliar language, while little offcuts of meat were shared around, presumably left-overs from a bigger meal they had eaten earlier.
I fell then into a dreamy state, neither awake nor asleep. Sometimes, when it was the old womans' turn to speak, and particularly when I was dozing most deeply, she switched to her slightly halting form of my own native tongue, and my attention was aroused again.
This went on for some time, but eventually I fell asleep, though I doubt it was for very long.