You'll Thank Me for This by Nina Siegal (top novels txt) 📗

adult wolf. She saw only a couple of the cubs, but the others had to be near here somewhere. They always traveled in their pack. If she wasn’t so scared right now, she might feel honored. He was famous.

Time was ticking by. Moments. Something was going to happen if she just kept standing there. She had to do something. If she tried to run, she knew the wolf would attack. She had to either start slowly backing away—which would make her seem weak and maybe vulnerable—or she had to somehow muster up the courage to start yelling at him and waving her hands like her mom had told her.

But still, she was frozen.

It felt like one of those nightmares where you only have to call for help, and you open your mouth, but nothing comes out. You try to scream, but your voice has disappeared. It felt like that for about ten seconds, but then the wolf started to move toward her. Two steps and then three steps and then four…Then she saw the other sets of eyes, the rest of the cubs, creeping up behind him.

Karin forced it out. She started to yell and scream bloody murder. She started at a high pitch but then got into the deepest, meanest, manliest voice she could find: “Get out of here, get away from me, you beast! Go away! Go away, leave me alone, don’t come near me!” She was suddenly flapping her hands and making a big commotion and even kind of lunging forward and shouting down at him.

At first, he took a few steps back and cocked his head to one side as if trying to figure out if she was some kind of crazy girl. But then she repeated the whole thing over again: “Go away, beast!” shouting even louder and even harder. “Get out! Get out, you nasty beast, get out!” And then he turned toward his own tail and fled. All the little cubs followed him, jumping over rocks and running off through the heath.

And then Karin saw her—it must have been her—the mom, taking up the final position in the pack. To Karin’s surprise, she came toward Karin, as if to get a look at this weird figure scaring off her mate, and looked at her. She was curious. She wasn’t attacking. She just looked. And then Karin stomped forward, as if she were going to try to grab the mama wolf, and off she fled, following her family, into the dark.

It was a miracle. They were gone. She had scared off a pack of wolves. Holy crap!

Karin remained standing where she was until the wolves were clearly out of sight. Then she started to feel her legs tremble violently. The last few minutes—how long could it have been really?—had seemed like they were set to slo-mo, and now it was like a switch had been flipped and she was back in normal time. She started to realize what had just happened. She’d chased off a pack of wolves in the forest in the night. It really had been a pack of wolves. She’d done that! And she was only twelve. Whoa.

When it hit her like that, Karin’s legs just kind of gave way, and she plopped down onto the ground like a rag doll. That was crazy; that had been crazy. And probably no one would ever believe her if she told them what had happened. She didn’t have her phone with her, so she couldn’t have taken any pictures for evidence. She’d just have to tell people, and then they’d think she was making it up or bragging or something. But it was true.

Her legs were still shaking and she was tired, and she was cold and she was alone and she was far from the camp, but she smiled to herself just a little. She was proud of herself for that.

She used her hands to kind of massage her thighs to get them to stop trembling and start working again. When rubbing didn’t work, she kind of slammed on them with her fists. They started to tingle and relax, and soon enough she thought she might be able to stand again. It was really weird what fear could do to your body, she thought. How it could make you seize up or freeze or run or leap.

After all she’d been through today already, in less than even twenty-four hours, Karin wondered if she would ever actually be afraid of anything again. She felt like she’d seen it all now. She was kind of a pro at getting out of hairy situations. She was kind of a rock star.

Feeling this new sense of pride, Karin stood up and brushed off her pants. She had a renewed sense that she would make it out of this. There was just one final hurdle, one last leg of her journey. She just had to make it a little bit farther; she just had to walk to the campsite.

Her feet were okay now; her legs worked fine. She didn’t even really feel cold anymore because her clothes seemed to be dry—maybe she’d fired up some kind of engine in her body when she was scared and that had warmed everything up. Who knows? There was a hill up ahead, and she climbed it, and when she came down the other side she saw there was another marking on the trail. It felt like the right direction. It must be.

Somewhere along the way, where the path sloped downward into what was sort of a hollow between banks of dirt, she heard what sounded like a human voice, shouting.

It was late and she was tired, and she took it, at first, to be her mind turning the sound of the wind into something else. But then it came again, like a hoot-hoot. And when she stopped and listened more carefully, she could make out the words: “Wait!” someone was shouting. “Wait!”

She stopped and turned around, squinting to try to