Prologue: Rough Start
Nala scanned the horizon from atop the small mount, the drizzle was making it hard to see too far. At least it was only drizzle she thought, she wouldn't have liked to have been out here in a full downpour, though even this was enough to leave her feeling a little chilled. Why she was out here even she wasn't totally sure of, the river's current was too powerful for anything to be able to cross it, so she wasn't, as she'd told the other earlier, scouting for potential prey. As if to persuade her to finally break off her pointless quest she felt a shiver run up her spine, time to set off home then.
Home was not where she ended up though, for within just a few hundred yards, she suddenly found herself face-to-face with a party of hyenas, "well well well, what have we here, a runaway perhaps?"
"I wasn't running away," Nala replied hotly, "I was..."
"Yes," the lead hyena sneered, "we're waiting."
"I was, looking for food," Nala replied, "I know nothing can cross this, but not everything's smart enough to know it."
"A likely story," the hyena snorted, "but you know, we've got order to deal with any runaways, or rogues, Scar himself told us that."
"Did he now," Nala asked, though disinterestedly, for she could already guess her fate. Had there been just three, or perhaps even four hyenas she might have risked a fight, but there were six of them, too many for any one lioness to deal with. Nor were there any trees nearby, or none that she could see, so her her only certainty of escape now would be the river...
"Oh yes he did," the hyena grinned, "so it's your choice, quick and painless, relatively anyway, or slow and painful."
"Neither," Nala replied, dashing forward between a pair of hyenas who were too surprised to try to stop her. As she gained ground, she heard a whooping behind her as the group began to give chase. Now was the challenge, how to loop around slowly enough so that they didn't catch on, but quickly enough that she wouldn't tire herself out before reaching the river.
A minute saw Nala fully turned around and heading towards the river, but the gap had closed, dropping from about a hundred yards to half that, and shrinking by the moment. Still, she was close enough that she knew she'd make it, though by the time the river was in sight her lead was down to single figures. Putting on one final burst of speed the young lioness reached the bank and leapt. It wasn't the leap she'd have liked to make, putting her very near the centre of the river, but it was enough, she was safe, relatively speaking.
As soon as she was in the water, Nala made for the opposite bank, the longer she was in the water, the longer her journey home would be. Considerably longer as it turned out, for with the river as high as it was, it completely covered an old, broken acacia stump washed down in a previous flood that had somehow lodged in the riverbed. The young lioness roared - more in shock than pain at first - as something unseen struck her in the ribs on her right side, arresting her forward progress. Pain was to follow though, for the broken wood had caught her forward of her middle, and so as she struggle to gain the purchase to free herself, the current pivoted her inexorably until she was facing upstream, which did free her, but at the cost of the broken wood drawing a line of agony up her flank, and tearing the pit of her right foreleg. Suddenly, her attempt to reach the other shore, had become a desperate battle to simple stay alive in the churning water, not helped by the effective loss of her foreleg.
Time passed - how long Nala couldn't tell, the pain, desperation and exhaustion left little room for such inconsequential thoughts - as she struggled to keep her head above water. After a while something brush her side, and she turned towards it, not caring what it was, and attempted to clamber onto it. Fortunately it was no more than a broken branch, and large enough to support at least her forequarters, after spending an eternity manoeuvring around it to find a way of getting onto it without aggravating her right foreleg any more than absolutely necessary. Finally though, she was far enough out of water that she could rest without fear of drowning. As helpful as this was though, it did bring other problems to the fore, or at least gave her the time to think of them. The first and largest issue was the wound on her flank, which throbbed agonisingly, but she was also chilled to the bone, and terribly tired, but the pain and chill made sleep impossible.
Eventually, Nala came to - not so much awakening from sleep, as returning from a daze - to find that the branch was no longer moving. How long had it been now she wondered idly, with the tiny part of her mind not fighting to keep the pain at bay. For a time, she just lay there, not daring to move lest it cause an increase in the pain of her would which had subsided for now to something she could cope with. Eventually though, the young lioness found herself growing dissatisfied, she was chilled to the bone, hungry and just plain bored, and so, cautiously, still trying to move as little as possible, she scanned as much of the horizon as she could see from her rather poor vantage point. At first there was nothing that looked at all inviting, but then, she spotted off to her left a patch of land poking out of the water, with even a couple of trees on it. This opportunity - of sleeping on dirt rather than a broken branch with its odd knobs and twig-stumps that poked uncomfortably into her too-thin frame - was enough to motivate her to move, despite the inevitable agony such a journey would unleash.
The patch of land was perhaps a hundred and fifty yards away, but was on the opposite side of the branch to the side Nala had to get off. It took her a few minutes to work up her resolve, and then it was almost immediately shattered, as what she assumed to be a drop into just a couple of feet of water turned out to be a depth over her head, and so she emerged coughing violently, grabbing desperately at the wood of the branch until her breath was steadier. After few minutes, she felt recovered enough to continue, and so she swam slowly, fitfully around the end of the branch giving it a wide berth lest she injure herself further, and then set off for the land.
Nala's progress was slow, slower than she'd have liked, but eventually, she made it those long yards, and with a supreme effort given her condition, managed to haul herself up the slope until she was in the shade of a couple of the tree, then all but collapsed. Surprisingly, as she lay there, chilled, exhausted and in agony, she felt satisfied. Later she would realise it was because she was still alive, despite the odds, but right now it just felt so, odd.