Early winter on the north slope begins with the first frosty fern leaf.
Eleven-year-old Rowan crouched behind a massive, dead redwood trunk, like a wary lynx, holding her breath, her eyes fixed on the greyish-white road boundary a few hundred feet away.
A full year had passed since she began surviving alone in this boundless coniferous forest. Time had left its cruel, yet equally effective, marks on her. Her once soft, long brown hair was now matted together like withered vines, clinging to resin, dirt, and a few clumps of dry grass for camouflage. Her bones had become unusually flexible from years of climbing and running, and her bare feet, calloused from countless treads on thorns and rough rocks, were as tough as natural leather.
She was no longer the human girl who would cry at the sight of a cut finger. Nature reshaped her with its harshest laws, teaching her how to judge rain by the humidity of the wind, how to discern the distance of predators from animal droppings, and how to find fungi to fill her stomach on rotting logs.
But the wilderness offered her two things: matches and salt.
As winter approached, the rains made the entire redwood forest damp and chilling. Rowan tried to start a fire by friction with dry cedar branches, but the extremely high humidity caused blisters to form on her hands, producing only a few wisps of pale smoke. Even more deadly was the extreme lack of salt. She hadn't ingested a single grain of salt for two months. Her muscles began to spasm at night, and dizzying black spots frequently appeared at the edges of her vision—dangerous signs of her body's electrolytes collapsing. The natural salt licks deep in the forest had long been licked clean by the wintering deer.
To survive, she had to cross that line. She had to briefly return to the world of "humans."
A small pouch woven from the supple bark of peeled trees hung from Rowan's waist. Inside were a dozen or so exquisite truffles she had spent a whole week digging from beneath the hidden pine needles on the cliff edge. She still retained a sliver of human memory—she knew that these black fungus chunks, exuding a rich, exotic aroma, could be traded for sustenance in the human world.
Eight o'clock at night, on the edge of Graycliff Town.
Rowan finally stepped out of the forest's shadow, her bare feet landing on the cold, hard artificial asphalt road. In that instant, a strong sense of physiological repulsion shot through her spine like an electric shock.
It was too hard. This surface, called asphalt, had no elasticity, no cushioning from decaying leaves, no breath of soil. It was lifeless, carrying a pungent, industrial stench.
This was followed by a horrific assault on her senses, both visually and aurally.
Not far away, two enormous incandescent streetlights hung in front of the general store. The ghastly white, blinding, and extremely high-frequency artificial beams of light were like powerful radiation to eyes long accustomed to the filtered light of starlight and the dim canopy of trees. Rowan squinted painfully, her pupils contracting sharply, tears welling in her eyes in protest.
Occasionally, cars roared past. The violent roar of internal combustion engines and the screeching of tires against the pavement were amplified countless times in her ears, more deafening than the most terrifying roar of a grizzly bear in the forest. The smell of incompletely burned gasoline and carbon monoxide from car exhaust, mixed with the stench of rotting plastic from the town's garbage cans, flooded her extremely sensitive nostrils, making her stomach churn violently, almost vomiting.
This was human territory. A morbid metallic jungle filled with noise, toxic fumes, and blinding light.
Suppressing the urge to turn and flee back into the darkness, Rowan crouched low, using abandoned oil drums and shadows by the roadside, inching closer to the grocery store like a stalking wild beast.
Through the huge glass window, she saw blue cylindrical bottles of salt on the shelves, and strips of matches with red flame symbols. That thin pane of glass represented the distance between life and death.
She gripped the bark pouch at her waist, took a deep breath, and prepared to rush over when no vehicles were passing.
"Ding-dong—" The grocery store's doorbell suddenly rang out sharply and shrilly.
Rowan's body stiffened instantly, instinctively pressing himself against a rusty tin trash can.
The door was pushed open, and three boys, around twelve or thirteen years old, jostled their way out. The boy in the lead, flanked by the other two, wore a brand-new and extremely expensive pure wool baseball jacket. His hair was meticulously combed, and his fair face carried an innate sense of superiority, as if he had never experienced hunger or hardship.
That was Julian Carter as a teenager. The only son of the Carter Lumber Mill owner, the future "crown prince" of Graycliff Town.
Julian, holding a freshly opened can of Coke, was loudly mocking one of his companions' silly jokes. Suddenly, his peripheral vision caught a glimpse of the shadow behind a trash can.
"What's that?" Julian stopped, frowning slightly.
The smell assaulted him before his sight. It was a mixture of earthy stench, fermented pine needles, dried blood, and the strong, acidic odor of body sweat from months of neglect. The smell was savage, utterly crude, instantly offending his olfactory senses, honed by years of use with expensive soaps and detergents.
Julian cautiously took two steps closer, his flashlight beam suddenly illuminating the corner.
In the stark white light, Rowan was exposed.
She was laid bare in broad daylight. Her hair was disheveled, her face smeared with black grime used to repel insects, and she was draped in tattered, musty-smelling rags. Her exposed limbs were covered in a patchwork of old and new scratches and bruises. She looked like a lump of rotting flesh crawling out of a sewer, or a stray dog that had wandered into a rich man's dinner party.
"God, it stinks!" A boy behind Julian immediately covered his nose and made exaggerated gagging noises.
"What kind of monster is that? A savage?" another boy exclaimed.
Julian's eyes held no curiosity or pity. As a rich kid raised to believe the entire town was his family's backyard, his territorial instincts were extremely strong. His eyes held only deep disgust and anger at being invaded by an alien.
"Get out of here," Julian waved his hand at Rowan like shooing away a dead rat carrying rabies, "Stay away from here, you stinking monster! You're polluting the air!"
Rowan didn't move. Her breathing became extremely slow and long. In the forest, facing an unknown predator, turning and running away rashly would only expose a fatal weakness. She needed to assess the level of threat.
She looked at Julian, at his clean face contorted with disgust. She didn't understand. In the laws of nature, a fox kills a rabbit to fill its belly, but this human cub before her, though clearly not hungry—his body brimming with excess fat and sugar—emanated an aggression and malice purer and more intense than that of a hungry pack of wolves in winter.
"Are you deaf? I told you to get lost!"
Julian felt his authority challenged. In Graycliff, no one dared to ignore him like this. He looked around, picked up a sharp-edged gray stone from the roadside rubble, and without hesitation, hurled it at Rowan with all his might.
"Bang!" The stone struck Rowan precisely on her left collarbone. The sharp edge instantly ripped through her tough skin, and dark red blood trickled down with the dirt.
A sharp pain exploded in her brain.
Any normal girl in town would have been clutching her wound, crying out in pain, screaming for help from an adult.
But Rowan didn't.
She didn't even utter a cry of pain. In the wilderness, crying is the most foolish waste of energy; it not only depletes precious water and salt but also attracts more predators. Pain, to her, was merely a bioelectrical signal reminding her of bodily damage.
She lowered her body slightly, adopting a perfectly standard wild animal defensive posture.
Slowly, she raised her head.
Those eyes, hidden behind disheveled hair and mud, pierced through the blinding beam of the flashlight, locking directly into Julian's pupils.
They were terrifying eyes. There was no childlike grievance, no fear, no emotional fluctuation whatsoever. Only an extreme indifference, emptiness, and a numbness, like looking at lifeless objects, that had settled after witnessing countless cruel cycles of life and death in nature.
Julian later wrote in his diary that it was the look of someone looking at a dead pig. This was one of the reasons he wanted to kill her fourteen years later, but in truth, the seed of hatred had already been sown on that winter night of 1979.
Thirteen-year-old Julian shuddered violently under the gaze of those inhuman eyes. A primal, inexplicable fear rose up his spine. He felt he wasn't facing an eleven-year-old girl, but a wild beast of the jungle ready to pounce and tear his throat.
To mask this shameful fear, Julian grew even more enraged.
"Kill this madwoman! Drive her out of our town!" he roared madly, picking up two more stones and hurling them at her.
Two other boys joined the brutal hunt, pelting the small figure with stones like they were driving away a plague.
Rowan made no attempt to retaliate. She had already assessed the situation: three enemies, larger in size, and in familiar territory.
Retreat.
She moved like a true ghost wolf. Her movements were fluid and effortless, the calluses on her feet gliding nimbly across the rough asphalt. She dodged several deadly stones with an incredible, even gravity-defying, zigzag trajectory.
Just two seconds.
As the boys raised their stones to hurl another volley, the mud-covered figure had silently melted into the heavy darkness of the roadside, leaving only a tiny puddle of blood quickly washed away by the rain.
The grocery store's doorbell still jingled mockingly in the breeze. And those expensive truffles, which had fallen from the bark bag during the dodge, were mercilessly crushed into a puddle of strangely fragrant black mud by Julian's sneakers.
Rowan ran frantically until she retreated several kilometers north to the depths of the redwood forest.
Only when she smelled that familiar, earthy scent—a mixture of highly acidic rusty mud and rotting needles—did her heart, pounding with extreme tension, slowly calm down. There was no blinding light, no roaring cars, only a deep, all-encompassing darkness.
She leaned against a massive redwood trunk, her tongue slowly licking the trickle of blood from her collarbone.
Salty.
The salty taste of rust spread through her mouth. This was the only salt she had received that night.
At that moment, eleven-year-old Rowan understood one thing completely.
The forest was cruel because it was necessary for survival; and human society was cruel because it existed solely for amusement and arrogance. Humans were far more terrifying than the hungriest bear, more deadly than the most poisonous fungus.
She looked up through the interlocking canopy of trees at the town of Graycliff below, its streets twinkling with artificial lights.
That night, an invisible but absolutely insurmountable boundary between her and all of human civilization was shattered by a flying rock, forever sealed.
Since human society couldn't accept her, since they treated her like a beast...
From this day forward, she would be the coldest, most inviolable beast in this redwood forest. Without matches, she would guard the embers left by lightning strikes; without salt, she would drink the blood of birds of prey.
She would never again cross the line.