Thunder by Bonnie S. Calhoun Page A

aroma caused her stomach to rumble with hunger . . . until the day Father came home from a Borough meetingand told Mother the farmer they usually bought apples from had died while feeding his hogs, and the animals ate him as an extension of their meal.
    Selah forever gagged at the smell of cooking pork, thinking about the poor man becoming part of the meat. The tale haunted her to this day. She was glad to give wide berth around the farm without seeing any animals.
    The clear, swift-moving stream was a welcome break after less than an hour of travel. She’d gotten here much faster than normal but suffered no fatigue—in fact, she felt invigorated as though she could run for hours. Strange. Selah plopped to the ground at the edge of the water, pulled off her pack, and shimmied on her belly to the edge. A few handfuls of the clear, cold water refreshed her. She wandered to a nearby apple tree, plucked a huge, dark red specimen, and bit into it.
    She could afford to rest for fifteen minutes. She stooped beside the stream as she ate. The sky was beautifully clear and the sun warm. It felt good considering it could have been a rainy, damp day, forcing her to travel wet. She amused herself watching the minnows dart in little side pools where the current stayed at bay. A hawk played chicken with a group of three tiny birds, swooping and diving as the three annoyed little ones tried to chase him away.
    Maybe she wouldn’t linger here. She’d never noticed the pig smell to be this strong near the stream. Usually it was only this rank near the fields being plowed and rooted by the swine herd, and those fields were easy to spot by the turned-over clumps of root, no grass, dark soil, and fallen trees. She sniffed the air again.
    Off to the left and behind her, a twig snapped. It came froma safe distance away, but Selah rose, spit out the apple seeds, and leisurely picked up her pack. Her heartbeat started its ramp-up to a pounding. She began walking north away from the sound. The place shallow enough to cross to the other side was still about a half mile upstream.
    The bushes in front of her rustled. Selah took a deep breath. A free-range sow weighing at least two hundred pounds plowed through the brush and grunted her displeasure. Selah stopped in her tracks. On her right came the playful grunts of a litter of piglets in the high brush near the stream. She was between the sow and her babies, which never ended well. Her legs began to tremble but she forced herself to back up. Getting out of the middle would improve the situation.
    Selah darted back the way she’d come. A boar ran from the tree line, considerably larger than the sow and bearing four tusks that looked five inches long and sharp enough to poke holes in her that a fist could pass through. She skidded to another stop. A wall of pork hurtled at her.
    Trapped between the two, she swung her backpack. The boar impaled it on a tusk and tried to jerk it from her hand. Selah yanked back. For a moment, a virtual tug-of-war ensued. He dropped his head and the bag slid free. In the process of trying to pull it back, Selah lost her balance and stumbled backward. She recovered just as the boar charged again.
    Selah took her only option. She clutched her pack to her chest and flung herself into the stream, landing in a crouch. Water covered her head and sharp rocks on the bottom tore at her knees and elbows. Struggling to her feet in the slow current, Selah coughed and spit out water invading her lungs. She swung around. The boar looked uninterested in climbing down the embankment. Selah exhaled a huge sigh and coughed up more water as she slogged to the other side and scrambled her way up the slippery bank. Her feet squished in water-logged travel shoes as she headed off across the field. She really hated pigs now.

    Selah raised her hand to shade her eyes and peered at the sun in the afternoon sky. She had run twenty miles. In her usual regimen she would gain a