Natii cursed as she limped through the forest, cursed the humans who'd driven her from her hunting-grounds, hounded her to the borders of her territory, and then tried to kill her, for what? For trying to feed on one of the bovines they'd begun to graze on her territory. The tigress also cursed the many other striped cats she'd cone across in her flight, unwilling to give even an inch of their precious territories to the injured cat, and adding their own injuries besides. Not that the scratches did much, she had to admit, but each stinging cut added its own flavour of pain to the feast of agony her other injuries were feeding her. The burns across her back and flanks felt like the fires there were still blazing, though they'd gone out days before, her mangled haunch sent spurts of agony up her spine with every step, and as if all of that wasn't enough, her stomach, now five or six days empty, was giving her no rest.
Suddenly, Natii's spirits lifted slightly as her nose picked up a faint scent; water! Moving as fast as her injured leg would allow, the tigress followed her nose and found, not just the stream she'd been expecting, but a pool, not a huge one, but rather deep for it's size, certainly deep enough to allow her to wade. Thanking the heavens vaguely for this gift, the injured cat stepped into the pool, following the bank down until with the ridge of her spine barely showing out of the water, her forepaws cold no longer touch the bottom. There she floated, enjoying the cooling, soothing sensation of the water on her wounds.
Natii floated in the pool for hours, not moving but for breathing and the occasional weak kick to keep her in the more-or-less middle of the watery heaven. The water also helped soothe her grumbling stomach as she drank several gallons of the cool liquid. The tigress knew she'd eventually have to get out of the pool though, but waited until nightfall to do so. Finally emerging from the pool, she shivered at the temperature drop, she wouldn't have noticed it in the pool, but out here, without the insulation provided by the water, the night air chilled her. For a while, she considered staying here, the pool would have made a nice focal point to her new territory, but after an investigation of the area she decided to leave, as nice as this pool was it didn't seem to be regularly visited, indeed it did not seem to have been visited in several moons.
Sad to leave, Natii slowly began to leave the waterhole behind. Normally she'd have shaken herself dry upon leaving the pool, but night the chill provided by the water within her fur seemed to dull the pain of her many injuries, which she considered more than a big enough reward. The tigress spent the night travelling as aimlessly as she had the past five days, and by morning, she was prepared to drop from exhaustion and pain. She temporarily staved off her slumber though, when she spotted a rather unnatural looking rock formation nearby. At first she wanted to run, things that were unnatural tended to involve humans, and humans were best avoided at any costs, but when a quick investigation found little evidence of humans, her fear was overtaken by her curiosity.
Moving closer to investigate the strange rock formation, Natii found to her surprise that while it did indeed bear the unmistakable touch of humans, no humans had visited for a long time, certainly there was no evidence of them beyond the rocks themselves. Her curiosity as satisfied as it was likely to get, the tigress immediately began to search for somewhere to sleep, eventually finding a place where the roof of a building had fallen in, leaving beneath the rubble a hole just big enough for her to turn around in, and completely sheltered from the sun. weighing the find up against the probability of finding anything else as inviting, she decided that the hole would do nicely, and so crawled in, and despite being unable to get comfortable, eventually drifted off to sleep.
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