Madeleine Williams was lost in the woods, again. There was really no reason for her to not know her way around this forest seeing as she had lived there for her entire life, and yet, here she was, staring at a trembling aspen tree she could have sworn she couldn't recognize, at all. Even though she had been walking around for a long time already. This is what came of her idea to have a morning stroll. She got lost.
Madeleine looked upwards at the sky, but it was too close to noon to tell in what direction she was in from there. And the trees around her didn't help at all as they didn't have even a fluff of moss growing on them to figure out the direction from where they would have been growing on the tree either. It seemed she was stuck with the tried and true method of guessing and checking any random direction she chose until she got it right.
Better get started then, this way of doing things, no matter what the activity was that she needed to use it for, always took a very, very long time to finish. And she had maybe eight hours or less before it became too dark to see anything around her let alone a path or something familiar to her that could guide her home. Eenie meanie minnie mo. She choose a completely random deer trail in the direction that she thought she had come from and started to walk down it scanning the trees to either side and in front of her for anything familiar to her that would jog her memory.
It turned out that the deer trail was not the right path to get her back to her home. But, the next path she choose was finally correct after she had backpeddled to her aspen tree she'd started from. It had taken her just under four hours to reach the clearing that her house cozily stood in.
It was a good thing for her that it had taken her so long in the end because there were people in her yard, lots of them, and one of them was striding forward to knock on her door. These people had come for her. They must be the strangers her parents had always warned her about. These people were definitely there to hurt her in some way. If she had come back earlier she would have been caught for sure. She had to get away now. She would lose herself in the woods, this time on purpose so that these people wouldn't find her. They were dangerous. She had to get away from them right now while they didn't know that she was watching them from the tree cover and not trapped in her little house like they thought she was. She needed to make them lose her trail now. They were standing at the door, waiting for her to open it. She wasn't in there though, their distraction with waiting for her to answer the door would give her the time that she needed to get far, far away from her home.