I was only mildly surprised by the DOT trucks illuminated in my headlights. I didn't think they'd be blocking the road so soon, but it didn't really matter. I rolled up to the hard-hat who was wrestling a barricade across the road and lowered my window. He leaned into the car, taking advantage of the heat.

"Road's closed" he said around a cheekfull of tobacco. "Snow's comin' in."

I smiled. "I know. I live just past Suches. I wanna get home before it hits."

He turned and spat on the ground and turned back with a puzzled look. "You wanna get snowed in?"

I shrugged my shoulders. "I stocked up. Besides, if I'm snowed in, they can't call me into work, can they?"

He grinned. "Ya gotta point. Well, be careful." I waved and rolled the window back up.

Chloroform is tricky stuff. Too much and you've got a dead kidnappee. Too little and you have to knock them around a bit. And you really can't predict when it'll wear off. It wore off about a hundred yards past the road block. I could hear Thigpen banging on the trunk lid and a few muffled shouts. I slammed on the brakes and heard him thump against the spare tire. "Wanna keep it down in there? I'm trying to concentrate on my driving." I shouted. I nudged the stereo volume up a bit. I guessed his head was somewhere around the subwoofer box, and I hoped he liked trip-hop.

Thing was, I really was trying to concentrate on my driving. US 129 winds its way through the lower Blue Ridge mountains with a hundred hairpin turns, a challenge for a good driver in daylight. At night, with black ice spotting the road, it was downright interesting. I almost missed the parking area turn-off and blessed the inventor of anti-lock brakes. As it was, I had to cautiously back a few feet before turning into the empty parking area. With the weather service predicting six inches of snow for the mountains and the temperatures safely below freezing, only a native or an idiot would be tramping around here. I wasn't a native, despite what I told the road crew guy, and I was beginning to wonder about the latter. I was putting a lot of stock in legends.

I switched off the car and got out. The thick trees blocked most of the wind, but I knew it'd be howling up on top of the mountain. It was still damn cold down here, and I hated getting undressed when it was this cold. I hurriedly stripped down and tossed my clothes into the back seat. I gave one last look at the moon, rapidly disappearing behind black-bellied clouds, and reached for that spot in the pit of my stomach.

The few people who know about me always ask what it feels like. It feels like someone heated a butcher knife over a fire until it was blood red and then jammed it into my stomach up to the handle. Then they twist it around for good measure. For a brief second, it's the most unendurable agony known to man, along with the greatest ecstasy. Then the wrench is gone and I'm standing gasping for breath. I usually stumble a bit; instead of the flat-footed stance I'm used to, I'm balanced on the balls of my feet. My feet have elongated quite a bit to compensate for the balance. Milky white claws extend from furred toes and dig into the dirt as I catch myself, and I shiver hard once. My fur, dark brown over my back and fading to amber along my flanks and creamy white on my torso and inner thighs, fluffs out to trap my body heat against the cold. Fur between my toe pads keeps the chill of the ground from freezing my feet. I leaned against the car until my brain caught up with the disorientation from my changed senses.

Thigpen knows we've stopped, and is strangely quiet. I don't know what he thinks he can do, handcuffed, gagged, and blindfolded in the trunk; but I'm sure he's planning something. I grabbed a small leather pouch from the back seat and dropped the car keys into it, and tied it around my neck; keeping the trunk key free. Time to get to work.

I crouched behind the bumper of the car and pressed down on the trunk lid with one hand while slowly unlocking the trunk with the other. As soon as I heard the catch pop, I slithered sideways and watched. Sure enough, a paunchy middle-aged man kicked the lid open and lunged. Unfortunately, he was still a little groggy from the chloroform and caught his ankle on the lip of the trunk. I waited until he stopped thrashing on the ground and yanked him upright by one arm. His blindfold had come off and he swung at me with both fists, but stopped once he saw me. Then he fell back on his butt, screaming something muffled under the gag. I reached to pull the gag off, but he started scooting backwards and kicked at me. I cuffed him hard across the head a couple of times with claws in until he stopped, and then pulled him upright again and snatched the gag down. He started blubbering immediately.

"You're- who- where-" I cuffed him again.

"I'm the same guy who put you in the trunk. I'm a werewolf. Well, cougar, actually. Where is the middle of nowhere. If you wanna scream, go ahead; we really are in east bum-fuck, so no one will hear you." I'll give him credit, he didn't scream until I smiled at him, and then only once. I suppose a cougar-headed furred humanoid showing you a mouthful of pointy teeth is disconcerting until you get used to it. "If you're through, we've got a ways to walk." I turned him towards the trail head and gave him a shove. He looked back at me and I made shooing motions. I really wasn't looking forward to dragging him up the whole mountain.

Blood Mountain rises almost 1,500 feet in a little over a mile from the trail head. We made it almost a quarter of the way before Thigpen sat down heavily. "I... can't... walk any more" he puffed. He was breathing kind of hard. I stood there watching with arms crossed for a few minutes until he regained his wind. He watched me with a morbid curiosity until he cleared his throat.

"What... are you? What do you want with me?" he asked.

"I told you. I'm a shapeshifter. I'm a go-between for humans and the rest of the animals. Come on. Time to move." He just sat there and looked sullenly at me. I prodded him with a foot and he swiped at it.

"Fuck you" he spat. "I don't give a shit who you are, I'm not moving. You might as well just leave me here. The police will catch you before get any ransom for me."

I sighed. "I'm not looking for a ransom."

He looked a little confused at that. These boardroom types always think in terms of money. "But why-"

"I want you to meet some friends of mine. Now let's go, or I'll leave you here." I would have thought someone who spent as much time striking billion-dollar deals like Thigpen would have had a better poker face. Rough day, I guess. He saw his opening and dug in. "If I leave you here, you'll freeze to death in a couple of hours. You're not exactly dressed for hiking. In about an hour it's gonna be snowing hard."

"Fuck you" he repeated. "You're going to kill me anyway."

"No," I said patiently, "I'm not going to kill you. But if you want to kill yourself, go right ahead." And I bounded up the trail on all fours.

Just until I was out of sight, of course. His sight, that is. He sat for a second or so more and then scrambled to his feet and began running headlong downhill. I stayed about fifteen yards behind him. It wasn't too hard to remain undetected; he was making enough noise for an army of overweight businessmen. It didn't take him long to blunder off the trail.

Crap. I could see where he was headed. I skirted widely around his path and got in front of him. He must have heard something, because he stopped for a second, peering at the darkness and panting, and then ran right into my chest. I had to post him into a tree and hold him until he stopped struggling.

"Naughty, naughty. Listen." I grabbed a large rock and held it in front of his face. He flinched; I guess he thought I was gonna beat his head in. I tossed the rock over my shoulder. One... two... three... after about four seconds we heard it clatter against the rocks below.

"You almost ran off a cliff, buddy. If you wanna reach the top of this hill alive, you'd better stay with me. Now let's go." His shoulders slumped.

We still had to rest three more times before we got to the top. I relented and removed the handcuffs when the trail turned rocky and we had to scramble over patches of ice. The summit of the mountain is a bare granite knob, and the wind was screaming over its top. Thigpen was still warm from his exertions for it to bother him much yet. I stood for a minute and let the wind blow through me, filling me with energy rather than chilling me. I could practically feel the weathered stone vibrating under my toes. Thigpen just sat huddled in on himself. He just didn't get it.

I swept my arms around. "Look around you, Thigpen. What do you see?" I saw moutaintops stretching away to the horizon. I saw unrelieved wilderness. I saw beauty.

"I don't see anything" he mumbled.

I dropped my arms. "No, I bet you don't. Tell me, what kind of man is so concerned with his own short-term wealth that he'll sell all this? That he'll run a company that's deforested half a continent? That he'll clear-cut timber in Belize and Siberia for a buck because he's stripped his own country bare? That runs a hundred strip mines that leach poisons into the groundwater?"

He looked at me incredulously. "What are you, some kind of envirofreak?"

I leaned in close. "I am an animal who happens to be human. You are a human who's thrown away his roots for a fast buck."

He snorted. "Fuck you. You wanna go live in the woods? Where do you think that car came from? The gas that runs it? Without people like me, we'd all be back in mud huts."

I let him smirk a bit. "People like you are dinosaurs, Thigpen. And if we let you, you'd rape the planet until we were back in the stone age. Yeah, I know where that car came from. But I also know we can have that car and have this wilderness. If we get rid of the dinosaurs like you and start trying to cooperate with the planet rather than conquer it."

He sneered. "You're naive."

"No, I'm thinking ahead. You're so deluded by dollar signs you refuse to sacrifice a little for the long run."

We were silent for a little, until he started shivering. I was trembling as well, but from pent up energy. I really, really wanted to run. Instead, I yanked him up and dragged him down the slope into the tree line. He yelped but thankfully kept his mouth shut. About two hundred yards down the slope, surrounded by thick brush, was a small granite knob with a vertical shaft in its center. Hot, dry air billowed out of it and I let him get warm.

"We're a little bit below the summit of Blood Mountain. Most folks say it got the name after a battle between the Cherokee and Creek Indians, when the summit ran red with the blood of slain warriors. Others say it was named in 1776 after a colonial militia nearly wiped out the Cherokees living here in a mass slaughter. In any case, no one lives here but the Nunnehi. The Cherokees call them 'the people who live anywhere'."

"Why are you telling me this?" He was starting to get his courage back in the warmth.

"Shut up and listen. The Cherokees believe that this mountain is special, that it's inhabited by spirit folk who live underground. The Nunnehi are generally benevolent, and there are lots of stories of how they help lost travelers and come to the aid of Cherokee hunters. They say that when the Nunnehi appear, they look like ghostly Indian warriors.

"The Nunnehi are hunters. They know about balance and harmony. They know that the weak and ill must be removed to keep the rest healthy. They tried to teach the Cherokees, and they try to teach us. But some of us-" I poked him with an extruded claw- "don't listen. Some of us have to be shown."

I felt a chill through my fur and stepped back. Thigpen was giving me a cynical look until he felt a tugging at his armpits and looked around. On either side of him was a shimmering, a shifting of light and shadow that, if one concentrated hard enough, took on a human aspect. I looked away as he started to struggle; I heard him start to shout as the wind picked up even more, his screams merging with the moaning gusts and finally fading, as if they were traveling down the shaft into the Nunnehi's underground city...

I stayed until the snow began piling thickly on my shoulders and head, and then ran down the trail on all fours. The drive back was going to be a real bitch...