To catch up with the story, see the previous part.

It was during one of the school holidays. My mother had put a tight schedule to make sure we were always busy as always. All Tuesdays were spared for a duty of fetching firewood from a neighbouring forest. It was not an obvious thing because the forest was guarded and so we had to play our cards well to make sure that we were not caught. To us, this was not a difficult task as we always knew how to manoeuvre our way.

On that day, I woke up early. Alerted other girls from the neighbourhood and finally we had made a group of eight girls. We knew going to the forest alone could be risky and that is why we made sure we formed a strong group. Equipped with all what we needed such like pangas, axes and ropes, there we went to pursue our mission.

Don’t dare to make a move, if you try to act weirdly, you might go back to your mother in a different form!

A scaring voice from one of the guards thundered

We were all scared to death as we did not know our fate. They tied our hands with our own ropes and frogmarched us to an open field inside the forest before taking us to their station where they locked us in a shanty room. For all this time, we hadn’t noticed that Florah, one of the girls, was not with us! Where could she be? Did she manage to escape or something bad has happened to her? Everyone of us was worried. We knew the forest was not the best place to be and especially late in the evening due to some wild animals which used to take the advantage of the dark to harass the village.

It was now getting late, yet we had no idea what was in store for us. We could here the guards conversing outside but we comprehended nothing at all as they were from a different community. No one understood their language. We tried to scream to attract their attention, but the effort bore no fruits. One of them could understand some words from our language but what he did was just to scold us commanding us to keep quiet.

Finally, it was dark. There was no need to continue pleading for our freedom. After all, being in that room was safer than walking aimlessly in the forest which could be more dangerous for us. What about our parents? They must have been worried waiting for us to return home with no avail!

We tried to get some sleep but the place was too cold for most of us apart from Daisy. Neither the noise that we made nor the cold in the room could deter her visit to the slumber land.

The night was so long that we all wished for the sunrise. Everything seemed quiet apart from scaring sounds of wild animals which could be heard from time to time. Some of as couldn’t bear it any logger. They tried to build some warmth by crowding together. This helped them to get some sleep, but it wasn’t the case with Judith and I. No matter how much we tried to close our eyes, no urge of sleep dared to give us a courtesy call. We were forced to endure with the situation knowing that we had no way out!

Before we could see the morning sun rays, our worrying peace was interrupted by noise and commotion from outside. We hurriedly tried to alert those of us who were sleeping. Everybody was awake when we heard the deafening shout from a man whom we couldn’t recognise his voice!…..what next?….don’t miss the next part…let’s go this journey together….below this story, I request that you follow me….kindly share your opinion as you comment...let’s meet next time and know what happened.