After chosing Bandit, we didn't see Mark for a while. Perhaps he was busy in D.C....at any rate, a couple of months went by without him. In that short time, spring arrived and several things of import occurred.

We ran out of food. I mean that there was almost nothing at all to eat other than the lentils. Raphah and I made the mistake one day of mentioning that Mark had shown us where the key to his cabin was if we needed to use his cabin for some emergency. Eliyah decided that our food shortage was just such an emergency, forced us to show him where the key was, and started bringing food from Mark's cabin to our house. We thought this was stealing, but our parents insisted that we would pay him back and he'd never know. I thought of all that our friend had done for us already and felt that I would rather go hungry than to take his food without his permission.

We received notice from our landlord that we would have to move. We had no money for food, so we certainly didn't have any money to rent a new place. The specter of homelessness, a new concept for every one of us, was now staring us directly in the face. Our parents had us ask Yahweh where we would go, but all we could offer were assurances to have faith. In the meantime, we had to pack up everything, even though we had absolutely no idea where it would be moving to, and it had to be done quickly. Only the most basic necessities were left unpacked, everything else went into boxes.

We gave all the puppies away at the Tamrak convenience store/gas station except for Bandit, Kodiak, and Alaska. Beauty found an owner who seemed to really love her. We had to move all of Eliyah's lumber collection, but where? Don and Helen said we could move it there and store it on their property. We also somehow wound up with a small, egg shaped travel trailer from their place, and of course we still had the old Airstream trailer, even though it was crammed full of stored stuff. About this time, my parents received a letter from Mark. They read it to us as we packed. He said that he had a difficult choice to make, because there were three women he had to choose from. He would be bringing one of them to his cabin at some future point. I wondered who the other two women could be and felt a sting of resentment towards the lady we would soon meet. Many years later, Mark told me of how my parents had offered me in marriage to him. I have no idea whether it was supposed to be some sort of financial transaction or not. He said he'd declined because he felt that at 15, I was too young...

Meanwhile, we focused on relocating our family. The lumber was moved, everything was packed up. The big question was, where were we going to move to? As usual, we, the children, were told nothing until it actually happened. We were moving onto Mark's property, without his knowledge or permission. Perhaps my parents intended this as a stop-gap measure, or to have found a permanent place before he came back. At any rate, telling Eliyah that Mark had given us emergency access to his cabin was turning out to backfire in ways we'd never intended or imagined.

So we packed everything into the Airstream trailer. Then they backed the truck up to the house and we filled the back of the truck with stuff, too. Mom and Eliyah were stressed and irritable; nobody could seem to do anything right. The loaded truck started and pulled forward as we stood to the side. It was then that I noticed my beloved cat, Ricotte, the same one who'd learned to ride horseback with me, who leapt from the porch railing onto my shoulder and perched there as I walked. Ricotte, with her short, dense gray hair and green eyes and shy, quiet ways....she was writhing hideously on the ground, dying. Her head had been crushed by the tire of the truck. She was making a tortured sound as her body flailed helplessly. I must have cried out, because the truck stopped and my parents jumped out. Then they yelled at me for not watching my cat. They said it was my fault she was dying, even though nobody had seen her anywhere near the truck before it started to pull out. Mom said I should have taught her to stay away from vehicles, that I had made her so tame that she was no longer afraid of anything, so it was my fault. My beautiful cat, my friend, was dead, had died violently and in agony, and I had no one to turn to for solace.