She hears a quiet sad whine, then more of that ragged, pained breathing.

Oh no, the poor thing... 

She backs away a bit, pours fresh water on her arm (shallow cuts, thankfully) and then holds her other arm over the wounds until they stop bleeding. She makes quiet soothing noises with her mouth as she does (and winces when one of them comes out as more of a screech than she intended. Normally it's fine, but...)

Then, carefully, she uses a stick to push some of the fern aside and peer inward.

The wounded feline there is both too small to be fully grown and also bigger than any cat she's ever seen with her eyes before. 

He's also bleeding from a wound on its side, and another on one of its back legs. 

She's done first aid on farm animals, before. They didn't like her much more than the people did, but she was good at wrestling with them, which was one of the only ways to bandage a wounded sheep.

The cat is hurt, pretty badly, but it doesn't seem like he's lost too much blood. Looks... probably survivable? With her help, at anyways.

She (slowly, carefully) opens her waterskin, and then pours some water (from as high up as she can hold it) into his mouth. He flinches at first, but then starts to drink.

She makes soothing noises at the poor thing, backs away slowly, and then empties the contents of her bag on the ground and hurries as fast as she can back to her tree. She needs him to trust her, and she also needs some cloth to cover the wound. 

(Climbing the tree with the claw wounds on her arm hurts horribly, but she barely notices. It's not what's important right now.) 

She returns to the creature's hidingbush about 20 minutes later, armed with a bit of spare clothing and the rest of her dried meats. She carefully offers him a piece.

(He's doing a bit worse, but still breathing.)

sniffsniffsniiiifffffffffffffffffffff CHOMP chewchewchewchewchewchew...

Okay, good, he can still eat. She sighs in relief. Now for the hard part.

She spends the next hour alternating between feeding and occasionally watering the poor cat, making her best attempt at soft soothing noises, and looking around to see if anything is coming. Each time she feeds him, she brings herself a little closer to his striking distance (slowly, carefully). 

He tenses up a few times, growling, but when she stops at the growls, he lets her continue.

After a while, she's getting her hand close enough to touch, and between snacks, he licks her, weakly.

That's as good a sign as any.  The wound on his leg isn't bleeding anymore, but the one on his side still is. And they both need to be washed. 

"Sorry. This is going to suck for both of us," she whispers to it softly.

She takes the waterskin out from the inside of her warm jacket (she'd placed it against her stomach to warm it up - cold water hurts more and doesn't clean any better), and pours it over the wounds. She's not aiming for gentle (this will hurt no matter what), or for doing a perfect job washing it out (she definitely can't do that), but even a bad job washing a wound can be the difference between life and death.

!!!! grrrowl SNArrrRL kickkickkick!!!!

But he's still too weak to stand, and she has a much better understanding of his range, now, so all he can do is flail in pain, and then look at her in confusion and anger when she finishes.

"There, there." She wishes she could pet him. She wishes she had healing herbs instead of just water and a rapidly dwindling supply of dried meat. She wishes...

...she doesn't have the time to be wishing. She feeds him a bigger chunk of dried meats, and while he's eating it, she places a long stripe of linen over the bleeding wound. There's no way for her to actually apply pressure, he'll spook and hurt them both, but just having river-cleaned linen over the wound should make the bleeding stop.

(He flinches, when she puts it on, but he doesn't knock it off, and after he finishes glaring at her for this latest indignity, he goes back to eating.)

munchmunchmunch yawwwwnnn

She breathes another sigh of relief, and then stops to think about what to do next.

...she just gave away most of her stored meat to a wild animal she's only mostly sure she can save.

That was... not the smartest thing to have done, even if the tubers are plentiful.

But... the Forest has been kind to her, kinder than her village ever was. She wants to be good to it, in return. And she'll start with this poor cat.

She was planning on learning how to catch fish in the river anyways. Now she just needs to do it faster. And she remembers a trick for it...

Her wooden fishing spear isn't especially sharp, but it'll do the trick if she can connect. She practices with the blunt end, aiming at rocks, and learns to adjust her aim for the way the water seems to bend things. 

Then, she crushes the poisonous berries into a thick paste, and places them under a rock, upstream, just like the hunter bragged about doing.

To her relief, he was right - downstream of the poison, the fish start moving slower. Her aim still isn't great, but it's good enough; she manages to skewer four of them before her spear breaks.

She brings her winnings back to her(?) cat friend(??) patient - it's dangerous to leave him undefended, and he might be lonely.

(He perks up as she approaches)

Sniffsniffsniffffff 

(...and is clearly very interested in the fish)

Sure. Fishie for kitty. 

Kaitiaki busies herself gutting the other three, which is gross but not difficult once you know how (which is why she volunteered to do it for her family, last fall).

Then she gathers fallen wood and twigs, spends a little while fighting with the flint, and eventually gets a small fire going, which she uses to cook the fish, piece by piece. (She's not great at it, but overcooked fish isn't unhealthy, it just tastes worse.)

The warmth of the fire is really nice, and she's had a stressful several hours. She ends up dozing off. 

When she wakes up several hours later, the fire is out (she vaguely remembers it being a bad idea to sleep next to an open fire, but apparently it's fine?) and her cat friend is asleep, though he stirs when she yawns and stretches. She eats the rest of her cooked fish and gives him the rest of her water to drink (he licks her hand eee).

She looks at him fondly, blinking slowly, the way the village cats did with each other when they got along. After a moment, he slow-blinks back, and something in her heart melts.

He'll need more food and water soon; she needs to think about her next steps. She can take care of those things at the same time.

Kaitiaki sits by the fire pit and carves a sharp tip on a pair of sticks, both thicker and sturdier than the spear she broke fishing earlier. She thinks about distances and safe storage places and food supplies and how long she thinks she has before the rains begin in earnest. 

When she finishes, she tells her striped friend that she'll be back soon (she doesn't know if cats can learn to listen, but she figures it won't happen if you don't try talking to them) and heads back to the river, stopping by one of the poisonous berry bushes to grab a large handful. 

It's easier, this time. She doesn't break either of her fishing spears, and she catches eight fish before she runs out of berries to slow them down with. Satisfied, she washes the berry juice out of her hands, then refills her waterskin upstream. 

She returns to feed her striped friend two of the fish (she's going to feed him most of this bunch, actually, but she thinks it's better to do it a little at a time.) She runs a bit of water over his leg wound while he eats, which earns her some annoyed growling, but he doesn't attack her or scramble out of the way, which feels like a good sign. 

She doesn't want to mess with larger wound - it stopped bleeding, as far as she can tell, and she's afraid of disturbing that. He's lost a lot of blood already. (Poor thing...)

When he finishes eating, she pours some water into her cupped hands and lets him lick it out. (dumping water on a cat is not a good way to get them to drink, and she does not want him drinking dirty groundwater!)

!!Oh, water!!

Licklicklicklick

D'awwwwwwwww. 

Once he's had enough to drink, she slow blinks at him a few more times, and says goodbye for now. She has some errands to run.

She makes her way back to her tree, climbs it (wincing when she puts too much weight on her clawed-up arm - it's doing better, but it'll take a while to fully heal), and packs up and lowers her belongings to the ground. (She needs to be nearby, in case whatever attacked her new friend comes back.)

Before she leaves, she bows to her tree. 

"Thank you for sheltering me," she whispers.

She ends up taking two trips - one to carry the supplies she came into the forest with, and another to get the best lengths of wood from her gathered pile.

When she finishes relocating all her supplies, she feeds the cat a fish, guts another for herself, and then starts working on (re)starting the fire. She wants to keep this one burning longer - a fire that's gone for a while is easier to start back up, and if she's going to be eating a lot of fish and staying in one place, it makes sense to have a dedicated spot for fire. (She vaguely remembers it being important to surround outdoor fires with a circle of stones? She doesn't remember why, but she'll try to get to it, when she has time.)

Fire: started. Hands: warmed. Fish: cooked and eaten.

Hmmm... She isn't tired enough to sleep again, and she doesn't think it makes sense to go fishing until they run out - meat goes bad unless you preserve it somehow, and she... doesn't know how to do that.

She decides to gather up more promising-looking sticks for her construction pile, and then she'll return to the fire, doing some woodcarving in eyesight of her wounded friend. (Slow blink!)

(He looks up in interest when she comes back into view)

 sniffsniffsnifff 

(and watches her for a bit, but when it becomes clear she's not bringing him more fish right now, he snorts and goes back to napping.)