Part 7

The naked teenager, her body stretched out into an "X", her hands and feet grasping the pine trees three feet apart, looked up and closed her eyes and said her daily prayer.

 "Please God, let me find clothes today.  And get me back safe to the people I love."

 She opened her eyes and walked back to where she was before, and sat down cross-legged, not minding the rough stones and sandy gravel pressing up against her bare butt cheeks.  She looked down at the remains of her "meal" -- a small cactus, some mesquite branches, and mint leaves.  She listened for the roar of passing trucks, several hundred feet behind her, and was glad that no one could see her.

 She was lucky to have found the mint especially, she mused as she cleaned her teeth with a cactus needle.  Thank goodness she remembered all she had learned in that "Stalking Wild Plants" course -- including the fact that no cactus was poisonous, at least on the inside, which was a rich source of moisture and minerals.  The mesquite was tough chewing but also nutritious.  And the mint was a real find.  Chewed after using the cactus needle, it was just like brushing your teeth.

 "Luck".  No, it was not all luck.  She glanced back at the now out-of-site interstate, having scrambled here after getting off that truck.  She had gotten here not through luck but through planning, easy to do now that she had so much time and only one goal.  After eating Travis's yummy big breakfast, she had kept a watchout from the top of that diner, observing the trucks come and go, overhearing what conversations she could, while enjoying the heat of the sun on her back after that miserable freezing night.  Surely her fastest way east would be to sneak onto a truck; after all, that first ride had taken her all the way into Arizona.  Trucks that arrived from the west were surely going east, she reasoned; they wouldn't come to a place like this and then turn around.  A couple of hours of observation bore this out, and she waited for the right truck to hop onto.  At length she decided on a straight truck with wood sides topped with chicken wire, holding a few pieces of farm equipment.  By sticking her head up she could see all the way around, and if she saw someone walking back there she could hop out the other side.  With the police after her she had to be sure of an escape route.

 She waited until no one was around, then jumped in, crouching next to what looked like part of a plow blade.  It almost went without saying that looking around, she saw no jacket or rag of any kind to cover herself with.  Finally after twenty minutes she heard the driver, evidently an old guy who coughed a lot, get in and off they went.  The truck found the interstate and rumbled eastward.  Sticking her head up ever so slightly, Tami was able to see the signs go by.  It was a good couple of hundred miles, good progress, but then this guy took a fork onto a southbound route and Tami watched helplessly out the left side as the eastbound road pulled farther and farther away.  She could not risk staying southbound.  She was probably close to Mexico now and the last thing she wanted was to be on a truck as it rolled into customs.  She had never been out of the country, but pictured customs agents as being very thorough.

 A few miles later they ascended a hill and the plow blade slid across the truck bed, almost pinning the naked girl.  The guy stopped the truck and got out, presumably to check the plow blade, and Tami knew she had to bolt.  She nimbly flipped over the side, her bare soles silently landing on the hot concrete, watching under the truck as the big  work shoes walked back the other side.  When he was undoing the gate in back she shot off to behind a bush, then scampered over the little rise, down a little gulley, and then over another little hill to where she was now.

 She found a little cactus and with a sharp rock pushed it over and cut it open.  The fleshy part inside had an indifferent taste but was nice and moist.  Then she recognized the mesquite plant and pulled it up and started chewing on the tough stalk.

 Now, having finished her little snack, she looked down at her dusty feet, her dusty breasts, the dust on her concave tanned belly, then down at her pussy, the stubble of her hair starting to grow back in.  She was dusty but her belly was full and she felt good.  Now she had to pee, and she got up and squatted, elbows on her knees, cradling her head in her hand as she contemplated the scene before her.  As the pee hit the dry sand and made a warm little yellow river coursing down in front of her, she looked across the blank sandy expanse to that ridge, far away, along which ran the eastbound interstate that she had to get back onto.

 That road was real far away now, extending across her field of vision, a little farther away as it went to her right.  She could just barely make out the big trucks on it as they slowly and silently moved across.  How far was it? The only way to find out was trigonometry.

 Tami Smithers, the straight-A math major, had no problem at all with that.  She was always excited when she found a way to use all that abstract knowledge in her real life.  A little straight branch stuck in the sandy gravel.  Then, uncomfortable though it was, she lay on her belly to get a line drawn from where the trucks could be first seen, with another stick planted right in front of her eye.  Little stones scraped her nipples, her tummy, her thighs.  She tried to lessen the scraping on her thighs by balancing her legs on her big toes.  Then a third stick in line with where the trucks disappeared on the right.  She picked one truck and counted the seconds it took to go from stick to stick.  One one-thousand, two one-thousand .  .  .

 Two minutes, 20 seconds.  She picked another truck and counted again.  Roughly the same.  She guessed they were going 70 miles an hour.  She drew lines from stick to stick.  The law of sines.  This angle in front of her, it was possibly about 15 degrees.  What was the sine?  30 degrees would be .5, as any math major knows off the top of  her head.  Fortunately she remembered the formula for finding the sine of half an angle, a pain because it involved taking a square root.  She got up, brushing the little stones off her, and with a stick wrote out calculations on the flat area of sand in front of her.  She was on all fours, her brow furrowed with thought, her toes behind her digging into the dirt, her breasts tightly hanging down and jiggling with the busy motions of her left arm.  This was not an isosceles triangle; possibly the right side was as much as twice the length of the left side.  .  .

 After checking her calculations, she found that the highway, at least where the trucks appeared, was at most 8 miles away.

 She remembered walking to mass on Sundays in high school, it was about a mile, and took her about 15 minutes.  Four miles an hour.  She could make that eastbound highway easy, in two hours, plus some time to rest.

 This mental activity was making her sleepy.  She was grateful for the shade from this little pine, otherwise it would be unbearably hot.  She knew from last night's bitter experience that she could not sleep outdoors on cold desert nights.  She couldn't start out now, in broad daylight, and risk being seen maybe by a police car from the highway.  She decided she would sleep by day, travel by night .  .  .

 She couldn't really believe she was doing it, but she laid her bare body onto the sand, and curled up, and .  .  .

 The cold air woke her up.  She must have really needed that sleep, to sleep naked on dry rocky soil.  She groggily got up and staggered to her feet, brushing away the tiny stones that had gotten embedded into her bare hip and her arm and leg.  There was some lighter sky behind her, but the sun had gone down.  She saw the distant highway, vivid with the pale shadows of the slow-moving trucks now studded with lights.  In a few moments, as the sun left the far ridge, all she could see were the lights, beading slowly along.

 The naked girl waited until she was sure it was too dark for her to be seen, then said a short prayer and with a spring of her bare toes ran down the hundred yards or so to bottom out onto the flat expanse of sand.  Fortunately it was not soft, which would have made for slow going -- it was firm like baked, dried mud, in fact now that she was treading on it she saw it had little cracks in it.  She slowed to a quick walking pace and looked behind her, at her temporary encampment home on the little hill, then looked ahead.

 How utterly naked I am now, she thought.  Just me on this flat dry plain, not hidden by trees or bushes or even grass.  Nothing to carry, nothing to wear, not even my old ankle pouch, not even a toe ring.  She looked up at the stars now coming out, amazed as more and more and more appeared until, with the sky almost black, she saw something she had heard about but never seen before, the Milky Way.  My galaxy.  Just me and the cosmos.

 She had read about pioneers and explorers, slowly trudging through deserts with their wagons and heavy clothes, and decided that survival out here depended on traveling light.  In fact, it was not possible to travel any lighter than she was right now.  No bags, no clothes, just her naked body.  She felt light as a feather, and found herself skipping along, her tough soles kicking up what little dirt could be kicked up from this hard, baked plain.  Trained gymnast that she was, she even started doing cartwheels.

A few minutes of this giddiness and she stopped herself.  Wait -- I've got to preserve my energy.  I'm in the middle of a totally flat plain.  My calculations might be wrong, that ridge might be a lot farther than I thought.  So, though she was hardly winded, she slowed to a gentle walk.  This was a moonless night and it was hard to see, yet her eyes did get a little bit used to the dark.  She looked down and looked in back of her.  She could at least see that in the hard ground she was not making any footprints.  She had heard about spy satellites, how they could take pictures of things as small as cars, at least in daylight.  Well, there would not be any intriguing line of bare footprints for them to see when the sun rose.

 The night air was a little chilly, raising goosebumps on her butt, causing her nipples to stick out big and hard, as if pointing the way forward for her.  Any other girl would have been traumatized, fearing hypothermia, totally naked and miles from anywhere, but not Tami.  She knew that God would protect her somehow, so long as she was smart.  That triangulation she had done with those sticks, she knew that was a smart thing.  She thought of the things that God had thrust her into, naked in all kinds of situations, and wondered if there was some purpose to it.  What purpose?  That word kept running through her mind.  Then she caught herself.  Maybe I'm getting swell-headed.  I'm just a ordinary naked teenager, walking through the desert.  There is no Grand Purpose for Tami Smithers.

 Her thoughts were then arrested by what she saw, and she slowed down and stopped.  She was looking up at a black sky filled with more stars than she had ever seen.  Every corner of blackness was filled -- either with the milky glow of her galaxy's disk, or tiny specks, or the bigger stars that made constellations, finally the brightest stars like Sirius or Rigel.  Arab names, given to them hundreds of years ago.  And now that big one must be Jupiter.  A planet.  Planets no doubt circling many of those stars.  Without clothes, without belongings, without shelter, just her elemental body, without any of the trappings of her culture or civilization.  She knew herself to be a species she called homo sapiens, and now as a representative of her planet and her species she was looking across the universe.  Was there some naked Tami, some young female filled with awe and wonder, looking down in her direction from one of those faraway planets?

 It was not a prayer, really.  But Tami looked up into the stars with wide open eyes, pupils big and black in the darkness, taking in the starlight to the fullest, and slowly spread her arms and legs into an "X", like an antenna, as if to expose herself to the energy of the cosmos and receive it and transmit her own energy, the energy of her species and her planet, communicating with all other beings in the universe.

 Then Tami Smithers, motorhead, Irish-Italian working-class girl from Providence, shook her head and giggled and began walking on.  I get loopy sometimes, I sound like some of those "New Age" guys on campus.  As her friend Terri noticed, they seemed to talk this way only to good-looking girls, never to guys.  Yet .  .  .looking up at the stars she admitted that this was different, she could not deny the intense feeling.  She wondered if this feeling was not merely a result of being naked all the time and walking through the nothingness of this desert, but came at least partly from someplace outside the borders of her bare skin.

 .  .  .  .

 She approached the ridge now.  Maybe a hundred yards ahead were the first trees and the beginning of the rise.  It had taken a couple of hours.  There was still plenty of night left.  Her skin felt flushed yet cold like, long ago, when she would go jogging in shorts in the winter.  She looked down at her toes and flexed them to get the blood moving.  They were cold but O.K.  It turned out that in front of the highway was a side road on this part of the ridge.  Not only that, but there was a little town off to the left, and straight ahead the road ran past a couple of stores, it looked like a gas station and a little convenience store, both closed up and dark.  Crossing the last of the flat plain, Tami came across a big branch.  She stepped on it and it cracked in half, making a sound that seemed to reverberate after so much silence.  She bit her lip and froze.  No, nobody would have heard that from such a distance.

She began climbing through the brush, making her way up to the road.  It was hard not to make noises as branches and underbrush crackled under her tough bare feet.  She moved very slowly.  When she got to the road she saw that behind the convenience store was a table with a couple of unopened cans of soda.  Obviously nobody was worried about theft way out here.  Well, gee .  .  .  Hiding behind a tree, she snapped open the can and drank in the cola with its sugar and caffeine .  .  .

The Unintentional Nudist XI:  "Tami Smithers Was Here", Part 8

 The way up to the interstate was rocky and steep.  In the blackness of the cool still night the naked girl crawled like a crab up  over pointy little boulders, grabbing with her toes as much as with her fingers, aware that anyone looking up would have a straight-on view of her butthole, but of course there was no one down there.  She heard a car or two passing, but by then she was well out of sight of the road, just another clothingless animal lurking about in the brush.

 She emerged from the brush onto the embankment of the interstate, dry long brown grass that felt soft and welcome beneath her feet.  She climbed the steep rise up to the road bed, then ducked as a truck boomed by with a blast that blew the hair half off her head in its wake, wind that she could feel in every crevice and tickling the short stubbly hair on her pussy.  She heard another truck go by, then another.  At night this was a busy road, at least for trucks.  And probably going faster than 70, which meant the dried mud flat was wider across than she had calculated.  Gingerly she crawled up to the roadbed again like a lizard, her knees spread wide, pussy and nipples resting on the grass, and looked to her right.

 The sign was far away but in the lights of a passing car she could make it out.  "Rest area -- 10 miles."

 Ten miles! Then again, it was better than she could hope for.  She had been expecting an exit, leading to another diner to wait on top of, but she had noticed that the exits here out west were far apart.  A rest stop would be almost as good, though -- a place to find a kind person who would give her clothes without having to call the police.  She stuck her head up again, like a chipmunk, looking at the eastern horizon up ahead.  No sign of light yet.  Could she walk along the interstate, out of sight, and make it to the rest area before she lost her only covering, the covering of darkness?  She turned around and relaxed, stretched out on the soft grassy slope and looked up at the stars.  She didn't feel too tired.  She had probably walked ten miles already.  Maybe a couple of hours of darkness left.  Well here I go!

 The engineers who built this highway had done an impressive job.  The embankment was a straight V-shaped strip of dry grass as far as she could see, with a gully in the middle for drainage.  Her father had worked on highway design once, she had heard him talk about the importance of drainage.  The naked girl got up and started walking.

 The gully itself was full of rocks, she had to walk along one side.  When her feet got tired of bending to one side, she walked on the other side and her feet got bent the opposite way.  She imagined this was a good flexibility exercise for her foot muscles.  Above all she had make sure there was no injury to her feet.

 She imagined that the chill air prevented her from getting drowsy, but as she finished mile by mile she could feel herself getting tired.  Finally she saw the rest area up ahead.  It was getting light out.  She couldn't risk being seen from the road below.  She found a secluded spot maybe a quarter mile before the rest stop, turned around and around like a dog to stamp the grass flat, then curled up in the little flat grassy bed.  She saw the sky lighten and the long shadows appear, then the shadows got shorter and the air got nice and warm.  The teenage girl lay her nakedness down in the soft bed God had provided for her and with a soft moan drifted off to sleep, the little sticks of dried grass like hay in her wild dark red hair.

 .  .  .  .

 The sun hitting her face woke her up.  It must be mid-morning by now.  She got up and brushed the dry blades of grass out of her hair, off her breasts, then pulled them out from where they had stuck to her short pussy hair and even lodged behind between her butt cheeks.  Time to approach the rest stop and form a plan.  Her previous experience with a rest stop had taught her to be careful.  She remembered the college-age girl with the little car full of clothes, whom she had so foolishly let get away when she had first escaped from Brian Cook's gallery.  She had to pick someone like that, then without hesitation come out and ask her for clothes.

 Looking up she could see the building ahead containing rest rooms.  She could also see guardrails that must be right next to a parking lot.  Aware someone walking there might see her, she retreated down into the brush.  When she was directly below the building she found a water pipe going up to the building, coming out from the ground.  And a little concrete platform that looked like a maintenance station, with knobs and valves.  And a little spout!

 She put one bare foot on the pipe and felt water running inside.  She hadn't bathed in three days.  Should she?  She looked up.  No one could see her from here unless they went around behind the building.

 It was almost as impulsive as her decision, long ago, to wash all that stinging boiler muck off herself in the sprinkler in full view of everyone in her dorm.  But not so horribly shaming this time, and somewhat more voluntary.  She slowly turned the knob until a moderate stream of water came out, bubbly and burping at first, but then clear and cool.  Gratefully she stuck her head under it and rinsed and scrubbed a much as she could with just her bare fingers.  She washed the dust from her eyes, from her face, rubbed the water around her neck.  Then onto the rest of her whole naked self.

 It took some contortions, like a limbo dancer, but she bent and twisted so that her breasts, then her back, then her thighs and calves felt the cool running of the water.  She rubbed the water all over herself, joyously, sensuously, almost like her body was one big clit and she was diddling all over herself with the water and her rubbing hands.  She rinsed her feet, getting the coolness between her toes, and felt woken up and alive.  She rinsed out her mouth and took a long, long drink.  She was thirstier than she thought after all that walking.

 Feeling like a total exhibitionist, like a wanton slut, she bent back on her hands and spread her legs and crab-walked her pussy into the downward stream.  Balancing herself on one hand, with the other she spread her pussy lips.  The water felt cold in there but it was so good! She thrust her hips up, putting her pussy right next to the spout.  Hmmmm.  .  .  .  Cold as it was the force of the water on did get her a little aroused.  Then she flipped around onto all fours and stuck her butt up right next to the spout, again balancing herself on one hand as she cleansed her butthole.

 She stood up and shook the water off herself like a dog, and gathered her hair behind her and squeezed out the excess.  Then looked up at the building.  No, no one had seen her.  She looked back down at the spout and turned it off.  God, that felt good.  Thank you God, for giving this to me and letting me feel all these wonderful sensations.

 The hot dry sun lovingly and quickly licked her dry as she bent this way and that to expose every part of her perfect, tanned body to its gaze.

 Now back to work.  The naked girl crawled up to behind the building and stuck her head up to see.  No, no one in the parking lot.  There were two little open windows in the back.  Which one was the women's room?  No, those windows were too small to climb into.  The pointed roof was inviting.  Could she?  Yes -- there was a fence in back of the building and she used it to hop on top of the rear part, not minding the scraping of the gritty tar shingles onto her belly and knees.  Crouching on the warm roof, she looked down the road, putting her head back down when someone drove past.

 Now a little yellow car came up and parked.  As Tami watched, her head just barely above the line of sight of the roof, a young blond woman jiggled out of the car.  In the back of the car Tami could see suitcases and what looked like several hanging closet bags -- of clothes! The naked girl bit her lip with longing and prayed.  Please God .  .  .

 The lady looked about late 20's, with stylish summer sandals and a kerchief tied lightly over her abundant platinum blond hair.  The kerchief had a Union Jack design; maybe she was English.  The car had California plates and Tami guessed this lady was moving from one state to another, carrying all her belongings -- and clothes -- with her.  Oddly, she had on a dark turtleneck sweater zipped up to her neck over what looked like a summer dress.  Her cover-up attire did little to hide the fact that she had a very generous bust.  Looking the lady over as she approached the building, the naked teenage girl decided that this lady looked sweet and kind.  Surely the type who would help her and give her clothes, of which she seemed to have a great many.

 The naked girl waited for the slow creak of the closing door below, then scampered back and hopped onto the fence.  She was around to the front in a flash and shot inside.  The lady was in a stall.  Tami got into a stall further down.  No time to wait; she wasn't going to procrastinate like with those two women at that other rest stop.  As soon as the lady was out and began running water in the sink, Tami decided to make her move.

 Not that it wasn't harder than she had thought.  Faced with another person, she couldn't bear to expose her nakedness.  At first all she did was open the stall door and stick her head out and say, "Please, Ma'am, can you help me?"

 The lady saw her in the mirror and looked back with immediate concern.  "Hello?" She did have an English accent after all.  "What's wrong, luv?"

 Tami cleared her throat, ashamed that this lady could see her bare feet, feeling her awkwardness because with the stall door open she was pinned against the toilet seat which had who knows what kind of germs on it.  "I -- my friends -- my sorority -- they took my clothes and left me here as a joke -- naked."  Now that she finally had the chance to say her well-rehearsed words, they were so difficult coming out.  Tami was just not a good liar.  "Could you give me something to put on?"

 The lady looked down to the floor and whispered, "No, not again.  That hospital .  .  ."

 "What?" Tami said.

 "Never mind," she said, then looked at the quivering naked teenager behind the stall door.  "You poor thing!"  She reached for the ring of the zipper on her black sweater, right up at her neck.  "Here, dear, let me give you this."

 Tami watched as the lady fiddled with the zipper.  Feeling uncomfortable where she was, she decided to be bold and step out, hands over her breasts and pussy, so that she was standing in front of the lady.  She watched as the lady's large breasts jiggled with her motions.

 Finally, a friend!  Tami just had to introduce herself.  "My name's Tami," she said.

 The lady paused in her struggle with the zipper and offered a hand to Tami, which she bent forward to clasp so as not to take her arm away from covering her breasts.  The lady said, "My name's Jenny, luv.  Jenny Hamilton.  You don't know how much I understand how you feel! Now," she said, returning to her zipper, "after I give you this there are some things in the auto you can have.  You poor thing .  .  ."

The Unintentional Nudist XII: "Tami Smithers Was Here", Part 9

The naked girl watched as Jenny continued to struggle with her zipper.  "Love, I've got lots of things you can have," Jenny said, her breasts jiggling.  "I -- uhh! -- had a mishap at my last job in Los Angeles, but I got an offer in Florida and my friend Ashley's arranged a flat.  .  .Darn this zipper .  .  .  So it's my moving day and all my clothes are in the auto.  Shoes, pants, socks .  .  .  you name it .  .  .Just let me get this thing on you .  .  ."

 It was almost unbearable for Tami to wait these last few seconds before she would be finally covered.  She just could not stand being all exposed, the bareness of her feet on the clammy floor, her bare butt, her bare shoulders.  Jenny represented the world of clothed persons, and in a moment Tami would finally make the transition back, being part of that privileged class that Jenny was a member of.  The naked teenager wanted to tell Jenny to hurry, but she didn't want to be rude, and the English lady certainly seemed to be trying.  The naked teenager clutched her hands to her breasts and pussy more tightly, pressed her legs together, put one foot on to cover the toes of the other, waiting, waiting .  .  .

 Tami knew that for the first time she had encountered someone who was nice and not out to get her, who was ready and willing to give her the clothes she so desperately craved.  With this lady, at last, she could relax.  She unwound a bit from her tightly coiled nakedness.  As she relaxed she began to enjoy the ironic humor of the situation.  She couldn't help smiling and said, "You sure seem to have difficulty taking things off."

 Jenny rolled her eyes and then returned to the stuck zipper.  "If you only knew .  .  ."

 Why Jenny was wearing a dark coverup sweater on a hot day, over a summer dress and sandals, was a mystery.  Maybe to hide her bust?  Not very successfully, though this lady did not have huge boobs like Marisol.  Speaking just between us girls, Tami said, "You seem like you have a lot to cover with that," Tami said.

 "Unhh!" Jenny tugged with such force that the zipper almost broke.  "I'm a 38CC."

 Tami was puzzled.  Jenny didn't seem that fat.  And -- "I didn't know there was such a size."

 "Actually there isn't," Jenny said.  "What those girls did to you wasn't right.  You should report it to the police.  Oh shoot!"

 Jenny's arms flew downward in frustration and both young women looked at her neck, the ring now broken off the zipper, and then at the ring in Jenny's right hand.  She'd never get that sweater off now, short of cutting it open with a scissors!

 "I'm sorry, luv," Jenny said, looking into Tami's eyes.  "I feel for you, really I do!"  And then, to Tami's surprise, Jenny hugged her, crushing Tami's hands and breasts between them, Tami enjoying the fabric of the sweater and summer dress against bare skin.  In her ear Tami heard a whisper: "I feel like you're my little sister!!"

 Jenny disengaged and headed for the door.  "Stay here hidden.  I'll get some things for you.  What size shoe do you wear?"

 "Um, 9," Tami said, thinking quickly.  Actually it was 8, but after months and months of going barefoot she probably needed something bigger.

 Opening the door, Jenny said, "I've got some sneakers that would be perfect.  And sweatpants.  And a T-shirt.  And socks --" Her voice disappeared with the closing of the door.

 The naked girl stood there awkwardly, then finally let the hands fall from her breasts and pussy.  She edged back into the stall, then closed it in front of her and closed her eyes in prayer.  "Thank you God.  Oh, God, at last! In a few seconds I'll finally have CLOTHES! CLOTHES, CLOTHES, CLOTHES! Oh God thank you SO much!!" She sniffed and fought back tears.

 She waited.  Maybe one minute went by.  The sense of anticipation was intense, she couldn't wait.  She couldn't resist going to the door and opening a peek --

 There was a police car! A highway patrol car, having pulled up next to Jenny, who was standing outside her car, one arm weighed down with clothes, the other hand holding sneakers stuffed with white rolled up socks.  Jenny, a look of concern on her face, was speaking to a female officer in the passenger seat.  Tami could make out the words and saw Jenny pointing toward the building.  "They took all her clothes.  I think she might want to bring charges.  'Tis a terrible thing what happened."

 The female officer got out and followed Jenny toward the rest room.

 In stark terror Tami looked around.  That little window in the back was too small but it would have to do.  She grabbed the sill and propelled her head through, realizing she would be falling head first outside.  Fortunately there was that fence to grab onto.  She dragged herself through the window, the sill painfully scraping against her breasts and thighs and finally the tops of her feet, then she hopped the fence just as she heard the creak of the door opening.  She ran frantically in a diagonal down through the brush which scraped her breasts and tummy and legs.  She didn't care -- she had to get out of sight of the police and FAST!

 Officer Biggsette thought of looking through the rear window, but by that time there was nothing to be seen back there and in a moment her stern visage was fixed upon Jenny Hamilton and contemplating criminal mischief charges.  Plus, she had noticed that this Hamilton lady's inspection sticker had expired.  .  .

 .  .  .  .

 NUDE GIRL ALERT

 Tami stood on Main Street and contemplated the headline in the window of the newspaper vending box.

 Not that she was out to expose herself.  This town was called Tombstone Flats, New Mexico, and according to the sign the population was 326.  And it was around 3:30 a.m.

 And freezing.  She hugged herself, her legs together, her toes almost numb standing on the gravel, watching her breath come out in clouds.  Well, maybe not "freezing", as in 32 degrees Fahrenheit, but still pretty cold.

 Her eyes shifted left and right.  There was not a soul around -- except there was a police car patrolling somewhere, she had seen it from the roof of that store where she had hopped after getting that ride on that empty cattle truck.  It was a daring jump; the interstate wound around a hill and suddenly she could see this little town right down below her.  It was just after dark, and as the truck got into low gear to climb up the hill, she jumped out into a sandy gully on the side of the road which fortunately was as soft as it looked.

 She wasn't too worried about the police seeing her.  If she heard the car coming she could easily leap into an alley, and it was so silent here that she could hear it from quite a distance.  She just didn't want to be caught in its headlights.

 She looked up and down this "Main Street", this short line of stores and offices on each side, the drug store she was standing in front of, then her bare shoulders drooped as she concentrated again on that newspaper.

 NUDE GIRL ALERT

 Obviously the headline was about her.  Obviously the all-points bulletin sent out by Chalfont -- at the instigation of Henry Ross, it was easy to figure out -- was still in effect.  But what did the article *say*? The headline was just above the fold in the paper, a broadsheet, and she had no way to see the other side.  She wished she had a quarter to open the box with.  She had looked, but there were none on the ground nor in the return slots of pay phones.  And kicking the vending box open with her bare foot, that would not only hurt, but the crashing sound would reverberate through the whole town, attracting the police.  The risk wasn't worth it.  She stared a hole in that headline and finally realized she just would have to never know what it said.

 She thought of that bulletin in the post office.  She squeezed her eyes shut.  Damn that Mr.  Ross!  What an evil, sadistic man!  Will he ever stop torturing her?!  She thought of the many humiliations he had subjected her to during that awful weekend "helping out" at his house.  How he was at the bottom of all the bad things that had happened to her.  And now, he was threatening to have her committed.  That, especially, scared her.  She had heard once about a newspaper reporter who faked his psychiatric diagnosis to get committed to a mental hospital, but then lost track of his contact person and couldn't convince the doctors to let him go.  They thought his story was just a manifestation of his paranoid delusions and he ended up being stuck inside.

 If they caught her way out here, Mr.  Ross would have her committed out here too, thousands of miles from help.  And somehow she knew they would manage to keep her naked!  She imagined herself having to undergo "total nudity therapy", and had a fleeting image of herself up on a treadmill, on a pedestal for better viewing, head and pussy shaven, having to run with frantic sweaty bare feet and bobbing breasts as a doctor in a white lab coat paraded class after class of graduate students to see her.  "You see here this unfortunate patient, the victim of advanced psychotic delusions, we have to keep her without covering and exposed at all times as her permanent lifelong therapy .  .  ."

 Tami shuddered and idly kicked a pebble with her toe.  Well, no way I'm setting myself up for that.  I will make it home somehow, finding clothes along the way, without ever letting myself fall into the hands of the police.  The naked girl had a grim determination now.  And was getting more confident that she'd succeed.  After all, she had gotten through three big states already, almost a third of the distance back to Rhode Island.

 With all the plants she was finding, she would solve her biggest problem, food.  For which she could also thank the easygoing habits of store owners out here.  Just two hours ago she had found an shed behind a grocery store.  Inside were hot dog rolls and jars of olives.  An unorthodox late-night snack, but she enjoyed it.  And then a bonus, a jar of strawberry jam.

 A flash of headlight far to her left and she darted into the alleyway.  She crouched down as the patrol car approached and meandered by.  Then it was gone.  She mused on what a boring job it must be in this town to be on late night patrol.  Her uncle was a cop, and he had talked about how boring patrolling was.

 The naked girl, squatting in the alley, looked down at her toes in the dirt.  There was a stone nearby.  An odd thought came to her.  It was hard to see in the darkness but she scrawled in the dirt with the stone:

 "Tami Smithers Was Here"

 It was a little crazy, but it made her feel good.  She stood up and thought of erasing it with her feet.  But she decided to keep it there.  Her little poke in the eye to Henry Ross.

 She decided to go back to her favorite place in this little town, the roof of the hardware store next to the gully.  She hopped onto some barrels and was on the flat tar roof in two minutes -- looking across at the back of the little clothing store, the dress on the display mannikin, complete with shoes and nylons, that was still brightly lit.  And with the back door half open!

 She had spent a solid half hour looking at the steep drop between the two stores.  It had to be thirty feet, a fatal jump into what was total blackness.  As she looked down she had to squint into the glare of the big floodlight on top  of that pole next to the interstate, hiding from its glare behind the little brick chimney which scraped against her breasts.  In the cold her breath formed little clouds in the glare.  She kept crouching there behind the chimney, peeking around it to look at that dress, watching the little clouds of her breath, hearing the big trucks boom by on the interstate above her.

 It was so pitch dark down there that she couldn't see anything -- not that it would matter.  A jump would be impossible.  How could she do it?  She looked to the sides of the clothing store, but there was nothing next to it, no way to climb up from the sides, and there were high walls on each side, one forming the side of another store, the other simply a high wall that must have had some other purpose at one time but now just stood there, twenty or thirty feet high, mocking her, daring her.  And climbing around the tops of those walls would do no good -- aside from shining like a beacon for the police to see, a naked girl lit by a floodlight, there was just solid brickface above, no way to climb down to that dress from above.

 A pitch black pit to jump into.  Impossible.  Yet that dress was so pretty, blue cotton, a little frilly for her taste, but about her size.  And the white shoes and nylons.  .  .  God .  .  . Her freezing toes flexed on the gravelly roof behind the chimney and she felt almost about to jump forward, a bird in flight, to get that dress, or whatever else could be got behind that half-opened door.

 Finally she decided to quit torturing herself.  She climbed off the other side and into the gully and peed, then found a hidden spot and went to sleep.  When morning came she crept onto the roof of a nearby diner and, after about an hour of waiting for the right one, caught a truck.

 It got onto the eastbound interstate and whipped around the hill, going terrifically fast, not with the slowness that had allowed her to jump off the cattle truck.  Once more the naked girl, peering through a hole in the canvas, saw the little town beneath her, this time in daylight.  And then she saw that there was no pitch dark pit at all, there was a series of steps going right down from the roof of the hardware store to the back door of the clothing store, painted black so that she could not have seen them.  She could have just walked down there and grabbed the dress, or had her run of the clothing store.  Upon realizing this, there was nothing for the naked girl to do but cry.

 .  .  .  .

 NUDE GIRL ALERT
 A HOAX

 Albuquerque, August 6 -- A series of fax notices sent to police and post office locations in the Southwest, warning of a psychotic nude woman demanding clothes, has been revealed as a hoax.

 According to the fax, the woman, whose name has been withheld, would disrobe in her car and then enter public buildings and demand clothes.  The fax also stated that attempts to give her clothing would trigger psychopathic and violent behavior.  A telephone number to a Northeastern college was given as a contact number for psychiatric guidance, stating that she was an escaped patient from an associated institution.

 The college, which has requested not to be identified, has informed the FBI that this was clearly a hoax and though the telephone number had the college's exchange, an internal investigation had indicated that no students, faculty or staff were responsible.

 Said Henry Ross, counsel to the college, "This was obviously a sick joke played by someone who just picked a college number out of a hat."

 A spokesman for the FBI said that their investigation is continuing but because no one was harmed their file on the matter will likely be closed soon.

The Unintentional Nudist XII: "Tami Smithers Was Here", Part 10

2:12 a.m.  Somewhere east of Tucson, Arizona, two miles north of the interstate.  A wide plain faintly lit by the nearly full moon.  Largely a desert, though dotted with low shrubs.  Temperature, 57 degrees F.

 A small dot on the plain, a bit taller than the shrubs, somewhat lighter in color.  Zooming in, one sees that this is naked 19-year-old Caucasian female.  Zooming in further, she is standing, hands on hips, looking downward as she contemplates a barrel cactus.

 The barrel cactus, a real prize.  Very sweet and so full of water that it would practically pour out, or so she had learned.  She is very thirsty, not having had anything to drink since she surreptitiously opened the faucet behind a service station the night before.  She is a bit cold, her wanderings off the interstate tonight having served to keep her warm.  It would have been more quenching to drink from this cactus when she was hot and sweaty, but standing around in the daytime would have been too risky.  This naked female is a wild creature of the night who stalks the wilderness for food and drink at night.  She drinks water whenever she finds it.

 Tami's brow furrowed.  The problem was how to cut the cactus open.  It was covered with needles.  She needed a knife, but she had no knife, no tools, no clothes, just her bare body and her brain.  She looked down at her bare feet and flexed her toes.  Tough as her soles were, they were no match for these needles.

 Fortunately she had time to think.  Though she was getting cold again, and kept warm by running in place.  Then, jogging out and around the cactus in a circle of maybe a hundred yards radius, the moon throwing a ghostly running shadow against the sand, Tami revolved like a naked planet around the focus of her attention.  After two Tami-years she got her idea and headed in for the cactus.  Finding two little flat rocks, she clutched them together in her left hand and tried to pull out one of the needles.  It came out after a little effort.  Sitting cross-legged on the rough sand, the naked girl slowly and diligently pulled out spine after spine until there was a clear area big enough for her foot to rest against.  Standing up, anchoring on the other foot, she spread her legs wide and pressed her foot against the cactus.  The muscles in her concave tummy flexed and she grunted as she exerted more and more pressure.  Finally the cactus toppled over, exposing the soft underside, which the girl had no trouble scooping out with her hands.  The water, which she drank again and again from her cupped hands, was delicious and strangely sweet, just like they said.

 .  .  .  .

 2:45 p.m.  Somewhere west of Las Cruces, New Mexico, three miles south of the interstate.  Temperature, 93 degrees.  Sandstone country, ridges, big rocks.  Her tanned brown skin looked nice against the redness, had there been a photographer to take advantage of it.

 The teenage girl sat on the warm rock, crouched in the painting-toenails position familiar to all teenage girls, her head resting on her knee, calmly and contentedly finishing the last toe, the little toe of her left foot.  Not that she was painting, there being no toenail polish in her world.  Nor any clothes, or shelter.  But though forced to go without  clothes, she was no weirdo, just at heart a normal teenage girl who liked to get pretty.  She had found, just as she was sneaking off from the truck stop, a little sheet rock nail on the ground which triggered this inspiration, to engrave designs on her nails.

 While walking out to this sandstone formation she had thought about the design.  Her first idea, hearts, she decided against; on a naked girl it might give people the wrong idea.  She decided finally on little suns, much in keeping with what she was doing now, also a favorite pastime of teenage girls, namely catching rays.  Having been attracted to this rocky formation from afar, she selected this nice flat rock and went to work.

 The first task was to get her nails clean and even.  With a sandy stone she filed them down, all twenty of them, a task that took some time, but time was something she had plenty of.  She cleaned her nails with a needle from a nearby cactus.  She worked very carefully, engraving very lightly, putting suns on each fingernail, a little ball with eight rays.  Being left-handed, doing the left hand was awkward, but with painstaking care the suns on that hand ended up looking the same as the ones on the right.

 Finally, the little left toe was finished.  A real, real tiny sun on that one.  Putting the sheet rock nail aside, the naked girl looked down on her outspread fingers and toes, twenty little suns wiggling in the sunshine, a fine and professional-looking job that she was proud of.

 .  .  .  .

 "Oops, I did it again .  .  .  I play with your heart -- unhh!"

 The naked girl grunted and twirled, dancing on the flat sand next to the rock.  This was her favorite Britney song,  she had seen it on MTV a number of times, and had memorized the moves.  Though Britney would not have done it stark naked as she was.  Jerking her hips, doing high kicks, in such good physical shape that she was not even winded as she sang out the lyrics, nice and loud into the hot desert air, Tami Smithers was proud, for once, to think that Britney would be envious of her body as well.  Maybe her voice too.  She could really belt out here in the wilderness, and discovered something she never thought about before, that she had a pretty nice voice.

 When both bare feet landed flat on the sand with the last chord, her head down and hair covering her face, the naked singer stood motionless for a few seconds to accept the loud cheers.  Then she started the song all over again.

 After three renditions, the naked Britney brushed her hair back and headed to that little barrel cactus next to the flat  rock.  Ten minutes later, her thirst quenched, her tummy full of saguaro fruit, she lay back on the rock, stretched out into an "X", feeling the sun caress her all over and inside too.  She lazily glanced at the sheet rock nail, which reminded her of putting up the ceiling at Jeremiah's house in the Vermont winter, holding the sheet rock up while Rod hammered it in, looking every two seconds at her hard nipples poking out at him in the chill basement air.

 She brought her legs up and her hand went to her pussy.  "Oh .  .  .  Rod .  .  ."  The naked girl reached orgasm two minutes later, eyes shut, smiling into the sun.  Then rolled over into the shade of the tall rock next to her, and dozed off.

 .  .  .  .

 This was heaven, she told herself, walking along the row of orange trees in the late afternoon sun.  The hired help had knocked off an hour ago; she had watched from her hidden perch in the last tree as they talked to each other in Spanish and piled into their pickup truck.

 Oranges, oranges.  .  .  Even the air smelled like orange rinds.  She had to have one.  With practiced moves she climbed the next tree, not minding the bark scraping her thighs and arms and butt cheeks.  She pulled an orange off and discovered something she never knew about freshly picked oranges: it was so heavy and full of juice that she could not bite into the rind to peel it off.  It was too squishy.  She was stumped only for a few moments; it turned out one could pierce the rind with the pointy end of a branch.  She tore off a little piece of the rind, but then found that a full fresh orange was still too squishy even to section.

 The naked girl happily hung upside down from the branch, looking down the orchard, straggly hair hanging down, tight breasts with nipples pointing slightly downward, and squeezed the orange, and drinking the most delicious juice she had ever tasted through the little hole, wiggling her toes and wishing only that she had her man with her to share this paradise.

 A few minutes of this and she realized that it was actually kind of hard to drink while you're upside down.  She uprighted and found a steady perch, steadying herself by putting a heel on each of two splayed branches, her back against the trunk.  She drank one orange dry, then drank another, then another.  All the time thinking about Rod and getting horny.  There was only one thing to do.  Turning her feet outward to prop herself up against each branch, wrapping one arm around the trunk behind her, she pleasured herself, thinking of Rod.  A fleeting memory occurred to her of the last time she had been splayed thus in a tree, and of Henry Ross and the Dean interrupting her sweaty grounds crew labors to stare up at her gaping sex and deliver the crushing news that had ruined her initial plan for a summer job.  Now, as she crested and came down again, then started on the way to her second orgasm, she felt the soft breeze and savored the delicious orange juice and her memory of Rod and had another fleeting thought, namely that right now she was having a better time than either of those mean old men and this was a kind of sweet revenge.

 A sigh and a deep breath and she was feeling sleepy.  She looked at the grass below, wonderfully lush and green.  Hopping down, confident no one was around, she began to lay down on the soft bed God had prepared for his naked child.

 "Eeek!"

 The cold water shot right up into her still gaping pussy and she jumped.  An underground sprinkler system was something new to her, certainly the last thing she expected.  And the water was cold!  Clutching her arms around her breasts, she danced backward --

 "Eeek!"

 Another shot of cold water from a sprinkler behind her, this one right at her butthole.  She danced forward, only to suffer another shot to the pussy.  Jumping to the side, attacked by another sprinkler.  They were all around, shooting at her no matter where she jumped.  After the initial surprise, the easygoing, post-orgasmic girl giggled and quickly knew that the only thing to do was enjoy the situation.  Why not, there was no escape; the sprinklers ran the length of the grass along this row of trees.

 It was a shower, something she hadn't had in days.  Though this was the first time the water had come from below.  She rubbed the water all over herself, spreading her arms to get at the armpits, bending over to get her face and hair, even squatting right on top of one to clean inside her pussy.  She used her trick of opening her pussy and then her butthole to get washed up inside, though feeling the cold water in there chilled her to the bone.  She squirted the water out, front and back, and ran down the length of the row, then back.  Finally pretending she was in a softball game, she slid head first along the slick grass, feeling it rubbing her nipples and her pussy.

 After five minutes the sprinklers stopped.  The naked wet girl, bits of grass all over her, was lying full length on her tummy, head resting on folded arms, watching the setting sun and feeling its warmth drying the droplets on her tanned butt cheeks.

The Unintentional Nudist XII: "Tami Smithers Was Here", Part 11

The big red ball of sun disappeared behind the distant interstate, and also behind the naked girl's bare shoulders.  She stood straight and tall on the prairie, having walked up and down several rolling hills, the soft warm wind, which  blew constantly in one direction, licking her nipples and newly covered pussy and scattering her scraggly hair, and contemplated the dark sky to the east, what lay ahead.

 She had made her decision.  No more straddling the interstate, chasing trucks and hiding from police in little roadside towns.  She knew from studying the highway map in that diner that the only road to the east led down into El Paso, and now she was closing in on it.  A big city, a big blotch on that map.  A city was not a good place for a naked girl to be, especially one who couldn't go to the police, and then there was the possibility that whatever truck she was on would go straight through to the Mexican border, where she would be found by customs or immigration agents.  Given her luck so far, she couldn't count on finding clothes before she got into such trouble.  Good thing she was able to hop out at that parking area back there where the trucker had stopped to catch a few winks.

 That diner had been a godsend.  She had overslept on the roof and awakened around midnight only to find that it was closed -- but they had left the back door open!  Another thing that probably could only happen in the middle of nowhere.  She had gone in and gorged herself, on hot dogs, apple pie, juice, and a sandwich.  Though she had been able to find enough wild things to live on, it was good to eat civilized food for a change.  She then washed herself in the sink, something she did whenever she had the chance.  Then, as a lark, she stole a pen from next to the cash register and gone up to the roof, where on the bleached white tar paper she wrote: "Tami Smithers Was Here".

It was only the next morning, after the diner had opened and she was looking down watching the truckers come and go, that she realized she could have looked for an apron or something to cover herself with.  And by then it was too late.  In a way it was almost funny.

 Though her sense of modesty was with her always, though she was subject to constant feelings of shame, she recognized that she could not let it drive her crazy.  Fixating on getting clothes was clouding her thinking.  The important thing was to get home.  Clothes would come, she told herself.  First things first.  There were too many police around these interstates anyway.

 Now, on the hilly prairie off the interstate, the naked teenager felt the bristly brown grass under her feet and strode forward.  This was her decision: to just walk due east, walk and walk and walk.  Given the approach of El Paso, she didn't have much choice.  But she had been good at finding things to eat and surviving outdoors, and the land was not so much of a desert here.  It was brown grass and low trees, some cactus, and the occasional ravine that might hold water and that she could hide in during the day to sleep.  She was quite sure that as she went east the land would get more and more moist and lush.

Walk during the night, sleep during the day.  Sooner or later she would happen upon a little town far from police and trucks and bad people, and a nice little house with a kind hearted lady who would give her clothes and let her sleep over while she called the credit card company and then, in the morning, make a trip to the post office that was more successful than the last one.  Maybe she could get some I.D.  this time by calling Terri, who had the rest of her things in Vermont.  Have her send them by overnight mail to the nice little house.  As for her dream of going to some unknown town and starting life over as a clothed person, well, that would be nice, but she was beginning to think that somehow, someway, her ordeal had to be resolved back where it started.  She was determined that she would NOT go through the fall semester at Campbell - Frank still naked.

 She calculated that between spurts of running and walking fast, going maybe ten hours a night not including rest periods, she could cover 50 miles a day.  In one week she would be -- how big was Texas anyway? -- halfway through?  How weird.  50 miles would take her from one end of her home state to the other and all the way back again.  What a big country, what a big state, what different kinds of people she had met, both good and bad.

She searched the dark horizon.  This was sparse land but surely within a day or two she would find a little town and, after hiding and scoping people out for a few hours, pick the right person to go up to.

 So she walked, away from the interstate, into the darkening night.  Naked and alone and confident.  She had no clothes but she had her mind and her body, and she would use all her strength and all her knowledge.  The naked teenaged girl knew that God would protect her so long as she was strong and smart and brave.

 .  .  .  .

 Her first night walking across the prairie was as uneventful as expected.  With nothing but emptiness in front of her, no clear destination, nothing around her, nothing to cover her, the girl ascended to yet another degree of nakedness, now there was yet another type of covering that was stripped from her.  And the night air was a bit chilly, but she knew that nights were not so cold as they were in the desert.  The grass was mostly short and crunchy but occasionally longer, particularly on the wide valleys between the long, low hills, and she felt it tickle her legs and thighs and occasionally even up to her pussy.  It was dark and she didn't see any lights in the distance except some to the south which she watched for a long time during a break, sitting cross-legged, feeling the bristly grass poke into her inner crevices.  The lights seemed to be moving and were probably vehicles on a distant road.  She decided not to pursue them and to continue east.

 Her bare back crunched against the grass as she lay back, her legs still crossed, and contemplated the starry black sky.  Again, the Milky Way.  She saw a faint round glow in the east which rose slowly and after wondering about it for a few minutes, seeing it slowly rise, she knew what it was: the gegenschein.  She had heard about it in her astronomy class last semester, and recognized it from the slides the professor showed.  Caused by reflection of interplanetary dust, it lay directly opposite the sun.

 She got up and walked, going mile after mile over the blank brown landscape, lit only by the stars.  And by the gegenschein, this anti-sun which rose and traveled across the sky, allowing her to chart the progress of the night as much as the sun showed the progress of the day.  She looked up and recognized the pole star, and kept her bare footsteps going strictly due east.

 When the anti-sun was in "late afternoon" position, a faint glow appeared on the southeast horizon.  She stopped to observe this latest celestial event, catching her breath, her nipples rock hard against the chill night air, the low constant wind that blew even now.  The event was the rising of the full moon, a breathtaking and beautiful sight that she had never experienced in its fullness, in such clear air on a flat horizon.  The huge bright disk rose bigger than she had ever seen it.  It was another time when she felt like she was the whole homo sapiens species, unadorned, standing there the way God made her, on her home planet watching its satellite lit by the unseen sun that was on the other side of the planet that she felt beneath her feet.  Then she continued onward in the ghostly light, that allowed her to see some wild onions that she uprooted and chewed on as she walked along.  In fact it was almost too bright; she worried briefly about being visible, but there was no one around for miles.

 She wondered what this land was used for.  If anything, it was a cattle range, she decided, but she didn't see any sign of cattle.  She did come across a low, half-fallen barbed wire fence, that stretched across the low hills and disappeared over the north and south horizons.  She crossed in a spot where it had completely fallen down and continued on, looking back only briefly.

 As she padded on, no sound except the crunching of grass and the soft whisper of the wind, she realized how simplistic it was to think of this as bleak, as "the middle of nowhere".  In fact she became aware of more and more sensations, sights.  The Milky Way and constellations, the gegenschein, the moon.  The ground might look bleak but was pretty interesting once you recognized the wild onions, the occasional cactus, the ravines.  She saw some holes in the ground and even detected two or three little animals -- prairie dogs? chipmunks? gophers? -- scurrying some yards to the side.  So much interesting stuff around her to see and feel and experience.  More interesting, it seemed, than some places she had been which were full of people and buildings and the trappings of civilization.

 The sky ahead started getting light.  It was always unearthly to her, this predawn glow, as she sensed her planet slowly turning its face back to its sun.  She came to some short wild shrubs in a ravine, she forgot the name, but she knew the berries were edible.  They were good.  Her eyes were getting blurry.  She curled up behind the shrubs, with a final thought.  Her skin had developed a beautiful deep all-over tan, but she still had to watch for the hot Texas  sun.  Knowing the sun was worse in the afternoon, she made a point to lie down on the east side of the shrubs so that in afternoon she would be in shadow.  She was soon asleep.

 She had a dream.  Herr Remmler was in it, as she last saw him, old and frail in his pajamas.  She was a naked angel, big white wings behind her, and she was pushing him in a wheelchair, ascending up into Heaven, through the clear blue sky dotted with clouds.  She woke up, seeing it was the middle of the day, and felt tears in her eyes and knew what the dream must have meant.

 Now she got up, intending just to look around before she went back to sleep.  She crept up to the edge of the ravine.  Nothing around except more prairie.  She would have another night's walk ahead of her before she came upon anything.

 .  .  .  .

 Clothes hanging on a line.

 And sheets, and towels.  Covering.

 The naked girl, like a scavenging animal, had crouched below the rise, observing the big farmhouse for an hour now, wondering if anyone was home.  It was only a few hundred feet away, on the other side of a straight two-lane highway.  "State Route 463".  "Thornhill 8 Miles".  The occasional car whizzed by, the occasional truck.  Parked in the driveway was an big Chevy.  A big metal mailbox, with the name "G Kaplan".  The house was surrounded by overgrown bushes and vines.  She guessed that retired people lived there.  Definitely no signs of children.

 It was now late afternoon.  She had walked most of the day before this lonely house came into view.  The sight of clothing flapping on a line could only be gripping to the long-naked girl.  She licked her lips.  And then looked around.  This was not untamed prairie here.  There was a field of corn, now high and getting brown, a few hundred yards to her right.  There were other fields stretching out into the distance, most of them mowed, maybe wheat or something that had been harvested, though Tami had only a vague idea about such things.

 Now she heard a faint buzzing behind her.  Way off near the horizon, a little airplane was flying low to the ground.  A crop duster, she guessed.  And someone who could see her if it came this way.  She saw it turn toward her.  Thinking fast, the naked girl ran the several hundred feet, hoping she wasn't being spotted, tough soles flattening the chopped-off stumps of thick grain, and plunged into the forest of corn stalks, the soft leaves flapping against her breasts and thighs.

 She penetrated about twenty feet in and hid.  Then she wondered if she had made a big mistake.  That little plane: would she now get dusted with some pesticide? She tentatively stuck her head up through the corn.  No, the plane didn't come near, apparently doing its work on the mowed fields beyond.  Odd, crop dusting where there weren't any crops.  Behind her, the buzzing slowly died away into inaudibility.

 She crouched down again.  All around her was a forest of corn, big floppy leaves that shook gently with the wind and caressed her butt and shoulders and knees.  And looked up to see three husks right in her face.  She smiled.  God had been keeping her away from clothes for some reason but was making sure she didn't starve.  She peeled off the husks and ate.  It was sweet and delicious, better than any cooked corn.  Maybe from now on she would eat corn raw.

 Now she became aware of bugs descending on her.  She crept to the edge of the corn to where she could see the farmhouse.  Looking back, seeing the crop duster was far away, she dashed back to behind the rise.  What should she do?  Steal the clothing off the line in broad daylight? Knock on the door?  She decided it was best to wait for darkness.  It would increase her options.

 The sun was about to set.  Now a creaky old car, maybe a Studebaker vintage 1959 or so, came down a side road across the highway from behind another stand of corn.  It stopped at the corner.  An old lady got out, carrying a bag which she set down.  She looked dressed up in an old-lady kind of way, complete with flowered hat, dark green dress, black nylons.  The car left and she waited.  This was apparently a bus stop.

 Tami smiled as the old lady took out a cell phone.  I've got to stop judging people by appearances.  This lady was all 21st century.

 It got dark.  The naked observer's eyes adjusted to the light.  The lady sat down on her bag, then used her cell phone again.  Tami guessed she was calling whoever was expecting her to say the bus was late.

 And now a big truck came whooshing by.
 

The Unintentional Nudist XII: "Tami Smithers Was Here", Part 12

The truck, a huge semi, blew down the stretch of dark highway, blowing its horn as it quickly receded into the distance and disappeared over a faraway rise.  The blast of air that was its wake was felt even by the naked girl, hundreds of feet away.  Soon all was silent and then she recognized what had just happened.

 A gutteral grunt, audible to the sharp ears of the naked scavenger.  As her eyes focused she saw the dark crumpled figure on the ground and realized the truck had hit the old lady.

 Tami gulped and hesitated only for a second.  The crumpled form was barely moving.  Trying to forget her nudity, she bounded over the rise and crossed the road, her bare feet softly slapping on the asphalt still warm from the recently set sun, and knelt over the injured woman.  The lady's face was to the ground.  "Ma'am?" she said, setting a firm grasp on the woman's shoulder to let her know someone was there.

 "Oh God -- please -- " The lady tried to roll toward Tami but winced in pain.  Tami tried to see where she was hit but she didn't want to risk moving her.  She spied the cell phone which had been thrown to the gravelly road shoulder and grabbed it.  Thank God, it was not broken.  She dialed 911.  "Police? Emergency here.  A lady got hit by a truck on" -- she stood up and looked at the signs -- "Route 463, 8 miles west of Thornhill.  Outside the house of G.  Kaplan."  She looked down to the crumpled form.  "She looks badly hurt.  Please hurry!"

 "O.K.," said a nervous voice.  "Is the other vehicle still there?"

 "No," Tami said, looking down the road, her voice choking with anger.  "I don't think he knows he hit her.  He just drove on."  She wished she could have gotten the guy's license plate, the bastard.

 After a pause the voice said, "We have an ambulance free.  We'll be there inside of ten minutes.  Is she bleeding?"

 Tami said, "I can't tell.  I'm afraid to touch her.  It's too dark to see."

 "Do you have anything to cover her with?  Like a blanket?"

 "Um.  .  .  no."

 "Just stay with her and hold her hand.  We'll be there in a few minutes."

 Now what?  The naked girl knelt over the old lady again and found her skinny wrinkled hand and held it tightly.  "Please try to hang on, Ma'am.  The ambulance will be here in less than ten minutes."

 The lady tried to speak, then swallowed.  "Lord -- something on that truck -- caught my hip .  .  .  Thank you .  .  ."

 Tami held the hand, and rubbed it.  She didn't know anything about emergency medicine, she didn't know what to do.  She prayed, please God, don't let this lady die.  She asked, "Can you breathe all right?" Hoping the answer would be "yes".

 "Yes," she said, "it just hurts on my hip."  Tami exhaled a little; it seemed like maybe it was only a glancing blow and the lady would end up O.K.  The lady turned her head and looked down at her leg and, bracing it with her hand, moved it slightly with a grunt.  "I don't think anything's broken."  Then she looked up at the teenage girl who had saved her life and her eyes widened.  In a weak but surprised voice she said, "Good Jesus, girl, where are your clothes?"

 Tami swallowed, still kneeling on one knee, still holding the lady's hand.  She wanted to cover herself but besides being awkward, it seemed self-centered and petty to worry about.  After all, this lady's life was in danger.  Seeing the lady wanted an answer, Tami said, "Don't worry about me.  I care about YOU.  I want YOU to be all right.  Please be all right!" She squeezed the clammy hand.

 The old lady winced again and lay her head down on the road.  She seemed to be trying to breathe evenly.  "Go get some clothes on you."

 Tami looked around.  The impact had thrown the lady into the lane of traffic.  In her dark clothes she was all but invisible in the dark.  Tami would have to stay and wave off the cars.  "I wish I could move you," she said.  But that would be dangerous.  But more dangerous than lying here to be run over by the next truck?  What to do!

 The teenage girl's dilemma was solved by an approaching pickup truck which had quite naturally slowed down after noticing from afar what looked like a naked girl in its high beams.  As it got close and Tami found her nakedness in its headlights, with an ambulance and probably the police to arrive any minute, there was only one desperate thing to do.  She gave the lady's hand a final squeeze and put it down, then bent down to give her a little kiss on the cheek.  She whispered, "Get better."  And then darted back to the barren field as fast as she could.

 Two men in cowboy hats got down from the pickup.  They had noticed the injured woman and one went down to her, while the other made a motion toward the dark field where the naked girl had run -- did I really see that?? -- before glancing back at the farmhouse, after which he went over to join his partner.

 Tami rolled down into the little valley through the sticks and dirt, then stayed there, curled up in a ball, holding her feet, listening.  Then, like a soldier emerging from a foxhole, she crawled up on her belly to her old lookout spot on the edge of the rise.  She had a thought of bolting back into the corn field, but then the ambulance came and then the police.  She might be seen if she tried that now.  After a few minutes they had put the lady on a stretcher and everyone had left, even, somewhat to Tami's surprise, the pickup truck.

 Tami put her head down onto the dirt.  Please God, let that lady be all right.  She kind of thought she would be, but it made Tami sad to realize she would never know.

 Once again, the naked girl looked across at the farmhouse, now more dully and with less interest.  There was a light downstairs; people were home.  And now, floodlights went on all around it, illuminating the sheets and clothes on the line and bringing the shaken girl's attention back to her intense desire for covering.  Once again she licked her lips, looking at those clothes.

 A stern-looking old woman came out with a basket and started taking the clothes and sheets down.  Tami wanted to jump out and say No! No!, but that would make her look like a crazy naked girl and the mental health people would be called.

 Tami tried to take her mind off the accident and focus on getting into those clothes.  Or ANY clothes those folks had.  She decided to let the lady finish up and then go over and knock on the front door.  Minutes passed.  Tami got on all fours like the naked animal that she was.  Then she started to stand up, noticing that her body was all dusty and scratched from rolling around in the dirt, then gingerly rose further to expose her nakedness to the harsh light of the floodlights.  This was not going to be easy.  If they were looking this way, the sight of the brightly lit naked girl approaching their house would explode like a flashbulb right in their faces.

 The naked teenager ran to the highway and then, suddenly getting cold feet, cut left and ran into a stand of corn to the side of the house.  It was then that the dogs started barking.  She peeked up over the tops of the corn.  From her new angle she saw a pen in the back yard, lit by yet another floodlight, filled with yelping dogs.  Three or four big dobermans.  Tami began to get a bad feeling about these folks, a feeling which certainly did not improve when a tall man came out with a rifle.

 And, after looking around, including taking a look at the stand of corn Tami was in, he fired a shot into the air.

 Tami froze, horrified.  She could barely see the man through the thicket of corn, but that meant that maybe he could see her too.  She stayed absolutely motionless, holding her breath.  The man looked around again.  He had a funny kind of soldier hat, which (though the teenage Rhode Island native did not know such things) was a replica of a Confederate Army cap.  She did recognize the stars and bars.  Tami found herself praying another urgent prayer, this asking that she not be shot at.  Being naked made her vulnerability twice as acute.  Please .  .  .

 The man turned back inside.  Tami waited for the dogs' yelping to die down.  She tried to think of how to escape.  She had forgotten all about clothes; the only thing on her mind now was to save her bare skin.  She looked around at the leafy stalks that lay against her nipples and butt cheeks and thighs.  It had been a big mistake to hide out here in the corn.  The slightest move would make a sound and set off the dogs again.

 She gulped and did the only thing she could -- run away in the opposite direction as fast as she could.  Keeping her head down, she flung her way through the corn in the darkness, trying to see where she put her feet, pushing the stalks aside with her hands.  In the distance behind her she heard dogs and then gunshots, relegated to the back of her consciousness by the adrenalin that helped her run, until a bullet zinged by to her left.  "No - no - no - no - " she whimpered, running faster, not caring any more if husks and stalks hit her in the face or rocks and sticks bruised her bare feet.

 Fortunately the ground descended a bit and she was out of the line of fire.  She kept running.  She came to a  clearing and straightened up and sprinted, going into her old track team pace, bent arms pumping, long strides, trying to measure her breathing to maximize her endurance.

 Blessedly there was a stand of trees about a quarter mile ahead.  The naked girl flew into them and then leaned against a big trunk, panting, the heaving of her concave tummy.  She looked back.  There was no sound.  She saw no lights as if from a vehicle going after her.  Indeed, by now the highway was far away and out of sight.  She was back in nature, away from people.  Squatting down, putting her head between her knees, she let go and started crying with relief, the awareness of what she had been through sinking in.

The Unintentional Nudist XII: "Tami Smithers Was Here", Part 13

 She stood on the high plain against the white sky, hands at her sides, her wild hair gently blowing, head cocked just so, listening to her nipples.

 Her nipples had changed the most.  Though her appearance had indeed been altered by her months of nudity and  now her weeks of living outdoors.  The all-over bronze tan which made her green eyes so striking, the wildness in her dark red hair with its intriguing streaks of gray, the tautness of her finely toned body, as muscular yet as lithe as a thoroughbred's, from her strong but slender shoulders and arms down through her back muscles and concave tummy and strong leg muscles, down to her tough bare feet, the toes spread to their natural extent, the hard soles that could walk over anything.  The fine, all-but-invisible hairs that covered almost all of her.  The firm breasts, that stood out more now that her torso had strengthened and narrowed.

 But her nipples and areolas had changed the most, from the hours and hours of being suctioned and bristled in the experiments, from being constantly exposed to the elements, and especially to the sun.  Formerly pale and pink and small, the areolas were now permanently large and engorged and dark brown, protruding slightly from her breasts.  And the nipples, as thick as her index finger, partially erect all the time and frequently fully so, engorged and half an inch long.

 Standing on the stubby brown grass of the bare bleak plain, the naked girl of nature looked carefully at the sky,  standing upright and absolutely still, and listened to her nipples, which had become very sensitive to temperature, humidity, wind direction, even barometric pressure.  She had learned to pay attention to them, they were thermometer, ammeter, and barometer all in one.  Dogs had their noses; fennecs had their ears; and Tami Smithers had her nipples.

 Right now, the nipples were detecting something strange.  It was another sunny hot day on this endless barren plain with still no break in sight.  After the ordeal outside of Thornhill, the naked traveler had steered clear of isolated houses, but that was all she saw as the went through plowed fields and stands of trees and more fields.  Realizing she must head north as well as east, she had altered her direction, with the Pole Star to guide her, and the land had gradually ascended and ascended until she found herself in this high bleak country where there were no fields and no ravines, just the occasional cactus.  It went on and on, and when morning came she had no place to hide and curl up.  Realizing she needed sleep, she simply spread out on her tummy, naked on the plain without even a clod of dirt  or a stone for a pillow, surely the most unprotected place she had ever slept.  She knew she could be seen by any airplane passing by, but there were none, and besides, she just could not go on without some rest.

 Now, in what was probably the early afternoon, she had awakened on her back, aware of the air making a strange feeling on her nipples, and she stood up to give them a better reception.  The sky was overcast and white, in a way she always associated with snow, but of course that was impossible; the temperature was (she knew she could guess very well at this) between 90 and 95 degrees.  And her nipples told her the wind, which had always been blowing the same way, night or day, constantly, had now shifted and had almost stilled.

 A tiny ping of cold, like a tiny ice cube, hit her right nipple.  A few seconds later, another one hit her bare shoulder.  Now several were hitting her, on the tops of her tight butt cheeks, on both shoulders, on the tops of her breasts, and more on her nipples.  Little tiny specks of ice.

 Now the wind really kicked up, in the opposite direction, and the icy shower hit her in the face, grains of ice cascading into her skin from head to toes.  She squinted; it reminded her, in a way, of long ago, dashing through the blizzard on the way to Congi's demonstration in Rossland Hall, feeling the bite of the tiny grains almost as if they were sand.  But this was in the middle of a hot day; the air was a little cooler now but still warm.  It was a strange feeling.

 A clap of thunder caused the naked girl to turn around.  Now the air was deafening with the roar of icy balls coming down, bigger now, some as big as marbles, pelting the naked girl.  Tami had never seen anything like this before; she had heard of hailstorms, but had never experienced one.  She looked up, shielding her eyes, as the icy balls rained down from a gray-white sky, seeming to come from only a few feet up.  It was odd to think that they were falling from -- what? A mile or more?

 She bent down to where the hailstones were gathering around her feet and picked one up.  At first she was concerned; she had heard of hailstones the size of baseballs, something from which she had absolutely no protection.  But picking one up and then another, she found that they were more like a frozen foam shot full of air, rather than solid ice.  And they seemed to have reached their maximum size; they weren't getting any bigger.  Still squatting, she looked around as they bounced all over, millions of white balls gradually cluttering up the plateau like ping-pong balls, making the ground white.

 She felt them bouncing, harmlessly, off her head, and somehow thought of a children's show she had seen, long long ago, where ping-pong balls fell onto people.  She stood up and the only thing to do was smile.

 And kick.  And dance.

 She had done something like this, during that cloudburst in April on the way to class, but this was better, there was no one to see, just her and God, and it was weirder and hence more fun.  She picked up handfuls of the icy marbles and flung them here and there, like she was completing double play after double play.  Now she sprinted across the plain, feeling the icy shower hit her on the front.  Now she ran backward, without any need to look where she was going because there was nothing around to trip over, and felt the shower of ice marbles from behind.  She stood still for a moment, looking down at how they hit her breasts, making them jiggle ever so slightly.

 Now she ran and slid into the icy slush, not feeling cold at all, the air still being strangely warm, but feeling the awakening and alivening tingle of cold on every inch of her body.  The plain was now white with icy balls, making her feel like she was a gift woman in a box full of styrofoam peanuts, and she rolled around in it, giggling.

 She was so happy, not only from the giddy feeling, but from the sense that perhaps, nobody had ever experienced what she was experiencing now, just naked old Tami and a flat plain and a playground of cold white marbles and God.  Lying on her tummy, her pubic hair getting wet in the slush, she raised her torso up with her hands and looked around and had only one regret: how she wished Rod were here!  Not only to see her like this, but to be naked with her and run around in this rare, special playground like little kids.  Of course, soon to do something very un-kidlike.  I wonder what it would be like to screw in the hail?

 Curiosity got the better of her.  She turned over and lay on her back, then stretched her legs up and out, up and out, holding her heels with her hands, and did her trick of opening her pussy.

 "EEEE!" she said, laughing, as one or maybe two ice marbles went right into her inner cave.  She closed her legs and doubled up and rolled onto her wet, slushy, muddy side.  "Oh shit! That's cold!!" she giggled, feeling chilled to the core, then squirming and squeezing as the marbles melted, and she felt warm inside again, sort of like having an ice cream headache that then goes away, only more pleasant.

 Up on all fours now, lowering her head to the ground, sticking her butt up like a cat in heat, doing her other trick of opening her butthole.   "Eeek!"  The inside of her rectum jumped as the icy stones fell in.  "Owww!"  Did a marble really go up through her "inner butthole"? It sure felt like it!  She stood up and ran, holding her butt, like a child who had been spanked with a stinging blow and wanted to run away to avoid another.  Her stiff-legged trot looked silly and she knew it and she made it sillier.  Soon she was kicking forward with bent legs like a Russian dancer.  One bare foot slid out ahead of her and her butt landed on the slush.

 She lay on her back, stretched out in an "X", as the icy puffy marbles caressed her face, her breasts, her tummy, her pubic hair, her legs, her feet.  She opened her mouth and ate a few.  Then, not minding if her words were blocked by more, she said, "Thank you, God.  Oh thank you so much for this! This feels so good!!"

The Unintentional Nudist XII: "Tami Smithers Was Here", Part 14

 Another clear night, ablaze with thousands of stars, as the naked teenage girl strode onward along the endless flat chaparral.  Tonight there was a meteor shower which she stopped to look at.  What was it -- the Perseids?  She tried to remember from her astronomy class.  She sat cross-legged and watched for a while like when she was a little girl in the back yard watching the Fourth of July fireworks across the highway at the high school field.  Once again she was acutely conscious of being naked and alone on this planet, of being the human species and of the stars, the Milky Way, and these rocks that occasionally burned into her planet's atmosphere, sometimes even getting through and cratering the surface.  Then she got up and walked on.

 She was getting hungry, and thirsty.  There was very little to eat up here in this high country, just some wild onions and the occasional cactus, and no free water at all.  Surely she would come across some town soon, or at least a break in the land.  She had gone two whole days like this, a hundred miles.  Occasionally she crossed a small road, and or a two-lane highway, but there was little traffic and no sign that they led to even a gas station.  She wondered if she was in some kind of secret government area, like a testing ground.  Weren't those in Nevada, not Texas?  This seemed like a place nobody was allowed to be in.  She got a little of a creepy feeling.  This must be federal land, not private property that someone could use for ranching or something.

 The sun rose into the sleepy girl's eyes into a sky that was still clear.  Yesterday, the day of the hailstorm, she had been concerned about having to sleep in the open, but it had been cloudy.  Today would be different.  Tanned though she was, she had to be concerned about the sun.  As the morning went on and the sun got hotter and hotter she bit her lip and worried about sunburn.  If she had to be naked all the time she at least wished she had an umbrella, or maybe hair down to her waist that would cover her shoulders.

 Noon came and went and now, for the first time, Tami worried about whether she would survive.  She was hungry and thirsty and very tired.  She collapsed on the hard dry hot earth and wondered what to do.  How foolish she had been to just walk into the wilderness!  She had survived so far but it had been just luck.  A naked girl out on the high plateau was defenseless with no food or water around and no way to protect her bare skin against the blazing sun.

 She licked her chapped lips with a dry tongue.  She sat cross-legged, absolutely still so as to preserve her energy, wishing night would come, but that was still hours away.  She prayed to a God who certainly wouldn't leave her to die out here.  But then, she knew by now that he would protect her only if she used her smarts.  That was part of the deal, it seemed.  And was it smart to walk out here naked and defenseless and alone?

 She opened her eyes and looked at the horizon shimmering in the heat.  And there, standing against the blue sky, was a mahogany brown horse.

 It looked like a wild horse, she imagined.  It didn't have a saddle, or reins, not that she would know anything about horses, having been on one only once, at an amusement part when she was in junior high school.  Back home she had heard of rich girls who had horses that they rode on weekends at horse farms out near Chepachet or in Connecticut, and had heard that for reasons probably having something to do with masturbation, teenage girls had a thing for riding horses.  As for Tami Smithers, she was a motorhead and math nerd, not a horse person, and anyway, she was from the wrong side of the tracks.

 But now, seeing this horse, she was intrigued.  A few hours ago she thought she had seen what looked like some horses herding together way in the distance, but they were so far away that she wasn't sure.  And now this horse right near her.  Not only that, it seemed to be looking at her.  It cantered over to where she was, apparently curious. She tried not to move as it even bent down and sniffed her hair.

 She had heard somewhere that horses were skittish, and she didn't want to scare away the only other being in her  universe, so she got up slowly.  Feeling the effects of exhaustion, hunger and thirst, she was unsteady on her feet as she went up to stroke the horse's side.  The warmth and softness of this fellow mammal's fur felt very good after her long period of loneliness.  She leaned up against it, then, with a smile, she watched as it turned to her and she stroked the big gentle animal on the wide flat area above the nose.  Then she hugged it, to the extent she could, her arms over its back, feeling the warmth and kindness of flesh and blood against her breasts and tummy.

 The horse seemed to want it, and she felt like it was the thing to do.  She thought about the mechanics; there was no saddle to grab onto.  Finally she just jumped, looping one leg over its back while grabbing the mane.  In a moment she was sitting on top, and it felt wonderful to feel this soft animal between her legs.  It wasn't sexual at all, but yet sensual.

 The horse started walking.  At first the naked girl almost fell backward.  As the horse picked up speed, she leaned forward and lay on her tummy, her arms around its neck, her legs still grabbing its sides, resting on its wide, soft back, her pubic hair against its smooth coat, head lying on its neck.  She heard herself say, "Hmmm .  .  .  go, girl .  .  .  go.  .  ."  And off they went, two wild, graceful females loping gently across the wide Texas plain.

 .  .  .  .

 Feeling the sun bake her bare back, trying not to lick her dry chapped lips, the naked teenage girl held onto to this horse who seemed like it had been sent to save her.  She kept her eyes closed, feeling her dear companion pick up speed until it seemed like it was almost at a gallop.  Then she felt the horse slow down, and maybe go a little downhill.  It was then that Tami awakened from her daze and looked up.

 "Ohh -- " She got off the horse and tried to run with stumbling feet over the rocks, then the mud, and then finally jumped in with  a splash and a smile.  It was a pond surrounded by a stand of trees, and some shrubs and grass, around which were several other horses, standing around, nibbling on the grass.  Feeling the cool water all around her, the naked girl plunged down until her toes hit soft squirmy mud on the bottom, then she emerged, catching her breath and then drinking in the water which surrounded and caressed every inch of her with its life-giving moisture.  She spread her legs and wafted the water into every nook and cranny of her parched body, bobbing her head up and down, taking breaths and gulps and more breaths and more gulps.

 How do you say "Thank you" to a horse?  Treading water in the clear water of the little pond, which was maybe thirty feet across, Tami looked to see her companion idly taking a few sips and then eating some grass with the other horses, two of which were gray, one that was black, and a fourth that was brown except for some whiteness with black dots on the butt.  What did you call horses like that?

 The only thing to do was to swim toward the edge, plant her feet in the muddy bottom and walk up and out of the water, dripping from her hair and face and nipples, and give her companion's big head a gentle hug.  The horse turned its head in toward her and nuzzled its nose between her breasts.  Tami just had to say it.  "Thank you, my friend.  My dear friend."

 And then, of course, she jumped back in, swimming all over the pond, sinuously snaking her arms and legs to feel the water swish all around her, what a lovely feeling it is to swish around in the water when you are naked!  Looking up at the branches overhanging the pond she was surprised to see that this was a fig tree, and some of the fruit was hanging almost close enough for her to reach!  She tried hopping up, a pointless effort when the water is over your head.  So she swam over to the side and climbed the low branch.  It bent with her weight, and she decided to climb it hanging from below, like a sloth.  As she slothfully made her way to where the figs were, the branch bent lower and she felt her butt touching the water.  She grabbed three figs in one hand and let herself fall back in, emerging to do a neat trick, eating figs while treading water.

 She glanced up at the branches and noticed the fig leaves.  Could she really make clothes out of them? It didn't look possible.  Yet how fitting, seeing a fig tree in this Garden of Eden.  A naked Eve, she wished she had her Adam with her now!

 She pulled herself out of the pond again and, looking around, saw a couple of other horses approaching, and the gray ones leaving.  A little tribe of wild horses.  Maybe there were other little water holes like this one, perhaps fed by an underground stream.  And of course the horses would know where all of them are.  She leaned against her companion again, then sat down and pulled up a few wild onions which she ate.  Then got some more figs, which had a surprisingly full and rich taste.  Lying in the shade, she lay back and immediately went to sleep, tired but sated and full.

 It was a few hours later when she awoke.  Her hair and skin had dried in the warm shade and she was surprised to see her companion sleeping near her, lying on its side with its legs folded up.  Tami sat up in the shallow mud and splashed water over her face, then looked at the sun now getting low in the sky.  She had to get going, but she would love to stay here a few more days.  She was lost in thought, walking over to the northeast edge of this oasis, looking with squinting eyes at the continuing bleak dry plain.

 Her companion made the decision for her, it seemed.  Rousing itself, it came behind her and stuck its nose below her butt cheeks, a wet surprise that made the naked girl squeal.  The horse went to her side and Tami felt she knew what was being said.  On she hopped and the horse cantered away to the northeast.

Tami was not exhausted this time.  She sat up and rode that horse as if posing for an artist -- "Naked Girl on Horse".  It took a little adjustment with her leg muscles, but with a little practice she found she could stay upright with just the slightest grasp onto the long hair of her companion's mane.  She pictured herself riding across the country this way, naked all the way, down Boylston Street in Boston to get Rod to hop on behind her and then -- maybe back to this oasis, or some other Paradise where they could be together and make love every day.

 The horse galloped and the naked girl gladly and happily rode it across the sun-drenched plain, learning how to stay on with just a slight inward pressure from her bare heels.  Her muscles moved together with the motions of the horse's wide, warm, velvety, strong back, as if they were one animal.  They went on and on like this for maybe half an hour.

 As the sun was setting behind them she could see a line of trees up ahead which turned out to be the bank of a wide river that extended in a straight line in either direction as far as she could see.  Her companion stopped and Tami got off.  The land on the other side seemed grassier, more hospitable.  Out in the distance she could see a little town, just a few low buildings.

 The horse went to the water's edge and drank.  Then it nuzzled between Tami's breasts again, and galloped away from whence they had come.

 "Wait! No!!" the naked teenage girl yelled.  She watched helplessly as her dear companion, that had saved her life, galloped over the horizon.  She knew now why girls liked horses so much -- knew the deep connection that cannot be described.  She wished she had given the horse a name, and as she realized she would never see it again, she almost broke into tears.  The feeling of loss was almost unbearable.

 But then she realized that their parting was not a tragedy to be mourned, but was just in the order of things.  The high plain was the horse's home; but her own home was somewhere else, across this wide river.  As darkness fell she waded into its cool waters, her toes grabbing the sticks and rocks at the bottom, trying not to get pushed to her right by the current, and then she shot forward and a little to her left and began a front crawl.

The Unintentional Nudist XII: "Tami Smithers Was Here", Part 15

 Tami sat on the hard dry dirt, hiding in the middle of the stand of trees, biding her time until it was dark and safe to  travel.  She looked across the river at where she had been, the bleak high plain, and thought of her companion, the horse she would never see again.  She prayed to God that it be given a long and healthy life, then realized how hokey it sounded.  But she meant it!  She wondered about the changes within herself.  She was thinking like some kind of medicine woman, and if she spoke her thoughts out loud she would be sounding like one too.  Not like Tami Smithers from Providence, Rhode Island.

 Yet she really meant what she said.  This new person was just as much Tami as the old one.  And she didn't really mind this new Tami.  After all, the old Tami had been cajoled into streaking across campus as part of a dumb sorority initiation.  What a stupid kid.  Yet she couldn't really criticize herself for doing that.  A normal thing for a new college student to do, suddenly being in a strange and privileged environment and wanting to belong.

 She shook her head, confused.  She was both the new Tami and the old Tami.  As she once put it, "Tami #1" and "Tami #2".  With a little stick she wrote on the dry earth:

 "Both Tami Smitherses Were Here".

 Night fell and she got up and walked.  Before long she found a two-lane highway.  She decided to walk along it, to the east and north, hoping she would come to the little village she had seen from across the river, but looking up she couldn't make it out anywhere.  She assumed she could tell it by lights, but there seemed to be no lights on there, wherever it was.  Still she guessed it was along this road.  She followed along it, about a hundred feet to the side, so that she would not show up in the headlights of a police car.  Or someone else's car.  She wanted to be in control of who she met, to meet only the people she wanted to meet, and then only after scoping them out from a distance.  Surely she would find someone who would give her something to put on.

 A few old cars passed by, the headlights not detecting the naked girl well off to the side of the road.  Not that their headlights revealed much anyway; most of the cars seemed to have one headlight out.  So did the beat-up pickup trucks.  One of the trucks did illuminate a route sign which told Tami that she was now in Oklahoma.

 She walked on and on.  Still no village.  Maybe it was on a side road.  Then she realized she was still wiped out by the ordeal on the high plain and had to catch up more on her sleep.  She should have eaten more figs to get her energy up.

She didn't want to rest during the nighttime, which she had designated for traveling, but decided a few hours wouldn't hurt her.  Picking a spot behind a tree, she stamped the grass down and curled up and went to sleep, thinking briefly of how natural it had become for her to just lie down on the bare ground like it was a bed.

 She woke up to the sight of the bright gibbous moon.  The air was a bit chilly, but only a bit.  Her nipples judged it about 60 degrees or maybe a little less.  As she got up a sharp pain hit her in the legs and she keeled over.  On her second attempt she got up and took a few painful unsteady steps before she realized what it was.  The insides of her legs were sore, very sore indeed.  It must have been from riding on her companion.  Riding a horse required muscles she never used before.  So much for thinking she was in good physical shape!

 It was funny, she mused, even as she hurt.  Taking slow, painful steps she felt like she was a hundred years old.  How am I going to get across the country like this?  She knew about sore muscles, being a trained gymnast, and how they went away after a day or two.  But in her present predicament a day or two was a very long time. What was she going to do during meanwhile?

 The only thing to do was keep going, painful though it was.  She staggered along, making very poor time.  Nearly tripping on some dead branches she hadn't seen, she decided to use one as a walking stick.  That helped some.

 Ahead, off to the right, away from the highway, she saw a campfire, or what looked like one.  On this open prairie, broken up only by the occasional stand of trees, such things could be seen from very far away and it took a while before she got close.  She approached carefully, looking down so that she wouldn't step on any more branches that might crackle and cause people to look.  As she got closer she saw that there were maybe ten people around the fire.  Men and women and children, a couple of babies in the women's arms.  They talked in some strange language in short, clipped phrases.

 They seemed like gentle people, not bad people, whom Tami had certainly seen enough of.  The presence of babies was a good sign.  Maybe this was one big family.  This could finally be her chance to get some clothes.

 As the naked girl's mind became distracted by hopefulness she inadvertently placed a bare foot on a stick and it broke.  A couple of the people around the fire turned in her direction.  They couldn't see her because their eyes were still used to looking at the fire.  But the naked girl didn't know this and assumed she had been noticed.  Thinking she had nothing to lose, she walked up to the circle of people around the fire.

 The arrival of the naked girl with the walking stick was received with mute politeness.  A couple of the women shifted over to make room for her.  The naked girl sat down, putting her stick aside, puzzled by this reception but yet thankful for the politeness.  It was almost as if they had been expecting her.

 Tami looked around.  These people were Native Americans.  Or, as someone once told her they preferred to be called, "Indians".  She had never known any.  She quickly checked out the impassive faces looking into the fire, people not particularly doing anything or planning on going anywhere, just hanging out.  Not wanting to be seen looking at them, she turned her gaze to the fire.

 A fire in the darkness just naturally attracts the eye, especially the eye of someone who is naked on a cold night.  Tami looked at the flames licking the broken dried branches and couldn't take her eyes off them.  She knew everyone else was as hypnotized as she was.  It was good also to feel the warmth on her naked skin.  She felt like a naked prehistoric woman staring at and enjoying her tribe's new discovery.

 Not that these people were prehistoric.  She chided herself for thinking that.  They were of today, as she could tell from the little grill to one side that held an old coffee can, the old wrist watch one man wore, the bottle with which one baby was being fed.  The other woman was breast feeding, her bare breast hanging out from her sweatshirt, under which she didn't wear anything.  In fact, looking around, Tami could see that these people were wearing very little, and what little they did wear was old and shabby.  The men were in shorts.  The women had just a tank top with no bra, and a skirt.  These people were poor.

 Though Tami, during moments when she tore her hypnotized eyes from the fire, thought about asking these people for clothes, she didn't think it was proper right now.  They had no extra clothes with them, and it would break the mood.  This sitting around the fire was something more than just hanging out, or maybe hanging out in itself was a habit and a ritual.  She decided to wait before saying anything.

 One of the men took the coffee can off the grill.  He had a ponytail with a feather tied to it.  He poured the hot contents into a cup, and gave it to the woman next to him.  Everyone took a sip while still looking at the fire.  Eventually it got passed around to Tami.  She politely took a sip and passed it on.  It was the only proper thing to do.  She was expecting cowboy-style coffee but it was some kind of bitter tea.

 She quickly got woozy and her last conscious feeling was of leaning back, still sitting cross-legged, and the back of her head hitting the ground.

 When she woke up it was morning and she was lying on her tummy on a bed of soft brown grass.  She was at first alarmed -- who had seen her in broad daylight like this? -- but then saw that she was behind a little shack.  Rubbing her eyes, she looked around and saw other shacks, a couple of little beaten-up houses, and a blocky little building with no windows that seemed like a kind of store.  With a shock she realized she was in that little village she had seen from across the river, when she was riding her companion.

 She thought of that horse again as she sat up and felt the soreness in her legs, though it was less now.  She was also ferociously hungry.  She sat there, wondering what she should do.  An old woman came around the corner of the shack and stopped, surprised to see her awake.  She regarded her solemnly with big wise gentle brown eyes, then went back out of sight.

 A few moments later a big man in long pigtails, wearing a T-shirt under an old leather vest, faded jeans, and boots came up to her and extended his arm with a kind smile.  Tami allowed herself to be pulled up and then he started walking away.  He beckoned and she followed.

 It was shaming to walk nakedly onto the dirt clearing, part road and part village square, in front of the watching  villagers.  Tami kept her gaze on her bare feet shuffling through the dust, her hands over her breasts and pussy.  She stopped as she saw the man get into a big red pickup.  He opened the other door from his driver's seat and motioned for her to get in.  Holding her hands to herself, the naked girl briefly looked around at the expressionless stares, then decided to hop in.

 The muffler was broken and the engine was deafening.  He took the truck out onto the highway, a two-lane state route, and kept going toward the morning sun that shone into Tami's eyes.  She slid down in her seat so that she couldn't be seen.  The seat was broken and scratchy, bits of foam rubber sticking out.  She placed her bare feet on one of the few places on the floor not covered with junk food wrappers or old napkins.  Where was this guy going?  As she got used to the noise she looked over at him.  Finally she had to say it -- or rather shout it, to be heard over the engine.  "Where are we going?"

 The man just smiled at her as if she hadn't said anything.  Maybe he couldn't hear her.  Looking at him some more, Tami saw that he was older than he first appeared, maybe 50 or so.  His ponytail was braided with a brown kind of string in a criss-cross pattern.

 Tami looked down and decided to let her hands fall to her side.  He had already seen her breasts and pussy, as had half the world.  Might as well act relaxed as if she trusted him.  And actually she did.

 Tami heard her stomach growl.  As if reading her mind the man reached back for a brown paper bag that had been behind his seat.  Tami looked in.  Two hot dogs, a kind of taco filled with orange stuff and vegetables, and a Twinkie.  And at the bottom, a bottle of juice.  "Thank you!" she mouthed to him, then went to work.  She tried to not act like a pig but she couldn't help wolfing down this food as fast as she could.  The taco was good, though a strange taste she hadn't experienced before.

 Her stomach full, the naked girl neatly placed the bag onto the floor, and then belched.  In a very expressive act for him, the man laughed.

 On they went.  They were going through deserted land and there was no one who could see Tami's nakedness, so she sat cross-legged and decided to enjoy the ride.  After a few miles they went over a crest and Tami could see a town ahead -- a real town, with two-story buildings and houses around the perimeter.  And a police car stopped in the middle of the road!  It was still a couple of miles away but Tami's eyes flashed and for a moment she thought she had been set up.  She looked at the man and was about to say something when he cut the truck sharply to the right and turned onto a side road which went behind a field of corn.

 He drove along this dirt road, really no more than a path for tractors between two fields, then turned left onto an only slightly bigger road.  This was dry land and looking behind her Tami could see they were kicking up dust behind them.  A few miles more and he turned back left again.

 Tami realized he was avoiding the police.  How did he know?

 They zigzagged between fields and then climbed east up a long, steady hill.  When they came to the top Tami saw a view that went on for miles, of fields and forests and a river or two.  On that side of the crest the land was lusher and greener.  In the clear, late morning air, she looked out the open window and felt like she could see all the way to New England.

 The man reached back and pulled out another bag of food, this one bigger than the first one.  Then he leaned over to get the door handle, and Tami felt his rough leather vest scraping against her tummy and her left breast.  He opened the door and gave her the bag and with another smile, motioned for her to go, as if this was where she had wanted to get dropped off.

 Tami got out, holding the heavy bag, and then looked back at the miles of lush land that lay before her, then paused and said, "Thank you."

 The man nodded, waved, shut the door and turned the pickup truck around.  In a moment he was gone in a cloud of dust, the drone of the mufflerless engine disappearing in the warm morning air.  Tami started walking down a path that led to a forest.  Only then did she realize that the man had been escaping the police, not for her sake but for his own.  She would always be grateful to this Indian Outlaw, who had supported her when she needed it and allowed her to continue her travels.