The sound of the water drew closer to her. Amanda could not see the source yet, but she could hear the heavy splashing of falling water. Am I walking towards a waterfall? she wondered. There's no waterfalls near the campus. Just how far away am I?
She had decided to aim for the water when she began walking, knowing that water generally leads to civilization, but was this still the correct path to take? Then again, she was lost in the middle of a vast forest, larger than any forest she had ever seen. There wasn't any sign of a path to follow, so she would just have to take her best guess.
However, perhaps the forest itself could lead to some clues. She knew the general area around her college; it was an urban area in the middle of a large city. To get to an isolated location like this would have taken a lot of planning and a lot of time to execute. How long had she been out for? When she had awoken, the sun had been low in the sky, but now it was nearing the peak of its journey. She had assumed that it had only been a few hours between her abduction to waking up here. The sheer amount of time that they would have needed for transport and being careful not to leave evidence would have made that a rather tight time-line. Yet, she didn't feel groggy enough to have been out for over 24 hours.
As Amanda shifted her focus to the forest, to the trees themselves, her uneasiness increased. She had already noticed how large they were, but the sheer size had not sunk in until this point. Almost all of the trunks were over a meter in diameter. The branches, though, were all relatively small compared to the trunks, allowing the trees to grow close together. The leaves were deciduous but small compared to normal trees. The sun's rays hardly pushed through the thousands of leaves that formed the ceiling to the forest. At the highest points she could see, the branches were all interwoven, making it nearly impossible to tell which tree each was connected to.
At that moment, Amanda realized that her one answer for the lack of evidence around her waking up was not possible. She had hypothesized that perhaps a helicopter could have lowered her down from above the forest. However, her body would have gotten stuck in the maze of branches. And, even if she could have made it through, it would likely have left a hole to the sky where she came through, but she could not recollect any such gap in the foliage. Thus, she was not air-dropped to that location. Her best idea to how she got there in the first place was ruined.