me.
Gutting might provide a challenge. I had no blade, nor expertise in Cervidaen anatomy. And how could I explain to you that your mother had single-handedly tackled a deer? Not to mention carried it back for half a kilometre upon her shoulders.
Perhaps it would be a means of explaining the truth, I thought, with a heave of my stomach. Another day had passed, I realised, and I still had not told you.
I stood there, ruminating upon this, and was just about to make my move upon the deer when another sound entered the picture. It was lighter, heavier than the rodents and ants, and closer than anything. I opened my eyes and saw two smaller ones staring back at me from a low-hanging branch. Its nose twitched. A squirrel.
It watched me. I watched it. I focussed on the muscles in my legs. Seeming to sense this, it stopped twitching its nose and braced itself. But it was too late; I had already sprung and caught it in both hands. Life scattered from me in an explosion of little legs and wings, and what was left struggled and scratched between my fingers. It was fat with nuts. With a squeeze and a squeak, it stopped and hung, still from my hand.
I EMERGED FROM the forest to find the fire roaring stronger than I had left it.
‘Well done,’ I said, and held up the squirrel in triumph. ‘Now, look what I caught us.’
I stopped. You were sitting by the flames with a knife in your hand, which you were using to gut three animals. They were larger and fatter than my squirrel, and the blade glinted as it turned expertly in your hand.
I dropped the squirrel to my side.
‘Oh,’ you said, glancing up at it. ‘Thanks. Put that one there.’
I placed my scrawny offering next to yours.
‘How did you get them?’ I asked.
‘Simple trap. Jorne showed me. It wasn’t hard, you know, that forest is absolutely bursting with life. They virtually jumped in.’
‘I see,’ I said, sitting down. ‘And did Jorne give you that knife as well?’
‘No, but he showed me how to make it. We constructed a forge.’
I wrapped my arms around my knees. At my silence, you glanced up and paused your vivisection.
‘Don’t worry, yours is good too. Here—’ you held up the knife ‘—do you want to try?’
UNDER YOUR DIRECTION I gutted the creature—a hare—whose anatomy was relatively easy to decipher. After a few strategic cuts down its abdomen, it seemed to offer itself and I pulled strips of muscle from its flanks, which you told me to lay upon a stone by the fire. It soon began to sizzle, filling the air with gamey steam.
You took a deep breath and closed your eyes.
‘Smells good, doesn’t it.’
I had to agree that it did.
We ate the hare and then my squirrel (it did not last long) and kept the rest of the meat for the next morning, sealed in my bag against predators. Then we curled up in our blankets. As the fire died, the stars revealed themselves, and whirled above as I held you close. Jupiter was visible, and for a second I remembered the night you were born, walking the steps from the Halls with you in my arms and spotting that distant constellation I would gaze at when I had more time.
More time. I thought I would have some. We erta are rarely wrong, but when we are it is usually with some profundity.
I looked for it again and found it, eight years of celestial shift now rendering it as a dim cluster south west of Orion. I was, I realised, no longer quite so interested in it.
‘I miss home,’ you said. I looked down from the sky, swapping ancient starlight for your new reflection.
‘We have only been gone a day or so.’
‘I know, but I miss it.’
‘What do you miss?’
‘Jorne, Payha, Sundra, my guitar, surfing.’
The sound of Haralia’s bitter rant played in my ears.
They all hate him. Even pretty Zadie.
‘What about school?’
You hesitated.
‘Yes, school too.’
‘Your friends.’
‘Yes. I miss my friends. Do you miss Jorne when we’re away?’
‘What do you mean?’
You withdrew, embarrassed.
‘I just thought… Never mind.’
‘Reed?’
‘Yes?’
I felt a nauseous swell at the cavern of truth beneath us.
‘You should get some rest.’
We settled down, listening to the fire and the forest still crackling, and slept upon our blankets of lies.
There was always tomorrow.
AS I HAVE said, ertian biology is far superior to that of humans. Nevertheless, I had never tried meat before and I was kept awake