Once Upon a River Page 0,77
pack.
• Chapter Fifteen •
Early one evening in September, Margo heard a car pull into the Pokagon Mound parking lot. She went ahead and sawed the front feet off the good-sized cottontail she had shot. She continued on with the back feet and then paused, listening to the ratcheting sound the car door made. After two months of living alone on the river, Margo was dismayed to find that her army knife had been rendered dull. She had tried sharpening it on some stones by the river, but that had made it worse. A dull knife made the work bloodier and more difficult than it would otherwise have been. She knew it was easier to cut herself with a dull knife, so she used great care.
At this time of the year, the local gardens were brimming with peppers, tomatoes, and eggplants. A few days ago, she had even snagged a small cabbage and managed to steam a few leaves in her pie tin. She gleaned some starchy sweet corn left in a farmer’s field across the road. She had pilfered three big Brandywine tomatoes, so ripe their skins were bursting. She would eat some alongside the rabbit, which she’d killed with one shot to its eye on a hillside upstream.
She was running low on ammunition, and would have to save her nine remaining cartridges for critical shots. Since she’d been here, she hadn’t had any paper targets, so she’d been practicing by hitting acorns and hickory nuts off the top of a fence post. Today she’d found the season’s first Osage orange, and she put it on the post and dry-fired at it whenever she felt the need to shoot, though she wasn’t sure if that was good for her Marlin’s firing pin. She was surviving fine as autumn approached, but she was in a holding pattern, waiting for a sign that would point her where to go next.
Margo slit the rabbit’s fur, groin to chest, and then did the same to the membrane below the skin and emptied the guts onto a paper bag. She scraped out the cavity with her fingers, finally tugging free the lungs. Suddenly a man was standing beside her. She slipped and almost jabbed her own wrist. She stood up, knife in one hand, eviscerated rabbit in the other, and took a look at the stranger who was standing way too close. He was probably Michael’s age, but he looked softer and slower.
“Good evening, miss,” he said, stepping back. “Don’t let me interrupt you.” He had a short, thick frame and black hair and was wearing a sweatshirt with a university crest on it. After he took another step back, she squatted down again and returned her attention to her carcass, cut around the tail and made a slit across the middle of the back left to right. This was not how her grandfather had taught her to skin a rabbit, but was Brian’s much faster method for retrieving the meat if you didn’t want to save the skin. She held the rabbit’s head in one hand and reached the fingers of the other into the slit she’d made and dragged the back half of the skin all the way off the back legs so only the tail area still had fur on it. She did the same with the front end, working her fingers underneath the skin, and then tugging the skin off the shoulders and front legs, up to the neck. She sawed off the rabbit’s head and twisted to finish disconnecting the spine. She kept an eye on the man’s loafers. She’d read in the Indian hunter book about slashing an enemy’s Achilles tendon so he couldn’t give chase.
“Are you poaching?” the man asked.
Margo removed the tail and laid that beside the head on the bag with the guts. The man didn’t look dangerous, and if he grabbed her, she figured she would stab him or clunk him with the butt of the Marlin.
“That’s impressive, what you’re doing,” he said and pushed coarse black hair out of his eyes. “I’d like to know how to skin a rabbit.”
“I’d show you for five bucks,” she said. Five dollars would get her enough ammo to keep her going for a while. She fished through the intestines for the liver, ran her finger over it to assure herself it had no spots that could signal rabbit fever. The man followed her to the river’s edge, where she tossed the guts to the fish and turtles.