When Haymitch has finished several platters of stew, he pushes back his plate with a sigh. He takes a flask from his pocket and takes a long pull on it and leans his elbows on the table. "So, let's get down to business. Training. First off, if you like, I'll coach you separately. Decide now."
"Why would you coach us separately?" I ask.
"Say if you had a secret skill you might not want the other to know about," says Haymitch.
I exchange a look with Peeta. "I don't have any secret skills," he says. "And I already know what yours is, right? I mean, I've eaten enough of your squirrels." I never thought about Peeta eating the squirrels I shot. Somehow I always pictured the baker quietly going off and frying them up for himself. Not out of greed. But because town families usually eat expensive butcher meat. Beef and chicken and horse.
"You can coach us together," I tell Haymitch. Peeta nods.
"All right, so give me some idea of what you can do,"says Haymitch.
"I can't do anything," says Peeta. "Unless you count baking bread."
"Sorry, I don't. Katniss. I already know you're handy with a knife," says Haymitch.
"Not really. But I can hunt," I say. "With a bow and arrow."
"And you're good?" asks Haymitch.
I have to think about it. I've been putting food on the table for four years. That's no small task. I'm not as good as my father was, but he'd had more practice.
I've better aim than Gale, but I've had more practice.
He's a genius with traps and snares."I'm all right," I say.
"She's excellent," says Peeta. "My father buys her squirrels. He always comments on how the arrows never pierce the body. She hits every one in the eye.
It's the same with the rabbits she sells the butcher.
She can even bring down deer."
This assessment of my skills from Peeta takes me totally by surprise. First, that he ever noticed.
Second, that he's talking me up. "What are you doing?" I ask him suspiciously.
"What are you doing? If he's going to help you, he has to know what you're capable of. Don't underrate yourself," says Peeta.
I don't know why, but this rubs me the wrong way.
"What about you? I've seen you in the market. You can lift hundred-pound bags of flour," I snap at him.
"Tell him that. That's not nothing."
"Yes, and I'm sure the arena will be full of bags of flour for me to chuck at people. It's not like being able to use a weapon. You know it isn't," he shoots back.
"He can wrestle," I tell Haymitch. "He came in second in our school competition last year, only after his brother."
"What use is that? How many times have you seen someone wrestle someone to death?" says Peeta in disgust.
"There's always hand-to-hand combat. All you need is to come up with a knife, and you'll at least stand a chance. If I get jumped, I'm dead!" I can hear my voice rising in anger.
"But you won't! You'll be living up in some tree eating raw squirrels and picking off people with arrows. You know what my mother said to me when she came to say good-bye, as if to cheer me up, she says maybe District Twelve will finally have a winner. Then I realized, she didn't mean me, she meant you!" bursts out Peeta.
"Oh, she meant you," I say with a wave of dismissal.
"She said, ‘She's a survivor, that one.'Sheis," says Peeta.
That pulls me up short. Did his mother really say that about me? Did she rate me over her son? I see the pain in Peeta's eyes and know he isn't lying.