Home > Out of the Wild(9)

Out of the Wild(9)
Author: Jessica Walker

When we had finished what was left of the smoked meat we packed I rose, prepared to continue moving west, but Cade stayed planted.

“I was thinking that maybe we don’t need to keep moving today. Our supplies are dwindling and your nightmare makes me afraid that you’re getting too much sun.”

I wanted to make a smart ass remark about the completely unscientific reasoning between connecting my nightmare to the sun, but I didn’t want to waste my argument on that when there were real and valid reasons I did not want to stay put for longer than we had to.

“It was just a dream. Really I’m fine. I don’t want to slow us down.”

“You set up camp, start a fire and scout the area for edible vegetation. I’ll head back toward water and see about catching us something other than crabs for a change.”

He doesn’t give me a chance to argue. He grabs his newly sharpened spear and heads into the trees before I get the opportunity to tell him that it’s not my dream I am afraid of. It’s whatever I heard in the bushes and now, I’m alone again. An uneasy feeling rests in the pit of my stomach as I do as I’m told. The sky is darkening above us and it will rain before nightfall so I start by searching for an overhang in the rock formations that cover the island. Like the hidden shelf back beside the turnaround rocks form small scale caves in between the trees. It doesn’t take me long to find one big enough for two people, our bags and whatever food Cade is able to catch.

Finding edible plants is harder. I don’t know this area and I’m nervous about picking any unknown fruits. When an hour passes without finding anything I trust to eat I switch gears and begin following the sound of the birds. Somewhere nearby there will be a nest and the eggs within it will make for a perfect breakfast after the storm.

The island is covered in birds big and small. I don’t have to remember the taste of chicken to know they don’t taste like it. We don’t eat them unless we absolutely have to. Their eggs on the other hand are perfectly serviceable.

The familiar kik kik kik of the Petrel leads me up and away from the overhang. These brown birds survive by fishing. They swoop out over the sea during the day, the white tips on the feathers under their wings differentiating them from other island birds. That and the fact that they are too friendly for their own good. It doesn’t take much to lead a Petrel straight up and onto your shoulder. It is so easy that I feel bad when I draw them away from their nest, tucked into a crevice on the rock, and steal the sole egg from within. They only produce one egg at a time and they’ll sit on it all through the spring and into mid summer before it hatches. If it hatches. Our group has stolen so many eggs over the course of the last seven years that I worry they will soon be extinct from the island.

“It’s us or them,” said Cade, years ago when I spotted the brown fluffy chick of a petrel waddling near our camp. It was one thing to steal them as eggs. It was another to look at the baby chick and realize these weren’t like chicken eggs, produced daily and unable to hatch without a rooster to fertilize them. The petrels eggs were supposed to become petrel babies and we robbed them of that each time we took one.

Cade was right though. We couldn’t survive on vegetation alone. There had to be protein and fish and crabs for every meal put my stomach on edge. I carefully swept the eggs from three different nests before turning the bottom half of my tank top into a makeshift egg hammock and heading back toward our shelter. Ky’s image pops into my brain when one egg slips from my grasp and I nearly lose it. After Anita died he was always dropping things, screwing up a hunt or making a mess of camp. He stopped working as part of the group. Things between him and the elders had been contentious before, but everything amplified after her burial. Suddenly, he wasn’t arguing to prove his point he was arguing to argue and if no one sided with him it didn’t matter he would push and push until a fight broke out. He was a chasm in our group and the longer he kept wedging us apart the harder it became to thrive. The night he was exiled Christa, Tanner, Cade and I left camp and sat on the boulder by the water. None of us wanted to watch as he was gifted minimal belongings and forced out. Especially not when we had cast a vote against him. We all had. Few votes among us are unanimous but exile, it always is. No one takes that decision lightly. No vote is planned unless we know how it will turn out.

I hated voting him out, but more than that I hated watching him turn from someone I admired to someone ugly.

By the time I arrive Cade is already squatted low over the beginnings of a fire, he blows lightly on the dry grass kindling, prodding it to catch on the rest of the branches he has stacked into a pyramid. Somehow we have all become nature scouts, deft at performing the challenging tasks needed to survive despite what limited knowledge of nature we crash landed here with. I distinctly remember the first time Cade tried to make a fire and have to bite back a laugh.

At fifteen he wasn’t the patient and careful Cade I now know. Then he was easily frustrated and kicked the heavy branches out of the way when after attempt after attempt he couldn’t get the kindling to catch flame. Then he broke a toe and spent the rest of the week hobbling around camp with a red face.

The smoke becomes a flame and the flame begins to lick at the branches until the whole pyramid lights up and the warmth begins to burn my shins. I scoot back from the fire and watch as Cade uses his knife to clean a long brown fish. I’ve never been a great fisher. The ability to time the throw of your spear just so, with enough force to hit your target before it darts away has always been a challenge for me. One miss and the mud from the bottom of the water becomes a murky cloud, the perfect escape route for a lucky fish.

Cade is a quick learner though and like learning to make a fire he worked at it over and over again until spearing a fish was as easy to him as lifting a glass of water to your lips.

When we have finished eating the rain begins to come down in thick sheets, drowning out the fire, still smoking in front of us. Secretly, I am relieved. Maybe what I heard in the bushes was the product of my imagination, but maybe it wasn’t and we don’t need to be setting off smoke signals to show them where we are sleeping or where we have stashed what is supposed to be enough fish for the next two days.

When it is too dark to read I put my book aside and stretch out under the overhang. Cade scoops up the paperback from behind me and laughs.

“Really? CEO of Christmas Town?”

I raise my hand to cover a yawn. “You objected to Flowers in the Attic. Now you have a problem with holiday romance?”

“What does the CEO of Christmas Town even do? Manage the production of Home is Where the Heart is signs and count candy cane profits?”

“Why don’t you read it and find out?”

Cade fans through the book and pauses to raise an eyebrow at me. “It took me less than 5 seconds of scanning to locate the phrase, “His throbbing manhood”.

I should blush, but I’d rather make him. “That’s my favorite part.”

A heavy sigh escapes his lips before he sets the book on the ground and turns his back to me to sleep.

He can keep pretending to feel nothing, but I’ve seen the way his eyes linger when Christa and I come back from a bath, our clothing pressed tight to our skin from the morning dew. I doubt it is annoyance that makes him turn the other direction.

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