Lies (Gone #3)(66)

Hunter sniffed. He had learned that he could actually smell the animals he was hunting. Deer had a smell, so did raccoons and opossums. He sniffed, but now what reached his nose was the smell of fire.

Hunter’s brow creased in concentration. Had he recently made camp near this spot? Or was someone else up here lighting campfires?

He was in a deep cleft, dark trees all around and overhead. He hesitated. The fire smell wasn’t right for a campfire. It wasn’t just burning wood and brush.

He was standing there, unprepared, when a big deer with a full rack of antlers appeared out of nowhere. It didn’t see him. It was running, not in panic but at a steady pace, bounding nimbly along over fallen logs and skirting the thicker thorn bushes.

He aimed both hands at the deer. There was no flash of light. Nothing at all that you could see or hear.

The deer took two more steps and fell forward.

Hunter raced to it. The deer was hurt but not dead.

“Don’t worry,” Hunter whispered. “It won’t hurt.”

He held his palm toward the deer’s head. The deer’s eyes turned milky. And it stopped breathing.

Hunter slid off his pack and his bird bag and drew his knife.

He was excited. This was the biggest deer he’d ever bagged. No way he could carry it. He would have to cut it into pieces. It was going to be a lot of work.

He took a long drink from his canteen and sat down, contemplating the job ahead of him.

Hunter hadn’t slept in quite a while, chasing the two other deer. He was sleepy now. And there was no longer any need to keep going. Between the birds and this buck he had two days of butchering and hauling ahead of him just to get it all to town.

There were some shallow caves not far from this spot, but some of them had flying snakes in them. Better not to go near those things. Better to stay out here in the open.

He lay his head on a soft rotted log and fell instantly to sleep.

How long he slept he couldn’t know, he had no watch, but the sun was overhead when he woke to the sound of clumsy movement. Someone trying to be sneaky and not doing a very good job of it.

“Hi, Sam,” Hunter said.

Sam froze.

Hunter sat up. “What are you doing here?”

Sam looked around like he was searching for an answer. He seemed weird to Hunter. He didn’t look like Sam usually looked. He looked like animals sometimes looked when Hunter had them cornered and they knew it was the end.

“I’m just…um…walking,” Sam said.

“Are you running away?” Hunter asked.

Sam looked startled. “No.”

“I smell fire.”

“Yeah. There’s been a fire. In town,” Sam said. “So. Is that a deer?”

It seemed like a stupid question to Hunter. “Yes.”

“I was getting hungry,” Sam confessed.

Hunter smiled his lopsided smile. Half of his mouth didn’t work quite right. “I can cook us a bird. But I have to give the deer to Albert.”

“Some bird would be great,” Sam said.

He sat down cross-legged on the pine needle carpet. He’d been hurt. There was blood on his shirt and he moved his shoulder stiffly.

“I can cook it with my hands. But it tastes better if I cook it with fire.”

Hunter gathered dried needles, small branches, and a couple of larger chunks of wood. Soon he had a fire going. He cleaned one of the colorful birds, burned off the pinfeathers, and cut it into smaller pieces. These he skewered with a wire clothes hanger he carried in his backpack and propped them over the coals at the edge of the fire.

He split the meat with scrupulous fairness. Sam ate greedily.

“This isn’t a bad life you have up here,” Sam said.

“Except when there are mosquitoes. Or fleas,” Hunter said.

“Yeah, well everyone’s getting fleas since most of the dogs and cats are…um…gone.”

Hunter nodded. Then he said, “I don’t have much talking.”

When Sam looked puzzled, Hunter explained. “Sometimes my head doesn’t want to give me words.”

Lana had healed him as well as she could, but the skull had never grown back all the way right. She’d fixed his brain well enough that he didn’t pee in his pants like he did for a while after the beating. And when he talked he could mostly make himself understood. But Lana had been unable to return him all the way to normal.

“It’s okay,” Hunter said, not realizing that he hadn’t said any of this out loud. “I’m just different now.”

“You’re important,” Sam said. “You’re a lifeline for kids. Do the coyotes ever bother you?”

Hunter shook his head and gulped some more of the hot bird meat. “We made a deal. I don’t go where they’re hunting. And I don’t hunt coyotes. So they don’t bother me.”

For a while neither of them said anything. The fire burned down. The last of the bird was consumed. Hunter pushed dirt onto the fire, smothering it.

“Maybe I could work with you,” Sam said. He held up his own hand. “I can hunt, too, I guess.”

Hunter frowned. This was confusing. “But you’re Sam and I’m Hunter.”

“You could teach me what you know,” Sam said. “You know. About animals. And how to find them. And how to cut them up and all.”