I wished I knew what the Indians used for bowstrings. In the vids I watched, the people used parachute cord or tarred seine twine to make bowstrings. I had neither, but then the Indians didn’t have those either.
I crossed the road and kept going in the direction my compass told me the Ozark National Forest should be.
I made camp in what remained of old log cabin near the edge of a field. There were a few of those old dilapidated cabins scattered around. This one was in better shape than most I’d seen. I usually watched for them from the back seat when we took a trip. It beat listening to my sisters.
And then I remembered what happened to my sisters and wished I’d listened to them more, and to Mom too. I wondered where my dad was and what he was doing?
But I understood I had no time to sit around moping. There was shit to do, like finding something to eat. I didn’t find anything that evening. I looked though, right up until dark. You better believe I looked. Shit, I couldn’t even find any wild onions.
So I made a fire in the part of the cabin where the roof had collapsed. There were plenty of old gray wooden shingles to feed my fire. I worked on my bow and arrows by firelight until I got sleepy. By the time I was sleepy, the knife was dull, but I'd whittled out something that looked sort of like a bow. I was proud of myself.
In the morning, I’d find somewhere to catch a few fish, and also keep my eyes open for hickory nuts. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten about hickory nuts. They’re hard to crack, but, if I could find some, I should be able to crack them open with a couple of rocks.
Man, this survival shit was tough, tougher than the people in the vids seemed to think it was. Tougher than I thought it would be too. I was almost too hungry to sleep. I decided there was a component to survival that the guys on the vids didn’t talk about, the part about constantly using your brain and not just zoning out cause you feel like shit.
When morning came, I was tired. I was as tired as I could remember being. I walked like an old man, but I got going. Two hours later I found a small pond and went fishing. My cut pole was awkward and heavy but it put the worms in reach of the fish. Soon I had five of the biggest, fattest crappie I’d ever seen. These boogers must have weighed over a pound apiece. I gathered them up and snuck back into the woods. I sharpened my knife and soon I had the fish cooking on a flat stone over a small fire.
I ate the first one before it was even done, and managed to eat four of them altogether. My belly poked out like I done et a watermelon, but I felt pretty good. I wrapped the leftover fish in some leaves and stuck it in my pack.
I looked for hickory trees as I walked. When I found one I looked for nuts. Twice I found trees with good nuts laying on the ground. I stuffed my pack with nuts until I couldn’t cram more in. Then I filled my shirt, which I carried on the end of my bow-in-progress like a hobo carries his swag.
Once I saw a deer. It raised its head and just stared at me as I walked past only twenty feet away. Its light brown coat rippled from time to time to shed flies. I think the deer knew I had no way to hurt it.
I smiled as I walked on. As soon as I finished my bow and arrows, that was gonna change.
I spent the night in a hollow. I made a fire, but a rain came up in the middle of the night and put it out. I huddled cold and wet under my blue tarp, which I’d been sleeping on top of instead of under, until sunrise.
I’d never done the best in school, but I usually made decent grades. Now I was starting to think of myself as just plain stupid. I should've known to get under the tarp, even if it was hot when I lay down.
I thought about what life was like before and what it was like now. I realized before the power went out I’d been skating through life with almost no mental effort. Meals were always, well, most of the time, there when I was hungry. Mom and Dad never bought me everything I wanted, but now I understood they had bought me far more than I really needed.
For a while I sat there just missing Mom, Dad, and my sisters. Then I forced myself to get up and get busy. I had no time to play the spoiled brat now.
I cracked a shitload of hickory nuts and ate them. Then I ate the rest of the fish because it still smelled good.
I had everything packed and was getting ready to leave when I heard the voices.
“That noise was coming from over there.”
“Yeah, I heard it.”
“Let’s find out what’s making the noise.”
I heard footsteps approaching, scraping and scuffing the wet leaves and twigs. I lit out like a hornet flew up my ass. I wasn’t gonna stick around and ask no questions.
I ran until I was out of breath. Then I stopped and tried to listen, but I couldn’t hear anything over my own breathing. Finally, I heard them, but barely. They were scrabbling through the leaves.
“Maybe there’s a whole one here somewhere.”
“Yeah, keep looking.”
Hell, they sounded like men grown. They could find their own fucking nuts. I lit out as soon as I had my breath. Four hours later I was more than ten miles away, getting close to where I thought the Ozark National Forest was.
That night I camped under a big walnut tree on top of a hill. There were a lot of good walnuts under the tree. Most of the green husks had fallen off. I was glad. They were a bitch to remove. One of our neighbors collected walnuts every year. To husk them, the guy spread them out on his narrow cement driveway and ran his car over them, again and again. His driveway had a permanent dark brown stain right in the middle. My hands were stained in spots from the walnuts. No big deal. The walnuts tasted good.
Sitting close to my small fire, I worked on my bow some more. Then I started skinning the bark off of my arrows. I held the bare arrow shafts, one by one, over the fire, heating the bent spots and then using my hands to straighten them. I’d seen a guy do that in a vid one time. It worked pretty good but it made my hands sore and I got tired of breathing smoke.
I slept like a dead baby and woke hungry. Some more nuts, and I was on my way. I needed something to make a bowstring so I headed for where I saw lights in the distance last night. I figured some town folks were using kerosene lanterns and those were the lights I saw. They flickered too much and were too yellow to be electric lights.
It was a small town, the kind my sixth grade teacher called a hamlet. She was the only one in town who knew anything about hamlets. I sure had never heard of one before. I suspected the folks in this one didn’t know they lived in a hamlet neither. One good thing about Arkansas, there ain’t no need for fancy words or big cities.
From the number of lights I saw last night, this town looked to be dang near empty. That’s what I wanted. I eased among the houses on the outskirts of town and poked through a couple of them. Man, these folks were poor. I didn’t find any good string, or anything else useful.
I did find a dog. He was a big black and white dog with a sweet face and a couple of splotches of brown. He must have weighed 130 pounds. His shoulder was over waist high on me. He had long and very muscular legs and a huge chest and head. He was almost big enough to ride. At first I thought he might want to eat me. Instead he came up and licked my hand.
He was wearing a collar, but his name wasn’t on it.
“What’s your name, Boy?”
He looked at me like I was dumber than dirt, which I guess I was, expecting a dog to talk and all. But, in my defense, I hadn’t had anyone to talk to for quite a while.
I stooped down and that big ole dog came into my arms just like he was mine. Maybe he was missing his people too? I petted him and fed him a few shelled hickory nuts from my pocket.
I finally stood up. I didn’t want to. It felt good with that big ole dog against me, like the world was kinda normal again. I walked to the next house and tried the door. It was open. I went inside and the dog followed.
I found some paracord, the good kind. It was pink, but I didn’t care. There was nothing else of interest in the house. With 100 feet of the paracord in my pack, I scouted that end of to
wn. It seemed completely deserted. I wondered where the people went.
Then I rounded a corner and saw scattered bones. They were human, I could tell from the skulls. Something had almost stripped them of flesh, but whatever it was left the stink behind. Man, it smelled rotten. I sniffed under my arm and that smelled pretty bad too. Okay, maybe there was something to this bath shit. The next time I found a stream, I’d bathe, even if the water was cold enough to turn my weewee into an innie.
I wondered if the big ole dog standing next to me was one of the critters who ripped the flesh from the bones in front of me. I looked at him, but he was paying no attention to the bones. Oh well, I guessed it didn’t matter. As long as he didn’t try to eat me.
I moved deeper into town, walking through back yards as much as possible. I was sneaking through a yard when I heard yelling. I slipped closer to the voices and peered around the corner of a house. There were three men in the street. They had guns pointed at another man who was on his knees loudly pleading with them not to shoot.
The sound of the gunshot shocked me. The kneeling man fell over onto the pavement. The shooter stuck his pistol in the air and said something I couldn’t make out. Then one of the other men pulled a big knife and cut the clothes off of the dead man. I was still trying to figure out what was going on when the man with the knife cut the leg off of the dead man and held it in the air above his head like a trophy ball caught in the stands at a baseball game.
Damn, they were gonna eat that guy. They were cannibals. What the hell happened to these people? Before the power went out, there weren’t any cannibals in Arkansas, at least none I ever heard of. I had just started to turn around and leave when one of the men saw me. He shouted and the man with the leg dropped it. All three men ran towards me. Before I could run, the big dog growled and charged them. Two of the men turned tail and ran as soon as they saw the dog. The other, the man with the knife, held his ground. The dog jumped up and struck the man in the chest with his front paws. As he fell, the man swung the knife at the dog. The dog yelped and backed away. I ran in and whacked the man with my bow. Then I whacked him again, and again, until his face was bloody. By now, the dog had a grip on the sleeve of the man’s knife hand and was shaking it back and forth. It took several more whacks before I realized the man wasn’t moving. I grabbed the dog by his collar and pulled him off. My bow was broken so I threw it away. When I left the dog followed, limping.
Three blocks away, I found some old clothes in a house and wrapped the dog’s wound with a cut up tee shirt. The wound looked deep, but the dog seemed like he was doing okay.
I made a beeline out of town and the dog followed.
Every boy needs a dog. I’d been telling my mom that for years. Mom didn’t want a dog, and neither did my sisters. My dad liked dogs, but every time I mentioned us getting a dog, he said, Her house, her rules. That never made any sense to me because I never heard anyone else say that.
But if we had had this here big old dog, and Mom hadn’t kicked me out, I’d bet he’d have chased off the men who murdered Mom and my sisters. She shoulda let me have a dog.
Every time I thought about Mom and my sisters, my eyes leaked. So I stooped down and hugged the dog. He licked me on the cheek.
“What am I gonna call you, Boy?”
That ole dog just stared at me like he knew what I was saying and wished he could answer.
I thought for a minute but couldn’t come up with a name. All the ones I could think of sounded too sissy now. Then it came to me.
“How about Sackett?”
The dog licked my cheek.
“You like Louis L’Amour books too?”
The dog licked my face again.
“Okay, Sackett it is.” I hugged Sackett to me and he pushed right back with his share of the hug.
Me and Sackett took outta there like we was racing. Man, it felt good to run just for fun, not cause I was being chased. Sackett was smiling too. Anybody ever tells you that dogs don’t smile is full of shit. They sure can and do.
“Come on Sackett, let’s head for the creek over yonder.”
And it was a nice creek, perfect for a fish trap. So I built one from cut sticks and piled rocks. I got wet enough that I figured it counted as a bath, soap or not. Sackett splashed in the creek and chased minnows while I worked. It felt great to have company.
It was close to dark when I finished building the fish trap. I picked a good spot close by for our camp and Sackett and I ate some walnuts. Then we lay down under the tarp. Sackett lay down right beside me, as close as he could get. I fell asleep quickly. Once during the night Sackett growled softly. I woke, but soon fell asleep again.
I woke with the sun. That was the best night’s sleep I’d had since I could remember. Sackett was still lying beside me, his eyes cocked up at me as if to say, time to get up, Boy. The days-a-wasting.
So I got up and we went to check the fish trap, not even taking time to pee. My piss-sack didn’t hurt near as bad as my belly. I think Sackett felt the same way, because he didn’t lift his leg either.
And there were fish in the trap, maybe twenty of them. A couple were big trout too. Man, breakfast couldn’t come too soon. Let me tell ya, all that shit about everything having to be cooked just so goes away in a heartbeat when you’re really hungry.
I waded in and caught the two trout, one by one. The biggest must have weighed four pounds. I’d never even seen one that big before.
I had those babies filleted and cooking on two flat rocks before I even took time to pee. Sackett was standing five feet from the fire drooling and peeing at the same time. I think the drool stream was winning. I turned around and emptied my bladder. I was drooling too.
I figured we had over four pounds of cooked filets when the fish was done. Me and Sackett ate them all.
This was a good spot. Sackett and I spent the day getting to know each other. He knew all the commands, sit, stay, fetch, and probably some I didn’t know. He loved fetching a stick. We played right through lunch and fell asleep under a big old tree. When we woke, our supper was just waiting for us in the fish trap, more than we could eat. I felt rich for the first time in my life. I had a dog and I knew where the next meal was coming from. What more could I want?
Well, I did want more. I wanted Mom and my sisters back, and my dad too. I explained that to Sackett while we were eating fish that evening. He pretended to listen, but I think he was more interested in the fish.
We camped there for three more nights. I was gaining weight again and so was Sackett. His ribs weren’t showing so bad, and his cut had already healed pretty good.
I could get used to this, lazy days and plenty of food. This survival stuff wasn’t so bad after all.
I had time to work on my bow and arrows. The bows I made from green wood would shoot a few times and then either get too weak or break. My arrows were just plain, pointed sticks. I was getting them straighter, but they didn’t fly straight. I needed some feathers or duct tape to make vanes, and something to make points from. But first I needed to find a way to keep the bows strong and not break.
I tried chipping a few points from rocks, but that didn’t work for me at all. I was starting to think the Indians knew a shitload of stuff that wasn’t in the survival vids.
That night, after a meal of fine fresh fish and dead-tasting boiled water, Sackett and I settled down under the blue tarp. We were both asleep in under ten minutes.
Somewhere in the night I woke to the sound of thunder in the distance. I could see lightning flashes coming our way. I thought about finding better shelter, but there wasn’t any nearby. All we could do was stay under the tarp until it was over.
The storm rushed over us in a continuous roar of rock-band-loud thunder, constant lightning, hurricane force wind, and sheets of rain and hail. It only lasted thirty minutes, but it felt like a month. For ten minutes after it passed the water dripped off the trees so hard I thought it was still raining.
With every flash of lightni
ng, a sea of cold hail shone white on the forest floor. I could see limbs down here and there, and a few trees snapped in two.
And then the rain came again and lightning struck a tree only fifty feet away. It was a single blinding flash and explosion, instantaneous, and as loud as a cannon fired two feet away, only higher in pitch and backed by a deafening crackle. The electricity made the hairs on my arms and head stand on end. I glanced at Sackett and he looked weird with all of his fur sticking straight out. He gave me a look that I knew meant he was confused.
When the rain stopped, the lightning bugs appeared. At first there was just a flash here and there as a lightning bug showed off against the backdrop of trees, far away lightning, and the distant sound of almost continuous thunder. The bug flashes became more frequent, and soon there was an orgy of light as thousands of bugs tried to outshine the lightning. Did the lightning excite them into a reproductive orgy? Were they trying to chase what they thought were other lightning bugs from their territory? Or were they just feasting on natures display and joining in because they were happy?
The smell was sort of like something electrical. If that smell were a color, it would have been a dark brown.
The temperature cooled down as the storm passed and then grew even colder until the chill raised goose bumps on my arms. I hugged up to Sackett to get warm.
Finally, it was over and the stars began to shine. I relaxed with Sackett under the tarp. I watched the stars where they showed between the treetops and played with the small hail that lay four inches deep on the forest floor.
I felt it before I heard it. Sackett got to his feet and whined at me. I stood as well. Now I both felt and heard it. It was a rumble, a rumble that shook the ground under my feet and quickly grew louder. Soon it was almost deafening. I had no idea what it was until I saw the wall of water in the starlight. The water wall was only fifty feet away and loomed several feet above my head. All I had time to do was grab Sackett’s collar before we were washed away.
EMP (Book 3): 12 Years Old and Alone Page 3
