Getting Air

by Dan Gutman

  “Open your mouth and close your eyes,” Julia told her. When Arcadia did as she was told, Julia put the critter on her tongue. Arcadia closed her mouth. We could see her chewing.

  “Ugh!” she said, spitting the thing out. “I think I’m going to die!”

  Julia tried to get the rest of us to try a bug, but there were no takers.

  I really wanted to. I knew in my mind that there was no difference between eating a chicken and eating an insect. But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. The thought of it made me nauseous. Maybe if I had grown up eating insects instead of chicken it would have been a different story. But I think we all admired Julia for what she did. It took guts to eat, uh, bug guts.

  “We don’t have to eat bugs,” David said. “I have another idea.”

  At that point, I was open to anything.

  “Let’s hear it,” Mrs. Herschel said.

  “I’ve seen a lot of squirrels running around,” David said. “These woods must be swarming with small game.”

  It was true. None of them had ever run into the Deathtrap that David made after the crash, but there were squirrels scampering all over the place.

  “I’m not eating squirrel!” Arcadia said.

  “You said you wouldn’t eat snake,” I reminded her.

  “How are we going to catch a bloody squirrel anyway?” Mrs. Herschel asked.

  “Let’s go hunting!” David said.

  “Yeah!” said Henry. “We’ll hunt for meat!”

  Let’s just say I had mixed feelings about the whole hunting-for-meat idea. I was hungry, that was for sure. It didn’t look like we were going to be rescued anytime soon, and I had to eat something besides berries. I had eaten plenty of animals in my life, but I didn’t particularly want to kill any personally.

  On the other hand, David and Henry were all gung ho to go hunting. At least David wasn’t being obnoxious about it, bossing everyone around the way he did before the snake incident.

  “Yeah,” I said, pretending to be enthusiastic, “let’s go hunt for meat.”

  Julia laughed. “I remember the last time you hunted for meat. It was at the supermarket. Mom told you to get a half a pound of roast beef.”

  The girls had a good laugh, but David and Henry were serious. Henry had taken a class in survival once, and he knew how to make some weapons. The three of us went out into the woods to search for the right sticks.

  Under Henry’s direction, we made two spears. I have a pretty good arm, so they let me carry the spears. David found a piece of wood that was flattened and curved a little bit like a boomerang. Henry said it could be thrown sidearm and it would fly like an airplane wing. So that became David’s weapon.

  Henry found a strong, flexible branch and made it into a primitive bow using dental floss as the string. We each made an arrow for the bow, and Henry even found some bird feathers and stuck them into cracks at the end of the arrows to help them fly straight. It was kind of fun. I was starting to get into the whole idea of going on a hunt with the guys. As long as we didn’t actually kill anything.

  “I wish I had a hatchet,” I said, while we were working on our weapons.

  “We have something better,” David said. “Our brains. Our ingenuity. Our intelligence.”

  “I still wish I had a hatchet.”

  “We have opposable thumbs too,” Henry said, giving me two thumbs up. “That’s what separates us from the animals.”

  Our weapons completed, we went back to the campsite to harden the spears and arrow points in the fire.

  “Nice spears, Brittney,” my sister told me.

  “Now, don’t you big strong men worry about us womenfolk,” Mrs. Herschel told us, putting on a really bad, fake Western accent. “We’ll stay right here and tend to the young ’uns.”

  Arcadia and Julia thought that was hilarious.

  “Didn’t you guys forget to put on your loincloths?” Arcadia asked.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Herschel, “maybe you want to do a little macho war dance to prepare for the big hunt.”

  “They’ll probably get lost in the woods and I’ll have to rescue them,” said my sister.

  “Go ahead and laugh,” Henry said. “Just be ready for a big feast when we get back.”

  “Bring back a quarter of a pound of ham, Jimmy,” Julia called as we left, “and a quart of milk.”

  “You’re our heroes!” called Arcadia as we marched off into the woods.

  Their jokes didn’t bother us. Even if we didn’t bring back any animals, it was fun traipsing around hunting for them. We were careful to keep track of our direction. Coming back empty-handed wouldn’t be humiliating, but getting lost and having Julia rescue us would be.

  “Maybe we’ll bag a deer!” I said soon after we set out.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Henry replied. “Where would we get a bag big enough to hold a deer?”

  “Quiet, you foons!” David said. “You’ll scare the animals away.”

  I held the spears up at shoulder height so I would be ready if anything less than human ran by. We tried to walk gently so the leaves and sticks underfoot wouldn’t make too much noise.

  In the survival class, Henry told us he learned that you’re supposed to keep downwind from an animal you’re stalking. That way, it can’t pick up your scent. How are you supposed to do that, I wondered? I guess you’re supposed to circle around them or something. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me.

  Henry also told us to keep perfectly still if we saw an animal. Some species, like deer, only see movement. If you stand still, you’re virtually invisible to them.

  We walked around for quite a while, and we didn’t see another living creature. The squirrels must have been hiding. I was getting tired and began to question the whole idea of the hunt. We needed to get some calories in us, but we were burning a lot of calories trying to find some. If we didn’t come back with anything to eat, we would have been better off if we had just stayed at the campsite.

  And then, about an hour into the hunt, David stopped dead in his tracks and held up a hand to signal us to stop.

  “What is it?” Henry whispered.

  “Shhh,” David said. “Don’t move. Eyes right.”

  I looked to my right and saw it. A deer. It was a big one, about thirty yards away. Its head was in a bush. This was one beautiful animal. Suddenly I could hear my own heart pounding.

  “Wow,” Henry whispered. “He’s ours for the taking.”

  “Nobody shoot until I say so,” David whispered. “We’ll triple our chances if we all fire at the same time.”

  “What if it attacks us?” I asked.

  “They only attack if they think their babies are threatened,” Henry whispered.

  The deer ate some leaves off the bush, and then picked its head up. It looked like it was staring right at us, but it didn’t run away. It must not have noticed us. The muscles in my arms and legs were getting sore from holding still for so long.

  “If he puts his head back in the bush,” David whispered, “I’ll count to three and then we’ll fire, okay?”

  “Okay,” Henry replied.

  “I don’t know if I can do it,” I said.

  “What’s the matter?” David asked. “You think we’re too far away?”

  “No,” I said. “What if that deer is somebody’s mother?”

  “We don’t have time for that carp now, Zimmerman,” David told me. “All living creatures have a sacred right to fulfill the measure of their creation.”

  “Oh no, here comes a religious lecture,” Henry said.

  “It’s not religious,” David whispered. “We’re hunting for survival. We don’t want trophies, we want dinner. It’s a mature relationship with nature. Humans are further up the food chain than deer. It’s our right to kill them. We have intelligence. We have opposable thumbs.”

  “So because they don’t have thumbs we should be allowed to kill them?” I asked.

  “Be wimps if you want to,” David said. “I
’m getting dinner.”

  “He put his face back in the bush!” Henry said, almost too loudly.

  “Hey, I think I see his thumb!”

  “Ready?” David said. “One. Two. Three. Fire!”

  I brought back my spear to throw it, but at the same time Henry’s bow and arrow misfired. The dental floss string must have come out of the groove in the arrow, because the arrow flew backward and hit me in the shoulder. I fell over and bumped against David as he was trying to throw his boomerang thing.

  “Ow, my shoulder!” I cried.

  “You foon!” David yelled. “You almost took my eye out!”

  “It wasn’t my fault!” Henry said.

  The deer scampered off into the woods. David cursed. He wanted to track the deer and chase it, but Henry and I were too tired. My shoulder was bleeding, too, from the arrow.

  Exhausted, we began the long hike back to the campsite.

  “What are we going to tell the girls?” I asked as we stopped to pick some berries along the way. “They’ll never let us hear the end of this.”

  “We’ll tell ’em we got attacked by a bear,” Henry suggested. “We fought it off, but he scraped you on the shoulder with his claw and he got away. We were brave warriors.”

  We rehearsed the story on our way back to the campsite. But as it turned out, we didn’t have to tell the girls anything. Because as we approached the campsite, Arcadia was signaling us frantically.

  “Shhh!” she said. “We’ve got an animal!”

  CHAPTER 18:

  Tastes Like Chicken

  We tiptoed the rest of the way to the campsite, where my sister and Mrs. Herschel were crouching behind the plane. They looked like they were playing hide-and-go-seek. I peered over to where they seemed to be staring, and a few yards from the campsite, next to a tree, there was a big, fat, rabbit.

  “How did you catch it?” Henry whispered to Arcadia.

  “We didn’t catch it yet,” she replied. “We’re trying to catch it.”

  There was some kind of a weird apparatus next to the tree. The girls had turned my skateboard wheels up and stuck a stick under one end of it. Tied to the bottom of the stick was a piece of dental floss, and I could see it extended on the ground to where Julia and Mrs. Herschel were hiding. Lodged between the front and back wheels of the skateboard was a big rock, I guess to give it weight.

  “That’s called a deadfall,” Henry whispered. “You yank the stick out with the string, and the weight falls on the animal.”

  “You mean we just spent an hour wandering around the woods for nothing and we could have caught a rabbit right here?” I asked.

  “I didn’t think of it,” Henry admitted.

  “Yer a foon,” David said.

  The rabbit was about two feet away from the deadfall, and it was sniffing around the ground. I couldn’t tell what was under the skateboard, but it was a little white glop.

  “What’s she using for bait?” David asked Arcadia.

  “Toothpaste,” she replied.

  “Do rabbits like toothpaste?” I asked.

  “We’re going to find out,” Arcadia replied.

  The rabbit couldn’t seem to make up its mind about going under the skateboard. Maybe the toothpaste wasn’t interesting enough. Too bad we didn’t have better bait, I thought. But then, if we had better bait, we probably would have eaten it ourselves.

  “Come on, Mr. Rabbit,” Henry whispered. “You should brush your teeth twice a day.”

  Julia was being patient. If she pulled the string too soon, the rabbit would run away. She had a good view of it from behind the plane, and Mrs. Herschel was right next to her, whispering in her ear.

  Finally the rabbit nosed forward a few steps to get a sniff of the toothpaste.

  “Now!” Mrs. Herschel said, and Julia yanked the dental floss. The stick popped out and the skateboard came crashing down on top of the rabbit. The rock held it down.

  “Got him!” Julia shouted, and we all started cheering.

  “Ooh, another extreme-sports accident!” Henry shouted, like he was an X Games announcer. “That just shows how dangerous skateboards can be.”

  “Especially if you’re a rabbit,” I said.

  “Or a snake,” added David.

  “This wouldn’t have happened if the rabbit had been wearing a helmet,” Henry noted.

  It occurred to me that there were probably more animal guts on my skateboard than any other skateboard in the world.

  I felt sorry for the little guy if, in fact, it was a guy. But after all, it was his own fault. Nobody forced him to go under the skateboard. He did it of his own free will.

  “Who wants to put him out of his misery?” asked Julia.

  “It’s not my cup of tea,” Mrs. Herschel said. “You may have the honors, sweetie.”

  “I’d love to help, but I have to do my homework,” said Henry.

  “I’ll help,” David said, and I breathed a big sigh of relief. I can’t even look when the doctor gives me a shot. No way was I going to kill a rabbit.

  “We’ll need one of those sharp pieces of metal from the plane,” David told Julia.

  Henry, Arcadia, Mrs. Herschel and I—the big chickens—hustled over to the far end of the campsite so we wouldn’t have to hear the tortured screams of protest from the poor innocent creature who was about to have his guts ripped out by my friend and my sadistic, demented sister.

  “Oh, the poor bunny!” Arcadia said.

  “We should hold a memorial service for it,” I suggested.

  “Yeah,” Henry said, “right after we eat.”

  “I don’t think I can eat a bunny,” Arcadia fretted.

  “Don’t think of it as a bunny,” I told her. “It’s a rabbit.”

  “It’s a bunny rabbit!” Arcadia said, nearly in tears.

  “Maybe it would help if you thought of it as an evil bunny rabbit,” Henry suggested.

  “Oh, don’t be silly, dear,” Mrs. Herschel said. “You ate snake. You ate a bug.”

  “I spit the bug out,” Arcadia corrected her.

  It took a while for Julia and David to kill, skin, and do all those other nasty things to the rabbit before we could eat it. Henry suggested we pass the time by playing the license plate game, and since Mrs. Herschel didn’t get the joke, we had to explain to her what the license plate game was and why it would be funny to play it out in the woods. Mrs. Herschel said we were “daft Yanks” and took it upon herself to explain the rules of cricket to us, which made absolutely no sense at all. But it did help pass the time.

  “Dinnertime!” Julia finally announced. “You wimps can come back now.”

  “Great,” I said. “I’m so hungry I could eat a rabbit.”

  The sheet of metal was laying by the fire with a bunch of thin strips of meat lined up perfectly in rows. It was impressive.

  “That was the rabbit?” Mrs. Herschel asked. “How did you do that?”

  “It was simple, really,” Julia said. “First we sliced the loose fur from his back and peeled the rest of his skin off carefully…”

  “…and then we cut off his feet and severed his head,” explained David. “We hung him upside down to drain the blood, cut his throat, removed his guts, and sliced him into cutlets.”

  “Great,” I said. “I’m not hungry anymore.”

  But of course I was. While Julia and David wiped the rabbit guts off their hands with leaves, Henry added enough wood to the fire to get a good blaze going. Arcadia and Mrs. Herschel gathered some long sticks. We attached the rabbit cutlets and began to roast them.

  We didn’t have any spices or seasonings, but the smell of cooking meat was wonderful anyway. Julia said we should be careful not to overcook it, because the more you heat something the more nutrition is lost. But we were all a little afraid of germs and bacteria, so we burned the meat a little.

  I couldn’t wait anymore. The smell was overpowering. I took my stick out of the fire and blew on the meat to cool it down. Then I took a bite.r />
  I’ve been to a few nice restaurants in my time. You know, those places where you have to wear your good clothes and your parents make you put the cloth napkins in your lap? Well, the food in those places was nothing compared with the taste of fresh rabbit roasted out in the woods. I had never tasted anything so delicious in my life.

  “It tastes like chicken,” said Henry.

  “It tastes better than chicken,” I said.

  For the most part, we didn’t say anything. We were enjoying the food too much. The only thing that would have made it better would be a big glop of mashed potatoes on the side. Or french fries. And a drink. A soda. That would have been perfect.

  When we finished all the cutlets, the six of us just sat back on our seats and relaxed.

  “I couldn’t eat another bite,” Arcadia said.

  “Do you know how much food the average person eats in one year?” Julia asked. “A ton.”

  Unbelievable. We had eaten almost nothing in the last few days. Back home, I took food for granted. Any time I felt a rumble in my stomach, I could just go to the kitchen and grab something from the fridge. I never once thought about where the food came from, whether it was grown from the ground or killed or how it was prepared. Maybe the rabbit tasted so good because we caught it, prepared it, and cooked it ourselves. Or some of us did, anyway.

  Arcadia and my sister got up and went inside the plane. They came out a minute later with a platter and what looked like a chocolate cake on it.

  “Happy birthday to you,” they began to sing. “Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, Mrs. Her…schel. Happy birthday to you.”

  Mrs. Herschel was beaming from ear to ear.

  “Is that a real cake?” I asked, incredulous.

  “Of course not,” Arcadia said. “We made it out of mud.”

  “How did you know it was my birthday?” asked Mrs. Herschel.

  “You told us you were going to turn eighty in a few days,” Arcadia said. “That was a few days ago. So we figured you must be eighty.”

  “We wish we had candles for you to blow out,” Julia said.

  “Forget the candles,” Henry said. “I wish you had a real cake.”

  “Well, I think it’s lovely,” Mrs. Herschel said. “Thank you. I’ll always remember where I was the day I turned eighty.”