“I understand. Thanks Jon.” I look to Jocelyn, into her green eyes. She blushes a little. “Thanks to both of you.”
It seems I’ve found a home.
Chapter 21: Sara
I think I like Carter after this past month. Jon says that Carter almost killed Caitlyn when he gave her the wrong medicine at first, but she looks a lot better now. Before Carter came, she’d been getting worse and worse for more than a week.
Besides, Carter’s been spending a lot of time with Caitlyn making sure she is getting better as fast as she can. I like sitting with them and talking; he has a lot of good stories from when he was an EMT. He said he’d often get called to this house owned by an old man who had frequent health problems, and no matter how bad the man was when he got there, he’d have a candy bar on the shelf for each member of the attending team.
“The first two times, we didn’t accept anything,” he said. “Then, about the third or fourth time, he had these caramel peanut bars, and was really insistent. How can you say no to an old man that’s on your gurney still wearing an ear-to-ear smile under an oxygen mask? After that, it became habit for us.”
He has lots of stories like that. I think the only person that likes them more than Caitlyn and me is Jo, but she won’t admit it. I see her looking over her shoulder and smiling as she pretends to read her books while Carter talks. Once she even giggled at a funny part about a story when he stayed at this campground.
“And just then, while we were sitting around the fire arguing over who would take the last strips of bacon from the cooling rack, a raccoon runs up, grabs the two pieces, stands up on its hind legs and gives us a look like this:” Carter held out two clenched fists as if he was holding bacon, tipped his head, shook it, and rolled his eyes. His impersonation of a raccoon was ridiculous.
Jo couldn’t help herself. I knew she had been listening, and she giggled with Caitlyn and me. But when Carter turned around, she pointed, “I'm laughing at you, not with you.”
She’s out hunting again right now. She still hasn’t brought anything back, but that won’t slow her down. She’s said the same thing all week, “I’ll get one tomorrow.” Then the next day, each time she left, Jon would remind her to be careful, and Carter would glance up at her a few times as she walked into the woods. He has spent some time helping her handle the guns properly. Carter has a little experience.
Jon has been working on basically two things: radishes and archery. He’s set up a really make-shift target behind the house just next to his fields. His “target” is more of a tall pile of dirt, and he aims for empty cans that he’s jammed into the side after taking out both the bottom and top parts of the cans. He doesn’t get the arrows in them very often, but even from far away he hits the mound.
Today, Caitlyn and I are out back with Jon, pretending to write cursive in the dirt with sticks. Really, I want to bother him and Caitlyn wants to watch the bow and arrow. He keeps firing at the piles of dirt in the distance.
“Just another week and we should start to see the plants!” says Jon, pulling the string back for another shot. We hear a muffled “thft” as the arrow embeds itself in the mound, just a few inches from the can most of the way up the side. I continue to bother Jon with all the things that I will try to make with the few things he planted. I have really become good at making stuff up in the kitchen.
THFT. We hear it again. This time, the arrow misses by much more, and on the other side of the can. Jon sighs, and I think I hear him say something under his breath, but I can’t make it out. He drops the bow, not seeming to care where it will land, and unstraps the quiver from his back. Without a word, he walks over to his bucket, picks it up, and heads for the lake. I don't think he is improving like he thinks he should.
“Sara, help me!” says Caitlyn, scrambling up and running over to the bow on the ground.
“What are you doing?”
“Help me put this on! I want to try.”
“Jon’s not gonna like this. He’ll be back soon!”
“I just wanna try a few. Let me take some shots, and we’ll put everything back just where we found it.”
I look toward the trees where Jon went. I can still see him. He doesn’t seem to be moving all that fast, so we might have time. “Okay,” I finally say, rushing to her side and helping her shoulder the quiver that is only a little too big for her body.
“Ok, go grab the two arrows out of the target for me.”
As I bring them back to her, she has already picked up the bow and is finding a way to hold it so that the tip doesn’t hit the ground. She’s just barely too short for it to be straight up and down.
“Oh well. I’ll just tip it a little bit until I… wait! A chair!” She puts the bow down and runs into the cabin. I follow close.
“Caitlyn! Shhh! Carter’s sleeping!” I say as we approach the front door. She slows down, and we creep in together to grab the chair.
In no time, we have it out back, and she’s standing straight up on the chair with a big smile on her face as she pulls back her first arrow. She struggles to pull it back all the way.
THFT! I’m getting really familiar with the sound. I tried to follow it as it left her hand, but it was too fast.
“Woah!” I can’t hold in my amazement. She put the arrow right beside the can! I look up at her, at the mound, and back up at her again. “I’ll bet you can’t do it again!”
She giggles. “Okay, you’re on!” She reaches over her shoulder awkwardly, finally getting her fingers around another arrow. She strings it, pulls it back, and fires again.
THFT! I can’t believe it. She put that one right next to the first arrow, except above the can.
She giggles again, just like last time, like she knows something I don’t. Reaching back again, she finds an arrow more easily. This time, she strings it much faster, and the draw is much smoother.
“Caitlyn!” we hear, just as she releases the string. I turn to look, and I see Jon, standing with a big surprised mouth as he watches Caitlyn’s third arrow stick into the mound, just on the outside of the can.
“Caitlyn, did you shoot all three of those?” asks Jon, putting the pail down next to the rows of planted radishes.
She hesitates. “Uh, I dunno,” she says, laying the bow down gently on the ground and fumbling to undo the quiver.
“No no, Caitlyn, I’m not upset,” says Jon, picking the bow back up. “Do it again.”
“Huh?” she asks.
“Do it again. Put another one in the can.”
Caitlyn looks at the target, then Jon, and the target again. She holds out her hand and accepts the bow back from him. He spins her around, pulls an arrow out of the quiver, still on her back, and gives it to her.
“Hold on one second,” he commands, hurrying over to the target to pull the three arrows out of the target. “Ok, pull back, but don’t release.”
Caitlyn does as he asks and holds the arrow by her cheek.
“Ok, that’s just how you want your hand, arms, and shoulders to be. Relax the string without shooting.” He continues just after she’s let the bow come down. “Bring your back foot out to your right just a little bit, and go ahead and shoot again.”
She follows his instruction again, and puts her fourth arrow right back in the middle of the can.
“Caitlyn,” begins Jon, smiling and turning back from staring at the target for a moment, “that’s unbelievable.”
“Yeah, you’re weird,” I chime in.
“I've been watching you closely,” she says to Jon, ignoring me.
We spend the rest of the day practicing. When Carter wakes up, we put on a show for him, and then a repeat performance when Jo gets home from hunting, still empty handed. She’s really impressed with Caitlyn, but it’s easy to see she’s frustrated, too.
“I’m going to start dinner,” she says, sighing. Jon made something awful last night and we are just going to have him clean up from now on.
“I’ll help!” I jump up and scampe
r to her side. Watching Caitlyn shoot was fun for a little bit, but I’m bored just watching now.
Jo smiles. We walk around the house, past Carter who’s now working on building some sort of outside oven on the side opposite the pump.
“Two of my favorite three girls. Soon I should have this working and we can try baking something.” he says, looking almost at us.
“And how many girls do you know these days?” Jo asks, coyly.
“Not important,” Carter responds, smiling. “So when are you going to bring back an animal so we can cook it in this thing?”
“You see, that’s my problem. I keep going out there thinking, ‘I’ve nowhere to properly cook a deer if I actually kill it.’ Maybe if you’d hurry up and finish, I’d be able to move past that.”
“Consider it done. You’ll need one tomorrow then.” He raises his eyes and continues working.
We round the front corner of the house and head inside.
“How about…” begins Jo, trailing off as she thinks of what’s in the pantry, “canned green beans and some cheese over rice?”
“We had that last week.”
“And we’re probably going to have it at least once a week all winter.”
“Oh.”
“Because of the whole having to live in the woods thing,” she says jokingly with a wry smile across her face, “still working on that.”
I laugh a little bit. “What do I do?”
“Go fill up this pot for me!”
The meal comes together quickly and easily. It’s just a matter of stirring the rice, and pouring on some cheese sauce that I add a little bit of my own special touch to. After boiling the canned vegetables, we’re ready to serve it.
“We make a good team” Jo says, turning to me as we serve up the plates.
I like the sound of that. I’ll make sure we don’t have rice and broccoli over and over again when its her turn.
Jo opens the door and yells, “Dinner’s ready!”
Chapter 22: Caitlyn
“Breakfast is ready, Caitlyn. Wake up!” I try to pull the covers over my head, but Jo’s hand is sitting on my shoulder keeping me from getting the sheets all the way up. She laughs and grabs them. “Come on! Get up! Eat with everyone, and if you’d like, you can go back to sleep.”
I think about that for a little bit, and even though I’m still fighting her, it actually sounds kind of good. I open my eyes and see Sara stumbling over to the table.
“Last day of muffins!” says Jon, pulling them out of the pantry. I stop fighting against Jo’s pulls on my sheets, but I only let her pull them back slowly. The past few mornings have been cold. Winter is here. As soon as they’re past my knee and I still haven’t felt that chill, I push them all the way off and roll up onto my feet.
“It’s not as cold today,” I say slowly. My lips don’t want to move yet.
“Yep. It actually looks really nice outside. Hopefully the deer will think so, too.”
I just stumble over to the table and peel open the pack of mini muffins. I liked muffins a lot, but a few weeks straight of these little pastries is a little annoying. Sometimes we make bigger breakfasts and other times we just have these packaged foods. I don’t mind too much that they’ll be gone after today.
“Are you two going to practice again today?” asks Sara, looking at Jon and me. She’s talking slowly, too.
“Sure. I don’t think I can read any more of that book without sprouting leaves, anyway. Besides, trying to plant anything is in the past.” he replies. It is December.
The only person that hasn’t said anything yet is Carter. He’s not really a morning person. It’s not like he’s mean. He just quietly pops his mini muffins, one whole one at a time, into his mouth and washes them down with some coffee that he found in a neighboring cabin one day. In front of him is the police radio. During the morning and evening every few days he turns it on and scans for any messages. A little static emits from the speaker. He turns it off and seems to think about what he’ll do all day. This past week, he’d started to make tools out of branches, rope from bark, and stones that he’d found. The tools seem pointless, especially in Jon's opinion, but it keeps us busy. I got a chance to help him a little. I liked it when he said, “Caitlyn, bring me more brope.” I try to absorb everything he knows.
As we all finished breakfast, I still felt good about going back to sleep, so I crawled back under the covers and closed my eyes. I start dreaming again almost immediately.
My dreams are cut short, though. The echo of a distant, loud boom rouses me. It’s just loud enough to wake me up, but faint enough that I have to think about whether I actually heard it or not. I get up and look outside, and Sara comes with me. Jon said we would practice, so maybe he was working on the target.
We see him looking up to the hills, and by the time I bundle up and get outside, Carter is walking around the house to meet them, too. His feet crunch over the light layer of snow.
“Did you guys hear that?” he asks.
We all nod, and I rub my eyes. After a moment, Jon goes back to working on the target so I follow him. Sara helps Carter with his next project, which looks like it will be some benches for the fire pit that he finished a while ago. Jon and Carter both have leery looks on their faces from the gun shots. I have become good at reading faces
About twenty minutes later, Jo comes running out of the woods with the rifle in tow and a huge smile on her face. “Carter! I hope that oven’s finally ready to be christened.” she says, really excited. “Come with me!”
Another twenty minutes go by as we all hike through the woods to find Jo’s first kill: a small white-tailed deer. I look up to see everyone’s’ reactions. Jo is still smiling, still thinking of how proud she is that she’s finally gotten a deer.
Jon and Carter look puzzled, though. “So… now what?” asks Jon looking at all of us in turn.
Jo squints a little bit and turns to him. “What do you mean, ‘What now?’ You guys kinda just…” she trails off.
“We do what?” asks Carter.
“You know. Get the meat out.”
Carter and Jon look at each other uncomfortably.
Jon starts. “Well, you’ve dissected a lot of things, right? Med school? Biology? Stuff like that?”
“Well, yes, but never with the goal of figuring out where a good cut of steak is.”
“But you can figure it out, right?”
Carter sighs and shakes his head out of disbelief, not disagreement. “I could really use a cigarette right now.” He pauses. I walk over to the deer and roll it over a little bit.
“Are you sure it’s dead?” I ask.
I kneel down next to it and put my hand in front of its nose. It’s not breathing, and I can’t hear anything in its chest. “I think it’s dead.” I feel kind of bad for it.
“If worse comes to worse,” says Jon, stepping toward the deer, “I’ll bet the concept of a rack of ribs goes for a deer as much as a cow.” He squats down, hoists the deer over his shoulders, and heads back in the direction of the cabin. “Paging Dr. Carter,” he yells over his shoulder, “your patient is ready to see you now.”
The four of us follow Jon down the hill and through the trees. All of a sudden, I’m kind of excited to have something new to eat. The boys seem hesitant, and I almost offer to cut up the deer. I look at its open eyes hanging over John's back. I bet I could figure it out.
About halfway back, Jo breaks the silence. “So I saw something very strange while I was hiding high in the hills this morning.” We all look at her at the same time, and she takes a moment to make eye contact with each of us. “I saw a vulture nest in one of the dead trees at the top of that hill,” she continues, pointing behind us and to our left.
“Well, that’s pretty low for a nest.” says Carter, apparently listening intently.
“I wouldn’t know,” replies Jo. “But the thing that caught me off guard about it was, well…”
“What?” I ask, wondering what made
the nest so strange.
“I think one of the baby vultures was eating another.”
None of us know exactly what to say to that.
“That’s really gross,” says Sara, settling on something obvious.
“Why would that happen?” I ask.
“It’s actually not too strange,” adds Carter. His claim surprises all of us. “Fratricide is common. If the young go without food or needs provided by the family for long, they often rely entirely on instinct. And instinct isn’t always… pleasant. And it never turns out well for the weakest even if it includes siblings.”
Jo still looks confused. “I just don’t understand how it benefits them at all. I mean, doesn’t that mean that in difficult times, the number of vultures gets even smaller?”
“Yes, but the vultures that survive will be much more likely to make it in the long run because they were able to sustain themselves while they were young. That’s why that part of animal instinct hasn’t died out. We might see it as barbaric, but some animals do whatever it takes to live.”
By the time he’s finished talking about the vultures, we’re back at the cabin, and Jon has laid down the deer and is looking at it with his hands on his hips. “I guess we just have to give it a shot. Let’s get started,” he says to Carter.
Carter pulls two different sized knives out of his pack and hands one to Jon. “Jo, can you take the girls inside, please?” he asks. Carter told me one day he would teach me how to gut an animal, when he has it figured out. I have my doubts.
Later, the three of us come back outside just as the sun is setting. Apparently Jon and Carter did something right. They’re sitting across the oven from each other, rotating most of the deer over a low, but hot fire while some of it cooks in the oven itself. I think it’s the first time I’ve seen them smile at each other.
However, I feel like I have missed out.
Chapter 23: Sara
Humanity Gone: After the Plague Page 9
