Fifteen

I’d been up the woods for two months before I found Huck, or he found me. It was really hard to begin with, since Ma hadn’t let me have the gun. The man whispered to her: he must have said don’t give it to me. Ma trusts me, of course, but the man always gave me suspicious eyes.

So it was hard to kill my first bunny rabbit. The airgun didn’t work over any sort of range. I set a trap instead. Four days before a rabbit was snared. It didn’t die, though, it wriggled and bucked. I had to put it down. I have a knife, but I held it in front of the rabbit a while and couldn’t quite use it. I shot the rabbit instead, with the airgun. I put the muzzle right in its ear. Two shots, it took.

Skinning it was the trickiest part. It’s very messy, skinning fresh game. I probably wasted a bit of it: more practice needed. Cooking it was easier, browning a few bits of meat at a time and eating them off the point of my knife like a real Wildman.

Otherwise, I’ve eaten the cereal bars I brought along, although I don’t have too many. There are berries this of year, and I’ve found oyster mushrooms on rotting stumps. All other mushrooms, I’ve left alone, just in case.

My shelter is an abandoned pickup, rusty boils on its body and branches in the back. It has a full width front seat so I can lie down in my sleeping bag. Sometimes I hit my head on the steering wheel and curse it. I don’t want to try to take it out though, because sometimes it’s fun to pretend I’m on a racing trail through these woods. Adrenaline dulls your hunger.

Just like Huck to turn up out of the untamed blue. Now I’m fifteen, I know he isn’t real, but who can deny the evidence of his senses? That sounds like a quote from a famous person. Huck was starving and dirty. He hadn’t an airgun, see.

I fed him a cereal bar and later, we caught a rabbit. I build him a shelter from the branches in the back of the pickup. He’s weaker, now. The forest has worn him down. Still, I sleep with my knife in hand, just in case.

When we first saw the loggerman, it was Huck’s idea to follow him. We kept back; he didn’t see us. The loggerman had a can of paint. He put circles on some trees, two horizontal lines on others. If there was a pattern to his choices, we couldn’t see it. He was easy to follow because he had on an orange jacket with shiny white taped seams. Eventually he led Huck and me to a wooden cabin, in a part of the woods I’d never been to before.

When the loggerman went inside and we saw warm light from the window, Huck said we should go ask if he had any food going spare. I got angry then, I’ll admit. I told Huck we are wildmen of the woods, and we don’t take handouts. I couldn’t believe how the forest had changed him. He who had been my teacher of survival skills showed little of the mettle he preached. Huck had always talked a seductive talk, but I desire to be a man of action now and he wears my patience.

So we went back to the pickup. However, once I heard Huck had fallen asleep under his bower I took out my torch and headed out for the cabin. I had resolved to take what I wanted, to be a man of action. In the woods, survival is a challenge for all us mad creatures. I stowed the airgun in my belt and my knife in my boot. The loggerman answered my knocking at the cabin door with a cup of liquor in his hand. Inside were a fire and a lantern on a little table.

‘You lost?’ he said.

I elected to scheme rather than just have a go straight away with the airgun.

‘Yes. Can I come in?’

‘Alright. What’s your name?’

‘Huck,’ I said.

He sat me down at the table and poured me a tin cup of the liquor. He didn’t ask anything and I made a show of gratefully warming my hands and feet at the fire.

That grievous first taste of liquor was like rabbit liver straight from the pan: metallic and hot as rage tears. Ma had never allowed liquor in the house, so this was my first go on it.

The loggerman saw my grimace and smiled.

‘How old you?’

‘Fifteen,’ I said.

I looked around the cabin. There was a door to another room, a stove on another table, a shotgun leaning on the wall; plenty of cans of food and a couple of liquor vessels under the table beside the gas bottle. Riches, even to a Wildman. I tapped my teeth with my fingers and thought.

Before long an opportunity presented its crimson self. The loggerman stood with a grunt and went outside. I heard his piss splashing on a tree. I looked at the shotgun, but my nerve with that failed me. Besides, I didn’t know if it was loaded. So I put the airgun in my right hand and my knife in my left and stood up facing the door.

When his lurched shape was on the threshold, I fired at his head. Owing to the liquor, I reckon, it wasn’t clean and I just took off the top lip of his left ear.

He growled ‘Damn you,’ and tilted at me. Honestly, I was panicked. He swung and I bent down and stuck my knife in his thigh. The loggerman yelped like my snared rabbit and fell down. The wound was deep and lurid blood gambolled to the floorboards. The man tore his shirt and tied it above the knife. I danced forward, the Wildman in his woodland trance, and yanked the knife out. He cried out again, and looked at me with fear in his furrowed eyes.

I opened the door to the other room. There was a grey pad and sleeping bag on the floor. I grabbed the loggerman under his arms and dragged him into the bedroom. He attempted to club me with his fists, but his strikes were feeble. I shut the door and wedged one of the chairs under the handle that my prisoner was secured.

I stood at the doorway and pointed my torch out into the forest night. I took a step back into the blood when my beam caught Huck, winding down through the trees. I shut the door and drew the bolt over.

Now I’m in a real situation. I’m enraged because Huck got me thinking about this loggerman and what I could get, when I should have stayed the Wildman. And now he’s banging on the door while the loggerman groans in the bedroom.

Outside, there’s me; inside there’s his victim, I’m in the anteroom between hateful reality and half-lit hell.