“Probably better than I do,” I conceded grumpily. I’d worked all morning. My shirt was stuck to me with sweat despite a chill wind blowing off the rain-soaked hills. Hunger gnawed at my guts. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I rolled my shoulders and stretched. I leaned the ax up against my chopping block.
“Where are you going?” Amzil demanded suspiciously.
“Hunting,” I decided abruptly.
“With what?” she asked. “For what?”
“With a sling, for whatever I can get,” I replied. “Rabbits, birds, small game.”
She shook her head and folded her lips, obviously thinking I was wasting time when I could be cutting more wood. But the morning’s work had already convinced me that I’d need a more substantial meal than watery soup. I’d begun thinking of food, against my will, and had suddenly become aware of the birds calling to one another.
“Can you do that?” she asked me suddenly. “Kill birds with a sling?”
“We’ll see,” I said. “I used to be able to.”
I was fatter than I’d been as a boy, and out of my territory. Dawn and dusk were the best times to hunt, and this was neither. I tried the woods first, where tree trunks that spoiled my swing and tiny branches that deflected my missiles frustrated me. From there, I moved to the logged-off hillside behind the town, and there I did better, braining a rabbit that foolishly stood up on its hind legs to see what I was.
It wasn’t much of a hunter’s bag, but Amzil seemed delighted with it. She and the children gathered round me as I gutted and skinned it and cut it up for the pot. While she took it inside to start it cooking, I scraped the skin and stretched it as tightly as I could before tacking it, skin side up, on a board to dry. “You’ll need to keep this out of the weather,” I told her. “Once it’s dried, it will be hard and stiff. You’ll have to work it, rolling it slowly until it softens up again. But it will give you a rabbitskin with the fur on. Four or five of these sewn together would make a blanket for the little one.”
I’d kept back the sinew from the rabbit’s hind legs. I showed it to her. “This makes the best snares. There was a lot of rabbit sign out there. If you set two or three snares each evening, you’d have a fair chance of having some meat in your diet on a regular basis.”
She shook her head. “They’re too smart. I’ve seen rabbits out there, at dawn and in the evening. But I’ve never been able to catch one, and the traps I’ve made don’t hold them.”
“What kind of traps?”
“I dug holes for them to fall into. I caught a couple of babies like that in the spring. But the others soon learned to go around them.”
My amused smile offended her. I quickly wiped it from my face. She knows nothing of rabbits, or of hunting, I thought to myself. Her skills from her life in the city were useless here. That wasn’t her fault, and I shouldn’t look down on her for trying. At the same time, I could not help feeling a bit superior. “We’ll make the snare lines very fine, so they’re almost invisible. And I’ll show you how to know where the rabbit will lift its head as it comes down the trail and out of the brush. That’s the best place to hang a snare, to make sure you get a quick, clean kill.”
“The young ones I caught were alive. I wanted to try to cage them and breed them, like people do pigeons and doves in the city. But…” She glanced at the children. “Sometimes meat today is more important than saving for a tomorrow.”
I found myself nodding. She was right. With the right kind of trap, live rabbits would provide her with a ready source of meat. “I might be able to come up with a pit trap that would work, then,” I offered.
“We’ll set some of both,” she decided firmly.
I was feeling rather satisfied with myself as I followed her and the children into the little house. The rabbit was simmering with onion and potato in a pot near the edge of the fire. The aroma of the cooking meat assaulted my senses. I almost lost myself in it. Then I saw my panniers open on the floor. All my possessions were stacked around them. I could not keep the chill from my voice as I asked her, “Did you find what you were looking for?”
She met my gaze, and her cheeks went a bit pink. But she did not look guilty. Instead, her chin came up. “Yes. Your washing and mending. That seemed a fair trade to me for the work you’ve done with the wood and the hunting. And when I found you had salt in there, I took some for cooking the meat. As you were going to be eating it alongside us, I thought nothing of it. Do you find fault with it?”
