Hannah

The deeper we travelled into the forest the greener our surroundings became. The dry ground covered with dead foliage that had fallen from the trees gave way to increasingly dense ground level vegetation. For me and the Kevin the vegetation around us was a big help, providing us with ample cover as we went in search of fauna. Close to the river was where Kevin had made most of his deer sightings. He searched one side and I searched the other, making sure to never stray out of each other’s line of sight for when we needed to signal that we’d found something. I had with me the hatchet that Kevin had told me to carry in case we caught something and I needed to help him kill it. This meant that Lisa and Miranda had nothing with which they could protect themselves but that was a risk we had to take; our dwindling food provisions was a crisis that put all of our lives in danger.

Lisa wasn’t the only one who hadn’t been eating enough; Kevin had been doing the same thing that Lisa had been doing for Miranda for all three of us. His body was more undernourished than Lisa’s; for him to be hunting having hardly eaten for four days was truly amazing. Desperate not to let him down I kept my eyes and ears peeled for any animal life in the area.

The signal came from Kevin, semaphoring to me from my left. I doubled back and crossed the river by skipping across some rocks that I’d passed seconds earlier and stood next to him to get a look at what he’d found. Straight ahead of us was a deer, not far away from where we were standing. It was smaller than some of the other deer that we’d seen and it didn’t have any horns. Watching it peacefully eating leaves from a small shrub, it made me sad thinking that we were there to kill it. The plan was simple: I was to arc to the right and get behind it while Kevin arced left and placed himself in a position to intercept it. I needed to be extremely quiet as I made my move. Kevin’s arc was much wider than mine so he was much further from the deer. I was going to be remaining relatively close; if the deer became aware of my presence before Kevin had gotten into position our entire plan would be ruined; there was too much at stake for me to allow that to happen. I moved slowly and softly, even taking care to ensure that my breathing wasn’t too loud. I managed to execute my arc successfully and waited directly behind the deer for Kevin to signal to me that he was also in position. Startling the deer was a two step process. First I threw the hatchet down on the ground behind it to draw its attention away from the shrub from which it was eating. Once it lifted its head and looked around I emerged from behind the tree I’d been using for cover and charged toward it. The deer reacted exactly the way we’d hoped it would, darting off straight in the direction where Kevin was waiting for it. I saw his face poking out from behind the tree that he’d chosen to use for cover, watching the deer running toward him. As fast as it was running he had to time his emergence from behind the tree absolutely perfectly or else it would get away. He didn’t. He emerged too soon and the deer rapidly changed course. It veered to its left and out of Kevin’s reach; he had to run it down if he wanted to catch it. I thought that we had lost it, that with the speed at which it was travelling there was no way Kevin was going to be able to catch it. Luckily we caught a break. The deer, in a panic, mistimed its jump over a fallen tree and tripped and fell to the ground. Kevin, displaying energy reserves that were incredible given how little he’d been eating, was on it in a flash, before it had the chance to get to its feet.

When it looked as if the deer had evaded our pincer I had immediately started running after Kevin and was thus able to see the final moments of his confrontation with the deer. He wrapped his left arm around the deer’s neck and locked his legs around its torso, using all of his strength to keep it grounded and under his control. The deer struggled with all it had, trying to flip itself onto its legs to give itself a base from which to attempt an escape, but its efforts were futile. Kevin held onto it with a relentlessly tight grip from which escape was impossible. With his right hand he drew the knife from behind his back where he’d secured it, stuck it into the deer’s neck and pulled it across its throat. The cry that the deer let out when Kevin plunged the knife into its throat was sickening. Recognizing that it was on the verge of death it kicked around maniacally, causing the blood to gush from its neck. Through it all Kevin never let go or even loosened his grip on the animal; he held onto his prey until he knew for certain that it was over.

The blood from the deer’s neck covered his entire upper body. After finally letting go of the deer he stood up and looked absolutely barbaric covered in blood with the knife still in his right hand. I was actually afraid to be so close to him with him looking like that; my fear quickly dissipated when Kevin dropped to his knees and put his left hand over his eyes. He started crying. I understood Kevin well enough to know that part of the reason he was crying was his relief at having finally gotten us something to eat and that the other reason for his tears was the violence of what he’d just done. Kevin was gentle, and remarkably in tune with the feelings of those around him; doing what he’d just done would have been very hard on him, adding to the strain that he’d been under as the leader of this expedition. I left him to cry, to unburden himself of what he was feeling. Watching him I felt great tenderness but also separation; he felt far away from me in a way he never had before. This was the first time I was seeing him reveal his emotions so openly, it wasn’t in his nature to do so. He was always the reserved one, holding back his emotions to reassure those around him about his dependability. I felt like I was in the presence of a stranger, uncertain of how to interact with him. I wanted to say something to him, to go to him and put my hand on him, to be close to him in some way, but I wasn’t confident about how it would be received. My uncertainty was quickly brought to an end as before long Kevin had composed himself and was back to being our stoic, dependable leader.

“We’re done walking for today; it’s going to take a while for me to skin and carve this thing; let’s search for a place to set up camp and head over there.”

I ran back to Lisa and Miranda to tell them the good news about the outcome of the hunt and asked them to help me find a place for us to set up camp. We moved slowly because of the pain that Lisa was in. Our search took us further downriver, to a spot on the riverbank under a rock overhang, where we were soon joined by Kevin, fresh from rinsing the deer’s blood off him in the river. He’d discarded the shirt that he was wearing and arrived shirtless, carrying the deer across his shoulders.

“WOW!” Miranda exclaimed when he dropped the deer’s body to the ground before us. It landed with a hard thud; the substantiality of it and what it meant for us going forward was a big relief to us all.

“How long is that going to last?” Lisa asked him. She was lying on the ground on top of both blankets with her hand on her stomach; the walk that we’d taken to get there had left her in more pain.

“Two days at the most,” Kevin answered.

“That’s all?” Miranda asked him.

“All four of us are starving and we need to eat as much of this as we can as quickly as we can because unlike the other meat this hasn’t been salted, so it’s going to spoil much quicker.”

Kevin needed a break after all that he had done that morning; he stayed behind at the campsite with Lisa while Miranda and I went to collect firewood. The whole time we were out there, picking dry sticks up off the ground and chopping branches off trees with the hatchet, Miranda never stopped marvelling at what Kevin had done; the strength it must have taken for him to kill the deer and carry it as far as he had on his shoulders. Listening to her praising Kevin brought back memories of the kiss they’d shared when rehearsing Darren’s play. She was with Lisa now and if their love for each other wasn’t real and strong they wouldn’t be out here with me and Kevin, nonetheless I couldn’t help feeling like she was trespassing.

I had no business feeling the way I did; there was no chance of anything happening between Miranda and Kevin and I hadn’t done anything to get closer to him since we’d left Prospera, in fact the distance between us had grown since we’d left. In reality it had been the same in Prospera, there had always been a consistent distance between us, unchallenged by any efforts from either of us to lessen it. Our reasoning had been that it was too risky for us to go down that road with Kevin being the subject of so much interest from the governing authorities. But then what of Lisa and Miranda, whose relationship exposed them to much greater risk than a relationship between me and Kevin would expose us to but who had continued to see each other in defiance of any instinct toward self-preservation and went so far as to flee their home so that they could freely be together? If Kevin and I had real feelings for each other we wouldn’t have chosen safety, if that was even what we’d chosen. Being out in the forest, free from the risks we’d thought we were avoiding in Prospera, there was no reason for us to still be separated by so great a distance. The avoidance of risk had been an excuse, what we’d really been avoiding was confronting our feelings, because maybe they weren’t as strong as we thought they were, maybe they weren’t sustainable and maybe our bond of friendship wasn’t strong enough to survive a romantic separation. There was only one way to know what the answers to those questions were and that was to put our feelings to the test. One of us would have to take the first step, to force our relationship onto territory where the confrontation of these questions was unavoidable, and with Kevin in the stoic mindset that he was in it was going to have to be me that forced the issue.

Miranda and I collected a lot of firewood, enough not just for the night but for the rest of the daylight hours as well. It was terribly cold, the air temperature had been dropping significantly every day since we’d left Prospera, a sign that the winter snow was on its way, would possibly be arriving in a matter of days.

Unfortunately the pelt from the deer was useless to us. In order for it to be of use to us it would need to be left out in the sun for days to completely dry out and with us travelling that wasn’t possible; it would have to be discarded. The deer then was only useful to us as meat, of which, thankfully, there was a lot. It was around mid-afternoon when Kevin got to work skinning the deer. The pelt came off in a flash. Kevin cut the deer from its mouth all the way down the underside of its body to its tail and muscularly pulled it off the carcass. Miranda had never seen anything like it before; the sight of the deer without its skin caused her to run off, double over and vomit. To deal with the bony parts of the deer Kevin used the hatchet. He started by using it to cut off the deer’s head, another useless part of its anatomy. Next he used the hatchet to crack and pry open the rib cage so that he could get at what was inside. Using the knife he cut out the stomach, the intestines, the heart; all of the bits that we wouldn’t be eating.

“How are you able to do that so expertly? You never worked in the abattoir; you only worked in the stables and on the fishing boat,” I asked him, amazed at the efficiency with which he was working.

“Whenever a horse died or was put to sleep because it was no longer able to be as productive as it needed to be I would take it to the abattoir on a wagon and I’d stay and watch them work.”

“Are you saying that there were times when we were eating horse meat?”

“No, the horse meat was ground up into food for the dogs.”

Kevin worked on the carcass assiduously, cutting away and discarding meat that wasn’t necessary and setting aside the meat that was for consumption. While he was busy with that, me and Miranda (who had since recovered from her nausea) offered to do what we could to help. Kevin told us to go back out into the woods and look for long, strong, relatively thin sticks. The plan was to use them to transport the meat by using the hatchet to strip them of their bark and sharpen one of the ends so that we could skewer the meat onto it. Finding the sticks we needed was easy; we returned to the campsite in no time and I got to work removing the bark from them and sharpening them while Miranda helped Kevin by washing the blood off the meat in the river. In the evening, after Kevin had finished carving up the deer, we ate dinner. Kevin’s suggestion was that for dinner we eat the parts of the deer that would be problematic to carry, a suggestion to which we all agreed. On the menu that evening was ribs and legs, and immediately we identified a problem. Because of their size we couldn’t use the frying pan to cook them, they needed to be barbequed.

Even though we were eating the parts of the deer that had the least meat on them we were all completely stuffed by the time we were done eating. Miranda and I allowed Kevin and Lisa to have a greater share of the meat to make up for the food that they had been sacrificing for us. We all ate rapaciously, burning ourselves by biting into the meat that was still piping hot having only just come out of the fire and pulling chunks of meat off the bone as if eating dinner was an act of predation. The bones we sucked dry, not a scrap of meat was left uneaten. After we’d finished our meal, there was a wonderful collective sense of ease among us. For the first time since we’d left Prospera we had eaten a substantial meal and we’d be eating substantial meals for the next few days.

The meat that Kevin cut off the deer filled two of the four sticks that I’d stripped and sharpened. Our food requirements taken care of, our other concerns—like what to do about toilet paper and the fast shrinking soap—felt comparatively minor. It was all thanks to Kevin that the good feeling we all had around the campfire that evening had descended upon us, even so he said nothing to us about the debt we owed him. Instead he sat with us around the campfire and made us laugh by going through a list of reasons why he thought Darren had no talent as a writer. The improvement in our food situation had changed Kevin more than the rest of us. Having been pensive and beset by worry over our meagre food stocks he was now relaxed and much more conversational. Lisa, who’d eaten her first decent meal in days, was also a different person. She wasn’t lying down anymore; she was sitting up, behind Miranda with her arms around her and her head on her shoulder.

After our stomachs had settled down from the big meal we’d consumed Lisa and Miranda took the soap and walked hand in hand upriver to bathe in a place where the river current was tranquil. I understood that they wanted to be alone together and didn’t go to bathe with them as we had been doing all the previous evenings of our trip. Alone with Kevin, an awkwardness instantly enveloped the campsite. We both knew what Lisa and Miranda had gone off to do and as such it was all we could think about. I was sure that it was raising the same questions in Kevin’s mind that I had been plagued by all day. Any fear or reluctance that he felt to address what was causing the present awkwardness that was between us was understandable; I felt it too, together with an eagerness to address it having waited our whole lives for the opportunity to do so that we now had being out here in the forest all on our own. I didn’t do it with words, feeling that enough words—both said and unsaid—had passed between us over the years on this issue. Not long after Lisa and Miranda had returned Kevin took the soap with him to the same spot to bathe. He desperately needed it, having gotten more blood on him from when he’d been carving the deer as well as a strong fire smell from being so close to the fire when barbequing the meat. The place where Lisa and Miranda had gone to bathe was a pool beneath a small waterfall not visible from the campsite. Once Kevin was out of our line of sight I walked after him, receiving looks of encouragement from Lisa and Miranda as I left the campsite. As soon as he saw me, Kevin quickly turned around so that he was facing the opposite direction.

“What are you doing here?” He asked me, sounding confused and panicked.

I didn’t answer him. I walked around to the side of the pool without saying anything and removed all of my clothes. Kevin didn’t turn around when he heard my clothes hitting the floor; he didn’t turn around when he heard me entering the water and wading toward him. He was in a state of confusion and didn’t know how to respond to the situation that I’d created. I put my arms around him from behind, pulled him close to me and pressed my breasts into his back. Through my right hand I could feel the frantic beating of his heart through his chest. He was more than panicked; he was terrified.

“There’s no reason for us to be afraid anymore,” I whispered in his ear before letting go of him and walking around him to be face to face with him.

His face reflected entirely what I’d sensed emanating from him when he had his back turned to me and from the rapid beating of his heart that I’d felt through his chest. What I was doing had him in a panic, too much of a panic for me to get him to surrender himself to me. I had to remind myself that this was Kevin and that he had great difficulty with letting his guard down. I needed to coax him out of his shell, to gently relieve him of his anxieties and uncertainties. Were he and I to become boyfriend and girlfriend it would mean one more thing for him to worry about in addition to all of the life and death concerns that he had to manage every day. I needed him to understand that having me as his girlfriend wouldn’t add to his worries at all, that I could be of help to him by being a partner who shared the burden of working to ensure our survival with him.

I put my hands on his shoulders and kissed him softly on his mouth, being careful not to push him too far too quickly. It took a while for a response to come from him. Through my hands I felt the tension dissipate from his shoulders, and his lips changed from being static receptors of my kisses to moving and slowly becoming active participants. The moment when his defences finally surrendered and he allowed himself to be carried away by what was happening between us was wonderful. He put his arms around me and released everything that he’d been keeping suppressed our entire lives. On that dark night, in the still pool with the stars above us and the half moon reflecting off the water’s surface, the distance between us was well and truly eliminated as we became one, sharing with each other that most seminal moment of love and trust.

We walked hand in hand back to the campsite where Lisa and Miranda were waiting for us. Upon seeing us, Lisa and Miranda’s faces broke out in broad smiles, a perceptive expression of ‘Finally!’ playing across both of their faces.