Getting Air (9 page)

We finished stargazing, and Julia said she would “bank the fire” before we went to sleep. None of us knew what she was talking about, so she showed us. She covered the fire pit lightly with ashes. The flames were snuffed out, but Julia said that in the morning it would be easy to take off the ashes, lay on a little tinder, and blow on the smoldering embers to get the fire back to life again. When did my sister get to be so smart?

When we woke up that next morning, Julia’s leg felt a little better and David had recovered from his encounter with the snake. I guess it wasn’t poisonous after all.

The snake. Just thinking about it got my stomach rumbling again. The berries we had found were good, but they didn’t satisfy my appetite. I felt a general weakness that I wasn’t used to. My body was crying out for some milk, or cheese, or meat. I’d eat another snake in a minute if we could catch one.

“We need protein,” I said to nobody in particular. “A person can’t live on berries.”

“Well, there’s no protein out here,” Henry said. “So just forget about it.”

“That’s not altogether true,” Julia told him. “Did you ever try entomophagous cuisine?”

“Is that like Ethiopian?” Arcadia asked. “I went to an Ethiopian restaurant in New York once. You eat with your hands.”

“Not exactly,” Julia said. She went over to a fallen tree at the edge of the campsite. The bark was loose and rotting away. Julia peeled back a piece of the wood. “See? This place is
crawling
with protein.”

There were all kinds of creepy-crawly things in there.

“Ugh! Don’t even think about it!” Arcadia said. “I’m not eating bugs!”

“Why not?” Julia asked. “You ate snake.”

“Snake is meat,” David said.

“Yeah,” Henry said. “Bugs are…bugs!”

“Don’t be silly,” Julia said. “You eat lobsters. They’re weird looking. You eat shrimp. You eat cows and chickens and pigs. What’s the difference?”

“I can’t eat bugs,” Henry said. “It’s against my religion.”

“You’re an atheist, you foon,” David said.

“Well, I’m on a bug-free diet,” Henry said. “Doctor’s orders.”

“Bugs have more protein per pound than fish or meat,” Julia told us. “They have a lot of vitamins, too.”

“You probably take one-a-day cockroaches,” Henry cracked.

“When did
you
ever eat a bug?” I asked my sister.

“In Girl Scouts,” she said. “I earned a badge for entomophagy. We tried cicadas, locusts, grubs, slugs, ants, maggots…”

“Eeeewww,” we all went.

“Remind me not to join the Girl Scouts,” Henry said.

“The grasshoppers were the best,” Julia continued. “We roasted them. You have to cut away their wings and legs first. They’re crunchy. Earthworms are good too. You just remove the shell and head, and then you mash them up in a stew.”

“Thanks for sharing that with us,” Arcadia said. “If you don’t mind, I need to go vomit now.”

“Squirt is goofing on us,” David said. “She never ate a bug.”

“Oh, no?”

Julia reached down and picked up some little disgusting crawling critter with her fingertips. Its little legs were flailing around. Then she popped the thing in her mouth like it was candy.

“Eeeewww!”

“You’re sick!”

“You have mental problems!”

“There goes my appetite.”

“I can’t believe we come from the same parents,” I told my sister.

“Delicious!” Julia said, smacking her lips. “Tastes like a Tic Tac.”

“Really?” Arcadia asked.

“Sure,” said Julia. “Try one.”

Julia found another little critter and held it out for Arcadia.

“I don’t want to touch it,” Arcadia said.

“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!”