Hunted (Dark Secrets Book 1) (6 page)

We walked for a half mile into the thickest part of the forest where there were no trails, not stopping until darkness had almost completely descended upon us. We came to a small clearing surrounded by towering trees.

"This is a good place to make camp for the night," I declared as I pulled my battery powered lantern from my pack and switched it on. I gathered some small dry twigs for kindling and added a handful of dried hay I had pocketed from the farm truck. I lit my silver Zippo and touched its flame to the hay. It quickly withered and danced while it glowed orange-red until it turned to blackened ash. I kneeled and blew gently, coaxing the flame. A few moments later we had a nice warm fire. Theron laid down two of my tarps as I had done before, one on each side of the fire, to give us a shield against the cold ground. Then he unrolled my sleeping bag over one tarp and laid his own bag over the other.

Meanwhile, I set out the meal for us to share and murmured a small thanks.

"Okay, we have chicken, potato-egg salad and rolls."

I flipped the clear plastic lid off the chicken container and used it as my plate. I took out my camp utensils. I still had two sets—I had never gotten rid of my mother's in the hope that someday she'd use them again. I passed them to Theron with a sense of great ceremony. I had never used these or shared them with anyone but her—ever.

"That chicken smells incredible," he exclaimed, taking hold of the utensils with no ceremony what-so-ever and tearing into his half of the chicken.

It was delicious. I decided not to talk about what he had said yet. I wanted to give him time to enjoy his meal without a game of twenty questions. We consumed everything I put in front of us.

Soon, with full bellies and warm, tired bodies, we cleaned up. I gathered my rope, tied both his pack and my pack together and then knotted the rope and tossed the other end over a high tree limb.

"What are you doing?" Theron asked.

"Protecting our gear from bears," I replied.

"Oh. How do we protect ourselves?"

I grinned and threw him my canister of bear mace. "I sleep with my knife and hatchet ready too."

"Great," he muttered as he removed a knife from his coat.

I snuggled down into my warm bag. Theron did the same in his. I was exhausted but couldn't help but wonder what made him want to follow me out into the middle of nowhere and if it had been a good idea to let him. I soon fell into a deep, deep sleep.

~

When we woke in the morning I felt well-rested. We stomped out the last of the remaining glowing embers from the fire, and I doused it with water from my water supply until I was sure it was out. I didn't need to be starting any forest fires. I brought down our packs from the tree and we packed up.

I realized it felt so good
not
to be alone.

After eating two nutritional bars and some fruit, we hiked for hours into the back country
—the area of the forest most humans don't traverse, where there were no ATV or hiking trails. We came upon a grove of towering pines and hardwoods which stood near a clearing that followed along the winding river that was swollen from the spring rains. The afternoon sun climbed higher into the soft blue unreachable sky above our heads.

I looked around at the picturesque scene surrounding us. "It's beautiful here, isn't it?"

"Very," Theron answered with a far-off gaze.

"This will be our home for the next few weeks," I announced automatically. And as the words my mother spoke to me so many times before slipped past my lips, I realized how intimate they really were.

"Home sounds good," Theron stated simply. And it did.

"You really know your way around here," Theron noticed.

"I've lived back here a few times now. It's a great place to go off the grid. There's plenty of hunting and spring is great for foraging, plus we have all the water we need for drinking, cooking and washing," I explained as I unzipped my backpack, turned it upside down and shook its contents out onto the layer of pine needles that I knelt in.

"Is there anything you
don't
have in that thing?" Theron asked with a lifted eyebrow.

I smiled and continued inventorying my supplies. First, I handed him a tarp. "Will you lay that right over there?" I pointed to a smallish flat area of plush green grass and piles of soft pine needles encircled by protective pines.

"You've got it, boss," he answered.

Then I went about unrolling the hunter green all-weather four-seasons tent my mother and I had called home for so many years. It really was a great tent. It sheltered you from the severe elements, kept you warm when it was freezing and kept you dry during extreme rain. I went and laid it out flat where Theron had just laid the tarp. I could put the tent up myself and, from years of practice, I had the system down to a science.

"I can handle this. Would you get some dead, dry wood for a fire?" I asked extending my hatchet toward him.

He reached out and took it. "Glad to."

I had the tent finished in about twenty minutes then went about creating a fire pit. With a flat stone, I dug a shallow earthen hole about a foot deep and two feet wide then bordered the edge with hefty rounded river rocks.

Theron began stacking a pile of wood.

I assembled my steel camping spit to use for roasting over the fire pit. I took out my small mess kit, which included one cooking pot and pan and utensils. I laid all of these items on three flat rocks I had placed together.

I walked over, unzipped the tent flap and tied it up and off to the side so the interior could catch some fresh air and so that I could lay out the rest of my supplies for easy access. That way, Theron would know what we had available: three garbage bags, zip ties, two more tarps, my first aid kit, good old duct tape, a solar-powered battery flashlight and lantern, a folding Swiss Army knife and tool kit, a fire-starter, a compass, a topographical map, cord, fishing line and hooks, snare line, a Kevlar Ursack, bear spray, insect repellent, and water treatment tablets. And, of course, my Take Down and bolts, my solar-battery operated Kindle and my iPod. I unrolled my sleeping bag and laid it across the tent floor which was seven feet long by five feet wide. Everything I owned in the world fit into a backpack.

I called Theron in to take a look at my supplies and to find out what he had.

"I pretty much have a sleeping bag, throwing knives, a hunting knife, a water bottle and my clothes," Theron shrugged. "I wasn't really planning a back country excursion."

I almost asked him why he had come. I knew that, if he wasn't into it, he could walk out just like he had walked in. But that didn't explain what was in it for him. I watched his back muscles move and flex under his T-shirt as he unrolled his sleeping bag and laid it on the other side of the tent and then removed his clothes from his pack and set them into a neatly rolled pile.

His and Hers sides of the tent,
I thought. That could have gone badly. I felt overwhelmingly grateful he was honorable.

Then the thought hit me,
My mother would kill me.

"Let's eat something." Theron turned abruptly and I quickly darted my eyes in the other direction. Guilty.

I took out some fruit to share, along with the cinnamon buns and doughnuts. He couldn't decide which one he liked best.

When we were finished I went about explaining my hunting techniques while I baited and set up some fishing lines. "Do you like fishing?" I asked him.

"Haven't done it, to tell you the truth." There was that unemotional, glazed expression again. I wondered why his dad had never taught him to fish. He had said he was a city boy… but still.

"Well, what we do"
—I handed him a line and a hook—"is we string the line through the hook and tie it off with a strong knot."

His large hands fumbled with the delicate wire hook at first, but he quickly got the hang of it.

"Perfect," I exclaimed. "Now we bait it." I stomped over to the edge of the trees to a fallen piece of decaying log and shoved it over with my foot. Grub worms wriggled and beetles scurried for new shelter. I picked up a grub worm between my thumb and index finger then pierced it with the hook. Theron did the same.

"Sorry," I told the little critter. Then to Theron, I said, "We want to get them into the water as soon as possible."

"You are the only person I know who would apologize to bait." Theron smiled softly.

I ignored his comment and tied my line to a heavy tree limb, walked it to the edge of the river and tossed in my hook. Theron followed suit.

"If we're lucky, we'll catch some trout for dinner. Now snares," I said as I marched us a little ways into the trees. "I hate skinning rabbits and I will only consume them in an emergency. If I catch one and I have plenty of other food, I let them go. I also don't use any traps that would injure an animal permanently because I might not need it. This is their home, too," I said gesturing toward the forest. "What I do like to eat is wild turkey. It may not be fair but they don't make me feel as… guilty as the rabbits."

Theron's shoulders lifted with a laugh.

"Hush! You'll scare everything away!" I scolded playfully.

I laid out three simple snares with slip knots rounded on one end and tied the other ends to the trunks of narrow saplings. "I'll also hunt with my Take Down. If I can bring down a deer, I'll smoke the venison to preserve it and live off that. Overall, fish, turkey, grouse, pheasant and venison are my favorite wild meats. Have you tried any of them before?"

He shook his head just like I expected him to.

"All right then." I shook it off. We still had work to do. "We need to give this tent some better covering."

"What's your plan?"

"We need to gather some small, light branches, twigs and limbs," I explained as I retrieved my second green tarp and zip ties.

I stretched the tarp up and over the top of the tent to form a second roof—a barrier from weather and reinforced camouflage. I estimated the distance from my two corners of the tarp to the two nearest trees, threaded my zip tie through the first grommet and secured the corner with the zip tie to a thin, low-lying branch. I repeated that with my other corner, then went to Theron's side.

"So we're constructing a canopy," Theron figured. "I'll get my side." He held his hand out to me and I placed two zip ties in his palm.

He smiled at me, and a lightning bolt shot through my stomach.

How does he do that?!
I mused.

Theron tied up his corner grommets, and the canopy over the tent was fastened. Then we hiked around and combed the ground, gathering broken and fallen branches and twigs and last autumn's fallen leaves and gently tossed them onto the canopy until it was disguised with forest flora.

As Theron lit the fire using my kit, I used the rest of the debris we collected along with a few fresh, young branches that I had hacked from nearby trees, and set them against the side and back walls of the tent for extra protection.

"This works," I declared.

"It looks good," Theron agreed. "It would be difficult to scope it out."

"Yeah. Now, we should make a cover to go over the fire pit
—for when it's doused."

"More fallen branches and sticks then?"

I nodded. We assembled a square carpet of bracken—roughly four feet by four feet—and tied it together using thin, pliable twigs and strips of bark. It went really fast with two of us working on it. It used to take me a good hour or so doing it alone. We laid the bracken at the side of the fire pit to cover it later.

Next, I studied my compass and walked about two hundred yards away from the tent, recording the area with my compass just in case I woke up in the morning and all of the trees looked the same. I strung my Kevlar Ursack, which was lined with a virtually odor-proof material, over a high tree limb about twenty feet up with wire. It would hold our food so bears and other critters didn't get at it.

Then another little fact of life had to be dealt with—a latrine. Two hundred feet away from the tent and river, I scraped out a small pit about a foot or two deep.

"I'm hungry again," I said as I stomped past Theron, who was tending to the fire, to get to the fishing lines. I lifted them from the water and found we had hooked a couple of trout.

Excellent!
I silently celebrated. "We caught something!" I called.

Theron came jogging over. "Nice."

"We'll have to clean them away from the camp. Got your knife?" I asked, dangling the fish from the lines in both my hands.

"Yes I do."

"Follow me." I walked us out downstream a little ways and located two nearly flat stones to work with the fish on. I sat down and laid one trout on the stone closest to me and one trout on Theron's stone. "We have to gut and clean it." I wrinkled up my nose.

"Show me."

I slid the knife deep into the trout's belly and slit it down the middle. Then I shoved my blade in width-wise and scooped out the fish's innards, dumping them into a shallow hole in the ground that I dug out with the heel of my boot. Theron mimicked my actions.

"Easy," he said.

"Careful. Like it too much and you'll be the official gutter-er," I joked.

"I could handle that."

Once the fish were cleaned we brought them back to the fire to roast them on the spit. Theron found a couple of log pieces and set them next to the fire for us to use as seats.

"Nice," I said as we sat there watching the fish roast while dusk turned into night.

"All the major work is done—as long as we don't have to move for a while."

I cut the fruit into slices and set them into the pan so we could eat directly from it. Then I picked up the pot and poured an inch of water in the bottom from my water bladder.

"Tomorrow we'll have to purify some more drinking water, but that's easy." I set the pot into the fires side embers and chunked up the cauliflower head. Once the water was boiling, I put in the raw vegetables. Everything finished cooking around the same time and I divvied out our portions, giving Theron extra.

"Bon appétit," I said as I dug in. But Theron just stared at me.

"What is it? Don't you like it?"

"You're amazing, Freya," he said with a tone of admiration or possibly even awe.

"Oh, is that all?" My pink cheeks betrayed my true shyness. No one had ever said that to me before.

"You are very unexpected," he said, looking at me from under his dark lashes.

After we ate every bit of the dinner, I stirred a little river water through the pans and utensils and let them air dry for a few minutes and then put them into the Ursack with the rest of the food we had brought.

"Do you want to hit the sack early?" I asked.

"I'll do whatever you do," he said. "You know what you're doing."

That felt good
—to have my abilities noticed. He didn't look at me like the homeless, abandoned girl I was. It made me wonder how he saw me.

"Okay then." I doused the smoldering embers with a couple cups full of water and we both climbed into the tent. We each turned around to give the other privacy to change into sleeping clothes, then we both climbed into our bags.

"Thanks for all your help today, Theron," I said.

"You're welcome, but you're the one who made it possible."

I set my bear mace and knife within reach, closed my eyes and smiled widely in the safety of the dark.