Blood Junction by Caroline Carver

Author:Caroline Carver [CARVER, CAROLINE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780446562256
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-06-27T04:00:00+00:00

India didn’t, as it happened, like witchetties. The flavor was okay, a bit like pureed chicken and sweetcorn, but it was the thought of eating a giant maggot—crunching through its outer coat into the soft juices below—that made her throat jam and her stomach rebel.

“Sorry,” she said as Milangga carefully extracted yet another from the torn root of an acacia bush. “I’ll stick to croissant, thanks.”

He laughed at her, his teeth yellow and long as a horse’s as they bit through the witchetty’s skin. “Very good,” he said, slurping noisily. “Protein, very good.”

India ingested her protein through rabbit and kangaroo, both of which the old man seemed to catch without trouble. He told her he used a boomerang to hunt them, but on the second day she confronted him as a liar.

“I found a trap,” she said indignantly.

“Anything in it?”

She looked away. “A rabbit.”

Unabashed, he grinned at her. “I’m too bloody old to go chasing after them animals with nothing but a bloody boomerang. Didn’tcha think of that?”

That evening she asked him how old he was. His skin was like oiled leather in the firelight, his gray hair a woolly skullcap. To her he looked as ageless as the countryside around them. He shrugged. “My mother told me I was born on your fool’s day, but I don’t know what year. I could be sixty. Maybe seventy. What does it matter?”

She looked down at her own body, smooth and supple, and then at his creased skin. Out here all that mattered was your fitness, and your ability to hunt and gather food.

“It doesn’t,” she said.

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