Last Girl Ghosted by Lisa Unger

Author:Lisa Unger [Unger, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Park Row Books
Published: 2021-07-27T14:36:09+00:00

twenty-eight

Then

Robin taught me how to track, how to follow signs, detect a game trail. How to determine if it had been a rabbit or a squirrel or a deer nibbling at the vegetation. How if you saw crows circling in the sky, there was likely a fresh kill—coyotes or less common wolves—and they were waiting their turn to pick the bones clean. The land spoke to her. And she was my translator. Or so it seemed to me at the time.

But it was my father who taught me how to hunt.

“Killing a thing,” my father told me, “is a sacred act.”

We’d been trekking through the woods for what seemed like hours, the vegetation thick, the crossbow heavy on my back. I was tired already, though the sun was just rising. And dread was thick in my throat. I was no hunter. I knew this, and I wondered how my father was going to feel about me when he figured it out.

“It’s nature’s way that we must kill to survive.”

Was that true? It sounded true but it didn’t feel right.

I’d seen enough nature shows—impalas felled by lions, seals taken by killer whales, bunnies carried off by eagles—to know that death was part of life. But animals act on instinct. They have no choice. Some animals kill to survive; others are born prey. Humans, supposedly, are elevated by their intelligence.

“Like war?” I asked quietly, knowing to keep my voice low.

My father looked back and down at me, eyes startled, deeply sad. “No,” he said. “Not like war at all.”

How is it different? I didn’t dare ask.

“When you kill an animal to feed yourself and your family, it’s part of an agreement you have with the planet.”

I didn’t say anything. There was only our breath, the sound of our movement through the woods. “Now, people take and take. They’ve taken too much. The bill will come due. And those of us who know how to survive when civilization crumbles will keep our contract with the planet. Take what you need to survive. Not more.”

I stayed quiet as we moved slowly on. The world we’d left behind had swiftly fallen away. Without phone or cable or internet, everything I knew and thought was real seemed as distant as a dream. Even the faces of my friends were fading.

The first sign of the deer was her scat. A pile still-warm, berries visible through the muck.

A few feet later, a nibbled branch, the end left rough and torn from her bottom incisors, frayed. Rabbits make a bite that looks like a knife’s cut from their sharp teeth. But deer munching leaves a ragged edge.

My father touched the frayed branch and gave me a slow nod, raising his fingers to his lips.

Soon enough, there she was. A doe, peacefully crunching on viburnum leaves. Her tawny fur and shining black eyes punching a contrast against the verdant green of the leaves. I watched her, overcome with a sense of peace—the wind, the birdsong, the quiet whisper of her eating.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.