Wild Life by Cynthia DeFelice

Author:Cynthia DeFelice
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Published: 2011-11-26T05:00:00+00:00

12

The sun shone brightly in the cloudless sky, and Erik shaded his eyes against the glare. As he looked around at the miles of unpopulated countryside stretching as far as he could see, a feeling of exhilaration rose in him. From this moment on, he realized, every decision was his to make. Not only that, these were going to be real decisions, important ones, having to do with staying alive. He had one simple job, he told himself, to live off the land.

The challenge quickened his blood.

First decision: which way to go?

He adjusted the pack on his back, shouldered the shotgun, and called to Quill, who seemed to have caught the scent of his excitement and was racing happily across the driveway toward the road. When she returned, he explained to her that they would be staying away from roads, crossing them only when necessary and when they were certain they wouldn’t be seen. This wasn’t nearly as difficult as it would have been back home, because the roads out here were few and far between. He’d noticed that, for the most part, they ran north to south and east to west, dividing the land into huge blocks that were several miles long on every side. That made a lot of space in which a boy and a dog could disappear. Also, in those wide-open spaces he could see or hear a car coming miles before it got close enough to worry about.

First, he decided, they would head for the cover of the line of trees he had spotted the night he arrived. From the car, the land had appeared flat and empty to him. But now, as he moved across it on foot, it told a different story. There were subtle dips and gentle mounds in the earth, and places where the rain had washed deep ditches. There were low spots where cattails and brush grew around the edges of little ponds, called potholes.

At home, that meant a hole in the road that caused the car to lurch and his father to say bad words. But his mom had told him about prairie potholes, which were rounded depressions in the earth that had been left behind by glaciers. Nowadays they held rainwater and snowmelt. Some of them were the size of a backyard swimming pool, others as far across as a football field.

There were patches of scrubby trees and small stands of woods, and gullies and ravines. There were odd objects people had left behind: rusty farm implements, an old watering trough, the foundation of a building long gone, a pile of rocks cleared from a field. Erik noted with satisfaction that all of these provided cover where he and Quill could hide, if need be. He imagined that pheasant and deer hid in those same kinds of places.

Erik was also pleased to see that Quill, with her mottled coat, blended in well with the rocks and dirt and grass, and he congratulated himself on his own clothing: faded jeans, a gray T-shirt, Dan’s camo jacket, and his own favorite camo-print baseball cap.

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