“Just do it,” I say, and I can hear him shifting; he is already moving, stretching his hand across the space between our cots. I reach out and find his hand, which is cool and large and dry, and he jerks a bit as our skin comes into contact.
“Do you think we’re safe?” he asks. His voice is hoarse.
I’m not sure whether he is referring to the deliria, or whether he is asking about the fact that we are trapped here, but he lets me lace my fingers through his. He has never held hands with someone before, I can tell. It takes him a moment of fumbling to understand how to do it.
“We’ll be okay,” I say. I don’t know whether I believe it or not. He gives my hand a quick squeeze, surprising me—there are some things, I guess, that come naturally, even if you’ve never done them before. We hold hands across the dark, and after a while I hear his breathing slow and deepen, and I close my eyes and think of waves pulling slowly on a shore. After a little while I am asleep too, and dream of being on a carousel with Grace, and watching, laughing, as all the wooden horses slowly break from their positions and begin galloping up into the air.
then
For three days, the weather holds. The woods are a symphony of cracking and snapping, as the trees and the river slough off their ice. Fat, jewel-colored droplets of water rain down on our heads as we move through the woods, looking for berries, animal burrows, and good places to hunt. There is a great feeling of release and celebration, almost as if spring has really come, even though we know this is only a temporary reprieve. Raven is the only one who seems no happier.
We must be on constant lookout for food now. On the third morning, Raven nominates me to check the traps with her. Every time we find one empty, Raven curses a little under her breath. The animals have mostly gone underground.
We hear the animal before we get to the last trap, and Raven quickens her pace. There is a frantic sound of scrabbling against the brittle leaves that carpet the forest floor, and a panicked chittering, too. A large rabbit has its hind leg caught in the metal teeth of the trap. Its fur is stained with spots of dark blood. Panicked, the rabbit tries to pull itself forward; then falls back, panting, on its side.
Raven squats and removes a long-handled knife from her bag. It is sharp but spotted with rust and, I imagine, old blood. If we leave the rabbit here, I know it will twist and turn and writhe until it bleeds out from the leg—or, more likely, it will eventually give up and die slowly of starvation. Raven will be doing it a favor by killing it quickly. Still, I can’t watch. I’ve never been on trap duty. I don’t have the stomach for it.
Raven hesitates. Then, suddenly, she shoves the knife into my hand.
“Here,” she says. “You do it.” I know it’s not squeamishness on her part; she hunts all the time. This is another one of her tests.
The knife feels surprisingly heavy. I look at the rabbit, scrabbling and sputtering on the ground. “I—I can’t. I’ve never killed anything before.”
Raven’s eyes are hard. “Well, it’s time to learn.” She puts two hands on the squirming rabbit—one on its head, one on its belly, stilling it. The rabbit must think she’s trying to help. It stops squirming. Even so, I can see the rapid, desperate pattern of its breathing.
“Don’t make me,” I say, both ashamed because I have to plead with her and angry for being made to.
Raven stands up again. “You still don’t get it, do you?” she says. “This isn’t a game, Lena. And it doesn’t end here, or when we go south, or ever. What happened at the homestead…” She breaks off, shaking her head. “There is no room for us anywhere. Not unless things change. We’ll be hunted. Our homesteads will be bombed and burned. The borders will grow, and cities will expand, and there will be no Wilds left, and nobody to fight, and nothing to fight for. Do you understand?”
I say nothing. Heat is creeping up the back of my neck, making me feel light-headed.
“I won’t always be around to help you,” she says, and kneels again, one knee in the dirt. This time she parts the rabbit’s fur with her fingers, exposing a pink, fleshy bit of neck, a throbbing artery. “Here,” she says. “Do it.”
It strikes me then that the animal under her hands is just like us: trapped, driven out of its home, desperately fighting for breath, for a few more inches of space. And suddenly I am blindingly angry at Raven—for her lectures, and her stubbornness, and for thinking that the way that you help people is by driving them against a wall, by beating them down until they fight back.
“I don’t think it’s a game,” I say, and I can’t keep the anger out of my voice.
“What?”