Chapter 22: Caitlyn
“Breakfast is ready, Caitlyn. Wake up!” I try to pull the covers over my head, but Jo’s hand is sitting on my shoulder keeping me from getting the sheets all the way up. She laughs and grabs them. “Come on! Get up! Eat with everyone, and if you’d like, you can go back to sleep.”
I think about that for a little bit, and even though I’m still fighting her, it actually sounds kind of good. I open my eyes and see Sara stumbling over to the table.
“Last day of muffins!” says Jon, pulling them out of the pantry. I stop fighting against Jo’s pulls on my sheets, but I only let her pull them back slowly. The past few mornings have been cold. Winter is here. As soon as they’re past my knee and I still haven’t felt that chill, I push them all the way off and roll up onto my feet.
“It’s not as cold today,” I say slowly. My lips don’t want to move yet.
“Yep. It actually looks really nice outside. Hopefully the deer will think so, too.”
I just stumble over to the table and peel open the pack of mini muffins. I liked muffins a lot, but a few weeks straight of these little pastries is a little annoying. Sometimes we make bigger breakfasts and other times we just have these packaged foods. I don’t mind too much that they’ll be gone after today.
“Are you two going to practice again today?” asks Sara, looking at Jon and me. She’s talking slowly, too.
“Sure. I don’t think I can read any more of that book without sprouting leaves, anyway. Besides, trying to plant anything is in the past.” he replies. It is December.
The only person that hasn’t said anything yet is Carter. He’s not really a morning person. It’s not like he’s mean. He just quietly pops his mini muffins, one whole one at a time, into his mouth and washes them down with some coffee that he found in a neighboring cabin one day. In front of him is the police radio. During the morning and evening every few days he turns it on and scans for any messages. A little static emits from the speaker. He turns it off and seems to think about what he’ll do all day. This past week, he’d started to make tools out of branches, rope from bark, and stones that he’d found. The tools seem pointless, especially in Jon's opinion, but it keeps us busy. I got a chance to help him a little. I liked it when he said, “Caitlyn, bring me more brope.” I try to absorb everything he knows.
As we all finished breakfast, I still felt good about going back to sleep, so I crawled back under the covers and closed my eyes. I start dreaming again almost immediately.
My dreams are cut short, though. The echo of a distant, loud boom rouses me. It’s just loud enough to wake me up, but faint enough that I have to think about whether I actually heard it or not. I get up and look outside, and Sara comes with me. Jon said we would practice, so maybe he was working on the target.
We see him looking up to the hills, and by the time I bundle up and get outside, Carter is walking around the house to meet them, too. His feet crunch over the light layer of snow.
“Did you guys hear that?” he asks.
We all nod, and I rub my eyes. After a moment, Jon goes back to working on the target so I follow him. Sara helps Carter with his next project, which looks like it will be some benches for the fire pit that he finished a while ago. Jon and Carter both have leery looks on their faces from the gun shots. I have become good at reading faces
About twenty minutes later, Jo comes running out of the woods with the rifle in tow and a huge smile on her face. “Carter! I hope that oven’s finally ready to be christened.” she says, really excited. “Come with me!”
Another twenty minutes go by as we all hike through the woods to find Jo’s first kill: a small white-tailed deer. I look up to see everyone’s’ reactions. Jo is still smiling, still thinking of how proud she is that she’s finally gotten a deer.
Jon and Carter look puzzled, though. “So… now what?” asks Jon looking at all of us in turn.
Jo squints a little bit and turns to him. “What do you mean, ‘What now?’ You guys kinda just…” she trails off.
“We do what?” asks Carter.
“You know. Get the meat out.”
Carter and Jon look at each other uncomfortably.
Jon starts. “Well, you’ve dissected a lot of things, right? Med school? Biology? Stuff like that?”
“Well, yes, but never with the goal of figuring out where a good cut of steak is.”
“But you can figure it out, right?”
Carter sighs and shakes his head out of disbelief, not disagreement. “I could really use a cigarette right now.” He pauses. I walk over to the deer and roll it over a little bit.
“Are you sure it’s dead?” I ask.
I kneel down next to it and put my hand in front of its nose. It’s not breathing, and I can’t hear anything in its chest. “I think it’s dead.” I feel kind of bad for it.
“If worse comes to worse,” says Jon, stepping toward the deer, “I’ll bet the concept of a rack of ribs goes for a deer as much as a cow.” He squats down, hoists the deer over his shoulders, and heads back in the direction of the cabin. “Paging Dr. Carter,” he yells over his shoulder, “your patient is ready to see you now.”
The four of us follow Jon down the hill and through the trees. All of a sudden, I’m kind of excited to have something new to eat. The boys seem hesitant, and I almost offer to cut up the deer. I look at its open eyes hanging over John's back. I bet I could figure it out.
About halfway back, Jo breaks the silence. “So I saw something very strange while I was hiding high in the hills this morning.” We all look at her at the same time, and she takes a moment to make eye contact with each of us. “I saw a vulture nest in one of the dead trees at the top of that hill,” she continues, pointing behind us and to our left.
“Well, that’s pretty low for a nest.” says Carter, apparently listening intently.
“I wouldn’t know,” replies Jo. “But the thing that caught me off guard about it was, well…”
“What?” I ask, wondering what made the nest so strange.
“I think one of the baby vultures was eating another.”
None of us know exactly what to say to that.
“That’s really gross,” says Sara, settling on something obvious.
“Why would that happen?” I ask.
“It’s actually not too strange,” adds Carter. His claim surprises all of us. “Fratricide is common. If the young go without food or needs provided by the family for long, they often rely entirely on instinct. And instinct isn’t always… pleasant. And it never turns out well for the weakest even if it includes siblings.”
Jo still looks confused. “I just don’t understand how it benefits them at all. I mean, doesn’t that mean that in difficult times, the number of vultures gets even smaller?”
“Yes, but the vultures that survive will be much more likely to make it in the long run because they were able to sustain themselves while they were young. That’s why that part of animal instinct hasn’t died out. We might see it as barbaric, but some animals do whatever it takes to live.”
By the time he’s finished talking about the vultures, we’re back at the cabin, and Jon has laid down the deer and is looking at it with his hands on his hips. “I guess we just have to give it a shot. Let’s get started,” he says to Carter.
Carter pulls two different sized knives out of his pack and hands one to Jon. “Jo, can you take the girls inside, please?” he asks. Carter told me one day he would teach me how to gut an animal, when he has it figured out. I have my doubts.
Later, the three of us come back outside just as the sun is setting. Apparently Jon and Carter did something right. They’re sitting across the oven from each other, rotating most of the deer over a low, but hot fire while some of it cooks in the oven itself. I think it’s the first time I’ve seen them smile at each other.
However, I feel like I have missed out.