Rejected

The Bear

It took a week for the bear to find his camp.

A week that had become progressively better for Milo. He had started to clear the brush around the fire pit and pile firewood against the dead fall. Poop Rock now had a poop pit that he had covered with leafy boughs when he was not using it. The moose had been at the pond most mornings and Milo had nicknamed it Jules after the barista back in the city: it was around when he drank his coffee and kept looking at him. He had managed to positively identify some wild strawberries that had not been picked over by the birds.

Even the trapping problem had been solved, though not with his fishing line loop. Instead, he had fashioned a box trap by ripping out the stiff trunk lining from under his car's spare tire. He propped the lining up with a stick under one side. Then he placed a foot sized rock on top to give the thing some weight and a bit of one of his sports bars in the back. Finally, he tied some of his fishing line to the stick and ran it behind a tree that was at least twenty meters away and with a good line-of-sight on the box. There he waited. And that was the real trick. The first time, with the loop, he had only waited twenty minutes, maybe thirty. The magic number was closer to forty-five or more. That was how long it took for the curiosity and hunger of the animals to overcome their paranoia.

Milo started to call his targets SFRs (Small, Furry Rodents), to assign them a text-like acronym, then trap and kill them. It was not as satisfying as stamping on the ants, but it helped to distance himself from his city-bred horror of killing animals.

Despite this attempt at detachment, trapping forest rodents forced Milo to closely observe them. He saw in them things that urban humanity no longer experienced. Squirrels and rabbits and chipmunks and such were creatures torn by two needs: to eat and to not be eaten. Often these two needs were opposed as they needed to venture into areas where they might get eaten in order to find something to eat. They had no noodle shops or cafes. Instead, they had to assume that the berry bush was being staked out by some predator and stay constantly alert to that threat. The same was true of ponds and streams and other popular watering holes. Everything was done with extreme caution. When a rabbit approached his trap, it would do it in stages, bounding from bush to bush, pausing at each to look and listen. Only when there was no hiding place closer to the trap would it creep slowly to the trap and its bait, always ready to turn and run. It reminded him of war documentaries that he had watched where the soldiers advanced slowly and carefully on an objective. He tried to imagine doing all of that for his morning coffee and could not. He knew that there were parts of the world where people lived like that, he had seen them on the news, but it was well outside his personal experience.

He had captured three with the new trap over the course of one morning, killing each furry thing by snapping its neck, though he lost the first one when he lifted the box and it scurried out. After that, he cut a hole in the top of the box and covered it with a rock when the trap was primed. When he sprung the trap, he would reach in wearing his gloves and grab the SFR, pull it out and wring its neck. This had been hard with the first one because he kept looking at its eyes. Milo found that if he focused on its teeth, trying furiously to bite him, that it was much easier to see the SFR as an enemy, grab its body in one hand, head in the other and twist.

He had also figured out how to skin the things, chopping off the head and feet, slicing the belly from neck to tail and then down the inside of each leg. He scooped out the guts and innards then he grabbed the skin behind the neck with one hand and wrapped the other inside around the neck meat and pulled the skin down to the tail. If he did it in a quick, sure motion, like pulling off a bandage, then the whole skin would rip off. He kept the skins, drying them by laying them out on the pond dam deadfall next to the fire. He did not bother boning them, instead pushing the naked meat on to a meter long stick and propping that over the fire to cook, turning occasionally. When the fat started to drip into the fire, he knew they were ready to eat. They did not taste like chicken, but more like turkey though with many small bones he had to be careful not to swallow. By the end of the week, he had nine skins drying by the fire, attracting flies. He knew he should do something with them, they were a resource and it was always a bad idea to discard resources, but he had no immediate need for them.