Birthright

Chapter 1

"I'll tell you when you're older," have always been Mother's favorite words. I ask "Who's my father?" She says "I'll tell you when you're older." I ask "Why can't I go to the school in the town?" She says "I'll tell you when you're older." I ask "Where'd I get the scar on my palm?" She says "I'll tell you when you're older." I ask "What's the big deal about my necklace?" She says, you guessed it, "I'll tell you when you're older." I don't know how old "older" is, but I'm seventeen and waiting, so I'm guessing I've still got some time until "older" hits.

I was raised in a tiny three room house about five miles outside of the nearest village, a decent settlement by the name of Berkeley at the junction of the Ley River and the Ber Sea, and only about a quarter mile from the Oak Rest Forest. The house is small but cozy. Mother sleeps in one of the rooms, I sleep in another, and the kitchen and dining room are combined in the third room. The two acres between the house and the forest are the garden. Mother grows corn, beans, wheat, squash, tomatoes, blueberries, raspberries, and she has five apple trees that have yet to actually produce anything that doesn't end up as squirrel food. She keeps trying to get me to help tend the plants. I dislike the plants, they're too complicated. I like the forest. I like to hunt the animals, to climb the trees, to swim in the stream. Life is easier in the forest, everything is straight forward.

Berkeley is most definitely not straight forward. I've been to the settlement fewer than twenty times in my life. It has grown greatly over the years, but still has no more than five hundred people. Mother doesn't like the town, and has never let me go alone. Every harvest season, when the chill is starting to set in, she'll load up our only cart with any extra goods we produced the past season, hook the mule up, and we'll go into Berkeley for the day. She sells what we don't need and buys what we do need but can't produce. I try to explore as much as I can, but Mother makes sure I stay close to her and the cart. We always get weird stares. The townsfolk know who we are, but they are as distrustful of us as Mother is of them. They only trade with Mother because they need to, not because they want to.

The sun hadn't even come close to poking over the horizon when Mother woke me up for my seventeenth trip to Berkeley. It was how it had always been. We would load the cart with the extra food from the garden and the pelts from my kills, and strapped it to the mule. By the time the sun would start to rise, we would just have started walking to town. It was a considerable distance, and took about two hours with the cart, but Mother wanted to get in and out of Berkeley before noon, so we would have time to unload the cart before the sun set again.