Red Rock

Chapter 13: One more for the crowd (Part 2)

Sam was a breath of fresh air from the intense environment Jacob and Daire brought to the cabin. A simple kind of ignorance mixed with a certain vibrancy made life at the cabin more bearable and their situation seem less dire. The dilution of testosterone was doing wonders for their habitat.

Daire was delighted to see that almost every trap had a small lifeless furry creature in the center. Their snapped backs and broken necks made death quick and painless. Daire cycled through each of the marked forests, taking down the vertical indicators for every trap he retrieved and putting them in his bag. The elation was short lived when he came across a triggered but empty trap. Daire set down his bag and slipped off the traps he had set on his shoulder. The traps had been fiddled with. "Coyotes," he said aloud, shaking his head. There were only remnants of hairy flesh remaining on the empty traps. The clamps that shut to hold the prey were licked clean of any substance. The sitting corpses of small rodents were easy prey for any predator scavenging in the area.

"How many did you get?" Jacob asked, hungrily awaiting the outcome of the harvest.

"Fifteen," Daire said, sounding mediocre.

Jacob frowned. "Only fifteen? Did you set them like I taught you?"

Daire nodded. "We had nineteen sprung traps."

"Then how do we only have fifteen rodents? You didn't set them how I told you to."

"Yes, I did. Something ate them. Coyotes are my guess. It was four consecutive forests that I found an empty trap. Maybe it's their hunting ground?"

"Fuck!" Jacob blurted, rubbing his head. "That's twenty percent of our meat! We have what? Maybe fifteen pounds worth of jerky from all that?"

"Its fine," Daire soothed. "We can dig into our ration packs this week and save the meat for jerky."

"That's still only ninety pounds by weeks end." Jacob paused again, thinking of a solution to the problem. "We need to kill the coyotes."

"They might not even be a problem, Jacob. Once we complete a cycle through the near forests they'll be gone."

"They're not going anywhere. They're scavengers. They'll keep eating what we catch."

"Relax. I'll go set the traps in new forests. The coyotes won't even know they're there."

"Alright," Jacob said, sounding unconvinced. "What else can we do." He turned to Sam. "Ready to learn how to make jerky?"

Sam looked excited. "Of course!"

*

Daire reset the traps in different forests, slowly traveling from one to another, eager to release another trap to lighten the load. He was tired. The energy in his legs had already dissipated from collecting the traps in the morning. 'Almost done,' he encouraged himself, jingling the five remaining traps in his bag, hopping over a log into another forest.

It looked just like every other one he had been to. They all blended in with the next, encouraging a fast entrance and exit. The trees were small and thick, mellowing as they travelled to the center, and the ground was slightly moist from the body of water in the middle. It was all the same.

Daire walked to the center of the tiny forest, freezing in his tracks when he came across the body of water in the middle of the woods. "Hey!" he excited, waving to the female drinking from the pond.

The fit middle aged woman turned wickedly on the dime and gave Daire a death glare. "Stay back!" she yelled grabbing a rock from the ground and chucking it in his direction. The rock whizzed by Daire, slamming into a tree behind him.