Prepper

Chapter Eleven

It's quiet, I'm cold, and it's dark as pitch. My red-lensed torch is the sole source of light and it's scarcely enough illumination to operate by. A light drizzle drifts down from the black nothingness coating the world in uniform wetness. Merida is curled up in an impossibly tight ball at my feet, conserving her heat. She doesn't know what the hell is going on, this is her first duck hunt. Might as well be mine, I haven't sat in a blind since I was a teenager. I did it once, with my uncle, it was a miserable experience, much like the present. It's deja vu misery. We paddled out to the blinds in darkness and now we wait for daybreak, and for the ducks.

I slurp coffee from a thermos in an attempt to stay warm and awake. Mr. Henneman and I occupy this rickety blind, which is little more than a half-assed construction of scrap wood, merely a box cobbled together by drunken rednecks from what I can tell and the years have not been kind to it. The spongy floor has serious rot issues, if we aren't careful where we place our feet, we will find ourselves waist-deep in muck and marsh water. The box is haphazardly camouflaged with reeds and burlap, there are no creature comforts, a couple pine boards form a rudimetary bench and there is a small, crooked shelf to store a few items on. A large, rusty soup can sits on the floor, filled with years worth of cigarette butts. I push it to the corner with my foot. Empty shotshell hulls litter the floor from previous hunts.

Jake and Heather are in the other blind. Jake says she's a helluva shot and from what I can tell she is all business when it comes to hunting. She showed up in a Jeep dressed in head-to-toe camo, even her gun has that Mossy-Oak treatment. I can't tell if the two are romantically involved or not, there is a certain camaraderie between them. I can barely make out their blind in the murky darkness, just the unnatural right-angles of the box, a mist shrouded apparition. I hear a quiet giggle from time to time - I suspect Jake is letting loose with his off-colour jokes. Otherwise I only hear the soft lapping of water beneath the blind and the wind through the trees on the distant shoreline.

I keep touching my nose, it's tender. Jake has me sparring now, I'm a bit of a punching bag for him it seems. He lands far more shots than I do and he's not big on safety equipment, so no head gear. He falls just short from saying that head injuries are good for you. He does insist that getting hit is good, once you get use to taking hits it's not such a big deal. I almost agree, until he lands a crushing body shot that leaves me on all fours gasping for breath. I want nothing more than to knock him on his ass, but that is far easier said than done. It's one of the many items still on my to-do list.

He's incredibly nimble, and my God his hands are fast, if I didn't know better, I'd think he had three arms. It seems like every time I open up my defense to throw a punch, I get two in return. He slips my headshots with ease and the body shots I do land don't seem to cause him much worry. All the while he picks me apart from all angles. I'm tempted at times to either tackle him or kick him in the groin, but I'm certain that wouldn't end well for me. Instead I soak up as much punishment as I can before conceding defeat. On a good day, I can hang in there until the egg timer rings a fifth time, on a bad day I'm soft-boiled.

My problem now is marrying the lessons Ari teaches with what Jake says. Ari tells me the best way to win in a conflict is to avoid it, if at all possible. Jake takes the approach that the best defense is a full out offensive, a pre-emptive strike, preferably accompanied with verbal slights. What might work best for me is to start with the open-handed peaceful "I don't want any trouble" bit, followed with a quick sucker punch, prior to sprinting to safety. Yeah, that's about my speed.

Mark is drawing slowly on a pipe, the aroma from the Captain Black is delicious and fills me with an aching nostalgia. My grandpa use to smoke that stuff. Memories of Cuckoo clocks and bowls of hard licorice candies come flooding back to me. Mark has hardly said a single word since we got to the blind, I always figured teachers for morning people, I might be wrong. He's lined up eight of those monstrous ten gauge paper shells on the shelf. I'm concerned about them getting wet and his gun exploding next to my head. Also on my to-do list - don't die today. My ears are not looking forward to him touching off that cannon of his. He appears to be lost in his thoughts. Sometimes that is the best place to be lost, and I leave him be.