ONE IF BY LAND, TWO IF BY SUBMARINE

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER THREE 

Kep didn't see T.J. the rest of the day—not during riding lessons, which Max refused to participate in, and not in the dinner line. Tela dashed a bit late to her usual spot, still wearing the shimmery pink dress and holding a LIBERTY TO ANIMALS sign. The sketch showed caged chickens and penned pigs.

Before Kep could congratulate her again on her shooting, the cook, a fat man wearing an apron covered in faded red stains, stormed out from behind the food table holding a wooden spoon like a hatchet. "Someone took wire cutters to the chicken coop!" He aimed the spoon at Tela. "That's stealing property!"

She sniffed. "Maybe someone doesn't think living creatures are prop erty. Maybe someone saw them as prisoners of war to be rescued."

The cook smacked his spoon against his open palm. "They're animals! If God didn't mean for us to eat them he wouldn't have made them out of meat!"

The dinner line grew behind Kep. Some diners seemed amused, others aggravated.

"Don't you think it's a bit hypocritical," Tela asked the cook, "to be reenacting this whole liberty thing while you suppress the rights of animals?"

The cook's face flamed. He whirled and returned to his spot at the food table. As the line moved forward, Tela stood to one side, silently holding her sign, eyeing the diners. When Kep took a plate, the cook slapped something black onto it.

"What's this?" It had a strange shape and even stranger texture.

 "Beaver tail. Roast it in the fire." He gestured to several campfires blazing nearby.

Kep tried not to think of the fuzzy brown creature working on its dam. While he wasn't vegetarian and certainly not vegan, he didn't eat swim- mers, anything that shared his joy being in water. He'd never told anyone that; even Mom thought he just didn't like the taste of fish. "No thanks."

"You're going vegan?" Tela's eyes lit up "Fab! After dinner, I'm going to report what I think were spur marks on a horse. Spurs! Can you believe it? Want to come with? We vegans need to stick together."

Kep shook his head. "I'm not quite there." He still worried her animal rights protests might not go over well at the final competition. "Not to be rude, but have you ever considered toning it down a bit? There's a girl on my swim team who's vegan, but she doesn't treat meat eaters like serial killers. She just quietly eats her tofu hotdogs and leaves everyone else to do their own thing."

"Obviously her quietly doing her own thing didn't change your think- ing. Most people don't want to change. They like their drive-through hamburgers and don't want to know about the animal inside the bun. You have to agitate people sometimes to make change. It's not fun. But you can't lead from the crowd."

"Yeah. Whatever. I'll catch you later." Kep plucked a couple pieces of hardtack—a tooth-cracking biscuit popular in army camps—from a basket, took a bowl of vegetable soup, and headed off to find T.J.

Five minutes later, he spotted T.J. roasting his portion of beaver. As he got closer, he heard T.J. giving his Bombast impersonation. Several soldiers had gathered to listen and laugh.

"Voices can be hard," T.J. said. "I started with bird calls." He gave an eerily perfect owl hoot.

"Hey, T.J.," Kep tapped his shoulder. "Can we talk?" 

"Sure." 

"I mean alone." 

"Soon as I finish cooking this thing." The fire sparked and the beaver tail on T.J.'s stick puffed to twice its size. A rail-thin man stepped in to help T.J. strip off the skin and slide the meat onto a plate.