A Novel

I

I am a bird. Soaring and spinning through the sky. Wings beating, plummeting, swooping. I can see him far below. A fine skinny looking thing. Mess of brown hair, grey eyes. A flick of his wrist and a flash of silver. A moment of panic, but it passes too quickly. I fall, tumbling through the air, limp, without the grace I should have. The world goes dark.

Love is like a bird. Moving too fast, dizzying and erratic, soaring, weightless, until you fall.

She walks over to me.

"Another one?"

I nod.

Wordless, we stand, staring at the little broken body. Wings splayed, head tilted to the side, feathers slowly turning red. A glint of metal sticks out from underneath the wing. The sun reflects off it into my eyes, a flashing shame, your fault, your fault, your fault.

Finally Hanna crouches to scoop up the little bird. She removes the tiny knife from the feathers, placing it on the ground by my feet. She buries the little body next to a tree, not far from the river. She knows not to ask why I killed it. I couldn't explain it if I wanted to. It's like a messed up instinct. I just see a bird and I know it shouldn't be flying. It's not fair that some tiny bird should get to fly when... Well, it doesn't matter now.

I pick up the four inch long knife, swirling it in the river to wash off the taint of blood.

"It was a sparrow." Hanna kneels beside me.

"I'm sorry." I whisper.

She sighs and shakes her head. "It's fine. I'll make dinner." She takes the tiny blade from me, careful

not to touch the sharp edge. "No more knives though, Sawyer."

- - - -

Half an hour later, when I enter the hut I can smell the stew she's making. Hanna's traps turned up a brush rabbit this morning which she cooks with wild asparagus and dandelion leaves. Being more prepared than me, Hanna had brought a camp stove and two small pots and spoons to cook with. She hadn't however, known anything about cooking, much less cooking only with ingredients from the Oregon forests. It had taken me about a month to teach her how to make anything remotely edible, but now she was something of an expert. Apparently six months of cooking only with what they caught and gathered could make a real chef out a person.

She brings the pot over to the makeshift mat I made and we eat on the floor in silence. Finally she talks.

"I was thinking and I think we should go up to the east side of the valley tomorrow. I found a spot where they might have amaranth. Plus it would give you some thing to do." She didn't say the unspoken so that you don't kill birds.

"You didn't actually go up there did you?"

"No, of course not. I just found it from the boulder." The boulder is a large jutting rock that came out at an angle from the hillside. Hanna can be frequently found sitting on the boulder gazing at the surrounding hills and valleys and the craggy peaks in the distance. It's also her lookout spot. She watches for wildlife and good foraging spots from that boulder.

"I think we should go check it out."

"Are you sure?" I respond. "That's farther from the hut than we've been in a long time. And what if..."

"I'll be fine. I haven't had one in a while." Hanna replies breezily.

I frown. "What about last week?"

"Sawyer." She sounds exasperated. "It's very sweet, but you don't need to worry about me. I'll survive."

I hesitate, but finally give in. "Ok, fine. You win. When are we heading out?"

Hanna regards me with a Thank you, trust me you need this expression. "I think we should be done with the snares by quarter-sky. If we leave then we'll have most of the day to explore."

"That sounds great." I smile fondly at her.

By the time I finish rinsing out the dishes and returning everything to it's place, the sky is starting to darken into a dusky evening grey. Back in the hut, I help Hanna unpack the sleeping bags onto two thin mats. Eventually I plan to sew a large bag out of scrap material so we can stuff it with leaves and make a mattress, however what with all the adjustments to actually living out here, I haven't had time yet.

The hut is a one room, ramshackle building. We discovered it as children once when we got lost in the forest on one of our summer road trips. Ever since, we'd always dreamed of turning it into a secret clubhouse, though we never imagined we would actually live in it. The hut has a concrete floor and plank wood walls. When we first discovered it, one wall had caved in and the roof leaked with hundreds of small gaps between the planks. The first week out here, we stuffed leaves between the boards, removed all the fallen wood, and put up a huge camouflage tarp where the wall had been.

Hanna originally guessed that the hut was abandoned from the gold rush, but I still think it's an old logging cabin. Either way, the inside is minimally furnished, with one concrete counter top and a small washbasin, though the running water has long since stopped flowing.

After six months the hut has gotten a little more welcoming, with the last summer flowers drying on the sill of a single grimy window. A thin blanket hangs in the doorway, though we use stones to hold it closed at nighttime. A few of our attempts at tools litter the floor in one corner, along with two pots hanging against the wall. The best part though, is the books. After a few tries, Hanna and I managed to wedge two sticks into the wall and lay a thick strip of bark across them, creating a sort of shelf. When we first came, we brought around four books on wilderness survival and foraging in Oregon. Of course Hanna also brought her favorite trilogy, the Hunger Games.

Now, as the sky darkens into evening, Hanna switches on one of our camp lanterns, grabbing Mockingjay off the shelf. I pull a blanket around us and she opens the book to our placeholder. We read this way every night, her nudging me gently when she finishes the page. I'm sure she knows a good amount of the books by heart by now, but we keep reading them. We started with the foraging and survival books, before moving on to these, but we've read almost every book twice by now. 

 We read until the light fades to almost nothing and our eyes are heavy with sleep. Hanna sets down the book and I turn off the lantern. I can see the outline of the doorway and the profile of Hanna's face in the dark.

"Sawyer?"

"Yeah?"

"Goodnight."

"Goodnight."