Chapter 10
Luke
After we were in Dillon together, Anna and I headed back to the cabin. She helped me unload the new meats I had purchased and this time they were fresh. I had enjoyed shopping with her. The more time I spent with Anna, the more I enjoyed her company. She was open-minded about life, and she wasn’t afraid of hard work, but she was elegant and graceful at the same time.
They said it was impossible to find a perfect woman, but Anna was pretty damn close.
While Anna put the kettle on in the kitchen after everything had been unpacked, I built up the fire. It crackled, licking around the fresh wood I had brought in from outside, and the cabin warmed up quickly so Anna and I were able to take off our coats and boots.
“I’m going outside for a while,” I said to Anna when the fire was ready.
“Why?”
“I set some traps this morning to see if we can catch some game. Now that the storm has passed animals might be around, and we can have a good dinner tonight. Have you ever tasted deer?”
Anna shook her head. “They’re fresh out of those in New York.” She chuckled.
“Well, hopefully, we find something. I think you’ll like it, and I can cook up a mean deer.”
“Are there bears in the area?” Anna asked.
I nodded. “They usually hibernate in winter, though. I doubt we’ll see any of those around until the snow melts. But there are plenty of woodland creatures, deer, the odd mountain lion here and there.”
Anna raised her eyebrows. “And we went out for a walk in the middle of the night.”
“They don’t come close to the cabin,” I said. “They know there are people here and they know people kill them. We’re safe as long as we stick to the cabin and I didn’t set traps that far out into the woods. Only a few yards out to catch the few creatures that dare wander close enough.”
“It’s so different, thinking you catch your own food out here. I know it’s what we did once upon a time as cave men, I guess, but we’ve become very comfortable and domesticated.”
I nodded. “It’s scary to think how dull people have become. “
“Well,” Anna said. “Life out here certainly isn’t dull, and I like the idea of fighting for survival, making it happen so we stay alive. I’d like to try whatever you can find.”
She was so open about everything. I liked that about her. Anna wasn’t like other women I had known growing up. She didn’t mind getting her hands dirty if it came down to it, and she wouldn’t cry over a broken nail. She was the kind of woman I could take on a hike, and she wouldn’t complain about bugs or animal droppings.
“I’ll be back,” I said and walked to her to give her a quick kiss on the mouth.
Anna smiled at me, her dark eyes beautiful and trusting. I stepped out of the cabin back into the blistering cold. Despite the sun shining through patches in the clouds and the storm having died down for a while, the cold had a bite to it that reminded everyone winter wasn’t over yet.
The trees were covered by a blanket of snow that lay perfectly on each leaf and each bunch of pine needles. The snow was thick and undisturbed, my footprints from earlier the only footprints that cut through the powder that had fallen throughout the night. Even though the undisturbed snow was beautiful, it was also a bad sign. No animals had come in this direction. There weren’t any tracks.
When I was a little boy, my dad had taught me how to track animals in the snow, what their footprints looked like, and how I could spot a pattern by the way the prints were laid out in the snow. He’d taught me to follow those tracks to burrows or fresh water and to see when there was a scuffle. I had used so much of what my dad had taught me out here in the mountains the past year, it was as if my dad was by my side all the time.
I’d had to leave them behind when I’d gone on the run. I had cut off all communication with them because I was scared Frankie and his men would use them as leverage to get me back if they knew where to find them. Frankie would stop at nothing, and my parents didn’t deserve a life of fear because I had made stupid choices.
I walked the trail I had followed earlier in the morning to set the traps and checked them one by one. They were all empty, as I had expected judging by the lack of tracks. Strange, I had never had problems with animals being scarce before. I only caught a few animals when I needed food, and I tried to put my traps in different places so they didn’t start avoiding certain areas. Animals were smart.
I wondered if they had realized I was here to stay and they had started looking for other grounds. But that seemed unlikely. I had been trapping the whole year I had been staying here, and the animals had never moved away to greener pastures, as it were.
The forest around me was quiet, with no birds chirping in the trees. The storm had driven them all away.
A whistling sound made me turn my head and listen. It was almost the sound of a person whistling, but not quite. I recognized the sound but wanted to be sure. A few chirping sounds following, close to what birds made but again, not quite.
I knew what I was hearing. A mountain lion was somewhere close by. People often mistook the sounds of a mountain lion for birds chirping of someone whistling, but I knew better than that. I had grown up out here, and it was mountain lion country.
It explained why the animals were so scarce, why I hadn’t been able to trap any. With a mountain lion around, it was dangerous for all animals out here. Aside from the bears in the summer, the mountain lions were at the top of the food chain.