For three days, the weather holds. The woods are a symphony of cracking and snapping, as the trees and the river slough off their ice. Fat, jewel-colored droplets of water rain down on our heads as we move through the woods, looking for berries, animal burrows, and good places to hunt. There is a great feeling of release and celebration, almost as if spring has really come, even though we know this is only a temporary reprieve. Raven is the only one who seems no happier.
We must be on constant lookout for food now. On the third morning, Raven nominates me to check the traps with her. Every time we find one empty, Raven curses a little under her breath. The animals have mostly gone underground.
We hear the animal before we get to the last trap, and Raven quickens her pace. There is a frantic sound of scrabbling against the brittle leaves that carpet the forest floor, and a panicked chittering, too. A large rabbit has its hind leg caught in the metal teeth of the trap. Its fur is stained with spots of dark blood. Panicked, the rabbit tries to pull itself forward; then falls back, panting, on its side.
Raven squats and removes a long-handled knife from her bag. It is sharp but spotted with rust and, I imagine, old blood. If we leave the rabbit here, I know it will twist and turn and writhe until it bleeds out from the leg—or, more likely, it will eventually give up and die slowly of starvation. Raven will be doing it a favor by killing it quickly. Still, I can’t watch. I’ve never been on trap duty. I don’t have the stomach for it.
Raven hesitates. Then, suddenly, she shoves the knife into my hand.
“Here,” she says. “You do it.” I know it’s not squeamishness on her part; she hunts all the time. This is another one of her tests.
The knife feels surprisingly heavy. I look at the rabbit, scrabbling and sputtering on the ground. “I—I can’t. I’ve never killed anything before.”
Raven’s eyes are hard. “Well, it’s time to learn.” She puts two hands on the squirming rabbit—one on its head, one on its belly, stilling it. The rabbit must think she’s trying to help. It stops squirming. Even so, I can see the rapid, desperate pattern of its breathing.
“Don’t make me,” I say, both ashamed because I have to plead with her and angry for being made to.
Raven stands up again. “You still don’t get it, do you?” she says. “This isn’t a game, Lena. And it doesn’t end here, or when we go south, or ever. What happened at the homestead…” She breaks off, shaking her head. “There is no room for us anywhere. Not unless things change. We’ll be hunted. Our homesteads will be bombed and burned. The borders will grow, and cities will expand, and there will be no Wilds left, and nobody to fight, and nothing to fight for. Do you understand?”
I say nothing. Heat is creeping up the back of my neck, making me feel light-headed.
“I won’t always be around to help you,” she says, and kneels again, one knee in the dirt. This time she parts the rabbit’s fur with her fingers, exposing a pink, fleshy bit of neck, a throbbing artery. “Here,” she says. “Do it.”
It strikes me then that the animal under her hands is just like us: trapped, driven out of its home, desperately fighting for breath, for a few more inches of space. And suddenly I am blindingly angry at Raven—for her lectures, and her stubbornness, and for thinking that the way that you help people is by driving them against a wall, by beating them down until they fight back.
“I don’t think it’s a game,” I say, and I can’t keep the anger out of my voice.
“What?”
“You think you’re the only one who knows anything.” I’m clenching my fists, one against my thigh, one around the handle of the knife. “You think you’re the only one who knows about loss, or being angry. You think you’re the only one who knows about running.” I’m thinking of Alex, and I hate her for that, too; for bringing that back to me. The grief and anger is swelling, a black wave.
“I don’t think I’m the only one,” Raven says. “We’ve all lost something. That’s the rule now, isn’t it? Even in Zombieland. They lose more than most, maybe.” She raises her eyes to mine. For some reason I can’t stop shaking.
Raven speaks with quiet intensity. “Here’s something else you might as well learn now: If you want something, if you take it for your own, you’ll always be taking it from someone else. That’s a rule too. And something must die so that others can live.”
My breath stops. For a moment the world stops turning, and everything is silence and Raven’s eyes.
“But you know all about that, don’t you, Lena?” She never raises her voice, but I feel the words physically—my head starts pounding, my chest is full of searing pain. All I can think is Don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it, and I’m falling into the long dark tunnels of her eyes, back to that terrible dawn at the border, when the sun seeped across the bay like a slow stain.
She says, “Didn’t you try to cross with someone else? We heard the rumors. You were with somebody…” And then, as though she’s only just remembering, although now I see that she has known—of course she has known—all along, and hatred and fury are welling up so fast and thick I think I will drown. “His name was Alex, wasn’t it?”
I am in midair, lunging at her, before I realize I’ve moved. The knife is in my hand and I am going to drive it straight into her throat, bleed her and gut her and leave her to be picked apart by the animals.
Just as I land on top of her, she jabs me in the ribs, pushing me off balance. At the same time her left hand clamps around my right wrist and she pulls me down, hard, driving the knife straight into the rabbit’s neck, exactly where she had been exposing its artery. I let out a small cry. I am still holding the knife, and she wraps her fingers around my hand to keep it there. The rabbit jerks once under my hand and then goes still. For a moment I imagine that I can still feel its heartbeat skimming under my fingertips, a quick echo. The rabbit’s body is warm. A small bit of blood seeps out from around the tip of the knife.
Raven and I are so close I can smell her breath and the sweat on her clothes. I try to jerk away from her, but she just grips me tighter. “Don’t be angry at me,” she says. “I’m not the one who did it.” For emphasis, she forces my hand down a little farther. The knife goes another half inch into the rabbit, and more blood bubbles up around its tip.
“Fuck you,” I say, and suddenly I’m crying for the first time since I came to the Wilds; for the first time since Alex died. My throat closes up, and I can barely choke the words out. My anger is ebbing away now, replaced with a crazy grief for the stupid, dumb, trusting animal, who was running too fast and didn’t look where it was going and still—even after its leg was scissored in the trap—believed it might escape. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
“I’m sorry, Lena. That’s the way it is.” And she does look sorry: Her eyes have softened now, and I see how tired she is, and must always have been—to live for years and years and years this way, having to rip and shred just for a space to breathe.
Raven releases me, finally, and quickly and expertly frees the dead rabbit from the trap. She wrenches the knife from the rabbit’s skin, wipes it once against the ground, and slips it into her belt. She loops the rabbit’s feet through a metal ring on her backpack, so it dangles, headfirst, toward the ground. When she stands, it sways like a pendulum. She is still watching me.
“And now we live for another day,” she says, and turns and walks away.
I read once about a kind of fungus that grows in trees. The fungus begins to encroach on the systems that carry water and nutrients up from the roots to the branches. It disables them one by one—it crowds them out. Soon, the fungus—and only the fungus—is carrying the water, and the chemicals, and everything else the tree needs to survive. At the same time it is decaying the tree slowly from within, turning it minute by minute to rot.
That is what hatred is. It will feed you and at the same time turn you to rot.
It is hard and deep and angular, a system of blockades. It is everything and total.
Hatred is a high tower. In the Wilds, I start to build, and to climb.