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"Night games tonight?" Blake asked.
"Anything you like," Valentine said. "Fishing, a deer run, or I can read you stories."
Blake put up with stories only when he was very tired. He didn't like to sit and just listen or read along.
"Night games!"
For night games Blake wore a football helmet with padding sewn in at the sides so it fit snugly on his rather narrow head.
The games took place in the old St. Louis children's museum, a warren of chutes and ladders and tunnels made out of assorted bits of industrial and artistic junk from the pre-2022
world. The Grogs used it to train young warriors. At night the Grogs loosed their young on each other, to chase and brawl.
Some of the tougher human children sometimes joined in, also suitably padded and helmeted. Blake's helmet had a mesh with eye-slits attached to the grill-Valentine once explained to another human parent that the Grogs sometimes gouged with their long fingers-and with leather gloves on it would be hard to distinguish him from any other skinny young boy.
He could even shriek like a prepubescent when the mood hit.
There were no human kids there the night he took Blake. Valentine relaxed a little. Blake sometimes liked to show off by executing a jump no human could make and sometimes when wrestling he reversed his arm joints.
The most common Grog game was for one of the less dominant males to run up and swat a tougher one and then try to get away. The Grog children clearly considered it something of a coup if they could get away from Blake; they would swing or dangle from climbing obstacles and hit him, or three would strike at once and run off in different directions. Blake took the punches and swats with good humor and pursued his attackers and threw and pinned them when he could.
The roughhousing resulted in surprisingly few injuries. Young Grogs bounced like basketballs.
Valentine had stiffened the mesh in front of Blake's chin. Blake had acquired a good deal of self-control, but no sense taking chances.
He sat, watching Blake play. When Blake disappeared into one of the ill-lit buildings filled with noise and shadow, he followed, carrying a mug of sweet tea hot from a thermos.
A second thermos waited in Valentine's pack for when Blake tired. It was filled with warm chicken blood.
* * * *
They fished the next day, then crossed into the woods on the north side of the Missouri the night after that, going on a deer run in the early morning.
Blake didn't have his helmet this time, just a hat with earflaps.
Valentine and Blake had a unique manner of deer hunting. They'd cover their scent as best they could with deer droppings and then wait. The deer liked to forage at the edges of old roads and broken-up parking lots. When they decided a herd was close enough, Valentine tapped Blake and they took off after a deer.
Last time they'd gone on a deer run, Valentine had been able to sprint ahead of Blake, even with his stiff leg. This time Blake beat him early in their dash after the bouncing white tails.
Valentine had that moment most fathers had, much earlier in the quick-developing Blake's case, when the son outdoes the father physically. He pulled up and sheathed his knife, relegated to the role of watcher.
Sometimes the deer crisscrossed and Blake got confused. But this time he bounded onto a big young buck at the fringe. Valentine had a moment's doubt, wondering if Blake would be taken for a brief ride before he lost his grip, but he brought it down like a cougar, clawing his way onto its neck and biting.
By the time he trotted up to Blake, the deer's eyes had gone dead and sightless. Blake raised a blood-smeared smile to him.
"Clean kill, Blake. Let's dress it. Sissy will have venison for the whole winter now, or deer sausage to go with her eggs."
At noon-Blake liked to sleep through the days-Valentine settled him down for a nap.
They'd return with the deer carried on a pole between them that night. He read to Blake a little from Charlotte's Web, but Blake seemed unimpressed by Wilbur's predicament.
"Pigs don't talk," Blake said, "story is not real"
"It's a story. In stories pigs can talk. So can spiders and rats."
Blake didn't understand why, if the pig could talk to Templeton or Charlotte A. Cavatica, it couldn't talk to Fern.
Blake would rather watch the bugs moving in the grasses and find out what they were doing. Maybe he was just scientifically minded. Valentine still found it disturbing that he couldn't summon his imagination to aid him in understanding the story.
