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“I don’t argue that much,” I objected, and then we both cracked up. “Okay, maybe I argue a little,” I conceded. “But I wouldn’t try to walk through a wall.”
“Honey, a wall would be a fool not to open up for you,” he said. His eyes twinkled in the firelight.
“Why do you call me baby bear?” I asked suddenly.
“Because you were so fat and roly-poly when you were a baby,” he said. “And we’d bundle you up when it was cold so you were even fatter and rounder. And I called you my bear cub, and the first word you ever said was ‘grrrrrrr.’”
“That is not a word,” I objected.
“It’s a bear word,” he said sagely.
I hugged the blanket wrapped around my shoulders. “Well, I’m not a baby anymore.”
“I can’t just call you bear.”
“You can call me Jess,” I said. “It’s my name.”
“Your name is Sequoia,” he said.
I rolled my eyes. “I hate that name. It’s such a tree hugger name.”
He scratched his neck. “Can’t say as I’ve ever hugged a tree, but if you say so. Jess it is. Now tomorrow, you and I are going to go hunting, Jess. I know you don’t like killing animals, but we won’t survive the winter up here without it. I want you to learn. Take that bow of yours and I’ll take a rifle, and I can show you around. At the very least you’ve got to learn to find your way around here. It’s real easy to get lost, and real hard to find anyone that’s gotten lost.”
“I’ll try,” I said. I meant hunting. Even though it made me feel a little sick to think about killing something, I knew it wasn’t that different from eating something that had been killed for me. It wasn’t like the Wilkersons’ meatloaf and frozen dinners, that looked nothing like the animal they used to be. When my dad brought in a rabbit, it was a rabbit, not just nondescript pieces of meat. Once I got over eating that, doing my own killing seemed like it couldn’t be that hard.
I was right. I don’t really care anymore. It’s really, really hard to kill a thing quickly enough that you don’t have to see it suffer. And that bothers me. But not the killing itself. Not anymore.
Now I just feel bad that I’m not better at it.
