Off Season - Jack Ketchum [29]
Now she was stuffing the mixture into the intestines and tying off the ends. When the man was finished with his softwood fire, she would wait for the smoke to die down and add some hardwood and then roast them for their dinner.
Tomorrow she would jerk the remainder of the kill. From the loins they would put aside steaks for supper and then slice the flesh of hams and shoulders. They would lay the slices in a pile and cut them through to strips two or three inches wide by four to six inches long. Then they would soak the strips in seawater and dry them in greenwood racks over the fire to keep the flies away. In a few days the meat would be black and dry. It would keep almost indefinitely.
Over her head the cage rattled. She paid no attention. The other two women laughed and pointed. The cage was made of metal grating and hung suspended from a heavy rope that passed through a ring secured to the roof of the cave, twenty feet above them. The rope fed down the wall and fastened to a large cleat. All this material they had found in the dumps a few miles away. There was a boy inside the cage now, perhaps fifteen years of age. He was naked and lay sprawled along its floor, long since motionless with fear. Now and then a tremor would pass through his body like an evil wind and rattle the grating. That was good. It would tenderize the boy’s flesh to allow him to fear. The female had died much too quickly. And she had had some difficulty with the hindquarters as a consequence.
She watched the man remove his clothes from the rack. Now, she thought. Ignoring the other woman, she gathered up the food and went to the fire. “They say there are more now,” she told the man.
“How many?”
“Three men. Two more women.”
He looked at the boy lying in the cage, lying in his own vomit, and smiled. Soon they would fill the cage, pack it tight. The boy would have to stand. Or die. They were great warriors. Life was better now.
The man had little memory and no sense of time at all, but he could remember their cold, spare life on the island—before the men with guns had come to search for those they had taken from the boat. He did not understand guns except to know that they brought a quick death and that they terrified him. Before the men with guns, they had lived off the sea for the most part, as the old ones had taught them to do in the lean days, off crabs and clams and algae, off baited night lines and a rude gigging.
He liked gigging even now. You would dangle a long smooth hook into the water, above which you had suspended bits of bone to shine and flutter in the sun, and these would attract the fish. Then when one was near enough you gave the line a fast jerk and impaled the fish and dragged it ashore. You had to be fast and sure. Or else you could sharpen a small bone at both ends and hide it inside your bait, and when the fish swallowed the bait he also took the bone. A tug on the line and the deadly bone slipped sideways inside him. The fish died for a long time.
He smiled at the thought.
But those were meager days. He remembered the skeletal faces of the old ones—now gone—the old man and the old woman who had called him by a name. He could not recall the name. He remembered that the old woman was Ag-Ness, and that the old man had once gone nightly to light the great Light. But they both had died before it occurred to him to ask what either name or activity had signified.
He watched the woman pile hardwood on the fire and slipped the red shirt over his shoulders. The smell was good now. He liked the smell of burning.
When the men had come with guns, they had had to hide. For many days they had fasted. They had nearly starved. The men returned each day for many days, and the island was no longer safe, and finally they had fled.
At first life on the mainland