Rian resumes his story, grateful that his audience seems welcoming. He’s keenly aware his delivery leaves a lot to be desired, but the group seems interested to hear where he’s going with all of this. Unconsciously, he’d left them on an emotive note, as the light had been failing while he relayed the ending of his childhood. It was lucky timing, nothing more. He shivers. Even mentioning chance sends chills down his spine.
He spent some time pondering luck, scanning his friends. Thae must be a believer. Wasn’t worship related? A deity just a cosmic ally bending fortune your way? He feels guilty at another unintended slight against the acolyte. From the little he knows of religion, the half-elf would likely feel insulted by the comparison. Something about service without thought of reward? And he suspects there’s some notional difference between luck and fate…
He can guess Anuk or Hugo’s thoughts on the topic. Both seem to approach life with a lack of concern, albeit from polar opposite directions. Like they can’t believe they might ever fail. Hugo seems certain he can charm anything or anyone to his side. Anuk’s approach seems more like grim determination that she’d stick in bad luck’s craw, drown it in her blood.
Then, of course, it dawned that only he had had any reaction to ‘luck’. Thanks dad. The others, he realised, were likely reacting to a boy coming to comprehend his mother’s death. That made him feel stupid. An introduction to empathy for beginners. Others may harbour different thoughts. Who knew.
Now, with their camp set up, they were sat around the fire enveloped in the aroma of woodsmoke and their dinner. The anticipation of the stew in his little cauldron couldn’t be hurting their appetite for the story. That, and the fact it might be preferable to facing one another in uncomfortable silence. Easier to continue his tale than tackle the weird undercurrent running between them, he thinks. Besides, the combination of firewood, meat and foraged vegetables were sharpening a few better memories from life with his dad.
-x-
There was little to recommend their day-to-day existence. Donal spent most days in a bubble of sullen silence, either butchering in the cold store or selling to their diminishing pool of customers. His dad wasn’t a ‘people person’, a lack of charm aggravated by his obvious disdain for serving others. His mum had usually fronted the shop, another fount of regret following her disappearance. His life was scrabbling, mostly by trial and error, to fill the void she had left in her wake.
His father had a very binary approach to life. Rian had never fully charted the demarcation, simply some things were Donal’s domain and others wouldn’t even occur to him. As with any child trapped in such a structure, obscured from understanding by a man who never discussed thoughts or feelings, Rian differentiated by rote. It didn’t seem to map to chauvinism, which the child could have believed. His dad would cook, frequently did until Rian learned to safely prepare and properly season food. But baking was beneath Donal’s attention, despite his appetite for the fare once Rian had pierced bread’s mysteries.
And thus, life continued, swaddling the boy in silence. He understood he was unhappy but lacked the vocabulary to break the feeling into smaller pieces. Grief, hopelessness and virtual imprisonment were the waters in which he swam. And like water, he was submerged. It was almost invisible to him. But then, around the time Rian was learning that ‘she’s gone’ meant his mum would never return, he was introduced to a side of his father he’d never encountered. And that gifted him the wilds.
As far back as he could remember, Donal would disappear for a couple of days each week, returning from these absences with full carcasses or slabs of meat for the shop. Young Rian had simply accepted this as a fact of life. He wasn’t ignorant that meat came from living animals – after all, a butcher’s shop will quickly instruct one how the literal sausage is made. The yawning void in his education was of animals’ pre-meat existence.
And while he understood their tiny island was surrounded by forest, endless in every direction, his experience of it had dropped to zero while his mother was unwell. By the time Donal decided he had passed some developmental landmark, Rian’s memories of walks in the forest (most likely the remaining wooded patches on the town side of the bridges) seemed surreal. Vague like half-remembered dreams, diminished to blurred sensory impressions.
-x-
“Y’got to relax yer arms, boy.” Donal’s muttering to him, voice low, sounding almost slurred as the man avoids hard consonants. Up ahead, a doe has her nose pressed against the trunk of a tree, worrying at ivy growth over the bark. She isn’t fully relaxed, though, and the munching is interrupted every few seconds as the animal’s ears twitch and rotate. She’s the image of a prey beast beginning to realise all is not well.
Butcher’s tone could be mistaken for harsh, but Rian’s certain it’s just his natural dourness leaking through. After all, he had nodded at the form of his boy’s draw. That would be rapturous applause from anyone more demonstrative. Who wasn’t concerned the beast they had been tracking might escape. Rian knows that, while he’s only wielding a shortbow, his dad’s impressed by his strength. The man hasn’t even seen fit to notch a backup arrow. Rian’s close to being able to draw a longbow. He has the raw muscle, or most of it; he just needs to grow a few more inches to handle the weapon safely.
His current struggle’s twofold. It’s taking most of his strength to propel an arrow with enough force to reach the doe and retain sufficient momentum to kill her. And that’s making his arm tremble. More importantly, the contained pressure is rendering his movements jagged, imprecise. The other side of the coin, he’s coming to realise, is that his father’s marksmanship far eclipses his own. The man’s a natural but seems unaware of that. And worse, he’s frustrated when his son can’t replicate his talent.
Rian, the overly tall, unnaturally broad boy who bounces off every doorframe he tries to pass through, is already adept at moving through the forest. His eyesight’s sharp, and he has a precocious ability to differentiate herbs, mushrooms and other nourishing treats secreted in the emerald tangle. He has great instincts for tracking and has quickly adapted to the movements of the wind. The boy naturally keeps prey within range of his blunt senses while obfuscating himself from the sharpened perceptions of predator and prey animals alike.
He calms his breathing, tries to relax his shoulders without letting the arrow slip from between his fingers. Sees the deer alert, ears turning away from where they’re concealed as birds flap noisily through the nearby canopy. He exhales, wills the arrow to fly true…
…and frowns as his fingers twitch-release the projectile. From his intention of skewering the animal’s heart, the fumbled shot perforates the beast’s left lung, ricocheted off a rib on its way in. The traumatised creature takes off, but drunkenly, legs already losing power. It won’t be a long chase, hardly a chase at all, but he can feel the dull glow of dad’s disappointment settle over them.
Donal doesn’t believe in excuses. Doesn’t hold with anything close. Beneath the man’s glum silence, foundational to it, lies responsibility for one’s own actions. For all the man demonstrates few gentle or nurturing emotions, he’s not usually unkind. Nor violently angry. To Rian’s mind, this kill was a matter of chance. He shot from close to the limits of his range, and he’s ‘missed’ by an inch or two. Nothing at all when factoring the size of the target. But he once described a shot to Donal as ‘unlucky’. Once. His dad’s round face had purpled, glowing with rage, all concern lost for the game sprinting away as he shouted – shouted! – shattering the forest silence.
At least Donal’s crouching in place as Rian pulls his javelin from the soil at his feet and gives chase. No need to confirm the kill, then, but he knows he’s diminished the meat’s quality. He anticipates picking shards of bone and wood out of the messy wound prior to butchering. And yet, rushing quietly through the trees towards the doe, now collapsed in the undergrowth, he feels the air of freedom pumping through his lungs. Even in the shadow of his father’s disapproval, he knows he’s meeting the man on his favoured terrain. Feels he’s an inch away from winning over his harshest critic.
And maybe the bow’s never going to be his be-all and end-all. Would that matter? Since Donal has that covered, wouldn’t that actually be a shame? There’s little sense trying to tackle a bear, or a boar even, with just arrows. Even with his dad’s mastery, beasts like that stayed up and dangerous way longer than any hunter could afford. Like expecting a gnat’s bites to scare or kill them. He’s standing over the doe, her eyes rolling with terror. Mutters an apology under his breath as he pushes the javelin into the heart his arrow had missed. Peace returns to the green space.
The hairs on the back of his neck prickle as he focuses in the direction the deer had startled. Something, some shift of shadow, certainly no noise, convinces him he’s being stalked. And with the smell of fresh blood to heighten the peril. He risks a glance at Donal, sees the man drawing an arrow. Reads that his dad’s just reacting to his body language.
And then it begins. A growl, an angry cat but deeper. The undergrowth wavers as something large pads across the dead deer’s blank gaze. The merest suggestion of grey fur, muted in the forest light, ideal for the cover in which something’s prowling. The briefest flash of a golden eye, feline pupil locked on the boy holding his breath, trying to loom larger.
He raises his empty hand for his dad to see, extends the javelin to track the hidden beast’s movement. A lynx, he guesses, that had perhaps caught the scent of his prey. And was now incited by the blood escaping its fresh meat. No need for a fight, he hopes, wishing he had more than 10 years behind him. Or, more importantly, under him.
-x-
For some reason, that was the memory he held four years later, on the last night Oakbridge had been his home. His handling of the lynx, intimidating the hungry beast into withdrawing, had apparently served as another progress point. Increasingly, the forest forays had become the son’s alone, his dad meeting him to transport the meat. And then he was alone in even that, once his 12th year growth spurt had filled him out.
Donal continued to disappear at other times, undefined ‘trips’ of three or more days every few months. These increased in quantity if not in length once Rian was reliably supplying game meat and fowl. With more reminiscences of the night he lost his mum as Donal, so obsessed with moderating one’s own actions, would return dishevelled, increasingly smelling of strong drink.
It had seemed an extension of Rian’s forest sense, some reading of the town’s rhythm feeling upset. Or maybe, he thought later, guiltily, it had just been luck that sent him out that night. He’d been expecting Donal’s return that evening, for as much as that could be predicted. And yet when his instincts pushed him out of the door, into the wet night illuminated by the slightest sliver of a moon, they were scraping with apprehension. Something was wrong, just nothing he could define.
He was soaked through by the time he located Donal, but the grating feeling had kept him looking. It was immediately obvious when he turned that last corner. The silhouette on the cobbles, limbs splayed the odd angles of the comprehensively dead, was obviously he. A short man, running to fat, denuded of the power he held over his son. And had wielded uncaringly, for all that it hadn’t been vicious. Staring into the dark sky, neck angled uncomfortably thanks to the boy’s largest meat cleaver buried deep in the back of his skull.
Rian hadn’t noticed it was missing, hadn’t needed the implement while his dad was away. But it had been wielded with the naked force of hatred. Or, whispered the part of him that had watched the deaths of many creatures, the force of a boy who was practically running the place now. Freakishly big, for a child. ‘Oi seen ‘im carryin the carcass of a big buck, longer’n ‘imself.’
He knew this couldn’t go well. He wasn’t concerned about his survival, he knew he could achieve that. He didn’t mourn his dad either, not really, knew that fact meant he had to leave. That said, it was early enough in the morning that he could take his bare essentials with him. But to where he must escape? Never in question.
Deep enough into the green that his life couldn’t find him.
