Chapter Thirteen: Day Two
During the night nothing had happened. I went to sleep and Cliff woke me up for my watch.
But now it's day two and we have to keep moving. We pack up our stuff and have three crackers each and an apple. We refill our water in the stream and keep following it. We left the crate behind and put the "lunch box" in my backpack.
Snap!
Snap!
Snap!
We hear branches on the ground breaking. But not from our feet.
"Climb!" I hiss at Cliff.
We climb up maple trees until we're concealed in the leaves.
The careers walk by.
"Where are they?" says Nixon. "That crate back there was empty and I'm pretty sure it didn't blow here from that stupid golden horn."
"We'll find them sooner or later. They may have gotten twelves in training, but we're still stronger." says Elextra.
They're hunting us down.
"Let's turn back and go back to the cornucopia, Butch will be waiting." says Zayden.
They turn around and walk back towards the south.
We wait fifteen minutes before climbing down again.
"Who's Butch?" I ask.
"The boy from Four, I think." he says.
We keep walking for hours before I see a clearing and the stream gets wider.
We're met by a beautiful lake surrounded by apple trees and wildflowers.
We pick more berries and head to the far side of the lake where there are willows.
"We should conceal our tent in there." says Cliff.
We do. I cover it with willow branches and the ones still on the tree camouflage it. We make a fire pit with a chimney leading to the ground.
Boom!
A cannon goes off and a hovercraft picks up someone in the middle of the twenty-four highest trees in the arena.
"Either one of the careers died, Butch or someone tried to steal from them and got killed." says Cliff.
"Yeah, probably."
Cliff catches more fish and I pick some apples.
For lunch we eat perch and freshly squeezed apple juice. We put the new apples in the "lunch box" and add some extra fish to our inventory.
It's finally sunny and warm and we take off our jackets.
We both take naps and go for a short swim and then dry in the sun.
Later on it starts raining again so we go inside.
The rain doesn't stop till late afternoon and the dirt is all muddy.
"Well, tributes this year sure won't have a shortage of water." I say. We laugh.
It starts getting windy again so we put our jackets back on.
"This is an interesting arena. It's exactly like back home in Seven. Rainy, sunny,windy. Rainy,sunny windy. With all the trees around it gives us a distinct advantage" says Cliff.
"Yeah, like at the Bloodbath we climb down fifty foot trees. Not everyone can do that." I say.
"Oh well. Anything to get us closer to home right."
"Yeah."
We have more fish for dinner. It's still raining and Cliff and I are getting bored. We just lie down in the tent doing nothing.
"Well, if that death was exciting enough for the Capitol, we should be safe from mutts for maybe a day." says Cliff.