A week passes.
My dad and I, we stay at our camp. Carol comes down twice and is greeted warmly neither time. Nobody else comes to see us and I don't blame them but it still makes my stomach heavy sometimes. I don't tell my dad that, though.
Dad takes me shooting every day, at the same place Rick and Shane took me and the others to before, and we never stay long, because we can't waste too much ammo, but I'm good. The little revolver Dad got for me fits right into my hand and by the fourth day I'm hitting the target nearly every time. That's when Dad starts letting me carry the gun, and he doesn't say so, but he's proud, I can tell.
When we're not target shooting, we're hunting. We hunt for us and for the camp. Dad lets me deliver the game to the others most of the time, though I have to come straight back, because (and he doesn't say this, either) he doesn't like for me to get out of his sight much these days. These days, these days since Sophia.
Anyway, delivering the game, that's the only time I get to see Carl and Dale and the others. I like bringing them the meat but it's hard, because I could talk to Dale all day but I can't, and when Carl sees me – at least the first couple of times I'm there – he asks if I'll stay a while. Because he thinks of me as his friend now.
But I don't stay.
Dad and me don't just hunt animals. We hunt walkers, too. Dad has me practice tracking them. Tracking's pretty easy for me, since I've been doing it since I was so young, and since it's in my blood. What we do is, we go into the swamps and we track geeks, sometimes all day, and it's almost too easy when the walkers stay around the mud and their tracks are clear as day. I like it better when we get on the trail of one of the ones that wander into the woods, where it's dry and the leaves hide things better. It's more of a challenge, better practice. When we find the walker I'm tracking, Dad always shoots it right off.
Until exactly one week after we've moved, when he doesn't.
On this day, we catch up to this walker that's given me a lot of trouble, that's dragged us forward all afternoon. It's this tall, used-to-be man in basketball shorts, and it's gotten itself deep into the woods, farther than any of the others I've tracked so far. When it finally comes into sight, it's still heading away from us, struggling up a slope. Dad touches my shoulder, his little cue for Good job, and then he moves forward, soundlessly, lifting his crossbow. But he stops. He lowers the crossbow, he turns to me and thinks for a minute, and then he backs off. He jerks his head at the walker.
I stare at him for a moment, because he's never told me to take one down before. But he nods in a go on kind of way, and so I guess he means it. My hand finds my little revolver, tucked safely into my waistband. I pull it out, I lift it, I cock it, and for just a tiny second I remember my dream about Mom as walker in the barn but I shove it away just as fast. The walker is still close enough to hit, since the hill's giving it so much trouble and it's too stupid to turn another way, and I haven't practiced with a moving target yet, not with this gun and not since before the walkers, but I think I can do it. I aim, I line the geek's head right up in my sights, like it's a bottle on a fence. No, a bottle in the water, bobbing around. Or a squirrel, maybe, but worse, much worse, and I think about my mother and Jim and Sophia and my finger goes to the trigger and –
And my dad puts his hand on the gun, pushing, making me lower it.
My finger pops away from the trigger, and the walker's still there and not looking and just waiting to get shot, and I give my dad a What? look. He shakes his head, signals for me to put the gun away, and then he steps forward again, raises his crossbow again, only this time he shoots. And of course he hits his mark. The walker goes down. My walker.
Mouth open, I run the last few seconds back through my mind. What did I do wrong?
Dad goes to the dead-dead corpse and, since it's safe to talk again, I blink and whisper, "What'd you do that for?"
Dad yanks out his arrow. "Decided I didn't wanna risk the gunshot."
But wasn't he planning on letting me have a rifle to hunt with before? And we're fast, we can get out of an area before the walkers show up. "But you told me to shoot it," I remind him slowly. There's no way I could have misread that, and he let me go through all the motions before stopping me and everything.
"Yeah, then I changed my mind." He's coming back to me. His eyes are over my head.
"You –" I start as he passes me, but the other words catch because I'm confused and a little mad and a little worried because he avoided looking at me and he sometimes does that when he's mad, and so finally I just point at the walker and stutter out, "You didn't cut off the ears!"
He doesn't even turn. "Don't want 'em. C'mon."
He's being short. And he doesn't explain, of course. Doesn't explain any of it, his tone or the ears or my gun. Ask him why a snare has to be tied a certain way, or how to build a fire without matches, or how to tell how long it's been since a print was made, my Dad'll tell you everything you need to know. That's how it is with me, at least. But as far as what's going on his head? Feelings, not facts? Never. Never an explanation. And sometimes, sometimes that really gets old.
. . . . .
A.N.: Short chapter, I know. But there will very likely be a new chapter of "Little Bit" up before my day's out, so hopefully that will make up for it.