Thresh shakes me awake for the second watch. I painstakingly climb to a sitting position, groggily wishing he would go away. Of course he won't though. His eyes have bags under them and he is already shuffling his limbs into the most comfortable position. I crawl to the sentry point, a slightly elevated boulder that one can perch atop for a better view of the area. My eyes alertly sweep the surroundings, but, as usual, I see nothing.
I quickly become fed up of looking for things that will probably not show up. Plus, my eyes are getting tired. I relax my body and focus my eyes on a random point far in the distance, hoping that my peripheral vision will detect movement. That is foolish, of course, but I am too tired to fight my baser instincts. My mind begins to wander, to the books I have read in the past. I have always been an opponent of the hunger games, yet I respected the potency of the principle to which the Capitol adhered so successfully. By anually reminding the districts that they are still in the wrong, the Capitol leadership created a divide between the district citizens and the normal Capitol citizens, both of whom they bled dry. Among its many other purposes, the games are a way to reinforce the idea that the Districts are an ideal scapegoat for problems in the Capitol. The power of division goes even further, as outsider districts also resent the extra training that the Capitol allows in the career districts. This extra resentment deflects the anger away from the Capitol and toward the career districts, which is great for those in power.
It does not help that the Hunger Games often portrays the district people at their worst. That is why Stara's goal to play the games with dignity has such appeal to me, as a person who has seen the same motifs during all the hunger games since I can remember. Now is as good a year to make a splash as any.
BOOM. The sound of the cannon jolts me back to alertness. Another tribute is dead. I wonder who it was. If I were to guess, the career pack hunted someone down. Though the wheat field keeps me safe, it also effectively obscures what the other tributes are doing. Of course Stara sometimes gathers intelligence, but it's disjointed, meaning we have to infer to fill in the gaps.
Thresh blinks and opens one eye. I tell him to go back to sleep. Stara, realizing there is no danger, settles back also. I wish I could do the same. Instead I force myself to divide the surrounding area into narrow sectors and scan each one slowly. I know I won't find anything in any of them though, which causes me to lose my focus and have to readjust my eyes frequently as they tend to wander around looking for anything to break the monotony. I hate night sentry duty. I really do.
My shoulders sag lower and lower as the moon traverses its way through the night. I manage to fight the torpour for a few minutes, but I quickly succumb to it, my eyes closing involuntarily. They fly open again as my body jerks into wakefulness. My innermost mind reasserts control over my body and wakes it back up, a sixth sense alerting it of possible danger. Perhaps I smelled something? My head rotates as I sniff the air, but all I smell is the ashes of the fire we had lit yesterday. Then I hear a sound I would hope to never hear again, the shrill barking of a fox mutt. Answering barks follow shortly after.
But the barking was distant; maybe they are hunting someone else. It's a feeble hope, but I decide not to disturb the others for just a couple more minutes. I know they'd be annoyed if it were a false alarm and I want to avoid that if possible. Unfortunately for us, it is not.
"Wake up," I shout, tugging on Thresh's arm. I've learned that this wakes him up a lot more effectively than trying to roll him or poke him. Unfortunately, it also activates a jerk reflex, which I now know to avoid. He grabs his rock with a tight grip and shoves it down where my hand had been before I withdrew it. He had only barely managed to stop himself in time two days ago. "More of those fox mutts. And it sounds like a lot of them."
I glance at Stara, who's eyes are already open. As another round of bark and response echoes back at us, she asks, "Is that bad?"
"Yeah," I say. "I thought I told you that already. They wounded Thresh. And he's the best fighter in the arena." I notice Thresh flushing slightly, but it's true. He's stronger than Kato and was blessed with endurance and determination, neither of which Kato has. Even though Kato is trained and has better weaponry thanks to his career status, Thresh can easily overpower him. I could easily see the games ending in a showdown between Kato and Thresh, and Thresh would surely come out as the victor in that situation unless he were severely disadvantaged.
The echo of the barking crescendos into the actual thing. As soon as she's gathered up her materials, Stara sprints off, her red hair disappears quickly as Thresh and I belatedly run after her in pursuit. We're going back the way we came two days ago, the scorched wasteland of charred stumps and the cold aroma of ash thick in the air. Eager howls urge us farther from our camp. It's strikingly similar to the way I herded cattle, but unfortunately the foxes are equipped with far more potent implements than cattle prods. We pass a dried up streambed. Thresh is several yards ahead, running steadily onward, arms swinging athletically in rhythm with his powerful legs as they carry him forward. He's not sprinting, I notice, but instead running just hard enough to not shorten the gap between us and the mutts. I pound up alongside him, my chest already heaving from exertion. Together we run for our lives.
The charred area stretches on and on, until I notice some trees a few hundred yards away. They're scrubby, but they still have enough branches for me to climb to hopefully avoid the stampede behind me. Thresh has noticed them too. With renewed vigor we burst into the welcome shade of the trees. My breath is gasping in and out from my lungs and my legs ache from running that far, butdesperation gives me enough adrenaline to continue. I put my hands on the trunk. I boost myself up with my legs, which burn in protest. I grab a sturdy-looking branch with one hand and pull myself up with the arm. Step up with my feet, grip the trunk with my hands, grasp a higher branch, hoist myself up. I slowly establish my climbing rhythm and have ascended twenty feet by the time the mutts arrive. I know that mutts can jump extremely high, but itlooks like twenty feet is high enough. I don't know what happened to Thresh, but I don't hear him screaming, so I suppose he made it all right. I let my breathing slow down to a trot.
The Mutts, unsuccessful in their attempts to jump or climb the tree, eventually get bored and move away in ignominious distraction. Slowly I climb down the tree, releasing a pent-up puff of air I did not realize I had. My shirt is caked with sweat, at least the parts that are still intact after the fire and the first mutt attack. We lost our meager supplies, but we're alive at least, which is all I could really ask for. I mentally berate myself for falling asleep on sentry duty. Had I not woken when I did, Thresh and I would probably have been fresh fox feed.
Where to sleep? It's still early in the morning, and I notice a cool breeze caressing my body asI search around for some natural cover. I finally settle in the middle of a small group of alders. Spear close at hand, I doze. I'm glad I didn't leave it behind. Being weaponless is bad, very bad.
Being caught off guard is bad, too. It's the second time she's done it, and it probably won't be the last. Stara sits silently beside me, holding my water bottle, which she's filled. At least she isn't leveling a blade at my neck.
"Did you purify that," I ask her. She just gives me a withering look. I take the bottle gratefully and sip from it. She sits there, waiting for me to finish drinking. I do so steadily, despite the powerful urge to gulp it all down at once. When it is depleted, she moves in front of me so that our eyes meet. They draw in mine, and I imagine that perhaps black holes work in a similar way.
My surroundings seem to shrivel, and the intensity of her eyes is overpowering, and I want to break free but cannot. And it is as if my entire body is being pulled into the black hole. The smell of the nearby vegetation slowly expels from my nostrils. The air in front of me begins to constrict as she moves closer. With a desperate jerk I wrench my eyes away, looking down, trying to escape, but I only see her. That is her nose, and I see the flash of red from her hair in my peripheral vision as the sunlight reflects off it, and her teeth, slightly disaligned but all there. Her lips are set to display them clearly, and they are set in an expression eerily reminiscent of the fox mutts. Her nose is inches away from mine now. Her hands grip my face, and they are soft. Now I am leaning forward, and now I smell her breath and feel her hands slipping slightly along my face, and I instinctively give a deep sigh. I try to fight the feeling of pleasure as our lips meet, but cannot, because it is unlike anything I have felt before, not even when I was with Old Boone. Her arms are now behind my back, and she has parted her legs, and her hands are fiddling with her pants, but it's just too much at once. I know I want it but at the same time I know I don't. I take her sweaty hands and I notice my own palms are not much better off, just as she is about to pull her pants down, and then she slowly disengages her lips from mine and turns away. I see the back of her head, the red hair as vibrant as ever, as it nods once, and she walks away.
I notice Thresh, a silent spectator to everything, studying a long stick of firewood intensely. I leave him to it. I sit down, away from both of them, wondering about what I could have done better, and how she smelled, and how her hands felt on my face, and the great unknown that was inside the jumpsuit, and those wiry legs that could open and close, like a pair of sleek scissors. And as I thought, the anthem played, showing the faces of the district 1 and district 4 girls, who were killed in some way that I don't care about. Because today Stara kissed me, and I know that one of us has to die, and it's just too much to think about for today. I rest my head against the tree and try to get comfortable. I don't want to sit watch tonight. I don't want to see Thresh or Stara either. I don't want to feel them shake me awake, and I don't want to hear the howl of a fox mutt. I simply want to be alone, and relive the kiss over and over and over and over, and condense my reality, the story of my life, to that kiss. I tell Old Boone about it all, and he gives me a wistful thought in the affirmative, and goes back to cropping the grass.