Chapter 14

As you’d expect, the mood in the common house was somber for the next few days. Steve and Rosa were over so often commiserating with us that I gave them the spare remote gate opener.

The response to Rom’s death notice posted on the blog was overwhelming. The outpouring of sympathy and sorrow resulted in thousands of comments; so many that it took Gilleena and I weeks to respond to them all. If there was any question before, it was now apparent that the blog’s followers hardly considered the clan members to be fictitious beings.

Grandfather wrote a separate memorial to his great grandson, chronicling Rom’s birth and life, describing how he and his twin brother grew up harboring a rather militant anti-man attitude that was difficult to tame. He wrote that one of the primary reasons they became hunters, willing to risk exposure to the toxic air, was to escape their imprisonment in the caves, if only for a few hours here and there, and to feel the sense of the freedom of purpose and movement that was the very soul of the Ennahai throughout their history. Their love for the forest and all its creatures was unbounded.

Neither Gilleena nor I could hold back the tears when she read that posting to me before uploading it.

But the Ennahai are an amazingly resilient people, as they’ve always had to be. Within a couple of days, routine in the common house was pretty much back to normal. I picked up some of Rom’s duties while Liam and Lothos assumed the rest, except for the role of hunter and provider, that is. I went ahead and ordered another whole buffalo carcass to be shipped from Wyoming.

The empty chair at the dinner table was a stark daily reminder of our loss.

Remus recovered quickly from his nearly fatal wound, but the stiffness and pain in his shoulder would need some time to resolve. Gilleena spent at least an hour of every day with him to help him through the emotional trauma of losing his twin, the person he’d spent nearly every day of his life with for more than sixty-four years. It was a concern to all of us that, aside from dinner and the visits from Gilleena, he spent nearly all his time alone now.

A couple of months after losing Romulus, I went looking for Remus and found him in his rooms sewing some leggings from the tanned skin of the deer that had killed his brother. I was so impressed that he never once expressed any bad feelings toward the animal. His attitude was that the deer did exactly what it had to do; stand its ground and fight for its life when it was cornered.

He heard me approaching his entryway and waved me in. “Jess, my friend! What can I do for you?”

I sat on the low stool in front of him and asked, “Uh, Remy, I was wondering, would you take me with you the next time you go hunting? I mean, you’d have to teach me some things because I’ve never hunted before, but I want to learn. I know I can never take Rom’s place, but I think I could be of some use to you, at least help you carry the game back to the cave, stuff like that.”

He gave me a strange look out of the corner of his eye and continued sewing the leggings, apparently thinking over what I’d asked. After a long pause he put down what he was doing and stood. “Well, you’re certainly going to need hunting skills on the new world. I believe you’ll find super markets in short supply there. Grab those two bows and a quiver of arrows and follow me.”

We walked down the tunnel to the pool and stopped. About thirty yards down the shore against the cave wall were some stacked hay bales with a target pinned to them.

Remus strung one of the bows and took an arrow from the quiver. “Have you ever shot an arrow before, Jess?”

“Well, yeah, as a kid, but never seriously, and it was just a little bitty thing. I never shot it with the intention of killing anything. I’ll definitely need some lessons?”

“We’ll see.”

He nocked the arrow, lifted the bow and pulled at the same time, loosing it without the slightest hesitation. The arrow moved to fast to follow with my eyes, but less than a second after it was released, it thudded dead center into the target.

“Now you try.”

He handed me the other bow, Romulus’ bow, and an arrow. I struggled a little bit getting the bow strung. I nocked an arrow and started to raise the bow to fire, but he grabbed my arm and stopped me.

“No, Jess, that won’t work. You’re going to hurt yourself and probably ruin a perfectly good arrow in the process.”

We started from the very beginning, with the absolute basics of archery. He began by telling me what the bow was made of and why it was shaped the way it was shaped. He showed me how the arrows were fletched to impart a spin during flight to keep it more steady. He also told me that for the hunt, the arrowheads were tipped with a paralytic solution to keep any game from traveling too far if they weren’t killed outright. Apparently, the deer that killed Romulus had run about as far as it was able, and was about to drop. Obviously, it still had something left to fight with. I guessed that was why Errol made such a fuss about making sure nothing was left behind.

Step by step, Remus showed me how to string the bow, how to hold it, how to stand, how to nock the arrow and pull the string, how to breathe as I sighted my target, how and when to release the arrow. We must have worked for two hours until my fingers were raw and my shoulder and arm muscles were quivering with fatigue, but we made progress; at least my last dozen shots hit the target area.

When we called it quits, he said, “Not too bad for a beginner, Jess. You’ve got good strength in your body, but you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you in learning how to use it efficiently.

“So, to answer your question, yes, you can be my hunting partner, but only after we perfect a lot of the skills you’re lacking. It’ll take time and lots of practice, and you must be very patient and do as I say. Beyond developing accuracy with your archery skills, hunting is both an art and a science, Jess; a lot more than just killing an animal. I don’t care how good a shot you are, you can’t take game you can’t find. You have to know the animal, think like the animal. You must respect the animals, understanding that they don’t die willingly. When you’re in the forest, you’re in their territory. The least little slip-up, and you could wind up like Rom.”

On the way back up to his rooms, Remus laid his hand on my shoulder and said, “You know, I wasn’t really all that fond of you when you first showed up here, Jess. Maybe it was just prejudice on my part, but I didn’t think you seemed all that committed to our cause. I thought you were just here waiting out the terms of Samuel’s will.”