The King of Mars

The pale sunlight against my eyes woke me into the chilly morning. I sat bolt upright, forgetting about the previous day for a split second. Then I saw Jess, who was already awake, wrapped in her sleeping bag and sitting up against the wall of the cave, watching the waterfall. I shivered, feeling the cold come in waves off of the falling water and seeping into the dirt all around me.

My chattering teeth must have snapped Jess out of her daydream, she looked at me and smiled. "Rise and shine," she sang. "What are we doing for breakfast?"

I groaned and rubbed sleep out of my eyes, the pang of hunger in my stomach as well. "Fuck if I know," I grumbled.

"But I'm hungry." Jess moaned.

"We have to get moving." I said, ignoring her complaints. "We have a bow, maybe I'll kill a bear on the trail."

"Are you serious?"

"No." Jess fixed me with a venomous glare. I grinned back. "I am a pretty good shot though. Hopefully I’ll get a rabbit or something."

"Ew." Jess wrinkled her nose. "Do you even know how to survive in the wild?"

"I was a boy scout when I was six," I responded.

"What did I get myself into?"

"Hey, once again, you asked to come." I pried myself out of my wonderfully warm sleeping bag and rolled it up. Picking through my bag full of gear I said to Jess, "Get ready, we’ve got a long day ahead."

Jess sighed and followed my lead. We sorted through all of our equipment and divided everything as evenly as we could. By the end, we were dressed in durable camouflaged outfits, the bloated packs on our backs. We each had a knife strapped to one of our legs and I even had a nice little place to hook the bow into alongside its quiver of arrows. We looked a pair of army scouts, quite badass if I do say so myself.

I helped Jess climb up out of the cave and followed her. The waterfall roaring at our backs, we began our trek to god knows where. A few hours and dozens of complaints later, I decided that it was time to find some food. I told Jess to take a load off and get to work on a fire. The girl happily obliged, throwing her pack to the ground next to mine and sitting on a fallen tree trunk. Wordless, Jess has been quiet for the last forty or so minutes, she fished out a fire starting kit from her backpack. She set it down and we both left the scene, me to find something to cook, her to find wood to start our fire.

Killing a wild animal is much more difficult than I previously thought. I spent a good amount of time creeping around the forest, and another good amount of time just sitting silently against a tree with my thumb up my ass. In my mind I willed a rabbit, a squirrel, anything made of meat, to come into sight so I could shoot it with the bow clutched in my fist.

Nothing showed up.

The sun was starting to set. I was drained by the heat and the sheer boredom. Just as I was getting ready to return to our camp and face the wrath of my companion, I heard something shuffle in the nearby brush. A fat, brown rabbit poked its head through the bushes on my left, conveniently close. It sat and sniffed the air. I raised the bow and knocked an arrow as silently as humanly possible. My heart pounded in my ears so loudly I was afraid the animal might hear it. Slowly... Slowly… I took aim and let loose an arrow. It connected with a fleshy thud and a sharp yelp from the poor rabbit.

I sprang to my feet and hurried to the bush that concealed my kill. This was my first time ever hunting for survival, hunting in general as a matter of fact. I was excited, if a little saddened, to pull out the recently deceased rabbit, but such is the way of the world. Silently thanking it for its sacrifice, I picked it up and hurried back with it dangling from my hands. Laughing to myself I thought maybe some scruff would grow around my face on the way back to the camp.

At our spot, Jess had been busy. A tent was pitched near a rough shape of fallen logs she must have arranged. In the center of the circle, a fire crackled, buried in the ground. Flames climbed around the sides of intertwined, green saplings on top of which one of our collapsible pots sat.

"Damn," I said. “Why did you bury the fire though?”

"This is how the Native Americans used to do it,” she explained and pointed at a hole adjacent to the fire. “You dig this little tunnel and connect it to the fire; it becomes a sort of bellows and makes the fire burn hotter. Also, it’s easier to conceal from enemies, but hopefully we won’t have to worry about that.”

“Wow, you’re really not as helpless as you look.” I laughed. “In all seriousness, I’m very glad that you decided to come with me.”

“I thought I'd have a nice surprise ready for you," Jess looked up and smiled at me from the steaming pot, where she was adding what looked like pieces of grass into it.

"Yeah, some surprise." I looked around. "How the fuck did you do this?"

"I spent a lot of time camping with my family when I was younger." Jess explained, returning to her soup. "Then my brother taught me how to do all of this stuff when we were a little older."

"What are you putting in that pot anyway?" I asked.

Jess gestured towards a book to her right. I picked it up, "Edible and Delicious Wild Plants. Oh. You're pretty smart." Once again, I was genuinely impressed by her foresight, glad that she picked out some of the stuff to take from the store we robbed.

"Thanks. I remembered a few of them, but I decided to look the book over. Better safe than sorry," she laughed. "You should get to work on that rabbit, we can add him to this."

I had almost forgotten about the animal I was holding. I brought it over to one of the fallen logs and sat down with it in my lap. I had never skinned anything before, so I completely improvised, knowing only that the most important thing was to not puncture the stomach. It was messy, but in ten or so minutes, I was holding a gutless, skinless (if slightly shredded) rabbit. I brought it over to Jess and she proceeded to cut slabs of meat off the carcass and into the soup. “I’m not too fond of rabbit meat but it’s definitely better than nothing,” she said.

“What do you like then?” I asked, sparingly pouring a little bit of clean water over my hands to clean off the blood.

“Venison is delicious.” I’ll have to remember that. “My dad and brother used to go deer hunting. I have good memories of us all cutting up the deer they brought back, before my family went crazy.” She definitely isn't like any of the other girls I've known. I'd be willing to bet ninety-nine percent of them would have been too squeamish to handle sleeping outside or a freshly dead animal. But she was so nonchalant about it. She probably knew how to survive out in the wild better than I did.

So I was startled when she finished and set the rabbit aside, cleaned her hands, and suddenly asked, "So… why don't you want me to come with you?"

"....What? When'd I say that?"

"You've been ignoring me all day. You don't talk. You act like I’m annoying you." She listed, looking from the boiling pot to me.

"No, no, no!" I stammered. "It's not that. I'm really glad you're here, even though you do talk a lot. I'm just a quiet person I guess."

"Well, my feelings are hurt." Jess said. Oh, jeez. She's gonna force me to talk, isn't she? "This trip would be much nicer if we pretended to be friends. I feel weird camping out with a complete stranger."

"Then why'd you decide to do this in the first place?" I muttered. I didn't like talking about myself. It's not that I was shy, I certainly wasn't. It just makes me uncomfortable to feel like I'm going on and on about myself and my childhood wasn’t exactly sunshine and rainbows. But, I definitely wouldn't be as comfortable as I am now with my half-baked plan if it wasn't for her company, so if that's what will make her happy, that's what I'll have to do.

“Whatever then, forget I asked.” Fuck, I know enough about girls to know what that kind of “whatever” means.

“Hey now, don’t be like that.” I sighed. “I really didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. If you want to hear my life story, fine, I’ll tell you. If you really must know.”

“Oh, I must.”

“Yeah, I figured.” Sighing, I sat back down on my log. Jess's attention all on me, and started to tell her about my childhood.