“You know we should probably talk about the food situation too,” David sprang on me when I thought we were through talking.
“What do you mean?” I asked genuinely curious.
“How’s the hunting going?” h e asked, slightly avoiding a simple answer.
“Right now it's not. I haven’t seen a deer to take in a month. Hell, I haven’t seen fresh sign of any in weeks... turkeys either. I hear the coyotes at night, but I think they’re eating all the rabbits and little stuff because my snares and traps are all empty. Why, what’s going on?” I pressed.
“We’re just getting a little light on everything is all and I know Sue is beginning to worry about it. The gardens are doing fine and the chickens are laying, but we need to start getting some meat put up or this winter could get… interesting.”
“What about the cows and sheep that the Janes’ have at their place? Don’t we have a stake in those?” I asked of the neighbors down the road.
“Well yes, but they only have so many and there are a lot of mouths to feed between all the families. I tried to talk to them last time I was over there about breeding the animals to get a sustainable system going, but I got the impression that they were worried about needing to eat everything that they had just to make it through the year. Plus the extra work for harvesting the hay fields, if the diesel runs out in their plow, thrasher and bailer…”
“Shit,” I sighed , rubbing my eyes. “Okay I’ll have to think about this. In the meantime see what you can do to ease their minds. We’ve got the bodies for the work, but they can’t panic and eat all the livestock first. Just do what you can.”
“I’ll try, but do you have any more bulk stuff like the buckets of rice and beans and other stuff you brought out here last year?”
“I might have maybe a few pounds of each left, not enough to spread around in any meaningful amount.” My tired mind was working hard now just to do the simple math. “I know it’s not something we have a lot of, but give me some time to think this through. I’m always hunting one way or another and this fall we should see some ducks and geese migrating, but you’ve got to work on getting all the neighbors on board. Everybody has got to start looking at longer term solutions. We should probably think about letting some of the chicken eggs hatch to get the flocks refreshed and up to size too.”
With this new issue now brewing in my brain, I was trying to remember just what it was I came back here for this morning in the first place.
Waving to get my attention, Nick signaled that they were ready to hike back out to the barricade. I picked up my pack that I had retrieved from where I dropped it when all the fun had began and gave Megan what I hoped was a reassuring and apologetic shoulder shrug. I was tempted to invite her along just to give us a chance to talk, and then send her back home with the guys as I was not planning on returning, but thought better of it in the end. It would just have to wait.
I did ask David to give Clint a quick run down of our recent events over the CB that evening, just to keep him in the loop. I wanted to do it myself, or better yet, go see him in person but again, more pressing issues were standing in the way.
On the way back out to the barricaded road, I cursed the noise made by the rest of the group more than a few times. Even though we were walking down the road itself this time and not really trying to be quiet, their talking and laughing was going to alert anyone else out here within a mile of us and it would surely scare any game away at the same time. There was a time when a walk with my friends down an old country road would have been fun and I would have joined in with the joking and laughing, but I was having a harder and harder time being able to even remember back that far.
The raider’s truck was still thankfully where I had left it and we made quick
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