Page 22 of Raw

There were so many questions in her eyes than ever before.

7

Strange how certain memories only reappeared when you relived them.

Fennec’s tongue against my skin brought up so many memories, and my heart started to pound in my chest.

Not sure if it was in a good or bad way.

It felt…familiar, yet unsettling.

“Papa didn’t tell us he would be gone when we came back,” I said as we arrived back to our camp.

“Uh, no, he didn’t. He probably went on a little hike. He stopped telling me things after our…”

Fennec muttered the last words of his sentence, making it hard for me to hear what he said.

“After your what?”

“Forget it. He’ll be back by dinner. He’ll be happy about the fish we caught,” he told me with a smile.

I studied his face for a while before nodding and smiling back at him. “He’s going to be proud of us.”

Papa was the one teaching us how to hunt and fish when we were little, but he also taught us about all the different plants and trees surrounding us.

There was still a lot for Fennec and me to learn, even if he had already spent one whole year with Papa, but in the wild, you never stopped learning.

Of course, there were a few things we couldn’t find in the wilderness, like salt and flour, but we tried to use as few of those things as possible.

We made sure everything we did was convenient for us, so meat and berries were what we ate most of the time.

Fennec placed the net with our catch onto the wooden table Papa built himself, then he grabbed one fish after the other and laid them out in a row.

“Wanna help me clean them?” he asked, pulling his knife out of his back pocket.

I nodded, but before I walked over to the table, I pointed to the treehouse.

“I brought my own knives.”

“Go get them. I’ll wait right here.”

I quickly climbed the ladder to get to my duffle bag and pull out my set of knives I’ve always been excited to take with me to Papa’s.

Some of them I made myself, others I bought from Gilbert’s store.

You could find everything hunters needed in there, but all I was ever interested in were the different kinds of knives.

“Remember what you gotta do before we can cook the fish?” Fennec asked as I got back down to him.

“Of course, I know. Who do you think cleaned the fish before Mama cooked them at home?” I asked with a smug grin.

“Right.” He chuckled, then pointed his knife at one of the fish.

We caught exactly ten, but since a few were smaller ones, we’d be cooking all of them tonight.

Papa and Fennec were good eaters, and I often only had one medium-sized fish.

That was enough for me.

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