Chương 20: Another Walk and Talk

Once we got our rifles, I noticed Colin loading his, so I asked him about safety procedures.

"I know we need to load the guns in case we need to shoot quickly, but do we put the percussion caps on now? How good is the hammer? It won't slip?" Colin first looked at his rifle in his hands, then back at me while already shaking his head.

"Oh no, no caps. These hammers are fairly safe, but if you trip or get jostled around you'll be lucky if it doesn't slip. Leave the percussion cap in its pouch while we're walking. When we get to the forest, if we think we should, then we can put the cap on." Based on the way Colin was holding his rifle, I could tell he was right-handed, like most people. I was one of those superior left-handed people.

This actually made walking around with guns easier for safety purposes since we'd naturally walk with our barrels facing the opposite way. Growing up, I hunted as often as I could. Cornfields made excellent hunting places for pheasants in the fall, and ducks or geese during the winter. We'd even built some duck blinds into a little three-acre triangle on the wrong side of a drainage ditch on our property. We'd gone way overboard and built a permanent structure.

As I thought about those fond memories, I thought about my favorite shotgun. I had a beautiful 12-gauge semi-automatic Mossberg 940. It was a masterpiece of a weapon. It was really too bad it didn't come over with me, along with a couple thousand shotgun shells. I couldn't help chuckling as I thought about that. Colin's response to my chuckle brought me out of my fond memories of growing up.

"What's so funny John?"

"Hmm?" I responded.

"You were laughing about something just now." He said with curiosity on his face.

"Oh," I said.

"I was just thinking about fond memories of hunting as a kid. Hopefully, we get to do some hunting this summer and then into the fall." Colin looked excited thinking about that. Then he asked me about my childhood.

"Where did you grow up John? Your accent is right for the home isles, but you said you were from a colony, if you didn't grow up with the priests all around you, then you definitely couldn't be from the home isles." He wasn't going to stop probing despite his mother telling him not to. I couldn't blame him, I would be asking questions too. Hmm, how to handle this? It was gonna have to be a lie, but maybe not an outright one. I said, "I grew up in a former colony, just not one you'd know about.

I can't talk about it more than that right now. That's not a satisfying answer, but it's all I can give." I could see Colin's frown, even with his head down, and his unbound shoulder-length hair mostly covering his face. But he just nodded, and we walked in silence for a few minutes. Finally, I asked him about the terrain to the south. That got him talking again. He switched his rifle to his left hand and held it straight out as he began gesturing with his right hand.

"So, we have a little set of hills here that have trees just a few miles in front of us. The river cuts through the hills. Then, like I said, it's a few miles to the foothills of the real mountains to our west. But after these hills here it's fairly flat for most of the three hundred miles going south from what I'm told. Nothing bigger than what's here."

"There aren't a lot of fir trees on this side of the river," he continued.

"Just the ones in the area we're going to, and some farther north. The other side of the river has more as the mountains get taller."

"Gotcha," I said.

"Will we see a deer or anything else to shoot?"

"Yessir. If we're lucky," Colin said.

"And you said there's wolves and bears, but they've never bothered you?" I continued. I wanted to know everything we might see.

"Yup." Colin kept pointing with his right hand. I noticed he never pointed with the rifle. That was a good sign. It showed he wasn't careless with it, something that could easily be the case since he'd been hunting by himself for several years.

"The bears won't be down here much this time of year. They're more of a bother in the fall. That's when they're fattening up for winter. There's a pack of wolves in the area, but they've always left me and Ma alone. They mostly stay on the other side of the river too." I interrupted before he could go on.

"How many in the pack? Do you know?"

"Hmm." He seemed to think for a moment before answering.

"Maybe twenty? Last time I saw them was last fall. There were a bunch, but like I said, they didn't bother me. There's lots of game around."

"The empire killed a lot of the goblins, and probably most of the trolls, in the last hundred years. Aside from bears and wolves there aren't many things that hunt the deer and elk. Wolves don't need to mess with me." He pointed out to the untamed wilderness.

"We really are out on the frontier for now, there's room for us and the animals."

"That's good info," I said.

"And they really haven't been a nuisance and killed any livestock?" He shook his head.

"Not that I know of. I bet if they did then the army would probably have Wizards throw a fireball or ice spike at them." He laughed as he said that. I just shook my head. I hadn't actually seen any real magic performed yet, so I didn't know how that worked. I'd look at the almanac tonight to see if I could figure some of that out. After that, we lapsed into silence for a little while, aside from me asking questions here and there about terrain. After a couple of miles of walking, the ground rose, but not steeply.

I didn't have an elevation gauge on my UI, but we definitely weren't climbing a mountain. It was more of a large hill. There were mixed stands of deciduous and coniferous trees covering most of it. The fir trees were so large it was shocking. I'd never seen trees so tall on Earth outside of a few redwoods I'd seen on a trip to California as a teenager. Some had to be over two hundred feet tall, and they looked like it would take half a dozen people linking arms to make it around the diameter.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. The spot that Colin had talked about was another mile and a half into the forested area. The trek hadn't been difficult on foot, but we couldn't get the tractor in here. The area had large boulders and a couple of large gullies with steep sides. A massive slab of stone had split off the face of a spire of stone that jutted out of the ground a hundred feet above everything else.

It had fallen and slid several hundred feet, right through at least half a hundred of these massive trees. A good two dozen on the edges had just been knocked over, otherwise they were in great shape as far as I could tell. I had to admit I had almost no forestry experience, but I checked the trees out extensively and couldn't find any obvious rot or bug damage.

"Well John, what do you think?" Colin finally asked after I'd spent a good thirty minutes checking things out. He had been walking the perimeter with his gun ready to shoot in case we saw some deer. Apparently, he had seen nothing, so he'd made his way back to me to ask his question. I watched as he carefully took the percussion cap off the rifle before I spoke.

"Well Colin, I'm a farmer, not a forester, or whatever you call it class-wise. But, I think these trees will work. They're huge though, and there's no way we'll get the tractor within a mile of here. So, we're going to have to bring the saw and make our cuts here." He nodded. Clearly, he'd known the tractor wasn't getting in here. It took us only forty minutes to walk the first three miles. It had taken us that long to walk the last half mile, once the terrain wasn't so hospitable.

"So are we coming back here today, or tomorrow to start cutting? We can bring the tractor to haul the wood back right?" He asked, looking hopeful about that last part.

"Don't you worry boyo, I'm not carrying logs back that far. But, I want to get the ditches dug first. I'll keep sleeping in the tractor for now. I won't let the crops go much longer without water." Colin was sitting on a rock, his rifle across his lap now. He looked up at me and blew the hair out of his face before he hesitated, then said, "I don't get why we need to dig a ditch and water the crops. I've never seen that done before. We water our garden but that's because vegetables need it.

No one here waters their corn or their wheat. I don't know anything about potatoes. But it's gonna rain plenty enough for the corn and wheat." I looked at him for a moment.

"First. Get yourself a hair tie. It's ridiculous that your hair is always hiding your face." Colin blushed and looked down, hiding his face of course. I continued on.

"Second. If the homestead was farther away from the river I'd agree with you. But it isn't. When I plowed I already made a fair start on the ditch. You'll help me dig the ditch as best you can. Then I'll worry about watering the fields. Fair?"

"Fair," he said, still looking down. I offered him a hand to help him up from his sitting position, and he took it. I walked over and grabbed my rifle from where I'd placed it against one of the massive, four-foot-tall tree trunks. Just as I was about to turn around, Colin whispered to me.

"Shhh." I quietly turned my head to face him. He pointed at his gun, and then towards the woods off to my left. As smoothly as I could, I turned and looked in the direction he was pointing. No more than a hundred feet from us was a majestic elk. I wasn't quite sure I was seeing things correctly, though. First off, it still had horns. At home, they shed their horns around March. But at home, there wasn't electricity arcing between their horns either!

After looking away, then back to ensure I was really seeing what I thought I was seeing, I looked towards Colin in shock. When he saw me looking at him, Colin pointed towards me, then himself, and mouthed, "You or me?" As he pointed first to me, then to himself. I didn't even need to think about it. I was in a state of mild shock, but even if I hadn't been, he was the better choice. I was a great shot with a shotgun, but I'd never been much of a big-game hunter.

My dad and brothers loved to go to the woods for a week or two every fall to go deer or elk hunting, but as much as I loved bird hunting, I just didn't care for "elk camp". I hadn't gone in years. Even when I did it, it was mostly just an excuse to get drunk with my dad and brothers for a couple of weeks. He nodded and slowly walked up to the tree I was standing next to. He placed the percussion cap back on his rifle and whispered to me to do the same in case I needed to take a shot too.

I nodded and got my gun ready. Colin lined up his shot using the tree trunk to steady his aim. I watched the elk as it ate some grass between the trees. When it stepped forward, giving us a good broadside profile, I heard Colin take a deep breath and pull the trigger on his exhale. His shot was perfect, and the bullet hit the elk just behind the front shoulder. The elk let out a sharp scream and stumbled forward a few steps before it fell. It never even attempted to get up again.

"Whoa! Colin, I don't think I've ever seen a better shot in my life!" I said while smiling at him. I quickly took the percussion cap off my rifle, then gave him a nice firm grip on the shoulder. He blushed, then grinned from ear to ear. I walked up to the elk with him. It was clearly dead. Its eyes were open, and there was a massive amount of blood. Still, Colin cautiously circled it. I smiled as I watched him. Caution never hurt out in the wilds.

"Well," I joked.

"Is it dead?" Colin noticed the mirth in my voice this time around and smiled back at me.

"I'm pretty sure it is!"

"Good," I told him.

"Looks like you've got an elk to dress." His grin faltered a bit there.

"Will you help me with it?" I laughed.

"First off, what's going on with the electricity? Second, I'll help, but I'm not an expert at dressing an elk. Honestly, I've never even shot one before. I've only ever shot one deer before, and that was twenty years ago." I'd shot a single deer when I was sixteen. It hadn't been a clean shot, and the deer had run. Poor thing. It took me hours of hiking up a steep hillside to finally find it. Then it had taken half a day to gut it and pack it back off the hillside to our camp. That had been enough for me.

The damned antlers were still arcing even though the beast was dead. It was downright distracting. He looked at me and smiled and looked up at the sky, giving off that, Oh yeah, you wouldn't know about this look.

"I forgot, you've probably never seen a spark elk before have you?" I shook my head.

"What in the heck is a spark elk?" As he began speaking again, he took the ramrod out of his gun and handed the rest of the rifle to me.

"Here take this. I'm gonna grab a stick with a fork in it and put the ramrod against the antlers and the ground. It'll make the lightning go into the ground and make the antlers safe to touch."

"The almanac has a section on animals with special abilities in it. You should look at it sometime. The Empire says that the orcs, or the goblins and people who stayed behind when the rest of the people left, bred animals to have magical abilities. But I don't know if that's true. The elves and dwarves both have magical breeds of animals too. You already know our rabbits were bred by the dwarves. They did better in their mountain cities. More critters to eat than vegetation."

Colin said as he searched around for a good stick. I waited and watched as Colin found a forked stick that he deemed long enough, and then he set one end of his ramrod against the elk's antlers and the other to the ground. There was a big spark, and the electricity left the antlers. He picked the ramrod up and tried again. When there was no more spark, he deemed it safe and pulled out the large knife that he'd strapped to his hip before we left and got to work.