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Rather than going back to our original starting point, she headed toward a rock face, barely visible near the side of the road. Dropping the rabbit, she reached behind her and pulled a ginormous knife from her waistband.
“Jeez! Where’d you get that thing?” It looked like a hunting knife. One of those things with a wooden handle and garishly serrated edges, used by guys with names like Cletus or Bobby Ray.
“It was in my drawer. ” She patted around the boulder, snapping off small branches from what little shrubbery grew at the base.
“So you just carry it with you?”
She nodded.
“Silly me,” I mumbled. “Every girl should run around with a huge buck knife in her pants. ”
Emma took one of the branches and began to methodically strip it. “If they gave it, they thought I’d need it. ”
Now, there was an insight. It was my turn to go silent. Why wasn’t I carrying around my throwing stars? Just because I hadn’t been taught to use them yet didn’t mean they might not come in handy. Maybe I could’ve speared Lilac in the back as she’d walked off.
Emma finished with that and took a larger branch. Kneeling in the dirt, she laid it on the ground and began to whittle it flat.
If each Acari had her own talent, I was dying to know what Emma’s was. “Okay, Pocahontas. What’s your skill?”
“I don’t know. Common sense, I suppose. ” Unimpressed by the concept, Emma simply finished her whittling, removed her gloves, and began to dig in the pockets of her parka. “Do you have any lint?”
I was beyond questioning anything this girl did. As far as I was concerned, my life was in her hands. I dug in my pockets, scraping my nails along the fleece seams. “Sure, probably. ”
When we’d gathered a quarter-sized wad of the stuff, she unzipped her parka, slid her hand into her tunic pocket, and pulled out a little tube of Vaseline. I recognized it from the basic Dopp kit we’d been issued. She squirted out a gob of it, working it into the lint ball.
“Wow,” I said. “I have no idea what you’re doing right now. ”
“Petroleum jelly. ”
I saw it wasn’t going to be easy getting information out of her. “Yeah? Vaseline is a petroleum product, and so . . . ?”
“Flammable,” Emma said.
“Ohhh. Cool. ” I knelt beside her. She was going to make a fire. A fire meant light, heat, hot food, dry hair. I rubbed my hands together in anticipation. Emma wasn’t exactly going to be leading any campfire songs, but I sure did like having her on my team.
I watched, mesmerized, as she created a small bow out of a stick, using a thin strip of fabric for the bowstring. She wound the bowstring around a thicker stick, stood that on the flat bit of branch she’d whittled, and, holding the bow, began a sawing motion with her hand. The stick twirled furiously, and Emma blew gentle puffs of air at the base of it, encouraging a spark to light the lint and the pile of shrubbery she’d nestled close for kindling. Next thing I knew, smoke tickled my nostrils, and a humble orange flame flickered to life.
She set to work skinning the rabbit, deftly wielding her knife in a way that made me happy we weren’t enemies. As dinner roasted on a spit, she scraped the rabbit skin clean.
Just the thought of heat and dinner had calmed my nerves, and neither of us had spoken in a while. Finally, I broke the silence. “So, is this what the kids do for fun in North Dakota?”
She gave me a blank look.
“Sorry. Lame attempt at conversation. ” Note to self: Emma is long on wilderness, short on humor.
“I didn’t know many kids. ” She was cleaning the rabbit pelt, and I had a feeling I was looking at what was to be my new hat. “It was just me and my grandfather on a homestead in Slope County. ”
I thought of my father and instantly assumed Emma and I had had similar experiences. “Did he hurt you?”
She looked baffled for a moment, then exclaimed, “My grandfather? Great Pete, no. Why would you think a thing like that?”
The girl thought nothing of dressing and eating roadkill, and yet she said things like Great Pete. Crazy. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you. I just assumed . . . My dad . . . Well . . . never mind. ”
That seemed to be enough of an answer for her.
All the knife wielding aside, she actually struck me as oddly innocent. I wondered how on earth she’d found herself here. I decided there was only one way to find out. “Emma, can I ask—how did you end up here?”
The boulder shielded us from the snow, which had been falling steadily since we’d arrived. Warm, amber firelight danced around us. But Emma just stood and walked away into the darkness.
