Easton’s lip twitched at the residual anger he had for her. She hadn’t even tried. He couldn’t begin to imagine where her head had been when she’d gone into labor. It hadn’t been on him or the baby. Maybe she had gone mad with grief, or maybe she had already accepted her fate from that dream she kept raging about as her fever spiked. It had taken her two days to die, and all the while, Easton had done everything an eight-year-old boy could to save her and the baby.
He’d seen awful things in this house.
Easton slammed the door and pressed his frail shoulder blades against it, then slid down the splintered length of it, sobbing. The baby had stopped moving yesterday, and now Mom was gone, too. It wasn’t fair.
He screamed his rage into the abyss as something shifted inside of him. Fear, anger, loss…loneliness. There would be no more room for happiness. The world was ugly, and now it would swallow him up. No matter. His insides were ugly now, too.
“Shit,” Easton rasped out, sinking down onto the creaking porch stair.
Everything had gotten so messed up here. His entire life had been shaped in the three-day window when he’d lost his family.
He’d dragged the supplies they’d gathered for winter from the house into the shed. Even at eight, he’d known it was an awful idea to burn his shelter, but it was that or go back into that room with Mom’s body. No, Dad had gotten a funeral pyre in the clearing. Mom got the cabin.
The raven brought him two more black ribbons. One for Mom and one for the baby. He’d knotted those together and kept them in his pocket to stop his weak tears when the hurt welled up too deeply. He’d set out on his own, headed due north the next day to find help, only to get lost and turned around, and to come back three days later dehydrated, hungry, and feeling even more empty than he had before. That first winter he’d lived in Dad’s workshop. Easton had rationed the supplies they’d gathered and insulated the outside of the shed with spruce limbs and mud shoved in the cracks, but it was still so bone-deep cold he’d almost died of it. He came out of that first season emaciated and heartbroken. And the raven was waiting. Always waiting on the bottom branches of a lodgepole pine. He couldn’t control his shifts very well anymore. Sometime in those lonely months, his bear had decided he was better off without those pesky human emotions, and he’d begun to take over. Easton hadn’t minded so much back then. He wouldn’t have survived without his animal instincts driving him to carve a life out of that harsh wilderness. He hadn’t known it at the time, but giving his bear that much power cost him his soul.
The raven had saved his sanity when he was a cub trying to figure out how to fend for himself, but just barely.
Every year got harder, and that young crow had been there, always watching, leaving him trinkets to find right when he needed a pick-me-up, as if she could see him wearing down. He should’ve known she was more than what she seemed, but she’d been there as long as he could remember, and to him, she was an intelligent animal who had become his friend. She’d ridden his hump when he’d gotten older and his muscle mass had started coming in. She’d sat on top of him, tiny talons clutching his fur as she rocked back and forth with his lumbering gate—content to just be. When he’d caught his first fish in the stream near the clearing, he’d tossed her a scrap because that’s what friends did. They shared.
Easton stood and sauntered over to the shed his Dad had built. It was still standing but was leaning dangerously to the side. The weather had gotten to it and rotted most of the wood. Inside, old rusted blades and tools were scattered about. Small animals had made several burrows inside, probably in the wintertime to keep from freezing. On the back wall, on an old, rust-colored nail, still hung the snares he’d made.
The raven had brought him one that first spring after his family had passed. He was starving and wasn’t hunting with any success, and the vegetable garden, the first he’d planted by himself, hadn’t been producing much. He’d built a treehouse in the canopy of three ancient pines just across the yard, but now only a few rotted boards clung to the branches of his old den. He’d taken to sleeping up in the treehouse back then instead of the drafty shed, and it was on the uneven porch of his treetop home that the raven had dropped a loop of wire. A rabbit snare.
He hadn’t caught a damned thing in it for the next three weeks, but little by little, he taught himself how to read signs for rabbits. Burrows, fur, scat, smell. He’d taught himself where to hang the loops around the burrow exits so that he could find success. And one day, he did. One dead rabbit that said he would survive another few days.