White Wasteland, Jeff Kirkham [ebook reader with highlight function TXT] 📗

from the highway. The farmer’s daughter died that first night. The rest either moved on or died later, defending the farm.

Sage hadn’t been around to see it. He’d left them to their hapless cause. Nobody could survive this close to a highway, not with hundreds of acres of farm to protect. The desperate and dying citizens of Seattle, Yakima and Richland had come from hundreds of miles to pick clean the countryside, just as the frosts of winter crisped the ground and grayed the skies.

For now, Sage didn’t have to worry about scavenge, though he would soon be a refugee himself. He carried a treasure trove on his back. His Grandpa Bob had set him up with enough food and equipment to last at least three more months. For six weeks now, he’d kept his head down, living in a cave carved into a crust of stone, hiding behind a camouflage wall of tumbleweed and sagebrush.

The same equipment that kept Sage alive also kept him rooted, unable to travel toward his family home in Utah. No matter how Sage packed and re-packed his gear, he couldn’t carry more than six days of food on his back, and to get home, he needed to cover 600 miles between Washington State and Salt Lake City. Even at twenty miles per day, a pace unlikely given the weight of his pack, his food would hold out for 120 miles—480 miles short of home.

But even more than calories, the peaks gave him a lump of cold lead in his gut. The Blue Mountains soared five thousand feet on the eastern horizon, looming between this place and the farmlands that stretched between Wallula and Utah.

He’d backpacked with his father and sisters many times, but it’d never occurred to him that live-or-die backpacking involved a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t calculus of weight and calories. The more calories, the more weight; the more days he could hike, but he’d make less distance because of the weight. The less calories, the less weight, the fewer days he could hike, but then he would make more distance.

There was the variable of footwear to consider as well. No matter how good the pair of boots, he knew his feet would blister and foul if he carried too much weight too far too fast. The immutable bedrock of math, physiology and calories anchored his journey to the inexorable conclusion: six days of food and thirty pounds of pack weight were all he could carry, and that wouldn’t get him even a quarter of the way home.

He couldn’t stay in eastern Washington much longer. He’d been dipping into his Grandpa’s food less and less because of the rabbits, onions, and roots he’d added to the stew pot. But very soon the snow would bury edible plants and force animals into hibernation. He’d already noticed that lazy rattlesnakes and sunning lizards had vanished. It was more difficult for him to dig up onions left by the harvester in the stiffening ground. Most of all, he burned more calories working in the cold. His hunger after foraging gnawed at his ribs in a way he hadn’t felt during the friendly days of fall.

Snow had given him an advantage when it came to snaring rabbits. He could tell where the rabbits lived and travelled. After each snowfall, Sage tracked rabbit prints between field and burrow. With the tracks, the mystery surrounding the hunt thinned; he now knew where the rabbits lived and where they scampered. Armed with a sure knowledge, the pace of trial and error quickened. He deduced the best snare wire—barbed wire proved too thick, but light fishing line worked perfectly. He learned he’d been losing rabbits because his loops were too large—a loop the size of his fist caught more bunnies. Snare height mattered too—three fingers above the snow yielded best results.

To learn those lessons required hundreds of repetitions, but Sage had nothing better to do in his autumn hermitage than supplement his food with wild game and edible vegetables. As a result, he only burned through about half the freeze dried he’d brought with him from the Olympic Peninsula in his now-rotting car.

But against a 600 mile trek, he feared that starvation would seize him like a cougar on a mouse—skillful trapper of rabbits or not. He’d watched from afar as hundreds had died of starvation on the interstate. At seventeen years old, he’d come face-to-face with death more times than he could count. He knew how quickly the Reaper would take a man, and he’d lived hard enough over the last months to see the truth: he was not his mama’s special snowflake. He was grist for the mill—another fleshy body Mother Earth would grind apart in her churn through the relentless seasons.

Given the skills he’d learned this fall, Sage felt cautiously optimistic he could extend his food by a factor of two. That’d get him 240 miles before he became another beggared refugee.

As he watched the half-dead stragglers pick at the burned-out farmhouse, a heavy sigh escaped him. Even with good forage, he’d die if he stayed here much longer. The winter would commit, the winds would embolden, luck would weaken and his life force would dribble away into the cold earth. His cave would become his tomb if he stayed.

The farther he ranged to set rabbit snares, the more likely he’d kick over a nest of refugees with enough spunk to hit him over the head with a rock or stab him with a knife. Eventually, he’d be discovered and he’d have to defend himself.

If the refugees caught him, they’d kill him for his backpack and his rifle. They might even eat him. He’d seen that recently too. Cannibalism. Human bones picked clean. Most of the refugees from the interstate had already surrendered to hunger, violence and disease. They were a peril slowly resolving itself—a self-licking ice cream cone, as his dad used to say.

Sage hung the binoculars on their harness around his neck and looked about, making sure he