Honor Road Jason Ross (any book recommendations .TXT) 📖

“Eeeech!” Isaiah screamed. Cameron stood. The polygamist pointed at the base of a red boulder and danced from one foot to the other. “Rattler!”

Cameron stepped back. “Kill it so we can eat it.”

“No way. I’m not getting near it,” Isaiah gasped as he backpedaled, as though the snake might launch itself at him.

“Don’t be a wussy. We can eat that. Kill it,” Cameron commanded.

“Hunh-uh, urgh.” Isaiah stumbled over the river rocks and danced back toward the trail.

Cameron didn’t want to get near it either. He’d never seen a rattlesnake outside the zoo, so he didn’t know what to expect. Did they chase after people?

He picked up a rock and approached. The polygamist’s screaming had sent the rattlesnake into a coil. The beaded tip of the tail had the unmistakeable hallmark of a rattlesnake, but it hadn’t yet rattled. It raised its triangular head, seemed to change its mind, uncoiled and slithered toward a stand of reeds.

As soon as the head stretched out, Cameron threw. The rock struck the neck and the snake coiled again. This time it rattled furiously. Its head hung crooked. He picked up a sun-bleached stick and approached the angry, damaged creature. The broken head followed him warily, but didn’t uncoil. Cameron reached in with the stick and smashed the head to the rocks, pinning it against a river stone. The body writhed and the fangs gnawed at the air. With his free hand, he grabbed another rock and hammered at the head until it fell away from the body. Still, the headless serpent twisted and fought.

Cameron pinned it with the stick. Without the head, he wondered if there was still poison, somewhere. Isaiah was on the trail watching the thick, writhing rope with eyes the size of teacups.

No, Cameron concluded, there couldn’t be any venom outside the head. He was safe to treat it like any other dead animal. Cameron grabbed the still-rattling tail and lifted. It stretched from the top of his hip to the ground and weighed several pounds. He could scarcely remember what meat tasted like, and his mouth watered. The severed end splattered blood on the rocks and his shoes. He didn’t know if reptile blood was edible. He let it drain.

“Stay away from me with that,” Isaiah said, shuffling along the trail. “I don’t like snakes.”

“Yeah. No shit.” Cameron waved the dangling body up-river. “Let’s see this impoundment of yours and get back to the house for some real food.” He held up the writhing cord of flesh.

Isaiah nodded without conviction, and skittered away up the trail.

Cameron waited to gut the rattlesnake until they returned to the homestead. He wanted it seen by the clan before he diminished it by removing the guts. He’d made their first kill in weeks and Isaiah couldn’t claim to have anything to do with it. The polygamists weren’t the only valuable members of the group after all.

Everyone except Isaiah gathered and watched as he gutted. Ruth handed him a paper plate for the entrails, one of the last plates that hadn’t fallen apart after being washed in the river a dozen times. Cameron had no idea what they were supposed to do with guts, but he dumped them onto the plate as directed.

From the inside out, the snake was ribs, muscle and skin. If he removed the ribs and the skin, there wouldn’t be a whole lot left.

“We lay the skin down on coals,” Ruth spoke, in answer to Cameron’s hesitation. “We’ll pick the meat off the bones with our teeth.”

The skin would act as a frying pan of sorts. Cameron cut the snake in eight-inch sections with Isaiah’s knife, so they wouldn’t have to coil it to fit in the skillet. Ruth piled up some dry sagebrush in the fire pit off the wood porch. She cooked outside unless it was raining or snowing. It was easier to work over a fire pit than to work inside the cramped fireplace in the one-room house.

The sagebrush burned down quickly, and Ruth laid the sections of meat, skin down, on the glowing coals. Everyone sat on the porch and watched while the rattlesnake meat cooked in its strange smell. Cameron considered taking an extra portion for himself, or demanding an extra portion for his boys. But, an innate understanding of the pack intruded, wordlessly, on his thoughts. He would give them all a portion equal to their size. He didn’t know why, but he felt certain. As the sections of rattler sizzled, he divided them up in his mind in a manner he knew would be seen as fair.

As Ruth pulled them off the coals, Cameron received them on the paper plate, then cut them into precise portions, and handed them out, each according to the person’s size.

As Julie, and then Ruth, took their piece, a brute electricity crackled between he and the women. Cameron’s eyes focused and he understood a little better. The women and children were a pack of sorts. He and Isaiah stood apart from them, and not necessarily as compatriots. In the darkening shades of sundown, the cold returned, as did a primitive gloom. Each person retreated to a corner, to gnaw down their portion of snake flesh until it was just charred skin and gleaming bone. It was a profoundly personal ritual. The raw loneliness of starvation cast a feral contention in their midst.

The group skipped eating from their stores that night, as though two hundred calories of snake meat apiece was enough. As Cameron stumbled to the edge of the river to take his nightly piss, Ruth approached out of the shadows.

She said nothing, but walked right into Cameron, breast to chest. She looked up into his face, and he saw the flash of something ancient and bestial in her eyes; the meat had awakened another feral hunger. She shoved her fingers into his hair and pulled his face down onto her tits. She wore her high-necked dress, as always, but the message