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Clark stretched, rolling her neck from side to side as she pulled out the tightness across her shoulders and upper back. She’d been sitting still longer than she’d meant too.
Looking out over the lake, she realized that the sun was dropping fast. If she wanted to check her traps before dark, she needed to go now.
Frowning, she picked up the old sketchbook and examined her work. She was devoting her afternoons to cataloging the plant specimens she collected during the mornings. Working on her life drawing skills while she compared the samples to her patchy memories. Trying to identify where they were the same and where they were different from the native plants of this region in the before times.
Her latest – wasn’t half bad as plant study, she decided. But she had to go.
She trotted down the trail, headed for the shore. The trail had been hardly visible, weeks (weeks?) ago. It was really only the switchbacks with roughly set steps that caught her eye. Since she was walking the lakeshore, she knew there was nothing below, so she went up. At the top of the trail there was an old cabin. It obviously predated the cataclysm; on the far side from the lake was the just barely visible imprint of an old driveway. Beyond that, she’d discovered later, was a road. The undergrowth was thick, lush and unbroken. None but forest creatures had come this way in a long, long time.
The cabin itself had clearly been inhabited afterwards. Maybe even for a few decades or more. There were plenty of visible repairs. The oldest were done carefully and with great skill. The more recent – though they too hadn’t been new in a long, long time – were more haphazardly done. The roof was failing in one section, leaving old bedrooms exposed to the weather, but it was still solid over the main portion of the house, which included the kitchen and a bathroom, complete with an old dry toilet.
She couldn’t tell if the inhabitants had simply died off and the property abandoned, or if they had left for somewhere else. But they hadn’t been driven off or attacked. The house and its contents were stripped, not destroyed. In fact, she rather thought the Mountain Men must have occasionally used it as a rest base in recent years. There was wood stacked that couldn’t have been cut more than a few seasons ago. Someone had dragged an old metal bedframe into the great room, the one where the original open fireplace had been converted to hold what had once been a very efficient wood-burning stove. The chimney pipe had leaked and the interior of the stove had rusted out, but someone had patched it with a piece of slate and some sort of cement. The cement was barely scarred by fire, so she assumed that was also the work of whoever had left the wood.
The Mountain Men were gone now, too. She figured the house was hers as long as she wanted it.
Her traps turned up one fat rabbit; she’d gathered edible greens that morning.
Clark had always been an excellent student. Her goal had been medical training, like her mother. In the fullness of time she’d expected to be Dr. Griffin herself.
In the meanwhile, she’d aced all her earth skills classes, just as she had all the other subjects in school. She wasn’t naturally very good at any of the hunting or trapping or fishing, not like Finn or Monroe, but hunger, determination and a solid knowledge base to build on and she was surviving. At least for the present.
She sat by the big picture window – the old tempered, double-paned glass still solid, even if the wood around the metal frame was soft – and ate and listened to the tree frogs and the night herons.
In the morning, she decided, if it wasn’t raining, she was going to try again to conquer climbing a tree.