suzanna-kollinz-acliq-oyunlari-1-hisse-eng

just growing in, still small and coated in velvet. Poised to run
but unsure of us, unfamiliar with humans. Beautiful.
Less beautiful perhaps when the two arrows caught him,
one in the neck, the other in the chest. Gale and I had shot at
the same time. The buck tried to run but stumbled, and Gale’s
knife slit his throat before he knew what had happened. Momentarily,
I’d felt a pang at killing something so fresh and innocent.
And then my stomach rumbled at the thought of all
that fresh and innocent meat.
A deer! Gale and I have only brought down three in all. The
first one, a doe that had injured her leg somehow, almost
didn’t count. But we knew from that experience not to go
dragging the carcass into the Hob. It had caused chaos with
people bidding on parts and actually trying to hack off pieces
themselves. Greasy Sae had intervened and sent us with our
deer to the butcher, but not before it’d been badly damaged,
hunks of meat taken, the hide riddled with holes. Although
everybody paid up fairly, it had lowered the value of the kill.
This time, we waited until dark fell and slipped under a
hole in the fence close to the butcher. Even though we were
known hunters, it wouldn’t have been good to go carrying a
150-pound deer through the streets of District 12 in daylight
like we were rubbing it in the officials’ faces.
The butcher, a short, chunky woman named Rooba, came to
the back door when we knocked. You don’t haggle with Rooba.
She gives you one price, which you can take or leave, but it’s a
fair price. We took her offer on the deer and she threw in a
couple of venison steaks we could pick up after the butcher-
265