Longshot. Part 25

'Chickens are birds.'

'Well, ordinary birds?'

'Pigeons? Four and twenty blackbirds? You eat anything if you're hungry enough. All our ancestors lived on whatever they could get hold of. It was normal, once.'

Normal for him was a freezer full of pizzas. He had no idea what it was like to be primevally alone with nature, and it was unlikely he would ever find out, for all his present interest.

I'd spent a month once on an island without any kit or anything modern at all, knowing only that there was water and that I would be collected at the end, and even with those certainties and all the craft I'd ever learned, I'd had a hard job lasting out; and it was then that I'd discovered for myself that survival was a matter of mind rather than body.

The travel agency, on my urgent advice, had decided against offering holidays of that sort.

'What about a group?' they said. 'Not one alone.'

'A group eats more,' I pointed out. 'The tensions are terrible. You'd have a murder.'

'All right. Full camping kit then, with essential stores and radios.'

'And choose the leader before they set out.'

Even so, few of the 'marooned' holidays had pa.s.sed off without trouble, and in the end the agency had abandoned them.

Gareth replaced the coil of fine wire in the tin and said, 'I suppose this wire is for all the traps in the books?'

'Only the simplest ones.'

'Some of the traps are really sneaky.'

'I'm afraid so.'

'There you are, a harmless rabbit, hopping along about your business and you don't see the wire hidden in dead leaves and you trip over it and suddenly pow! you're all tied up in a net or squashed under logs. Have you done all that?'

'Yes, lots of times.'

'I like the idea of the bow and arrows better,' he said.

'Yes, well, I put in the instructions of how to make them effectively because our ancestors had them, but it's not easy to hit anything if it's moving. Impossible, if it's small. It's not the same as using a custom-made bow shooting metal arrows at a nice round stationary target, like in archery compet.i.tions. I've always preferred traps.'

'Didn't you ever hit anything with a bow and arrow?'

I smiled. 'I shot an apple off a tree in our garden once when I was small because I was only allowed to eat windfalls, and there weren't any. Bad luck that my mother was looking out of the window.'

'Mothers!'

'Tremayne says you see yours sometimes.'

'Yes, I do.' He glanced up at me quickly and down again. 'Did Dad tell you my mother isn't Perkin's mother?'

'No,' I said slowly. 'I guess we haven't come to that bit yet'

'Perkin and Jane's mother died yonks ago. Jane's my sister - well, half-sister really. She's married to a French trainer and they live in Chantilly, which is a sort of French Newmarket. It's good fun, staying with Jane. I go summers. Couple of weeks.'

'Do you speak French?'

He grinned. 'Some. I always seem to come home just when I'm getting the hang of it. What about you?'

'French a bit, but Spanish more, only I'm rusty in both now too.'

He nodded and fiddled for a bit putting the insulating tape back on the tin.

I watched him, and in the end he said, 'My mother's on television quite a lot. That's where Dad means I see her.'

'Television! Is she an actress?'

'No. She cooks. She does one of those afternoon programmes sometimes.'

'A cook?' I could hardly believe it. 'But your father doesn't care about food.'

'Yeah, that's what he says, but he's been eating what you've made, hasn't he? But I think she used to drive him barmy always inventing weird fancy things he didn't like. I didn't care that much except that I never got what I liked either, so when she left us we sort of relapsed into what we did like, and we stayed like that. Only recently I've been wis.h.i.+ng I could make custard and I tried but I burned the milk and it tasted awful. Did you know you could burn milk? So, anyway, she's married to someone else now. I don't like him though. I don't bother with them much.'

He sounded as if he'd said all he wanted to on the subject and seemed relieved to go back to simple things like staying alive, asking to see inside kit number two, the black pouch.

'You're not bored?' I said.

'Can't wait.'

I handed it to him and let him open its three zipped and Velcroed pockets, to lay the contents again on the bed. Although the pouch itself was waterproof, almost every item inside it was further wrapped separately in a small plastic bag, fastened with a twist tie; safe from sand and insects. Gareth undid and emptied some of the bags and frowned over the contents.

'Explain what they are,' he said. 'I mean, twenty matchbooks are for lighting fires, right, so what are the cotton wool b.a.l.l.s doing with them?'

'They burn well. They set fire to dry leaves.'

'Oh. The candle is for light, right?'

'And to help light fires. And wax is useful for a lot of things.'

'What's this?' He pointed to a short fat spool of thin yellow thread.

'That's kevlar fibre. It's a sort of plastic, strong as steel. Six hundred yards of it. You can make nets of it, tie anything, fish with it, twist it into fine unbreakable rope. I didn't come across it in time to put in the books.'

'And this? This little jar of whitish liquid packed with the sawn-off paintbrush?'

I smiled. 'That's in the Wilderness book. It's luminous paint.'

He stared.

'Well,' I said reasonably, 'if you have a camp and you want to leave it to go and look for food or firewood, you want to be able to find your way back again, don't you? Essential. So as you go, you paint a slash of this on a tree trunk or a rock, always making sure you can see one slash from another, and men you can find your way back even in the dark.'

'Cool,' he said.