The One Who Won't Be Abandoned - Chapter 5

No matter how much I chewed on the jerky we bought from the village, it couldn’t compare to the sizzling, juicy flavor of freshly cooked meat. Even the sweet mountain fruits, grown under nature’s bountiful energy, became tiresome when eaten day after day. And so, I made up my mind: I was going to hunt. It was a decision fueled by the thought of sinking my teeth into tender, freshly cooked meat.

Hunting also seemed like the perfect way to stave off the creeping laziness of mountain life. The monotony of spending the entire day loitering around the cabin, eating away at our provisions, made my body feel sluggish and unmotivated. I needed a productive way to spend all this extra time, and hunting seemed like the answer.

Andre, too, seemed thrilled by the idea of hunting. His face lit up as he nodded in agreement, clearly just as bored with our quiet mountain existence as I was.

However, as we combed through every nook and cranny of the cabin and its shed, we couldn’t find a single gun or bow. I hadn’t really expected a gun, but I had held out hope for a bow. Not that I knew how to use one, but Andre had been taught archery by a knight, so I had high hopes he could handle it.

The lack of hunting tools was a bitter disappointment. The sharpest weapons we managed to find were a small portable knife and an axe—hardly ideal for hunting. I handed the knife to Andre, who eyed it with a curious gleam of excitement.

In the end, I settled on making traps.

I pinned my hopes on the basket, rope, and shovel we’d found in the shed. Whispering a silent prayer for the success of our hunt, I suddenly felt Andre take the shovel from my hands.

“I’ll carry it,” he said simply.

Andre had been quick to adapt to our mountain life. Despite his young age, he showed remarkable resilience and awareness, always looking for ways to contribute. He even seemed to sense when I was irritated or exhausted, adjusting his behavior to suit my mood. His efforts to shoulder his share of responsibility were impressive, and I couldn’t help but feel a little pride as I gave him an encouraging pat on the shoulder.

We decided to set up our traps in a grassy area about ten minutes away from the cabin. While Andre dug a pit, I focused on crafting a basket trap.

I had once seen young servants at the Kaiman Estate catch sparrows using a similar method. They would prop a basket up with a stick, attach a string to the stick, and hide nearby. When a bird wandered under the basket, they would yank the string, trapping the bird beneath.

Before long, I had put together a fairly decent trap. I tied a rope to the stick supporting the basket, then hid as far away as the rope allowed, crouching behind a tree to keep watch. Peeking out from behind the trunk, I scanned the trap carefully, only to hear Andre chuckle behind me.

“Hahaha, what are you doing? Planning to stay there all day?” he teased.

“Of course not!” I replied defensively, even though waiting by the tree all day had been my original plan. His teasing made me feel a bit embarrassed.

Still chuckling, Andre climbed out of the pit he’d been digging and rummaged through his pocket, pulling out a piece of jerky. He tore it into smaller pieces and then took out the portable knife from his other pocket.

With practiced ease, Andre cut the rope attached to the stick and tied the jerky to it, creating a bait system. He placed the bait beneath the basket and propped it up again with the stick.

“When something tugs on the bait, the stick will fall, and the basket will drop on top of it,” Andre explained, adjusting the setup. “We’ll have to hope for something small enough to stay trapped under the basket.”

He had transformed my crude trap into something far more effective with just a few quick adjustments.

Next, he turned his attention to the pit he had dug. Andre placed a few long, thin branches over the opening and covered them with grass, creating a simple but effective pitfall trap.

“Let’s come back tomorrow morning to check,” Andre suggested.

“…Sure,” I replied.

“By the way, I saw some blueberries over there earlier. Should we pick a few?”

Andre, born into a life far removed from this rugged environment, had adapted to mountain life in no time, as if he’d always belonged here. He was, I had to admit, reliable—more than a little, actually. Maybe even a lot.

Spending every waking moment together in an empty, desolate forest had drawn us closer. We couldn’t help but lean on each other.

It wasn’t a bad feeling. Having someone to rely on, a companion in solitude, was comforting. I didn’t feel lonely.

As his hands, stained faintly purple from picking blueberries, moved deftly to pluck another perfectly ripe one, I found my gaze fixed on Andre.

The precious heir. The only son of the esteemed Kaiman family. The very same Kaiman heir whom the household treated like a treasure beyond price.

If those loyal to him at the Kaiman estate knew their young master was now surviving on wild berries deep in the wilderness, how would they react?

I thought of the old head chef, a man who took immense pride in crafting meals for the Kaiman family. Each day, he prepared dishes with the most sacred ingredients, delicately seasoned with rare spices. He lived for the honor of feeding the lord of the Kaiman family and his kin.

As I chuckled to myself over my silly thoughts, Andre turned to look at me. He had no idea what I found so amusing, yet he couldn’t help but smile along with me.

The corners of his lips tugged upward in a carefree grin, and the sight of it felt refreshingly bright.

* * *

The moment I opened my eyes that morning, I ran straight to the spot where we had set our traps, not even stopping to wash my face at the creek. Andre, caught off guard and dragged along by my eager grip, let out a surprised shout as he followed me.

“Wow! You actually caught something!”

Sure enough, a small creature was trapped inside the overturned, twitching basket. Andre, clearly excited, crouched on the ground with his face pressed close to the basket. Then, with both hands, he firmly held it down to stop it from moving.

“Jeanne, it’s a rabbit! You caught a rabbit!”

“R-really? Really?”

“Yes!”

“Wow!”

Overcome with joy, I began hopping up and down in excitement. Andre’s trap had remained untouched, but mine—mine had caught a rabbit!

“I did it! I caught a rabbit!”

Unable to contain my excitement, I threw my arms around Andre’s shoulders. His smaller frame fit perfectly in my embrace.

“Rabbit meat! We’re going to eat rabbit meat!”

My excitement swelled as a sense of accomplishment washed over me. It took me a while to calm down, but eventually, I crouched to check the basket.

However, when I carefully lifted the basket to get a proper look at the creature inside, my heart sank.

Instead of a full-grown rabbit, the tiny animal caught in my trap was no bigger than my palm—a baby rabbit. Its diminutive size was disappointing, but I quickly decided to focus on the fact that I had caught something at all.

Andre stepped aside to give me space and, with a bright expression, asked, “Should I slit its throat with the knife?”

“…What?”

“I’ll do it,” he offered confidently.

Of course, catching prey meant eating it. Andre had told me last night about the times he had gone hunting with his father. He’d even seen his father slit a rabbit’s throat to drain its blood.

“Be careful.”

Andre reached a hand under the basket to grab the rabbit, and to my relief, he caught it on the first try.

Holding the trembling rabbit tightly, he flipped the basket over. Next to the rabbit, a few twigs and a piece of jerky, still tied with twine, tumbled to the ground. The rabbit, being an herbivore, had wisely ignored the jerky, which meant we could reuse it as bait. That thought briefly lifted my mood.

But as my gaze returned to the rabbit, the earlier excitement drained from me.

The poor thing was even smaller than I had initially thought. Its soft, fluffy gray fur made it look like a tiny ball of cotton, fragile and helpless.

“Oh… what should we do?”

I was so focused on the trembling baby rabbit in Andre’s hand that I failed to notice him pulling a knife from his pocket.

When I realized he was about to press the sharp blade to the rabbit’s neck, I panicked.

“No!”

My scream startled a flock of birds perched nearby, sending them flapping into the air with a loud rustling of wings.

Andre, just as surprised, froze mid-motion and looked up at me, still holding the knife poised near the rabbit’s neck.

I forced my voice to remain steady, though I couldn’t hide the slight tremor of urgency.

“Don’t… don’t do it. Look at it—it’s way too small. It wouldn’t even make a bite-sized meal.”

“So what do we do?” Andre asked, his tone curious rather than defensive.

“Let’s, um… raise it. Fatten it up first. When it’s bigger—plump and meaty—then we can eat it. Right?”

Andre studied the tiny rabbit, turning it this way and that as if inspecting its potential, then nodded in agreement.

“Yeah, there’s plenty of grass to feed it. That makes sense.”

Standing up straight, he added, “I didn’t even think of that. Leave it to you, Jeanne.”

“Well, of course,” I replied, feigning confidence. “I’m pretty clever, you know.”

“You really are,” he said with a bright smile, standing tall as he turned to face me.

The trust and admiration in his expression made my guilty conscience twinge.

Andre didn’t know how to start a fire, but he had quite the talent for building things. Using some wooden planks and a handful of rusty nails, he managed to craft a decent rabbit hutch. He placed it in a corner of the cabin, safely out of reach of foxes or weasels.

While Andre worked on the hutch, the rabbit quivered in fear but remained remarkably calm in my hands, as if sensing it was safe.

“This is your new home now,” I murmured gently, carefully placing the little rabbit into the hutch.

The warmth of its tiny body left my hands feeling empty and oddly cold as I pulled away.

“That rabbit is so cute,” I murmured, watching its tiny black nose twitching as it sniffed the wooden slats of the hutch.

The sight of its soft, fluffy paws moving hesitantly as it hopped around nearly made my heart melt. It was painfully adorable.

Even though our trap had worked, Andre and I still had to survive on berries and roasted potatoes. But the fact that we’d proven the trap could work gave us hope—soon, we might have all the meat we could eat.

“Eat up,” I said, slipping some tender grass I’d picked into the rabbit’s hutch.

The rabbit sniffed at the grass, its little nose twitching, but didn’t eat it. Still, it hopped around energetically, its wariness fading, and I felt relieved to see it adjusting.

Another day passed quickly, and as dusk fell, the forest grew dark in no time.

We loaded the fireplace with plenty of firewood and lay down side by side on the bed. Sharing one blanket had become so normal that I couldn’t imagine sleeping without Andre’s warmth nearby.

“What should we name the rabbit?” I asked, breaking the silence.

“You want to name it?”

“Yes.”

Andre paused, seemingly deep in thought, before cautiously asking, “Are you sure about that?”

I turned on my side, facing him, curious about what he meant. The soft glow of the fireplace made it easy to see his face, just a hand’s breadth away from mine.

I hadn’t realized we were this close, and the sudden awareness made my heart skip. I instinctively pulled back slightly, startled, but quickly composed myself and asked nonchalantly, “What do you mean?”

“…Are you sure it’s okay to name it?” he repeated, his tone gentle.

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Well, we’re going to eat it eventually. Won’t naming it to make it harder when the time comes?”

“Oh…”

I froze, suddenly realizing how cruel my suggestion had been. Giving a name to something you planned to eat? It was twisted.

“Oh no, what was I even thinking? Forget I said anything. Naming an animal we’re going to eat… that’s just awful,” I muttered, shivering as I rubbed my arms, trying to shake off the unsettling thought.

“That’s just… so cruel,” I whispered.

The image of the baby rabbit’s bright, curious black eyes staring up at me flashed in my mind. Right now, it was curled up in the hutch, sleeping peacefully.

Though I’d spared its life for the time being, Andre and I needed meat. If the trap didn’t catch anything else soon, we might have no choice but to eat the rabbit.

“Let’s just sleep,” I said hastily, embarrassed by the conversation.

I shut my eyes, trying to put it all out of my mind. Strangely enough, sleep came quickly. Waking up so early to check the traps had worn me out more than I’d realized. My body was heavy, and my thoughts faded into a peaceful blur.

“Goodnight, Jeanne,” Andre whispered softly, his voice brushing against the edge of my consciousness.

I drifted off, his gentle words lulling me into sleep.

* * *