It was getting light. In October here, that means it was just about 7.20 a.m. Peppa slept on in the bag and I hauled myself out so as not to wake her. The leaves that had fallen were light yellow and they shone as the daylight came through the trees.The birch trees shone too. Birch is white and it would be good for the barrier because white reflects light and heat. I blew the embers back and fed in some little sticks with burny ends. I’d put a stack to dry on a flat stone overnight too, and once it took I built a pyramid over it. It hissed and smoked and I got the steel frame and put it over and then put the little kettle on it to boil. We had teabags and UHT milk and sugar in tubes from McDonald’s. Loads of them.
The sun was up now and it was bright through the trees and steam was lifting off the wood floor in little white wisps. There were wee sparkles of frost on the leaf edges and twigs and the wind had dropped so the smoke went straight up between the trees. It was still, just the wissshh sound of the fire.Then I could hear birds and squawks of crows. Nothing else. No rumble of a road or traffic or wheels. No banging or bleeping. No telly. Nobody shouting.
I had four snares made from twisted wire with little gold rings where the wire made a noose and green cord to a wooden peg with a notch in it.You set them in runs where rabbits went and left them overnight. I had seen it done on YouTube on a survival site. It looked easy and the rabbit was dead when you went back. But I wouldn’t mind killing one. I had never killed one. Or anything apart from Robert.
It said you should bury them for a few hours to get human smell off them, so I scraped back the leaves and got them out of Peppa’s backpack and covered them up. I bought them in a fishing tackle shop in town with the money I got from one of Robert’s cards. Robert always had cards when he came back from wherever he went off to. I used to nick them when he was asleep drunk.
The thing about Maw and Robert was they never noticed anything. If something changed or moved they didn’t even know. I knew where everything was in my room and the rest of the flat. I knew how many cups we had, how many spoons. I knew how much milk there was and how much washing-up liquid. I noted it all the time. I’d done it from a baby. I noticed what things were and where they were and I noticed when they moved or changed or went. Maw and Robert didn’t see anything.
Maw was worst. Even her cans – she never knew how many she had left. I did. I used to hide them and she’d not even notice there were only two instead of three in the fridge. Sometimes if she just had two she was alright. I noticed that years before so I’d hide a couple and just leave her two and when she came round and wanted one I’d say you’ve only got two left. And she’d go, I thought I had a four-pack, and I’d go, you must’ve drunk them. And she’d say aye.When Peppa started nicking her fags she didn’t notice either.
Robert noticed nothing either, because he was mostly drunk or on weed or both, and even though he stared really hard and long at things he never noticed if something was missing or if I’d moved something or bought something. Robert’s eyes were always half closed like he was squinting and they were always red from weed and bevvy. The little bit of the white you could see was yellow.
The tarp and the hunting knife and the kettle frame and even Peppa’s walking trainers all came in the post, all got on Amazon and all with the nicked cards Robert brought back with him and kept in the bedside drawer. I was careful when I was nicking the cards or lifting his wallet. Once he was out of it, lying on the sofa, and I tried to pull it out of his back pocket and he half woke up and grabbed me and went ‘I’ll cut your fucking hands aff’ and then he flopped back asleep and I got it then.
The only thing he did keep his eye on was me. ‘Alright ma darlin’?’ he used to say. He once said I was his daughter to a guy in the chippy. I wanted to say ‘Ah’m fuckin not’ but he was giving it the big man and had his arm around my shoulders and going ‘This is ma lassie Sal.’ If I’d said anything he’d make it worse later so I just shut up and stared at the guy.
Peppa woke up and said ‘Is Connor still there Sal?’ And I went over and lifted the stone on his house. And he was.
It was nice and damp under there for him in the leaves and muck. Peppa said ‘Brilliant!’ and jumped out of the sleeping bag and started putting on her shoes. They were £84 on Amazon and they’ve got Vibram soles which are the best for walking and climbing.
Peppa can run faster than anyone in the world I think. She has got really long legs and she looks like wind running along. She was faster than any boy at school, even boys older than her. In fact she does everything fast. She is either still like a stone or going really fast. She eats fast and she talks fast.
And Peppa will eat anything, and she is ALWAYS hungry. When we were wee, we were hungry a lot because Maw was out or drunk or we had no money and Peppa used to go to other flats round the close and ask for food. She learned to eat anything, not like most kids who hate salad and only want chips.
But Peppa used to beg chips at the chippy and ask kids at school for food. And teachers. And in the end I told her to stop and I had to get her food because if they told, the social would come round and take us. The social took kids all the time and they always split them up. So I didn’t say anything to anyone and Maw warned us we’d get took and split up. So I nicked food for her a lot, and I got her bags of salad and carrots and once some beetroot in a plastic bag that was cooked and she loved it, and she stopped begging food and nobody told the social on us.
And when Robert started on me he said if I told, even if I told Maw, we’d get took and split up. He said Peppa would get fostered and adopted by Africans because she is half an African and I’d get adopted by old people and we wouldn’t be together. And that is never going to happen.
So it is good for surviving if you will eat anything like Peppa, but not if you are hungry all the time like her. And she said ‘Ah’m starving Sal’ and I gave her some Dundee cake and four belVita biscuits and I said ‘We’re gonna snare rabbits’ and she said ‘To eat?’ and I said ‘Aye’, and she said ‘Good.’
She had a look at Connor under the stones and picked him up and he sat in her hand and she talked to him. She told him her name and my name and where we came from and why we were in the woods. Then she put him back in his house and got her Helly Hansen on.
Rabbits don’t hibernate and there are loads in the Galloway forest and they mostly live in warrens at the foot of hills and slopes where there is scrubby ground cover and grass. Grass is the thing they eat most and not carrots or lettuce like Peter Rabbit on the telly. It was autumn and most sites said they would be active and you had to look for runs in the grass to set the snares. I had never set a snare or gutted a rabbit or skinned one but I had seen it done loads of times on YouTube.
I got the snares out from the leaves and mud and put them in the pocket of my coat. I had my knife in a sheath on my belt.
We walked down from our shelter along the burn and climbed over it on rocks and then up a slope where the trees were thinner and there was grass and ferns. Peppa ran. The ferns were turning brown but they still stuck up high and she was lost in them and then I’d see her red hair shoot by in a gap. I watched the ground looking for runs. There were paths there made by animals and I saw prints of deer in the mud and other prints I needed to check later in the SAS Survival Handbook. We walked up until it came level and then beyond was another long slope down towards the loch right at the bottom. Peppa tore down the slope and I wanted to stop her from frightening anything but when she was running like that you couldn’t stop her. I had seen her tear away like that before, leaping over logs and fern stumps, running and swift and smooth like she was on wheels.Then she stopped dead halfway down and shouted ‘Sal!’
I came down towards her where the trees had thinned out, mostly old birch and oak, some with big branches thicker than me that hung down to the grass. She was by a big grey rock that poked up out of the grass. And she was pointing down in front of it. ‘Look’ she said.
It was rabbit holes, three of them with droppings all around. And when I looked I saw more, some of them were further back up towards an oak tree and the holes were covered by fringes of grass.There were nine of them in total, some were disused with no droppings and