prim asked me. “what other food can we
find?”
“all kinds of things,” i promised her. “i just have to remem-
ber them.”
my mother had a book she’d brought with her from the
apothecary shop. the pages were made of old parchment and
covered in ink drawings of plants. neat handwritten blocks
told their names, where to gather them, when they came in
bloom, their medical uses. but my father added other entries
to the book. plants for eating, not healing. dandelions, poke-
weed, wild onions, pines. prim and i spent the rest of the night
poring over those pages.
the next day, we were off school. for a while i hung around
the edges of the meadow, but finally i worked up the courage
to go under the fence. it was the first time i’d been there
alone, without my father’s weapons to protect me. but i re-
trieved the small bow and arrows he’d made me from a hol-
low tree. i probably didn’t go more than twenty yards into the
woods that day. most of the time, i perched up in the branches
50
of an old oak, hoping for game to come by. after several hours,
i had the good luck to kill a rabbit.
i’d shot a few rabbits before, with my father’s guidance. but
this i’d done on my own.
we hadn’t had meat in months. the sight of the rabbit
seemed to stir something in my mother. she roused herself,
skinned the carcass, and made a stew with the meat and some
more greens prim had gathered. then she acted confused and
went back to bed, but when the stew was done, we made her
eat a bowl.
the woods became our savior, and each day i went a bit
farther into its arms. it was slow-going at first, but i was de-
termined to feed us. i stole eggs from nests, caught fish in nets,
sometimes managed to shoot a squirrel or rabbit for stew, and
gathered the various plants that sprung up beneath my feet.
plants are tricky. many are edible, but one false mouthful and
you’re dead. i checked and double-checked the plants i har-
vested with my father’s pictures. i kept us alive.
any sign of danger, a distant howl, the inexplicable break of
a branch, sent me flying back to the fence at first. then i began
to risk climbing trees to escape the wild dogs that quickly got
bored and moved on. bears and cats lived deeper in, perhaps
disliking the sooty reek of our district.
on may 8th, i went to the justice building, signed up for my
tesserae, and pulled home my first batch of grain and oil in
prim’s toy wagon. on the eighth of every month, i was entitled
to do the same. i couldn’t stop hunting and gathering, of
course. the grain was not enough to live on, and there were
51
other things to buy, soap and milk and thread. what we didn’t
absolutely have to eat, i began to trade at the hob. it was
frightening to enter that place without my father at my side,
but people had respected him, and they accepted me. game
was game after all, no matter who’d shot it. i also sold at the
back doors of the wealthier clients in town, trying to remem-
ber what my father had told me and learning a few new tricks
as well. the butcher would buy my rabbits but not squirrels.
the baker enjoyed squirrel but would only trade for one if his
wife wasn’t around. the head peacekeeper loved wild turkey.
the mayor had a passion for strawberries.
in late summer, i was washing up in a pond when i noticed
the plants growing around me. tall with leaves like arrow-
heads. blossoms with three white petals. i knelt down in the
water, my fingers digging into the soft mud, and i pulled up
handfuls of the roots. small, bluish tubers that don’t look like
much but boiled or baked are as good as any potato. “katniss,”
i said aloud. it’s the plant i was named for. and i heard my fa-
ther’s voice joking, “as long as you can find yourself, you’ll
never starve.” i spent hours stirring up the pond bed with my
toes and a stick, gathering the tubers that floated to the top.
that night, we feasted on fish and katniss roots until we were
all, for the first time in months, full.
slowly, my mother returned to us. she began to clean and
cook and preserve some of the food i brought in for winter.
people traded us or paid money for her medical remedies. one
day, i heard her singing.
52
prim was thrilled to have her back, but i kept watching,
waiting for her to disappear on us again. i didn’t trust her. and
some small gnarled place inside me hated her for her weak-
ness, for her neglect, for the months she had put us through.
prim forgave her, but i had taken a step back from my mother,
put up a wall to protect myself from needing her, and nothing
was ever the same between us again.
now i was going to die without that ever being set right. i
thought of how i had yelled at her today in the justice build-
ing. i had told her i loved her, too, though. so maybe it would
all balance out.
for a while i stand staring out the train window, wishing i
could open it again, but unsure of what would happen at such
high speed. in the distance, i see the lights of another district.
7?
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