The Last Pilgrims by Michael Bunker Read Free Book Online

her father talked about the times
‘before the collapse’, she was fascinated. To her it all seemed
unreal. Just imagine the foolishness of those people! They didn’t
even know how to hunt or grow their own food! Ruth would hush and
listen intently when the older folks talked about that time. She
really couldn’t get a good hold on what it had been like back then.
It all seemed so bizarre. Father had said that there were over 25
million people living just in Texas before the collapse! Ruth shook
her head as she tried to imagine it. Some things she would never
really grasp. She could understand it, but it wasn’t truly real to her.
    But it was real. She had read many of
the books in Father’s library. She especially enjoyed reading the
history books that portrayed life as it had been in the last fifty
years before the crash. It sounded like another world. It was
another world.
    The fun part was when the older people would
talk about technology. What magic! She had seen some of the
devices, although they were all powerless now. ‘Phones’ no bigger
than a stone, which were used to talk to people anywhere at any
time without any delay. There were also computers, all linked
together to share information across a huge ‘web’ called the
‘Internet’. As a result, you could find out anything in the world
just by typing questions on your computer. It all seemed very
useful, but Father said that people soon became addicted to the
technology, and risked their lives and the lives of their families
by being dependent on it. The Vallenses were referred to as
‘legalistic’ or ‘quaint’ for rejecting most of the technology, or
at least any dependence on it.
    As Ruth walked along, deep in thought, she
noticed the tell-tale silence of Louise locking into a ready and
listening stance. Then, like a shot and without any command, Louise
rocketed into the oak grove down by the creek. Pig.
    She moved with practiced precision. Before
Louise even reached the trees, Ruth had dropped her game bag and
her stick, and had drawn an arrow from her quiver, smoothly feeding
it onto the bowstring and drawing it back. She knew from where
Louise went into the trees, and from the sound of her bark, just
where the pig would most likely come out.
    She took a deep calming breath, just as her
brother David had taught her, willing her heart rate to steady, as
she sighted down the arrow. Just before the feral hog broke through
from the trees, with Louise snapping at her heals, Ruth had a
strange and untimely thought. I wonder if Tim is
watching .
    The thought passed in an instant. Timothy
was responsible if he was hit by an arrow, she reasoned. She
calculated the lead, and let the arrow fly, watching as it found
its mark, striking the hog just above and behind the left shoulder,
traveling into the chest area, piercing organs along its path, and
exiting low and on the right side of the pig’s underbelly.
    The stunned hog slowed down enough for
Louise to catch up with it. The dog grabbed it by the back leg and
spun it to the ground, evading the hog’s head as it swung around
gamely trying to gut the dog with a swipe of its 3-inch tusks. As
Ruth approached, Louise finally pulled back, barking up a
storm.
    This was the most dangerous time, when the
boar was wounded but not dead, so she advanced slowly in a crouch
with her knife drawn and ready. She trusted that Louise would have
intercepted the pig if it had tried to charge her, but she was
cautious anyway.
    After a few minutes, the pig had lost all of
its energy, and—giving up—it lay its head down in the dust. Ruth
moved in quickly and carefully, pinning the head down with her
foot, as she jabbed her knife into the pig’s neck, cutting the
carotid artery. She made a clean slice across the pig’s throat to
give the blood a route out of the body, then dragged the
rear-section of the pig uphill in order to use gravity to
facilitate the bleeding.
    She guessed that the hog weighed somewhere
in the