Hunter's Beginning (Veller) by Garry Spoor Read Free Book Online

was scared of what her father would do.
    Harold Veller didn’t have much use for his daughter, and he never hesitated to let her know. He wanted sons. Sons could carry on the farm, sons could carry on the Veller name, and that was more important to him than anything else. He often spoke about the Veller name and how it meant something in Riverport, although Kile never knew what, they weren’t a wealthy family or one that had any real influence in the town. The only person who honored the Veller name was Mr. Fen at the dry good store and that was only because of the tab her father had run up there over the years. Still, her father was much more patient with Leon than he ever was with her. Leon could do no wrong and wrong was the only thing she could do in her father’s eyes. It wasn’t that he was abusive, not physically anyway, in fact he never laid a hand on her, never hit her, never struck her, never hugged her. She had always just been somebody in the way. Kile was just another mouth to feed, another body to clothe, another pair of feet to put shoes on. She had tried to help out as much as she could on the farm, but all too often it would end in disaster and he would always dismiss her as being ineffective or incapable of doing any real work. To her father, Kile was useless.
    She was actually the third child in the family, Leon was the oldest, and then there was Andrew. Andrew lived to the age of four before being taken by fever. Kile’s father took the death of his son hard, so when Kile was born about a year later, it only added to his disappointment that she was a daughter and not another son. Kile had to grow up in the shadow of Andrew, the brother she had never known.
    She knew exactly what would happen when she didn’t return home that night. Her mother would start panicking as mothers always do. She would demand that they send out search parties to try to find her little girl. Groups of town’s people would start sweeping the forest looking for Kile, and all the while her father would be complaining about how much time he was loosing and how much work still needed to be done on the farm, how much of the harvest still needed to be brought in. Not to mention the fact that it would be a huge embarrassment for him that the entire town had to come out to help him solve one of his little problems. That would be something he could never live down and it would nag at him each time he looked at his daughter, how he would now owe so many people for their time and effort. Kile had thought that it might be better if she was never found, or if she was found… not in the same manner as when she was lost.
    It was well into the night when she heard the sound of someone calling her name. Her first instinct was to run, not toward the caller, but away from them. That was the point when she realized something was seriously wrong in her life. That was the point that all the anger she felt toward herself was suddenly turned toward her father, so instead of running, she found a flat rock overlooking a small creek. She sat there and waited, neither running towards nor away from home.
    As the caller got closer Kile realized that it wasn’t her father as she had feared, but a woman’s voice, but not her mother’s. That was when she first met the Hunter Erin Silvia.
    Silvia had been in the area hunting down a rogue script; she was passing through Riverport on her way home when she heard about the lost girl and offered to help. Harold Veller was reluctant to accept the help of any Hunter, let alone a female Hunter, Kile’s mother Beth on the other hand was very insistent and so Erin set off to find Kile. It had not taken the seasoned Hunter long before she finally found the lost child.
    Erin Silvia was everything Kile wanted to be. She was a strong, intelligent, capable, independent, female, and for the first time Kile realized that there must be more to her than what her father made her out to be.
    She never remembered much after