Some of Your Blood Read Online Free Page A

in the figure 4. You shake fine dirt all around until the loop is buried and the bait-cord is buried, and then you go home. In the morning you got yourself a rabbit or a chuck or maybe even a fox or badger. Because first time he tugs on the bait he pulls out the peg and that snaps upright and that thin wire loop grabs him and hangs him up higher than Haman. Or maybe it’s a damn skunk or maybe nothing but the chawed off foot of a fox, but usually it’s something good.
    Oh this George he loved to hunt. But he never liked killing anything. He had no use for people who killed things just to be killing when the animals never did nothing to them. Nobody should kill nothing they don’t need to for some purpose. Like deer. One time George found a doe pressed flat against the ground by a fallen tree after a bad windstorm and he worked all morning clearing it away with just a bitty hand axe and dragging up poles until he could lever it up high enough to let the deer out. The doe like to died of fear but George just laughed and went on working till he got it loose. George never did kill a deer. They are too big anyway. But this George, when he wasn’t hunting, or maybe fishing, he was laying around thinking about it. He sure did like to do it.
    All the time this hunting was going on, and school days and all, things were getting worse around the house. The mother got more arthritis and pretty soon she stopped cleaning the house much and couldn’t hardly cook even. This made the father mad and he got worse than ever. Sometimes he was out all night and would go to work drunk in the morning and he was a good worker, strong, but sometimes when the foreman would say something he would argue back and once he hit him but not much. So he kept getting laid off. When he got laid off he would draw his pay and then he would go on a mad drunk until he spent it all. It was not too bad when he stayed away at those times but when he came home it was very bad. George and the mother always tried not to say the one word that would set him off but any word would do it. Then he would beat up the mother, punching her right in the face and the blood came and the mother cried but she never screamed real loud she was so ashamed. He used to beat up George too but when George was big enough to run away he would run away as soon as the trouble started and even before that, as soon as the father came home. He would come back after the father was asleep. Once the father was asleep there was never any more trouble and when he woke up he never seemed to remember anything about it. George never ran to the neighbors because they had no use for any of them or to the cops because the father hated cops and George never thought there was anything wrong with that, who was to tell him different? He just went into the woods and lay up in a tree or hunted if it was moonlight or maybe just hung around outside until it got quiet and then peeked in the window to see if he was asleep and if he was he would come in and get in bed.
    And sometimes he would already be in bed and even asleep when the father came in and those were the times he would wake up hearing the mother crying, first, “Don’t, don’t, not now, the boy, the boy,” and the father would growl that the boy was asleep. George would keep his eyes tight closed and lie still like in the woods waiting for the rabbits, and the mother crying “no no” until she would give a little scream and say, “My hands, oh, my hands,” because that is what he would do, squeeze her arthritis until she gave in, because he always said there was nothing really wrong with her, she was faking. So she would stop saying no no but go on crying until he went to sleep. That was one thing about it, he always went right to sleep.
    When George was thirteen he was as big as a man. He was as big as his father and maybe stronger although he did not seem to know this. His father was a yellow headed man with a lot of bad teeth and his skin