The Night Is for Hunting Read Free

now were like watching TV in the old days – something to do when your jobs were finished.
    That was the theory, anyway.
    I was standing by the kitchen sink of my grandmother’s house in Stratton. I’d half-filled the sink, using a bucket, so I could peel some potatoes. I was thinking about Christmas and wondering when it was. I’d lost track of dates pretty much completely. We’d managed to pass almost a whole year without celebrating any birthdays. Unbelievable. It was mainly because half the time we didn’t know what week it was, let alone which day. Sometimes someone would say, ‘Is this August? Hey, it’s my birthday in August.’ But as we were usually attacking an enemy at the time, or hiding in a blacked-out school building, or changing sentries at three o’clock in the morning, the comments about birthdays tended to float off into the Milky Way, to be read by any passing aliens.
    Plus birthday cakes were in short supply.
    It was sad though, to think I’d missed a birthday. When I was little it never crossed my mind that this could happen. Birthdays were so important. No, more than important. The whole year revolved around birthdays and Christmas. Months of waiting and dreaming and hoping. The funny thing was that afterwards you didn’t spend months reliving the wonderful day. Within twenty-four hours it was gone and you just had to think how long it was till the next big one.
    One thing I could never understand about adults was how they didn’t seem to enjoy Christmas or birthdays any more. They said sterile things like, ‘The best present would be if you got better grades in school,’ or ‘You don’t really want presents when you get to my age.’
    Not want presents! I couldn’t imagine that! For me, that day would never come. Never! But the adults turned it all – Christmas especially – into a nightmare. They spent weeks complaining about stuff like shopping and the rellies and the cards they hadn’t written and why you hadn’t got a tree yet and why you hadn’t put up the decorations. They sounded so tired and cross and cranky, going around saying, ‘Sometimes I wish Christmas was only every second year,’ or ‘It’s just a big commercial rip-off.’
    Didn’t they realise that for us kids it wasn’t that way at all? Had they forgotten so much already about what it was like to be a kid?
    I saw a poem once, in a book, and it was by a kid, and there was a bit that said:

    No one can get in
    Our world.
    It has a wall twenty feet high
    and adults
    have only ten foot ladders.

    Boy, was that ever right.
    Yet here I was, peeling spuds and thinking, ‘Well, Christmas sure doesn’t mean much to us any more. There isn’t going to be a Christmas this year.’
    What was that Dr Seuss book, How the Grinch Stole Christmas? The soldiers had stolen Christmas from us.

Chapter Two

    It was Homer who first had the idea of making another approach to the ferals. The ferals was the name we gave to the gang of kids who were running wild in the streets of Stratton. And I mean really wild. They weren’t just average naughty little tackers. They were ferocious, dangerous, frightening. They had caught us and mugged us more successfully than the soldiers. They had at least two guns, and a bow and arrow that would be as lethal as a gun, assuming they could use it.
    But we’d had vague ideas for a while about doing something for the ferals. It was horrible to see kids so young and so crazy. Homer said once that we wouldn’t have given up on them if they were our little brothers or sisters. In a vague abstract kind of way we all agreed with that idea. We just hadn’t ever got around to doing anything about it. We had enough worries of our own. And I don’t know about the others, but I was pretty damn nervous of these kids. With the frights and the horrors we’d been through already I wasn’t anxious to go looking for more trouble.
    Once I’d offered them some food. I left it on the footpath near their