Free Born by Tara Brown Page B

picks up the long thin bone and walks
toward the same spot in the field he has for five days. He whines.
    "Okay let's follow him then." I
sling on my backpack. I look back at the farmhouse. I've left a note in the
bunker under the barn. Anna knows it's my favorite hiding place. My heart
hurts. I don’t look behind me. I don’t run through the field. Leo trots along
like real dog. He doesn’t wait at the meeting tree.
    Nothing is the same.
    I opened the cabin door and suddenly my
life feels lost. I knew I would regret opening the stupid door and helping her.
I never imagined the regret would be being separated from them.
    My heart hurts when I think about the
kiss I shared with Jake. My stomach hurts when I think about Anna being taken.
    Leo picks up the pace as we enter the
woods. I reach out and brush my fingers along the meeting tree. Instead of
going the way home to the cabin he cuts a hard left and we climb a different
hill.
    "So then when I was eleven she says
that she wants to try to go to the city. So we get all dressed up and I mean
bathed and spiffy. We walk all the way to the city but they don’t just let us
in. We have to go through a bunch of tests and other nonsense. The city was
brand new. It looked like nothing I've ever seen. Anyway they come to us in the
bright white clothes and make me take all my brand new clean clothes off. They
burned them. Momma was mad as a wet hen. Aunty Lisa failed the diabetes test
they gave us and so if we wanted to go into the city we would have to leave her
behind. No diabetes in the city. Momma said they could shove that up their
behinds. So we left the city. My aunty Heather got grabbed there. Momma thinks
because she tested healthy they told the bad ones to take her to the breeder
farms. They drove up in their trucks and held guns on us. They dragged her into
the truck. She screamed and reached for us. Momma never moved. She just
watched. I never seen aunty Heather again."
    Her story is the story of thousands of
women.
    "I've seen them taken too. They
always leave the kids behind."
    She puts a finger to her lips, "Shh
you hear that?"
    I listen. All I hear is my own heartbeat
and it dawns on me that as she natters on, she listens to the forest song the
way I do. I don’t hear them. No birds, no squirrels. I stop walking. I pull an
arrow instantly and hold the bow ready.
    A branch breaks to the side of us. I
swing the bow with the arrow trembling in my hands. A huge black bear groans
and walks past us on the ridge below us. Leo growls and crouches. He looks at
me but I shake my head.
    We don’t turn our back on it. We walk up
the hill backwards until the bear is far enough away. Leo's dark hackles stay
up until he starts sniffing the ground again. He wanders in a circle for a
moment.
    "So then I was saying to Momma…hey
look I think he has a smell. Not totally useless is he?"
    I glare at her.
    She puts her hands up, "What? He's
no hound but I think he's got the scent."
    I follow him through the thick woods
until suddenly he stops walking. We've hiked for hours and this is the most
animated I've seen him. He growls in his low tone and crawls along the forest
floor on his belly. We follow him low to the ground. I am scanning the forest
but I see nothing.
    "There." Meg points to a man
wearing camouflage high up in a tree. He holds a sniper rifle. There is no way
we will get around him. I pull my bow out but Meg stops my hand and points to a
man in another tree just behind him.
    "We wait for dark." She
whispers.
    I look at her and frown, "Where is
your home?"
    Her brown eyes look haunted, "It's
back closer to the town by the big river. Momma was taken when they were
looking for some girl. They searched all the houses and found my aunty Lisa and
Momma hiding. They didn’t find me. I snuck out the back and over the pointy log
wall. The others snatched me outside the gates. The hunters were long gone
though, so they were gonna wait for them to come back."
    "It was me." The words