J U M P E R

C H A P T E R | F I V E

"You really will get used to it. It just takes some time and an open mind. But it's worth it, in the end. It is."

She said the last part with a sad note in her voice. Kieran tried to picture herself in twenty years. The image that used to come to her was that she had a job, a home, a family. She was content. Now all that came up was large snarling wolves and an underlying feeling of fear. She didn't want to be afraid, not if she had to live there for the rest of her life.

The large group stopped after roughly an hour and a half of walking. Almost immediately everyone fanned out and claimed their own small area to pick through. Tammy led the younger girls a little further up the path where less people were looking.

"Just dig around," Tammy said to Kieran. "If you think you found something just holler and I'll come take a look."

Kieran nodded her agreement and walked a short way away from the other two. She was briefly startled when she saw a figure watching them from the trees. It was one of the Forager Guard, as they were officially called. He nodded to her and she returned it somewhat awkwardly. She tried to forget that there were men in the woods watching everyone as they worked. The foragers were all women, and contrary to what Kieran had originally thought, they weren't taught how to fight like the men were.

She spent a couple of minutes just looking around. She'd never been interested in plants or gardening, and she hadn't done so well in biology last year. To put it simply, Kieran had no idea what she was looking for. She walked around for a while, looking for anything remotely useful. She found a cluster of large bushes dotted with small pale orange berries. Excitement welled in her chest, until she took a closer look. The berries looked half rotten. Still, they may have some purpose. So, she called for Tammy.

"Persimmon, great find. We're running low."

"But they look rotten," Kieran pointed out.

"That's when they're sweetest. We use them to make jam. Go ahead and grab some. I saw some Rosehips back there too, you should grab some of those," Tammy said.

Tammy walked away to return to digging up some sort of root and left Kieran alone. She placed her basket on the ground and crouched into a squat. She picked the small berries carefully and dropped them into her basket. As she worked her way up the branches she found herself falling into some sort of limbo. The repetitive action of picking berries moved her into a calm grey area of thinking. She stopped worrying about getting home, about seeing her family, about what her life would be like when she was forty.

It was just her, and the berries.

When she'd relieved the area of its Persimmon she stretched. It had taken longer than she thought it would to collect the orange fruit. After a small break she walked back toward Kat and Tammy, looking for the Rosehips the older lady had been talking about.

Now those were something Kieran did know a bit about. Her mother liked to drink Rosehip tea a lot, she also liked to make her own at home, so she wasn't a stranger to the red berries. Once she found them she got right to picking. It was mildly therapeutic, picking things off of branches. There weren't many Rosehips to pick, so once she finished she found Tammy again and asked her about what sort of plants she should be looking for.

Tammy spoke for nearly five minutes about all the different types of plants that had been picked up there. Kieran only retained about a quarter of what she was told. The small amount proved to be enough however when she stumbled—completely by accident—on a spread of Sassafras. She pulled her pocketknife out of her hoodie and flicked it open. For the next hour she dug with the small knife to pull out the roots of the Sassafras shoots.