13. Splinters, Slivers, Shards, and the Other Things under Our Skin
Mina
No two things The Old Man cooked ever tasted exactly the same. His “chili” was rarely spicy enough to warrant the name, for which I was glad, and there were too many variables between what he could catch, gather, and loot from his different hideouts at different times of the year. There was enough commonality, though, that the taste of the mountain sage and what I was almost sure was rabbit made me uncomfortably homesick for a string of other shacks much like this one, but not uncomfortable enough to stop eating.
I’d spent as much as I could of the years between age nine and fourteen in these hills with him. He burned and rebuilt his shelters at new locations every few months at most, but the basic style of them h
