“Who was he?” Drake pondered. “Why did he come to us? Did he have a family, and was he going to shoot me or the deer?” “We need to burn him, gut the buck and send his boat downstream,” Tomek said nonchalantly, breaking the silence. Drake agreed, but it was not what Tomek said that caught his attention. That is, in fact, what Uncle would have told them to do. It was how cold, simple and calculated it was delivered by Tomek. This man was just an animal to Tomek. Drake did not spend too much time worrying about the change in his brother and laughed to himself, “At least Tomek does not want to eat him.” While dragging the carcasses back to their fire pit, Tomek recollected how the stalk through the orchard happened and admitted that even he could not see Drake inside the tangles of wood, seaweed and rocks. Drake realized that Tomek had no idea he was saving his brother’s life and Drake was not sure if that was a good thing or not. Drake knew that Tomek killing a man to save his own brother is much different than Tomek killing the man just to do it.
