“Susan!” The boy yelled at the girl in my tree. She’s the only human I allow there. The others aren’t as reverent, and so get nuts thrown at their heads.

I was readying my ammo when the boy arrived under the shade of the oak. “Susan, how the hell did you get up there?”

She gave him a glare I was proud of. “I climbed, you idiot.”

“Why you gotta be like that?”

“Why are you here?” This was the time she spent with us. The girl was a frequent visitor. I loved her. She always brought a handful of corn.

“I just got back from hunting and thought you might wanna go out with me.”

“Leave.” She twirled a dead leaf, admiring its beauty like no other human I’d seen.

“You know, there are girls at school who’d kill for me to take them to the movies. Do you know what I just did? I shot a fox from so far away it was practically a speck.”

“It. You refer to the fox you murdered as ‘it?’ And you wonder why I won’t date you? Leave, Mark. Now.”

“Or what? You’ll set the squirrels on me?”

Bombs away!