by Alex Fox
She looked sweet; big dark eyes, smooth clean coat, even if she was a little gaunt and strange around the edges. Just after she died I put my hand on the soft black skin of her nose. It was still warm and I cupped it with my hand like a mug of cocoa until it grew cool. I could hardly believe that I had found such a deer. Back then my strategy was just wandering around the woods until I ran into a deer. People would tell me, “That’s not hunting. You’re supposed to find the deer, not just walk aimlessly.” I would look at them and say, “Well, you have your approach and I have mine.” I didn’t like the hiding and the surprises of hunting. I just wanted a nice, relaxed deer that wouldn’t mind me stabbing it in the heart with a big knife. So this last deer I killed was walking through the forest on the same game trail I was but in the opposite direction. I stepped to the side and offered to let her pass first, but instead she just stood there looking at me with one of her big inky eyes because I was standing too close for her to see me with both at once. This seemed like grounds for a conversation:
“It’s pretty cold today.”
Silence.
“You don’t have to talk. I just thought you seemed nice, and you stopped so I thought maybe you wanted to talk.”
Sharp exhale from her nose. Two rolling clouds of steam.
“I really like the woods. I wish my house was made of leaves sometimes and that it would change colors in the fall.”
Silence.
“But then I guess in winter all the leaves would die and I wouldn’t have a house…”
She lowered her head and started to walk in circles around a tree. I followed her with my hand resting on her back.
We talked for a while and eventually I showed her my knife and asked if I could push it into the side of her chest and twist it around until she died. She stayed completely still which I took as permission. I lay my hand just behind her shoulder blade and felt the pumping of her blood and the whooshing of air between the slots of ribs. It made me think that we might all have forests inside us. Wind swishing leaves around big strong trunks of bone, hearts going lub-dub like animals stomping out a rhythm on the ground, and quiet dark places where stillness collects like rain water in a bucket. I cut her with my knife.
I ruined her when I was getting ready to pull out her guts. I was trying to cut her belly open but my knife was a little dull. I had to push hard to get through and the knife went in too deep when I finally did. I put a hole in the digestive tract and poop and soupy food got all over the meat. You could smell it right away and it couldn’t be argued with. The smell was very succinct and bad. I yelled, kicked leaves around.
For a long time I didn’t even want to kill deer for food. I would just walk through the woods and look at them if I saw them at all, afraid of what I might do to them if they let me have them. I never liked making the deer feel as though I was stalking them or aiming something at them. I just thought of it as two animals, who happened to like the woods, bumping into each other. I spent some time sitting in bars whimpering, mostly to old timers who would hear anything you wanted to say to them.
“When that deer looked me in the eye I knew she would let me kill her.”
“Son, you must’ve stumbled across the most boneheaded doe I’ve ever heard of. Come to think of it, probably had worms in its brain. I hearda that before. You didn’t eat them brains did you?”
“I just can’t stand the idea of taking an animal’s life without asking it first. I think people kill things they don’t deserve to.”
“Askin’ it first? What the shit a deer gon’ say to you?”
“All I mean is, that deer looked me in the eye and saw my knife and didn’t move. We respected each other.”
“I think you ate its wormy brain is what I think.”
He pushed me the newspaper and slapped a finger on an article titled “Local Deer Getting Wasted”. It was about something the deer were catching called Chronic Wasting Disease. The article said it was a variant of mad cow disease and that it messes with the brain of the deer. They said there had been no reported cases of humans getting it from deer, but were advising hunters not to eat any animals they bring down as a safety precaution. They gave a list of symptoms: “Weight loss over time. Behavioral changes also occur in the majority of cases, including decreased interactions with other animals, listlessness, lowering of the head, blank facial expression, repetitive walking in set patterns, and a smell like meat starting to rot.” I hoped it was true people couldn’t catch it—the last thing I needed was for my wasting to get chronic.
I had to move to a new town—the factory I had been working in was shut down after someone lost an arm in a machine or something. Moving wasn’t terribly difficult on account of my not having much stuff, but the woods by my new place were filled with hunters. In fall it almost seemed like the trees were beginning to drop fluorescent leaves as hunters walked around in bright orange vests trying not to get shot by each other. The deer that hung around these trees acted a bit different. I didn’t see a single one. I passed a hunter and asked him about it.
“Hey, how come I’m not seeing any deer on my walk?”
“Cause them shits is scared. They smelled you and ran off, I’d say.”
“Why are they scared?”
“You’d be scared too if everybody in town with a firearm was fixin' to shoot you in your little deer face.”
“Suppose you’re right.”
He was right. I would be scared if a bunch of people were trying to shoot me while I walked through the woods. As reasons to be scared go, this is not a bad one. I wasn’t being sneaky or trying to shoot the deer, but they were afraid of me anyway. All the other deer killers and eaters had been hiding and launching bits of metal at forest creatures for some time now. Still though, it was hard not to take it personally, to not feel misunderstood. I would walk far out into the trees, past where the hunters would go. I wouldn’t even have my knife with me. I was worried about what the animals thought of me, whether they respected me. I didn’t imagine them sneering and joking at my expense. It was worse, I felt like they didn’t think of me at all. They would just avoid me on instinct, the same as any other hunter. I thought I was different, and I thought those differences mattered, were valuable. I felt tragically overlooked.
I spent days walking through the woods alone, wildlife disappearing before I got close. I was disgusted by the other hunters. I would look at them, fat and bolted into a tree up off the ground, and wrinkle my nose or maybe shake my head. Some of them had assault rifles, I didn’t like that either. I would see them posing for pictures with a deer they’d killed, holding the head up by the antlers, the body dangling limp, smiling proudly as though this meant they were better than the animal they had partially blown up.
I was beginning to feel guilty for wanting to kill a deer. I had always thought of it as my connection to the forest. I was a real forest creature because I would walk through the trees and eat wild animals for food. Living things were always disappearing into other living things; this was the way things went. I was a kind of animal that deer were eaten by. Killing a deer wouldn’t speak to its value or mine. It would just reaffirm the kinds of animal we were. But how can I want to kill an animal when I know everyone else is thinking about what it would look like on their wall, or whether fur underwear would be too warm?
I was hungry and had been living off of a fifty pound bag of rice I stole from the back of a truck. Thus far my plan to find a job in this new town had belly flopped so I was running out of cash. It became clear that my usual meet and greet strategy was not going to work. The deer didn’t seem to care what I did so I asked around and got somebody to lend me a barely functioning .22 rifle. It’s not good to hunt deer with a .22. The bullets are so small that you are more likely to maim the deer than you are to get a quick and clean kill. I scraped together the last of my money and bought a batch of SPIKED Deer Urine. This was recommended to me over other choices such as Jimbo’s Extreme Heat Deer Urine. This bottle of gussied up deer piss was supposed to attract deer.
I was perfectly still, lying among some rocks on a small hill which overlooked a clearing in the forest. I have drenched one of the trees with a the SPIKED Deer Urine. It was totally overcast, the sky looked like it got in an accident and had to be bandaged up with gauze. Everything was cast in a silvery haze. Other gun shots rang out through the forest. Someone was riding an ATV not too far away—very stealthy. I didn’t want it to be this way. I wanted to be honest, and but instead I was carefully positioned downwind of the clearing so the deer wouldn’t smell me. I had to hide. The world was indifferent to my intentions and its indifference turned me into something ugly: a man with a gun.
The wind kicked and lulled, squirrels bustled around in the dead leaves and chased each other up and down tree trunks. I waited all day, hearing and occasionally seeing other hunters in my periphery. I caught a few glimpses of deer too far off to consider shooting at. I began to feel like my batch of deer pee might not have been as “spiked” as it could have been. The light was beginning to dim and my stomach had been empty for a long time.
Finally, the sun went down. I was starving, but a little relieved I didn’t have to shoot anything. The whole time I lay there among the rocks I felt so distant from the forest and the animals I saw in it. I had come to it with a scheme and equipment. I felt like I was staging a bank heist—throwing a cheeseburger away from the vault to distract the comically fat guard while I cracked the safe. Yet, for all my planning—choosing my hiding spot, spraying the urine, loading the gun—I felt absent from the whole thing. I couldn’t have made a gun myself and I certainly didn’t come up with the idea of bottling deer urine, let alone “spiking” it. It made me feel lonely. If I did shoot a deer it wouldn’t see me or smell me. If it died it wouldn’t be because it trusted me, it would be a kind of monument to normal physics, to billiard balls and chemical reactions.
But regardless of how different I felt on the inside, my guts were the same as all the sneaky hunters with shotguns—I needed to eat. I went out again the next day to the same spot. It was early in the morning and the air was cold in my lungs. I looked around, everything looked the same as the day before and it was hard for me to imagine something different happening. I lay down among the rocks and got ready for all the waiting I was going to do. I was trying to hide my body in the forest so the animals wouldn’t see it. I never used to feel I was in the woods, I felt I was part of them—wind blowing and heart stomping in my chest. Now, I was out of tune and staring through the trees with this gun.
I was watching a squirrel burying nuts. Every few seconds it perked up and looked around. It seemed nervous, but squirrels always seem nervous. It ventured out a little ways into the clearing. From the trees a large, dark shape swooped down. The squirrel saw the Goshawk at the last second and screamed as it ran. It made a quick left turn in the leaves that the hawk matched with its long tail feathers and short rounded wings. The hawk’s claws caught the squirrel on its hind legs and the back of its neck. Its furry tail beat frantically as the hawk waited for it to die.
The trunks and branches started to waver in and out of focus. I rubbed my eyes and shook my head. Once everything realigned I saw the deer coming through the trees. It was a buck and his antlers looked heavy, he was dragging them along the ground like he was trying to rake leaves or something. He was moving slowly as he came into the clearing. My eyes were still blurring but I lifted the gun and lined it up with the buck. On cue, my stomach growled so I shot. The gun made a sad noise, like a thin, dry branch snapping. The buck didn’t move, didn’t lift his head. I wasn’t sure if I hit him or not. I was squinting, trying to see and I spied a deep red spot beginning to drip.
I shot him in the ass. Clearly, this was a less than fatal wound, but he still hadn’t moved. I was a bit confused but didn’t want to waste time or screw up another shot. I stood up and descended towards the buck. I was pretty close to him when I took the second shot, aimed just behind his shoulder where it would likely put holes in the heart and lungs. This shot went where it was supposed to but the buck didn’t go down. Instead he started pacing, still dragging his antlers. I had expected something a little more grisly from my botched shooting—more blood and suffering. So far this didn’t look so bad, odd behavior aside. I got even closer, and put another bullet in the gun. I wasn’t really sure where to shoot. I could hear him struggling to breathe, but his pacing wasn’t slowing down. I might have only hit one of his lungs. I could have reached out and touched him but he hadn’t even looked at me. I shot him in the head and he fell to the ground. Then I was alone.
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