He first took her hunting when she was 10 years old. She rode dreaming through the darkness, across the patched asphalt roads, Paul Harvey on the radio. Her grandfather’s truck smelled of grease and vinyl. His gun was in the back, but she’d been allowed to hold hers–heavy and still new–nested in its casing. Her hand cupped the trigger guard like some tiny, fragile animal.
She’d taken two planes and four hours to travel from Chicago to her grandfather–skirting the western rim of Michigan before crossing into the Upper Peninsula. But as they drove, Mattie’s mind moved backward, repeating the distance and hours she’d come–as if her body had moved too quickly between worlds.
She remembered her grandfather meeting her at the airport gate, holding the long red scarf for her, the one her grandmother had knitted. Mattie would see her grandmother later in the week, when she brought more groceries to the hunting camp. The scarf was her hello. Her grandfather had stretched it out, holding an end in either hand. He waited as she walked forward, straight into it, until the yarn pulled against her face like a web, stopping her. It covered her mouth and nose, and she closed her eyes to breathe it in. She smelled her grandmother–White Shoulders hand lotion, Lily of the Valley perfume.
Before that, Mattie remembered her mother and father saying goodbye at the airport in Chicago. She was glad her father had come alone, without his new girlfriend. Her parents sat with one chair between them, and Mattie stood, facing them. They stared into her face, as if it were a mirror from which they caught glimpses of each other. When people passed too close, her father tugged her gently toward him, and she’d felt grateful for the familiar circle of stillness they made.
They stayed as she boarded the plane–she could feel the weight of their eyes, tugging at her like kite string, pulling her back. She clutched her stuffed animal–cradling it close to her neck–holding on to please them, to make them feel better.
Two months earlier, Mattie’s mother had caught her swallowing Tylenol in front of the television, one bright pill at a time. When the doctors asked, Mattie couldn’t remember how many she’d taken, or why. She could only remember looking out the window, noticing the colors of the sky–the streaks of orange and red nestled low on the horizon. The days had tipped into autumn. She felt the colors like a weight in her throat, dense and chalky. The bottle of Tylenol had been left on the coffee table, and Mattie picked it up, turning it in her hand. The pills were coated, one side yellow, one side red. She swallowed one, felt its long pull down her throat. She waited until it was gone, and then she swallowed another one.
Mattie came back to this memory in her grandfather’s truck–her mind circling and circling through shallow sleep until she found it once again. She hadn’t meant to create such panic. It had been like a dream, those moments, the changing sky and the ache of the pills moving dryly toward her stomach–like the dreams that come at the edge of sleep, comforting, easing. It returned to her as she drove with her grandfather through the night, the quiet solitude of that evening, the drowsy focus. Her cheek rested against the stuffed animal, which she had placed against the window to pillow the weight of her head. Its body was stiff, scratchy, but it held a comforting mix of scents–her bedroom in Chicago, the close, musky airplane and the darkness itself, racing beyond the airplane window, beyond her grandfather’s truck–the stuffed animal absorbing the night’s cool condensation, the night itself, Mattie imagined, and then releasing it back to her while she slept.
Sometimes Mattie saw Dr. Sheffield alone, and sometimes she was with her parents. There was a big desk on one side of his office, and a living room on the other–with a fireplace, couches, a chair and coffee table. Dr. Sheffield always sat in the chair, his arms resting along the high armrests, his legs crossed at the ankle like a man watching a football game. He was tall and stocky–his neck a short stump rising out of his crew-neck sweaters. When her parents talked, he leaned his head against the chair cushion, staring at the ceiling until one of them said something to snap his head forward. “Say that again,” he would say. “Listen to what just came out of your mouth.”
Other times he would raise his hand to stop them talking. “And what does Madeline say to that?” he would ask.
She didn’t like talking to Dr. Sheffield. She didn’t like the way he focused things on her, the way their faces turned toward her, fat with expectation, hope.
“Yap, yap,” her grandfather had said over the phone to her father. Mattie was listening in, though she was supposed to have hung up. “You act like talking’s holy medicine. You should bottle it, get rich off the pills.”
“It’s helping her. Don’t belittle it.”
“Belittle.” Her grandfather laughed. “You listen to me. There’s nothing wrong with her.”
Mattie heard her father breathe into the phone. His breaths were rough, close. “She wants to visit you and Mom,” he said. “Sheffield said it was a good idea. Yes or no?”
“Well, so long as the doctor says so.”
“Yes or no, Dad? Just answer.”
“You don’t need to ask.”
“Fine,” her father said. “I’ll get back to you with the details.”
After her father hung up the phone, Mattie waited for her grandfather’s click. Instead, he stayed on the line. “Madeline,” he whispered. “Are you there?”
Her heart turned. She could hear her father upstairs, moving back and forth in his study. The silence on the line was thick with waiting, and Mattie found she couldn’t break it.
“Mattie,” he called again. “There’s nothing wrong with you.” Then there was a long quiet before she heard the sound of his phone hanging up.
She stopped speaking of anything important during her appointments with Dr. Sheffield. She talked only about things she understood–girls she liked and hated, TV programs she watched. She stopped trying to explain herself, to describe the cave of sadness which had opened within her.
Mattie’s grandfather called back two weeks later. She took the call at the kitchen table, staring into her mother’s face as he spoke.
“How are things?”
“Fine,” she said. “Great.”
“That’s my girl,” he said. “Listen to me, now. I’m taking you hunting when you visit. Out with the boys. How does that sound?”
“Good.”
“Your mother there?”
“Yes.”
“She doesn’t need to know about this. Neither does your dad. They’d just say no.”
“I know.”
“They think you’re a baby. But you’re not a baby.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m not.”
“We think you’re ready, your grandmother and I. We think you’ll be dandy.”
She went to bed feeling happy and sly, her dreams filled with this new version of herself–this Mattie of her grandfather’s making–a clear-eyed, laughing girl, absent-mindedly confident, moving through the world like a late-summer wind, leaves chattering nervously in her wake.
The access road to camp woke Mattie up for good. They bounced along the frozen, rutted tire tracks, sending the seat springs creaking. The darkness pressed close and absolute–the woods impenetrable as rock, a long sheet of rock rising straight out of the ground. The sky was of a softer darkness, filled with heavy, blinking stars.
As they pulled into camp, Mattie’s grandfather suddenly cleared his throat. “Now don’t be afraid,” he told her. “Just remember what you’ve learned. You’ll be fine.”
Nervousness lit his eyes. His cheeks tightened into an awkward smile.
“What do you mean?” she asked. She heard the alarm in her own voice, felt it move through her stomach like a slow fish. “Fine how?”
“Just don’t act scared,” he said. “That’s the worst thing. You’ll only set him off.”
He pulled to a stop before a long, low building. Firelight glowed weakly from the windows. Two men stood silhouetted in the doorway. One of them stepped forward and slapped the hood in greeting. Mattie saw that it was Armin LaForque, an old friend of her grandfather’s. His hair stood out beneath his ball cap in a fine spray of silver. He opened Mattie’s door for her, then took her rifle before she could object. He gave her grandfather a questioning look. Despite the stuffed animal, a sore rut ran along her cheekbone.
“She had to hold it,” her grandfather said. “I’m just the driver in this outfit.”
Armin stepped away, and Mattie saw beyond him to the other man, who wasn’t a man at all, but Armin’s grandson, Samuel. The juvenile delinquent. The last Mattie had heard, Samuel was away at a “facility.” He’d blown up a bathroom at his school by flushing M-80s down the toilets, then punched a teacher in the face.
Samuel stared at Mattie’s gun and then at her. He was 12, two years older than she was. The skin of his face stretched tightly across his bones, and his green eyes were bright even in the darkness. The wrists of his long johns reached halfway down his forearms.
“That thing’s about longer than you,” he said, nodding at her rifle. “It’ll knock you flat.”
“Will not,” she said. “I’ve already used it.”
“It’s got an easy kick,” her grandfather explained. “They make them special. For girls and women.”
Samuel examined the rifle again, as if he could see through the casing. “A girl’s gun,” he said. “Huh.”
Mattie didn’t hear anything sneering or teasing in Samuel’s voice, but she still blushed violently. She hated that her grandfather always explained her gun to people.
“You should see her handle it,” her grandfather said. “Good target-shooter.”
“And how do you tell if it’s loaded?” Armin asked.
“Check the chamber,” Mattie said. “And the clip. When the clip’s full, the gun’s empty.”
“How many bullets to your clip?” Armin asked.
“Four.”
Armin handed her the rifle, smiling. It was a .30-30. Mattie’s grandfather had given it as a birthday present the summer before. It stayed at his house, resting beneath his rifle in the gun rack. She had every part of it memorized.
“OK, then,” Armin said. “Around here, what we do is put our guns to bed at night.”
“That means you have to lock them in the rack,” Samuel said. His face shifted expressions–swiftly, absolutely–like a person changing masks. The suspicion dropped out of it, and a manic eagerness took its place. “No sleeping with them under your bunk.” He shook his finger as if speaking to a child. “Or next to you in the bed. No playing with the bullets, either. No seeing how many you can stuff inside your mouth. It’s against the rules.”
Mattie watched her grandfather. His small head looked knobby in silhouette. Tiny, silver bristles gleamed across the top of his bare scalp. “The rules,” he said.
“Samuel and I spent some time going over things,” Armin said. “He likes to know how things are supposed to run. He likes to have things just so. Isn’t that right, Samuel?”
“Yes!” Samuel clicked his feet together, straightening himself from shoulder to spine. “Yes sir!”
“Boundaries,” Armin said softly. He was speaking to Mattie’s grandfather. “They’re supposed to help him. He tends toward confusion.” Armin turned to Samuel, touched him gently on the shoulder. “At ease there, buddy.”
The cabin was a single long room. A wood-plank table stretched down its middle with benches on either side, polished smooth from time and weight. A tall fireplace lit one end, and an old wood stove still warmed the other. Eight bunks lined two walls, each bed bolted into place.
Samuel pointed out where everyone would be sleeping. He kept his hand on Mattie’s bunk until she had placed her things there and then, satisfied, he pointed out her grandfather’s bunk to him. “I did the dishes,” he announced, pointing to them in the rack. “Grandpa says you have to do for yourself at camp. No relying on the women to clean your messes.”
Samuel’s high voice filled the cabin–naming rules, assigning places–until finally Armin turned and laid his hand atop Samuel’s head.
“Enough,” he said.
Samuel closed his eyes, took a breath. His neck and shoulders sagged, as if a string linking him head to foot had suddenly gone slack.
The men settled themselves across from one another at the table. They poured scotch into tin cups and sipped from them, staring off into the fire. Samuel sat next to his grandfather, and Mattie climbed into bed without changing her clothes. In the silence, the cabin seemed to shrink around them, as if some enchantment had caused the men to suddenly outgrow their surroundings. Mattie watched as Samuel fell asleep at the table, his head cradled in the crook of his arm. She watched the fire cast its long shadows across the ceiling and walls, across the men’s still faces, until she fell asleep.
In the morning, Mattie woke with a start–eyes snapping open, heart pounding. They were all watching her, standing and staring. Her grandfather’s face hovered kindly next to her bunk. Armin and Samuel stared from the other side of the table, their faces curious and surprised.
“Do we have to go now?” Samuel asked his grandfather. “Is it time to go outside?”
“Up and at ’em,” her grandfather said to her.
A new fire cracked and spit in the fireplace, but the darkness outside the windows was as dense as it had been when Mattie went to bed.
“We have to go outside now,” Samuel said. He jerked on his snowmobile boots, struggled into his coat. “But not you,” he said to Mattie. “You’re staying. You’ll tell us when to come back inside.”
Mattie saw, with some alarm, that Armin also had his coat and boots on. “Where’s everybody going?” she asked. “What’s going on?”
“We need to brush our teeth is all,” Armin said. He moved Samuel out the door, and brought it closed behind them.
Mattie’s grandfather patted the shape of her hand beneath the covers. “You go ahead and get dressed, sweetheart. You let us know when you’re finished.”
A sense of shame pinched at Mattie, blistered slowly beneath her ribs. She noticed, for the first time, that there was no place for her to change, to undress. No separate room, no closet, no corner with a screen. The outhouse was just enough to turn around in. She could not change in front of them, and she saw that they understood this. Earlier that year she’d had to start wearing a bra, after her teacher phoned her mother to discuss Mattie’s “sudden development.”
She watched them out the window, huddled around the water pump like shadows of men, their shapes darker than the darkness around them, lined shoulder to shoulder with their backs to the cabin. Mattie dressed to cover all traces of her bra–pulling on a tank top, a T-shirt, a frayed button-down oxford and then a sweatshirt. She rubbed baby powder into her underwear to hide the new smell which had begun to claim her–an earthy, sorrowful smell which emerged whenever she broke into a sweat or woke from sleep.
After she had finished the men returned, distracted and silent. The cold morning air drifted off of them, out of the folds and pockets of their clothes, coloring their eyes and cheeks. Her grandfather began breakfast at the stove, and its smell soon moved through the cabin, warming as heat.
“I’m going hunting,” Samuel sang. He danced his fork and knife around his plate. “Tomorrow I’m eating deer for breakfast.” He looked at Mattie, smiled. “I’ll let you have some too. But you have to tell me please and thank-you.”
“I’m eating my own deer tomorrow,” she said. “You can eat my scraps.”
Confusion moved into Samuel’s face, focusing his eyes. “No, you’re not,” he said. “You’re not allowed. You’re only 10.”
“So,” she said. “I still know how to shoot a deer.”
“No,” he said slowly. “You can’t. You cannot.” He pressed his fingertips hard against the rim of his Chinette plate, buckling it down the middle. “You have to be 12 to go deer hunting. It’s the law.”
Mattie turned to her grandfather, scrambling eggs at the stove. He and Armin exchanged a long look.
“That’s not your business to worry about,” Armin said gently. “You worry about the laws that apply to you.”
“But she’s only 10,” Samuel said. “She’s supposed to be 12.”
“Hey, look at here,” her grandfather called. He brought the skillet of eggs and bacon to the table, loaded two piles onto Samuel’s plate. “Bet you can’t eat all that.”
Samuel took a long time moving his eyes from his plate up to Mattie’s grandfather. A pale line appeared high across his cheeks–the opposite of a flush, as if the color were being rubbed away in streaks. “She’s not allowed,” he said.
Mattie’s grandfather took his place at the table. “I’m allowing it.” He settled his napkin slowly onto his lap, reached for his fork and knife. “That’s all that matters.”
Samuel’s eyes picked through the room–grabbing at details, releasing them–like something cornered. He settled his attention on Mattie. The skin near his eyes tightened and twitched. His hands clutched the table’s edge, his knuckles a line of tiny white marbles shining through the skin.
“Samuel.” Armin spoke gently, with only the slightest edge of warning to his voice.
Samuel turned his head without moving his eyes from Mattie’s face. Then he pushed himself away from the table, roughly, causing the coffee to swing up the sides of their cups. He went to the door and stood before it, hands tucked deep inside his armpits. “Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineten,” he counted. Then he started back down from 10. He did this four times before coming back to the table.
“What do you say?” Armin asked. He continued eating without looking up from his plate.
“I’m sorry.” Samuel picked up a piece of bacon, crumbled it onto his plate. “I’m not supposed to get mad like that.”
“You handled that real well, though,” Mattie’s grandfather said. “You took yourself right through it.”
“They taught me how to count like that,” Samuel said. He popped a piece of bacon into his mouth.
“That was good,” Armin said. “That was much better.”
Samuel smiled. He looked at Mattie expectantly, and she felt as if there were something she was supposed to say. Instead she shrugged her shoulders, smiled back.
After breakfast, Mattie and her grandfather hiked out to the deer blind and sat there, sipping coffee. Armin and Samuel had gone off on their own for the morning. The sky moved from black to gray, and the trees emerged, one by one, out of the night. A light, gritty snow blew through the air.
“Deer hunting,” her grandfather said, throwing her a blanket, “is mostly just a whole lot of boring. Lesson No.1 .”
“Is it true what Samuel said?” she asked. “About me breaking the law?”
“Yes,” he said. “That law protects against ignorance. It’s for children who haven’t been properly prepared. You have been.”
Mattie thought about all she’d learned in the past few years. Mostly basics–how to clean pheasant, smelt and walleye, how to shoot rabbits, cans and clay pigeons, how to clean and unload her gun. But there were other things she wasn’t sure of. Her grandfather had only recently explained that deer sometimes vocalize when they’re wounded, that their cries can sound like a baby’s.
“What’s the matter with him, anyways?” she asked. “Samuel?”
Her grandfather shifted his gun, shrugged. “Lost,” he said. “Father’s in jail. He hurt a woman. Now Sam and his mom are living back with Armin. Sam’s working hard to be a better sort of person.”
They sat quietly after that, watching the woods, listening. After a few hours, her grandfather tossed her a sandwich. He had packed four of them–ham, mustard and cheese, Mattie’s favorites. “Eat up,” he told her. She ran a finger across the smooth surface of the wax paper. “I’m not hungry,” she said.
Her grandfather stopped unwrapping his sandwich. “Sure you are. You didn’t eat your breakfast.”
She shrugged. “I wasn’t hungry then, either.”
He turned to her, searched her face. “Your father said you’d pull this. I told him no. ‘Not on me, she won’t.’ I’ve been so long sticking up for you, I figured you’d show me some courtesy, not prove me wrong at the first opportunity.”
Mattie ducked her eyes away from his. A warm blush rose through her, flowered in her cheeks. She picked up a sandwich, unfolded its wrapping. “There she is,” he said.
She pressed the wax paper flat, opened the sandwich and began eating its components one at a time–lettuce, bread, cheese, ham, bread. Her grandfather watched without speaking.
Mattie didn’t hate eating so much as she hated being full. Eating small things separately, slowly, helped keep her from the feeling she’d had so often during the first months after her father had left. She and her mother had spent long evenings eating in front of the television, moving through salads, dinners, desserts in 30-minute intervals. Even her mother’s phone conversations followed the patterns of the shows–moving from laughter to tears along with the characters in the programs. When the news came on, Mattie would stand automatically–dazed, blinking–and her mother would say, “Yes, time for bed, now. Time for bed,” and Mattie would walk slowly toward the darkened rooms of the house.
Mattie was always full during those months, never hungry. When her body began its silent, relentless betrayal of her–when she had to begin wearing that bra and her pants began to tighten at her hips and thighs–Mattie feared it was because of that fullness.
Her parents thought it was the divorce, but they were wrong. Mattie saw how hard they worked to be fair, good. Her father left his office every day to drive her to school. Three times a week they went out for breakfast, just the two of them. Her mother took flex-time so she could leave work early and pick Mattie up from school.
Yet something had broken open inside Mattie, some new way of seeing. Shadows which had appeared only dimly suddenly stood–vivid and irrefutable–before her. Mr. Mattson, the hilariously fat school principal, emerging from the faculty bathroom–a half-empty box of donuts cradled in his arm, their faint powder sprayed lightly across his lapels–surprised by Mattie on her way back to class. The shame in his eyes, his shoulders, as he walked silently away.
And Mattie’s father, calling late at night, still, to talk with her mother. “Donna’s leaving me,” he says into the phone. “I know she’s leaving me. What should I do? Tell me, please.” Her mother speaking softly to him, lying on her side in the bed, counseling him deep into the night. Her father’s eyes, when he arrives to pick Mattie up for school, blank and swollen, avoiding her mother in the doorway.
They had emerged like ghosts, these moments, from out of the flat landscapes which used to be school and home. At night Mattie dreamed her body’s changes, her ribs and hips taking on new shapes, complicated patterns she wouldn’t recognize upon waking. One day, alone together in the office, Dr. Sheffield had leaned forward, suddenly serious. “You’re trying to escape your body,” he told her. “Why?” She had stared at him, furious at his discovery, thinking, I have to. Thinking, I must.
When he was finished eating, Mattie’s grandfather gathered up their lunch litter–wrappings, napkins–and tucked them into his pocket. He unfolded a small knife and ran its tip slowly beneath each fingernail.
“I want you to know that I read a book,” he told her.
Mattie glanced into the clearing. The gloaming was upon them, though it was only 1 o’clock. By 3, it would be dark. “Oh,” she said.
“A long book.”
He stared, as if he had given her an important message, one she should understand.
“This book,” he said, “was about girls like you. Who go strange. At this point. This, change.” His face darkened at the word “change.” Mattie stared after his knife, wishing for some tool of her own to consume her concentration.
“I’m not strange,” she said.
“Some girls get spirits,” he said. “Abilities. Rooms explode to life while they sleep. Toys spinning through the air and so forth. Beds shaking.”
“Spirits?”
“Girls who pull their dinner plates through the room with just a thought, never knowing they’re doing it until the plate is hovering in front of their faces. It’s a kind of calling. Something in the girl calls out for what she needs, and the world around her responds. It doesn’t last long, this ability. That fellow, the author I read, likens it to a dog whistle, one of those that can’t be heard. Beckoning, he called it.”
“You think I’m possessed?”
He clicked his knife closed, exasperated. “It’s just a different way to look at things. Instead of running to doctors, like a person who’s losing something. Maybe it’s not losing. Maybe it’s more like this beckoning business.”
The sky was now the color of the snow, the clouds a blanket tucked neatly from edge to edge along the treeline. “Beckoning what?” Mattie asked.
Her grandfather shrugged. “That would be the million-dollar question.”
Mattie liked the idea of special powers. She tried to imagine making a table dance, a fire flare, a room burst to life with objects her mind had set whirling. But these things were beyond her. They were too direct, too specific. She was more jumbled. She felt like the fish who gather at dusk, drawn hungrily to the water’s surface, nipping desperately at the tiny slivers of light lingering on the waves.
Her grandfather stood, gathering their guns and cases. At the edge of the trees, he handed her the compass. “I’ll carry these,” he said. “You take us back.”
The woods were dark, though the sky was still light. He had taught her that night was a shadow that seeped out of the ground, crawling branch by branch up the trees before finally touching the sky.
The woods stretched on and on, each forest touching other forests, connecting the peninsula coast to coast in every direction. Each tree still linked to something vast and wild, still able to consume a person, confuse him into circles. The woods held huge, untapped stores of iron ore–small mounds could stretch hundreds of feet beneath the ground, setting compasses off course, confusing direction.
Mattie stared at the compass, just beginning to glow in the darkness. Its cool light lit her palm–a tiny, captive star. They walked silently through the afternoon evening, into night. Her grandfather called the directions softly from behind her–south now, swing some to the west–his easy voice reigning her back whenever she began to wander.
The next morning, on her way to the outhouse, Mattie saw four bucks standing 30 feet from the cabin, still and silent and watchful.
Morning light had just begun to seep through the cloud cover, casting the woods silver. Frost glistened along the ground, up the water pump, and a thin fog drifted between the trees. A strip of birch bark hung from one buck’s mouth as he stared at her. Small clouds of breath circled before their nostrils, dissipated. One of the bucks–the largest one–lifted one hoof, stamped the ground lightly. He canted his head, forward and down, squaring his antlers. The other bucks aligned themselves quietly, until they were standing behind and beside him, all facing her.
Mattie heard her own heart, pounding through her. The bucks were beautiful, terrifying. She had the sensation of trespassing, as if her dreams, trafficking through the morning, had drifted beyond their proper boundaries, grown tangled with the dreams of these animals. Their dream–of harmless woods, silver grasses, the night’s cold trembling from their coats–had somehow become part of her own, and now they faced each other as phantoms.
The vision held–stretching, lingering–longer than Mattie could hold her breath. Then the cabin opened with noise–howling and frantic–and the bucks were gone, disappeared from the day before Mattie could turn around.
The howling was Samuel’s. “Come back,” he screamed. He ran from the cabin, a cartoon of a boy, his long johns unevenly buttoned, his snowmobile boots flapping wide, a steak knife clutched in one hand. “Here. Come here.”
Armin and her grandfather stood just outside the door, bent with laughter. Samuel stopped in the place where the deer had stood, turned a slow circle as if he could conjure them back.
“Come back,” Armin imitated. “Here bucky, bucky.”
“Stop it,” Samuel yelled. He turned and pointed at Mattie with the knife. “She missed them. She did.”
“Missed them with what?” Mattie’s grandfather asked. “Her bare hands? She supposed to strangle them? Stab them with that steak knife?”
“Sometimes they just sneak up on you,” Armin said gently. “Teasing.”
“They were right here.” Samuel’s voice was high with anger, loss. “Just standing here.”
Mattie walked to the spot where the deer had been. The frost was beginning to melt from the ground, and with it the glistening imprint of their hooves. She and Samuel watched as the edges slowly diminished with the sunlight, fading like breath from a frozen window.
Mattie was first to spot the doe that evening. She and her grandfather were waiting in the blind while Samuel and Armin moved through the woods. Armin was teaching Samuel how to push an animal–how to cast a wide circle through the woods, walking to the blind with the wind at your back, using your scent to nudge any deer toward the waiting hunters.
Mattie saw the doe while it was still among the trees. The sky was clear, the sun bright in its lowering. It caught the doe’s eyes, flashing gold, so that Mattie saw them shining from the woods. The doe’s ears flicked backward, forward, back–measuring her danger, seeking its direction. She stepped nervously in place, testing the ground.
Mattie remained silent and still, watching. When the doe walked slowly into the clearing, Mattie raised her gun. Without a word, her grandfather brought his rifle up beside hers, matching the doe’s tentative pace. “You go ahead,” he whispered.
Mattie kept her sight just forward of the flank, high along the ribs. Her grandfather had shown her pictures of deer–targets with quarter-size circles marking the best places for a quick kill–but the doe’s hide was tricky with shadows, and Mattie feared a bad shot.
She moved her sight back and forth, up and down, waiting for the click that would tell her she’d found the spot. But when she found it, when her sight came almost naturally to rest among the doe’s ribs, Mattie was unable to pull the trigger. She could not break the quiet of the moment. She felt herself pushed up against a boundary, unable to cross. After pulling the trigger, anything might happen. The doe might fall, or not. The doe might cry out. Mattie herself might.
She waited, counting her breaths. Her grandfather didn’t move or speak, but she could feel an urgency in him, a limited patience. And then, suddenly, Mattie saw something in the woods beyond the clearing. Samuel. Kneeling in the brush directly across from them. Taking aim. His rifle, like Mattie’s, had no scope. Their grandfathers believed in open sights. Aiming at the doe, they were also aiming at each other.
Mattie didn’t know what, exactly, had drawn her eye to Samuel. It wasn’t movement, because the doe would have sensed it first, bounded. And yet she had known someone was out there, working against her. The knowledge had entered her mind like a telling scent.
Mattie returned her sights to the doe, saw her hide twitch, as if feeling the guns upon her. Mattie swallowed once, twice, and then fired. Her grandfather shot a moment later. A shout came from out of the woods, and then a third shot sounded. The doe leaped, then came down on her forelegs. Her hind legs kept working, trying to gain traction, sliding her forward across the frozen ground. She fell to her side and lay there, panting.
Mattie’s grandfather began to run across the clearing. Samuel was slumped over his gun, supporting himself with one arm. Armin stood above him, breathing hard, hands braced against his knees. He held up an arm when Mattie’s grandfather drew near.
“Is he all right?” her grandfather called.
“He will be,” Armin said.
“We never saw him.”
“Greedy!” Armin yelled at Samuel’s head. He jerked him up by the arm. “Look where you were aiming!” He gestured toward Mattie and her grandfather, standing side by side. Samuel kept his face turned away from them. A scarlet handprint bloomed across his cheek.
Armin took Samuel’s gun. He emptied it, tucking the bullets into his pocket, then walked to where Mattie and her grandfather stood, leaving Samuel behind.
“I’m sorry,” Armin said. “He got ahead of me in the woods. Fired when I shouted at him.”
“Might have scared him,” Mattie’s grandfather said. “Made him flinch, pull the trigger.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Armin said. “He knows better than to take a shot like that.”
The doe was already dead. There were two coins of blood on her coat–one just between the third and fourth ribs, the other in the upper neck. A strange darkness had pooled in her eyes, turning them black and still as agate.
Her grandfather touched the place where each bullet had entered, then moved his hand down the length of the doe. He took Mattie’s hand and placed it beneath his. The doe’s coat was still warm. Their hands traveled in long strokes, neck to hip, as if soothing out the last life. Mattie’s fingers brushed across something dry and rough in the loose fur of the doe’s belly–a nipple. She snatched her hand back.
“She’s had a few,” her grandfather said, nodding. “But none recently.”
Mattie stared at the doe. She felt an urge to beg for reassurance, to hear her grandfather say that the doe had not suffered, that she had left no fawns, that it was right to have killed her. “Promise?” She asked.
“No,” he said. “But I’d be surprised if it was otherwise.” He took out his doe license, tore the tag from its corner and fastened it to the doe’s ear.
Mattie watched Samuel walk across the clearing. He lingered at the rim of Armin’s shadow. The mark on his face was just beginning to fade. “You got her,” he said quietly. “You got your first deer.” Though he had stopped crying, his eyelashes were still wet. They had clumped together–dark, glistening triangles that brushed his skin each time he blinked.
“Excellent shots,” Armin said. He had taken his hunting knife from its casing, and he touched its tip to each bullet hole. “Both of them. Just the way it’s supposed to be done.”
Mattie watched Armin’s words fall upon Samuel, curling his shoulders inward, sinking his head. She saw what she had done, what she had taken from him.
“We have to clean her now,” Mattie’s grandfather said. “You don’t have to watch, but you can if you want to.”
“I start by cutting the throat,” Armin said softly. “So I’ll be able to take out the windpipe.”
They explained each of their actions as they cleaned the doe–the order in which things should be removed, the placement of the urinary tract, the intestines, the heart. Armin showed Mattie the small uterine sac–the color of bright, melted jewels. She tried to imagine it growing, expanding to hold something as large as a fawn, pushing organs and intestines out of its way. The impossibility of such a thing–and the truth of it–was startling. She reached forward, touched it with her finger, watched colors swirl across the slick surface like oil.
They placed the innards in a Hefty bag and wiped the cavity with dry cloths, taking out as much blood as they could. By the time they were ready to go, the light was dimming into darkness and the woods were silent. Armin and Mattie’s grandfather carried the doe between them. They’d tied the hooves with thick rope–front to front, back to back–creating a kind of handle for each man to grab. Mattie shouldered her gun and her grandfather’s, but Samuel was not allowed to carry his. He walked behind them, silent except for the sound of his hands, scratching against the nylon of his coat pockets.
For dinner that night, Armin cooked the long, slender steaks he’d cut from either side of the doe’s backbone. He explained that it was camp tradition for hunters to eat these gourmet cuts instead of packing them up. The meat had almost no tallow, and so was its own reward.
Armin filled Mattie’s plate, loading it with venison and buttered white potatoes. “Hunter eats first,” Samuel said quietly. His face was placid and blank. “It’s the rule.”
Mattie took a bite of the venison. It was sweet and rich. The taste–the scent hovering high at the back of her mouth, filling her head–made her feel hungry, starving, as if she would never get enough. She imagined the meat moving through her like paint, marking its bright path.
Armin served the table and set out four cups. He took the whiskey bottle from the shelf above the stove and poured just enough to cover the bottoms of two of them. He placed them before Mattie and Samuel.
“For sipping,” Armin said. “For us grownups.”
Samuel looked from Mattie to Armin, questioning. Armin smiled. He reached out, touched his fingers to Samuel’s cheek, the place where he’d slapped him. Tears welled in Samuel’s eyes, and his face worked to fight them. He stared at his lap, and then he began to weep. Armin stood beside him. He placed a hand on Samuel’s shoulder and the other on his head, bracing Samuel against his leg, holding on as he shook.
The sound filled the cabin, surrounding them. Mattie felt a great relief, as if she were the one crying. She felt like he was crying for both of them, that he was right to. Mattie sipped her whiskey. It was strong, stinging, and she closed her eyes against it. She kept them closed, took a deep breath. She wanted to keep it there always, the mingling scents of venison and whiskey, this taste of adulthood–this sad and lovely burning.
