It was lying on its side, its legs splayed out against the grass, its head thrown back. The dead eye gleamed. It was the white deer, pierced through the heart with an arrow.
ELEVEN
At first I assumed the arrow to be a sportsman’s. But when I touched it, and felt its irregular, planed smoothness, I realized that it had been handmade, from a whittled twig and what appeared, in the moonlight, to be crow’s feathers. The shot was excellent — it had struck directly between the creature’s ribs. There was little blood, just the barest stain around the wound, far less than one might expect from an animal with its heart pierced, and I wondered if perhaps the hunter had treated the arrow with poison.
And how had the deer come to rest here, at the edge of my yard — and why? It couldn’t be chance that led it here; its presence could only have been deliberate, a signal to me. I knew now with certainty that my pack had been stolen by a human being, not some hungry animal. I stood and scanned the impenetrable treeline. Was this hunter, this thief, watching me now? My flesh rippled with fear and disgust, and I felt, for the first time, utterly exposed.
I mastered myself, however, and went back inside with slow, deliberate steps. I dressed. It was a quarter to four — sleep, it appeared, was finished with me for the night. I went out the back door, grabbing a shovel from the vestibule, and returned to the white deer’s corpse. In the few minutes I’d been away, it seemed to have deflated somehow, its one visible eye sunken, its fur lusterless. The body had cooled. With another glance at the treeline, I took a few steps back and sank the shovel into the sod.
The soil here was clayey and resisted the blade, but I had faced far greater challenges, and persisted in my work. In an hour I had made considerable progress, and when dawn arrived, the hole was dug. I went inside and drank a glass of water, then returned to the grave. I wiggled the arrow: it was stuck fast. After a moment’s thought, I went back to the kitchen, found a pair of rubber gloves, and put them on. I then removed my new knife — it had replaced the one stolen over the weekend — from my new pack, and carried it outside. I made several cuts in the deer’s flesh, radiating away from the arrow’s shaft, and in time I was able to wiggle the weapon free. I held it up before my eyes. The tip appeared to have been fashioned from scrap metal — stainless steel, it seemed, perhaps from an old kitchen knife. It was roughly cut, and uneven, but the blade itself had been carefully whetted and was clearly very sharp. I brought it inside, rinsed it off under the faucet, then left it to soak in a mixture of hot water, dish soap, and bleach. I would scrub it more carefully later, using a brush — I didn’t want to risk the same fate as my deer.
Back outside, I took two of the animal’s hooves in my hands and dragged it into the grave. I’d dug the hole three feet deep, and hoped this would be enough to discourage scavenging creatures. I shoveled the dirt back on top, tamped it down again with my feet, and replaced the sod. The mound was considerable and would likely remain so for a long time.
I completed my cleaning of the arrow, then sat down at the kitchen table to examine it. It was, to be sure, a peculiar artifact. The maker had found a remarkably straight twig, cut it to a length of thirty-six inches, stripped it of bark, and sanded down the knots, perhaps with a rough stone. He had carefully split several crow’s feathers, slotted the shaft, and inserted them with impressive straightness, apparently without glue. The same was true of the tip, which, as I had surmised, was made of a kitchen knife — the beginning of the word JAPAN was actually visible, engraved on one side — cut to the shape of an elongated chevron and ground to a stunning sharpness. A very small, crude hole had been bored in the shaft and through the blade, and a precise little peg had been fitted to hold the metal in place. I tugged at the tip, but it would not budge. The arrow was solid.
I set it down on the table and considered. Clearly, anyone who lived in this area would have no trouble buying as many arrows as he wished. Indeed, I had admired the bow-hunting supplies at the sporting goods store, and briefly considered buying some for myself. It was possible, of
course, that the arrow maker had little money. But surely even a poor sportsman would have access to tools? The arrow appeared to have been made entirely out of found materials, and the tiny peghole, while effective, was too rough to have been made with a drill.
There was one obvious explanation, which had first occurred to me while I lay, bruised and stunned, at the bottom of the pit: that somebody was living in the woods. I had previously assumed that, if this had ever been true, it was certainly not true now. But I could deny it no more. Someone was in the woods — in the castle, quite probably — and this person had dug the pit, stolen my pack, and killed the white deer. Furthermore, it was possible that this person was the same man who owned the land to the east of the rock — the vanished psychologist, Doctor Avery Stiles.
On the face of it, the theory seemed ridiculous. A mad doctor, hiding out for thirty years in an abandoned castle? But the facts lent themselves to this strange explanation, and I had to assume, in the absence of conflicting evidence, that it was correct. Of course, Doctor Stiles would be quite old by now — nearly eighty, in fact — and it hardly seemed reasonable to think that such an elderly man could survive alone, particularly in the harsh winter climate of the region. Nevertheless, no better explanation presented itself. A crazy old man was living in my woods, and did not appear to want me around. These were the facts, and, as such, had to be dealt with.
Randall had not indicated a time to meet him and Heph at the Amvets. I assumed that this meant they would be spending quite a long time there, so I decided not to worry about being punctual. After a bath and a long nap, I went into town for dinner. I was still disgusted with myself for having eaten the fast food cheeseburger the day before, and vowed to find more nourishing fare; after driving around Milan for a good twenty minutes, I believed I had found it in a small, tidy restaurant called Vegan Delights. It occupied an unlikely corner of a parking lot that primarily served a dilapidated shopping center, and looked more like a gas station than a health food establishment, but I found several appealing items on the menu and ordered one without significant consideration.
The place was sparsely patronized by scattered collections of hippies and loners, who thoughtfully chewed their food without saying much to one another. There had been a time in my life when I had reacted to such people with deep disdain. In those days, I viewed pacifism and activism as expressions of cowardice, and had even gone so far as to pick fights with anyone who espoused such radical ideas. Indeed, I considered such people inherently, and willfully, weak — and believed that their political views were merely a convenient means of justifying their weakness. Eventually I would learn that all human beings are inherently weak, and that our efforts to overcome that weakness are little more than pathetic sallies up the face of an impossibly high mountain. As a result, I came to a somewhat more nuanced understanding of “alternative” lifestyles. But I was still uncomfortable in the presence of such people, finding them unreasonably indulgent of their frailties. Furthermore, I could feel their judgment of me: doubtless they found my trim profile, stern bearing, and unwavering gaze discomfiting. The people here tonight, however, appeared focused on their food and on one another, and I was left in peace.
Eventually my waitress, an attractive, dreadlocked young woman with hairy underarms, brought me my falafel, and I ate it while reading the day’s paper, a used copy of which had awaited me in the booth. The paper was filled with inconsequential things — businesses opening or closing, town council meetings, births and deaths. I wondered, idly, why most people were so disconnected from world events, why they only seemed to care about those things that affected them directly, rather than those with broad consequences. But then again, I thought, I myself had lately been guilty of this same self-absorption.