Our uncle the mico was always getting older.
IT WAS BECAUSE he promised to watch me that my mother let me hunt with him, my first time. The men were preparing for their months-long winter trip, not for food but for the trade, from which they would return heavy with skins for the women to scrape and cure, so this would be a short journey, just to give the younger boys a taste. I still saw him as mine alone. His one eye, I thought, would follow me as I followed him; the love I had — though it was a more desperate feeling than love — would draw him like a pulling moon. How could he look at me and look away? My heart was loud.
We left in the afternoon, and he was tall and his arms swung an inch farther than any other man’s. The stripe of his hair was pulled up tight, and the ring in his nose gleamed silver. His feet in shoes were silent, almost no feet at all. I knew the short paths we took that crossed each other through the village and into the farming land that lay along the river. But when we moved past the cornfields and beyond the burned woods into land that was new to me, I abandoned my human self, my upright legs, and I was a creature. No matter the men I was with. I swam through pine needles. My thoughts floated off from me before they ever made a noise. I was cold at first, for it was the slow drift into winter and the trees that had been golden were now muddy. The wet leaves clung to my heels. But my skin turned into something else, something like a shell or hide. I no longer felt the thorn vines clutching, the buried pointed rocks, the pricks of the pine cones. I had eyes, and fingers enough to hold my bow, and a heart that steadied me onward, the blood pumping in drums through my chest and in my ears, beating the thoughts to fragments. Only the beeches still held their leaves. In the light of afternoon, the forest ahead was fiery brown, the color of a deerskin in sun, the sky beyond cut with winter branches and the russet of the shaking beech leaves. Our sounds were the sounds of the wood. Wet leaves stepping, squirrels flipping acorns, the chatter of the chickadees in the low branches, the wind matching the water. The sun’s crispness as it fell, a faint ringing as it marked our path and gave us to the dusk.
We lay down to rest in this new land, taking our women’s food from our bags for supper and then lying in a mass under skins for warmth, the damp scrub like a slick beneath us. I swept my spot clean and piled the broken branches at my feet for luck. The night sounds were different here, the owls with a dialect. My hands balled into fists in case the animals were evil or the ghost children found us. I took pleasure in my fear because it gave me yet another thing to conquer and possess. I slept for the first time without my mother, and in the ring of bodies, hunters all, I smelled myself a man, or the beginning of one, and when I fell asleep at last, I had creature dreams. I was running far and fast, I was climbing and falling, I dove and buried. There was no thought but movement. We were animals in an animal world, and I was the newest of them.
I woke with a low growl in my belly to the grayness before dawn. The men were already rubbing out the leaves where we slept, and I, the last to rise, felt like a child again. Someone had kicked aside my pile of branches, so I bunched them back up. We were moving before I remembered where we were and who my mother was. I was cold, and I no longer felt like an animal, and no one had given me anything for breakfast. There was a thin fog that dampened our clothes and misted my eyelashes. I envied my little brother Oche and his nearness to the women. How much more sense it made to plant seeds and coax their stalks to the sun and pick their fruits to grind into meal than to be a lone boy in the woods, searching for food you cannot see. At home, my mother would have clean blankets.
The legs of my uncle looked like stone, carved in muscle shapes. How had he ever come from a woman’s body? He stood up fast, he ate little, he wiped no sleep from his eyes. He was wrapped around this forest like strangler vine, like there was no difference between his breaths and the breathing leaves. I trailed behind him, putting my feet in the prints his feet left. One of the other men was wearing a deerskin on his back, and in one hand he held a head: a dried deer face that he raised and pivoted, becoming a strange two-legged half-dead animal that was meant to seem ordinary to the wild deer watching. My uncle looked more deer than him.
We crossed another creek as the sun spread on the edge of the land, and through the last of the mist — which would live on my clothes all day, the sun never rising high enough to reach its heat — I saw the stand of deer. They hadn’t heard us, our wet-leaf footsteps or my belly. In the dawn their skin was as golden as beech leaves, as smooth and unbroken as the bark. Two bucks, four does, and a fawn. A family, like my family, a band of woods warriors, like my woods warriors. A surge of something warm tripped in my throat. I wanted to protect them and seize them in the same childish instant. As we paused to watch them blow through the leaf litter with their muzzles, the fawn reaching back to lick her shoulder, I drew an arrow, fit its notch to my bow, aimed it as I would at a flying crabapple, and loosed it at the baby.
It cut a line through her flank and fell away and the stand of them exploded in a flurry of thin legs so fast the first thing my eyes could settle on was the leaves drifting down from where they’d been kicked. One of the men cuffed me across my face and another took my bow. In the clearing, we found a vein of salt and a spatter of dropped blood from the fawn. I took a leaf that had been curdled red and slipped it in my shirt. This was my blood, blood that I had drawn. The men laughed at me and called me the names of women and one twisted my ear until it rang, but I could not be shamed. My brother, girlish, attached to my mother’s leg, had never done what I had done, would never understand the swell of possession.
We found more deer to catch. I stood behind the others without my bow and touched my shirt where the leaf was hidden, and grown men brought down the animals with guns, clean shots to save their skins. We carried the bodies back on sleds. Half-homeward, we stopped to eat and I sat beside my uncle as naturally as if there were no other space in the woods. He didn’t look at me or grab my shoulder, but unlooped a pouch from his breeches and opened it on his lap, pulling out his charms.
“A foot,” he said, and I looked over, pretending that I hadn’t been looking all along. “You take it from the last kill to trick the new deer. They smell it and think their brother is still running.”
I rubbed it with a soft finger. It had been cut off at the ankle, was thin-boned and cleft. The hoof was black and milky, like dark water. I touched it quickly to my lips.
“Physic-nut,” he said. The yellow fruit rolled around his palm.
“What does it do?”
He shook his head. “Slips in their minds and fuddles them. I don’t know. Draws them near.” He turned to the three small stones and tumbled them beneath his thumb.
“They trip the deer,” I said. “They keep them from running far.”
He laughed. “No, these are from my grandmother’s grave. Just bits from her grave.”
A woman’s spirit on a stone didn’t sound like a deer charm. There weren’t women on the hunt, except to cook for us and strip the bodies we caught; their smells and the red richness of them were too potent to be masked. Even wrapped in skins, they were never less than women, less than intoxicating. I didn’t press my uncle further, because I didn’t yet want to know their secrets, which I knew he knew.