Dang, it’s tiny, you say.
It is that, your uncle replies. You want it?
Do I want it? you say. I don’t even know what that means.
It’d be some work.
What kind of work?
Well, the first part of the work would be figuring that out, he says.
What’s the other option?
I can call Fish and Game. They’d probably just let it go. It’ll starve without its mom. Or something’ll eat it. He stops talking and fixes his eyes on you.
What? you say and when he does not speak you say it again: What?
You know, he says.
Do I?
You’d better.
You look back at the tiny deer and as you do it emits a loud piercing shriek. Let’s get it out of there, you say.
I was hoping you’d say that.
The fawn’s forelegs wheel in the air over the roadside ditch. All the while it continues to wail.
Your uncle has brought a plastic pet carrier box and you retrieve it from the truck and open it to extract a wool blanket and the two of you come to stand next to the couple.
You from the vet? the man asks.
Wildlife rescue, your uncle says.
Ah, the man says. How old you think this one is?
I’d guess a week. Maybe week and a half.
Get her out of there, the woman says. Her eyes do not move from the fawn. Limp now, limp and suddenly silent in the fence line.
That’s what we’re here for, your uncle says. You ready?
You nod.
Let’s get her foot out.
You set the pet carrier in the gravel beside the road and then you and your uncle approach the animal, so slowly, and the fawn does not move until you are upon it, your uncle tossing the blanket over its body. Then it is in motion again and its cry starts up, loud, its shape writhing under the blanket as David wraps his arms around it. Get its foot now, he says.
You manage to pry its tiny hooves out of the V of fencing and then your uncle steps back with the fawn still kicking in his grasp, like a blanket come alive, kneeling before the pet carrier and pushing it through the opening. It slams immediately into the gated door but it is inside now and will not escape. The plastic box skitters and jumps beside the road and for the first time you can remember, your voice falls between faint shush and whisper: It’ll be all right. We’re here to help you. You’ll be all right now. And the animal actually relaxes for a moment as if to listen to you, wide-eyed and panting in the shadowed interior of the box.
Wow, the woman says behind you. Wow.
You say nothing in response, only staring at the animal’s terrified eyes.
Your uncle talks with the couple for a time as you lift the carrier and secure it in the back of the truck. When you drive away at last, the couple is still standing alongside the fence. Through the windshield you can see the back window of their truck: a round, red-bordered sticker proclaiming membership in the National Rifle Association and a series of deer and elk images outlined in white. And for the first time you understand that everyone is a killer: here in the forest, in the desert from which you have come, indeed perhaps the world itself nothing more than a vast field for the dealing out of death, some odds so slight as to be impossible to gauge.
YOU CALL her Ginny, after a girlfriend of Bill’s you had a crush on when you were ten or eleven, and you pour yourself into that animal. Perhaps that was your uncle’s plan all along, his way of keeping you on the straight and narrow. When other animals come in you do the same. The year pulls to a close and then another. There are three and a half years of that, days and nights of working and building up the enclosures, and figuring out ways to entice people to pay to see what they had gathered. A few fund-raisers in town. A family discount week. Ginny grows into a beautiful doe and when you release her a year after her rescue, when you watch her disappear into the forest, you cannot deny your tears. She returns briefly for a few seasons and then disappears forever among the others of her kind. You and your uncle rescue a one-winged bald eagle from near the highway where the Long Bridge crosses out of Lake Pend Oreille in Sandpoint, and the following year you bring that giant raptor to the local elementary school and the children treat you as if you are a god, the eagle perched beside you on the great wooden T you have erected for that purpose. The eyes of the children are wide and filled with wonder, and you can see your own childhood self reflected in their gaze.
And then your uncle is gone. The event is not unlike your brother’s death a full decade earlier. One day he is there and the next the sheriff is telling you the news, that David has suffered a massive heart attack in Bonners Ferry while visiting his girlfriend and that he is dead. You can think of nothing to say so you say nothing.
You cannot fathom running the rescue without your uncle and you do not even know if that is indeed what you are supposed to do. Part of you simply wants to release them all, to open the doors of the enclosures and step back and watch them flee into the forest. In such fantasies their mangled bodies are made whole again, their minds clean and pure and made up of wilderness. Or wildness. They dream of fields of golden grass and meadows filled with elk and moose and stands of dark pines and white birch and cool clear rivers flowing from melting snow. And perhaps such an idea is true. Perhaps even now. But you know that were you to open the cages, the animals would simply stumble to their deaths. One-winged birds. Three-legged animals. A bear who would walk up to the nearest human, seeking a marshmallow, only to find fear and death.
There is no funeral, no service of any kind, and when it is revealed that there is a will, you learn that your uncle owned the property outright and that it has been — all fifty acres — willed to you and you alone. Your uncle’s girlfriend receives nothing at all. Her only words to you are to tell you to fuck off. You never see her again.
You have thought less of Rick than you did years before but now in your loneliness and despair his face swims up out of the muddy darkness of your dreams. It has only been four years since you left Reno. Before your uncle’s death, you might have claimed that the whole of that geography felt cut off from you, like a severed limb, but now it feels too close, as if just beyond the trees. Thinking of Rick and then thinking of Susan. You know in your heart that you will never see her again and your relief at such an understanding is mixed with a slow and painful longing.
Soon after the reading of the will you stop at a low, dark drinking hall in the strip of small battered buildings that comprise Naples, the town you ostensibly live in and which is in some ways no town at all but a dot on the map between Bonners Ferry to the north and Sandpoint to the south. The sign reads Northwoods Tavern. Wagon wheels line the entrance. Old chain saws in the rafters. Perhaps you somehow think you will be welcomed here in the way you had once been welcomed at Grady’s. What you know is that you have never felt more alone in all your life. You take a stool at the bar and ask for a vodka on the rocks and then turn and look at the room. There are only two others present besides yourself and the bartender, two older men who sit at a back table, drunk and mumbling to each other. Beyond them are mounted all manner of animal heads: a big-horned buck, a moose of enormous size with a rack that extends like two huge fins, a feral pig of some kind, its mouth permanently molded into a snarl. Smaller animals as well. A badger and, mounted upright in a running pose, a mink or marten.
All mine, the bartender says.
What’s that? you say.