Those kills. All mine.
Oh.
You turn back to the bar, sip at the vodka. The bartender is a thickset man, barrel-chested and possessed of an enormous round belly and a downward-curving mustache not unlike the mustache that Grady wore those few years ago back in Reno. Perhaps the fashion choice of discerning bartenders everywhere.
I don’t really hunt, you say.
It’s not for everyone, the bartender says.
Your eyes have fallen upon a ten-by-ten grid marked on a big sheet of butcher paper and decorated with felt-pen drawings of football helmets. Various names have been scribbled into a good many of the squares. What’s that? you ask.
Football pool. Super Bowl. You want in?
How much?
Dollar.
Sure, you say, and even in that single word you feel the hard twist of metal in your gut. I pick the numbers?
The bartender looks up briefly and then returns his attention to a small, soundless television mounted up above the bar. Numbers will all be random, he says. Shirley’ll pick ’em out of a hat or something, day of the game. I don’t think I’ve seen you around. You new around here?
You look across the bar at him. I’ve been here four years.
Yeah?
Yeah, I live just up the hill.
Doing what?
My uncle has—had—a little wildlife thing. A grizzly and a couple of coyotes and that kind of thing.
You mean that weird little zoo up there?
You cringe at the description but not enough that the bartender notices. Yeah, that’s the place.
What’s the deal with that anyway? It’s like wild animals, right?
Yeah, it’s animals that can’t survive without help.
That’s what I mean. Those animals are wild. You don’t put a wild animal in a cage.
My uncle’d probably argue you don’t shoot one either.
That’s not the same thing, the bartender says, glancing at you and then looking up and down the bar. At least out there it’s understood. They’re part of the food chain. Caging them up ain’t right.
They’d die in the wild, though, you say. I mean they’re mostly permanently injured in one way or another.
That’s what they’re supposed to do. They’re supposed to die in the wild. Not in a cage.
You tip the contents of the glass into your mouth and swallow. Well, you say, thanks for the drink anyway.
Shit, don’t be sore about it, the bartender says. We’re just having a discussion.
What do I owe you?
The bartender tells you and you pay and slide off the stool.
Where you from anyway? the bartender says.
And you almost say, Battle Mountain, because you are angry but you catch yourself and in the end you simply say, I’m not from anywhere.
None of us are, the bartender says. You turn to leave and the bartender calls to you again, Hey, kid, and you turn back, standing in the doorway now. No hard feelings. Really.
Whatever you say, you mumble.
You are nearly back to the rescue before you realize that you did not give him a dollar for the football pool.
YOU SPEND the next three days feeding and watering the animals as always, but the bartender’s words continue to burn inside you, a twist of hot anger that you cannot release. You find yourself thinking of calling the bookie again, although it has been many years since you have done any such thing. You fantasize briefly that you might place some insubstantial wager but for some reason you do not make that call and because there is no one to talk to — not about this urge nor about your uncle’s death nor about the bartender’s words — you find yourself talking to the animals, a kind of ongoing monologue that continues as you make your rounds.
Then comes the day when you happen upon the wreck. It is dusk and you see the smoking car first and then the animal and you pull to the side and before you can think you are running up the center of the road. What lies before you is a deer, a white-tailed doe well into adulthood who drags her paralyzed hindquarters across the asphalt, her voice coming in crazed high bleats like a child’s screams cut short over and over again.
The man there calls to you: What do we do? He is dressed, incongruously, in a jacket and tie, eyes wide and breath coming in shallow gulps. Behind him his car steams, the gold hood crushed into a V.
There’s not a lot we can do, you tell him.
Ah jeez, the man says when the animal’s cry starts up again. Don’t you have a gun or something?
Why?
So you can put it out of its misery, the man says. We have to do that at least. His voice is high and keening and when the doe cries it is so loud that it obliterates his words.
Hang on, you say.
You do not know it yet but you will see this scene many times: deer, elk, raptors, squirrels, and of course the moose. The long black slaughterhouse of the road. Now, you stand on the asphalt before the animal, the yellow line stretching out into the misting forest beyond its struggling shape. It lurches forward again, tries to, its backside already dead, rear legs dragging, draining urine and a wet discharge of fecal matter and blood. You think she is at least two years old. Maybe three or four. Perhaps older than that. You try to study the color of her fur, the long line of her head, her dark and rolling eyes. But you cannot answer your own question, cannot tell if she is the same doe you raised, the same that you bottle-fed, the same that saved you, four years ago, from who you were. Could it be? Could it be her, returned to you in this last moment?
Ah jeez, the man says. Look at my car. Holy shit. My wife’s gonna kill me.
You do not know how long you stand there. The animal continues to struggle, to bleed and to cry, a long line of mucus hanging in a thin rope from her jaw.
When you turn to the truck, it is a motion nearly automatic. The old Savage 99 rests in the gun rack across the rear window, placed there by your uncle without comment at least a year before. As if he knew. As if he could have seen that it would be needed. And perhaps this was true.
You pull the rifle from the rack and lever the chamber open and see that indeed there are cartridges within. The sight of them fills you with dread.
The man has wandered over to his crushed car and now stands before it in silence. Another vehicle has stopped, a pickup, and its driver rolls down the window and calls to you: Hey, you need some help?
That guy might, you say.
You can hear the door open and close again and the man’s voice calling to the driver of the smashed car: Hey, hey, you all right?
But you are not listening now. You have come to the doe. She has stopped moving and lies sprawled on the asphalt in exhaustion. You pray that she is already gone but then she starts her crying again, that explosion, that shriek of sound, so close now. Could this be her? Could this really be Ginny, who you pulled from the fence wire? Who you cared for? Who you named?
She is looking at you now. Her eyes roll.
You raise the rifle to your shoulder and aim. You wish you could say her name one time but your voice does not come and when you sight down the barrel at the hard cap of her skull you can say nothing at all.
YOU DO not sleep that night, so completely is the image of that blown skull burned into your mind. You bottle-fed her and learned that to help her excrete her waste you needed to wipe her anus with a baby wipe and so you did, many times a day, and she came to you and you held her and fed her and when she was a year old your uncle told you what you already knew, that you needed to release her back into the forest, and so you did. So much effort and care, and then there she was — if not the very same animal then one so much like her — and all your work has been for naught. You saved her and then you were her executioner. You wonder, in such moments, what Bill would tell you about living and dying, about what is right and what is wrong, but there is only you, alone. In your mind, pickup trucks blow past with gun racks, and mustached men brandish firearms that spark and kick white smoke into the trees. And you see the animals. How they leap into the air, twisting upon a fulcrum of blood, their bodies blowing apart over the snow. Marmot and muskrat. Black bear and grizzly. Beaver and raccoon and snowshoe hare. The great cats whining and hissing as they go down. Mountain lion, lynx, bobcat. See how their claws cut the empty air, how their teeth snap on the ice. And the deer and the moose and elk. And from the sky the first few faint red daubs of blood marking the paperwhite cold of the earth, each a meltwater crater lined with red like a bullet hole. Then heavier droplets, the torrent constant and unceasing once it has begun and all of it smelling of death. The first of the birds is a small dark shadow that ricochets through the tree branches and falls at last to the snow almost without sound. A faint puff like a quick exhale of breath. A tiny green hummingbird barely as long as your finger. You hold it in your hand but already it is too late. For this bird. For them all. Now come the woodpecker and the kingfisher and the warbler. And then at last the falcon and the hawk and the owl and the eagle. How their wings flutter backward over their curved bodies, as if trying to pull that last scrap of sky from the blood rain that surrounds them. Everyone a killer and so everything killing. Death coming into snow, into the fallen needles, into the frozen earth under our feet. Everyone a killer.