In the afternoon, when it had stopped snowing, they set out on another stoned walk. Two days earlier the forest had seemed uniformly dense; now they could see that there were large patches of open ground, swathes of untouched snow.
‘Nothing but coke,’ said Luke, ‘as far as the eye can see.’ They walked for an hour, skirting the edge of the forest, tramping through perfect snow. They had all been so terrified of getting cold that they now found themselves sweating under too many layers of clothes. At times they sank up to their knees in drifts. They all wore sunglasses. Nicole had lent Luke her Mongol hat. Hidden behind his shades, Alex remembered her as he had seen her that morning, in the bathroom, his chest as tight as the snow creaking underfoot. Apart from that there was no sound. Then Nicole thought she heard something. Almost like a scream. They stood still, listened, and a moment later they all heard the noise.
‘I think it was over that way,’ said Sahra, pointing. They walked into the woods, stopped and listened again, hearing the sound more clearly this time. They saw tracks in the snow: the tracks of an animal that no one could identify.
‘Fox.’
‘Deer.’
‘Bear.’
‘Wolf.’
‘Too big for a wolf,’ said Sahra.
‘Big wolf,’ said Luke.
They followed the tracks, obliterating them with their own. A few minutes later they came upon the dying animaclass="underline" a deer, caught in some kind of trap. The snow was spotted with blood. Hearing them approach, the deer thrashed around in terror, its eyes wild. The friends stopped dead. Nicole buried her head in Luke’s shoulder. Sahra was speaking to the deer, urging it to calm down but by now it was in a paroxysm of pain and terror. More blood began spraying on to the snow. The trap was self-tightening. The wire had already cut through one of its legs. The hoof lay like a wretched slipper on the blood-drenched snow. The other foreleg was almost cut through. The four friends stood where they were, hardly able to look, not knowing what to do. The deer was still thrashing around wildly. They moved back.
It was impossible to get a vet: there was no phone, they did not know if anyone lived nearby and, besides, the car had no snow chains. Alex said he had heard of something similar happening. The deer had been destroyed, he said. The only thing to do was to put the creature out of its misery but they had no idea how to do so.
‘What can we do?’ said Luke. ‘Club it to death with branches?’ Suddenly they were all laughing, shocked into hysteria. Alex suggested they cut the deer’s throat or stab it to death with Nicole’s Swiss Army knife. Their deranged laughter made the deer panic and they fell immediately silent. Blood splashed from its leg again. What seemed terrible was not the creature’s injuries — though they were terrible — but its tenacity, the way it was obliged to hang on to life by a thread as thin as the fur and bone that connected its hoof to its leg. Resilience, clinging to life: that was what was awful. It should have given in, should have lain down and died but instead it persisted, wounding itself more grievously with every attempt it made to release itself from the trap its life had become.
‘We’ve got to do something,’ said Alex, moving forward. At that point, as if sensing that Alex’s attention was focused on ending its life, the deer made a final lunge and its hoof came off. Blood sprayed over the snow. Nicole screamed and averted her eyes. The maimed creature lunged off, its two damaged legs sinking into the snow, leaving ghastly pink holes where it went. It was in agony but fear over-rode pain and it careered off through the trees. And that was the most terrible thing of alclass="underline" to have it demonstrated so plainly that mutilation and pain were not the worst things that could be suffered, that it would endure these in order to evade whatever was represented by the four humans who watched it disappear. They were relieved to have been spared the effort of trying to kill it, horrified by the thought of the deer skidding and lurching through the snow on its ruined legs, dying later of cold and hunger. They turned away, leaving the two hoofs lying in the snow.
They walked back to the house in silence. Their footprints from earlier in the day were like evidence leading to the scene of a crime. They felt implicated in the cruelty they had witnessed. The sunset, too, dyeing the snow a delicate rose-colour, was incriminated, culpable. They saw no other animals on the way home, no birds even.
That night the four friends were quiet with each other. The deer’s agony — ‘all that shit with the deer,’ as Luke and Alex would later term it — had tainted their stay. They ate the leftovers of lunch (itself the leftovers of the previous day’s meal). Alex opened a bottle of wine but no one felt like drinking. Nicole washed up in the kitchen and stayed there when she had finished. Alex, Luke and Sahra were in the living room, sitting, not reading, not speaking. They heard Nicole moving around, putting away plates, heard her turn off the light in the kitchen. They expected her to come into the living room but there was absolute silence, as if she were standing very still. Then, after more than a minute, she walked in, quietly.
‘Come,’ she said. ‘Quickly but quietly.’ They followed her out into the dark kitchen. Nicole opened the door and stepped outside. The others followed. It was very cold. The sky ached with stars. The snow was lit by the light of the porch — and standing there was a deer, smaller than the one they had seen earlier in the day. It was standing quite still, on four perfect feet, its skin a light fawn colour. Its eyes were shining with the light from the porch.
‘I was sitting in the kitchen, eating an orange,’ whispered Nicole. ‘And I looked up and it was standing there, looking in.’
Sahra reached for Alex’s hand. Luke put his arm around Nicole’s shoulders. The deer stood in the snow, breathing, twitching.
Then, unhurriedly, it turned and swayed off, picking its way through the snow, disappearing into the trees.
I want to tell now, as quickly as possible, a little of what happened later, much later. It should come after everything else, but I find that I don’t want things to end like that, as they did. Perhaps that is what led me to tell this story that is not a story: the chance to rearrange, alter, change; to make things end differently.
The four of us remained extremely close for another year but we did not go away together again as we did that Christmas or the following summer (I will come to that later). Sahra and I began to see less of Luke and Nicole. There had been a time when all four of us had wanted the same things, had wanted to do the same things. We rarely noticed who proposed something and who went along with it. Then an element of give and take entered into our dealings; we became conscious of saying ‘no’ to each other. Sahra and I, for example, stopped taking E — we felt it was fucking up our heads but the more we took the less easy it became to tell how — which meant that there was a peak of intimacy, of rapture, the four of us could never reach together again. Saying no to E — or anything else for that matter — was like saying no to Luke. Especially as what had seemed so vital and affirming about him (‘yes, always yes’) became, exactly as Sahra, half-jokingly, had claimed, simply greedy (‘more, always more’). He fell for the easy part of the Rimbaud myth, the prolonged and systematic derangement of the senses, but — like many before him — he had none of the discipline or drive of the genuine artist and ended up with nothing to show for it, except what he’d done to himself.