She could’ve really hurt him, Dad said.
But she didn’t, Mom said and her voice sounded tired.
So next time when he comes in bleeding to death, you going to reward her again instead of sending her to her room?
Mom sighed. Bill, I’m sorry. But you’ve got to understand, sending her to her room doesn’t work. I’ve tried it. You’ve got to redirect her.
Redirect, he muttered. I don’t need a lesson on how to discipline my kid. I swear, Hannah, sometimes you act like you’re the only one responsible for raising her.
Sometimes I feel like I am.
What’s that supposed to mean?
They both went quiet a spell. I stood outside their door, my head bent. Moonlight spilled across the floor through the window at the end of the hall, bluish-white, it coated everything, the floorboards and the bookshelf and my own bare feet.
Dad spoke real soft. Hey.
I’m trying to think of what to say that won’t make me sound crazy, Mom told him.
The bed creaked.
I don’t think you’re crazy, Dad said.
She give a laugh. Not yet, she said and sighed again. It’s just when it comes to Tracy, it’s—different. We need to—
What? Dad said.
Mom went, Shh. Then called out, Tracy?
I froze. I could feel her listening for me. I crept away from the door silent as I could. Mom’s ears was nearly good as mine, keen enough to hear my bare feet shuffle away from their door, to hear the tiny click of my own door closing.
Next morning, she was waiting for me, boots on.
Let’s go, she said.
Where?
Hunting.
She might of suggested we shave our heads and fly to the moon. I stared at her as she tucked herself into an old pilled sweater, then moved toward the door.
Well, she said. We doing this, or what?
We followed the trail into the woods, walking but not speaking. A quarter mile in or so, she grinned at me, then bumped me with her hip before she took off, sprinting through the woods.
I run after her. The two of us bounding over the packed dirt, me in my bare feet, her in her clunky boots. But she was faster than she looked and I stretched my legs and pumped my arms to keep pace with her. My heart sending blood surging through my veins, it warmed every part of me and I felt stronger and faster than ever, but still she pulled away. She disappeared round a bend and when I followed, she was farther and farther ahead.
When she finally stopped and I caught up, the two of us laid on the ground beside the trail, catching our breath.
She sighed, then sat up. That felt good, didn’t it? she said. I miss this.
It hadn’t occurred to me, till she said it, that this was the first time I ever seen her in the woods without Dad. She always come on family walks, or the two of them exercising a new pack of pups together, but she never explored the woods with just me or Scott, and definitely never on her own.
Come on, Trace, she said. You’ve got your knife, right? Show me what you know.
So we pushed through the woods, looking for a good spot for me to set a snare. Then we was quiet a long time, sitting close enough together I could feel the heat coming off her body. Till a marten come along and found itself caught. I showed Mom how I used the knife she’d give me, where I knew to cut and let the blood out till whatever I caught was dead and ready to bring home to skin and butcher.
Go ahead, she said as I bled the marten.
I hesitated. It wasn’t hard to recall how she had hollered the one time she caught me with Scott’s blood on my mouth.
It’s okay, she said.
So I held the critter close. A warm, metallic flood over my tongue, and in my head I went scurrying down the trunk of a tree to where I knew voles nested and made their burrows, I sniffed the air and smelled something curious and trotted past the vole place and into a cluster of birch trees, closer to the scent, like sticky sweet berries, and took a final step forward to taste the bit of jam smeared on a rock before the snare closed.
Most animals I found in my traps was hours, maybe days dead. When you have an animal that is dying as you hold it in your arms, rather than one that has been dead a spell, it is hot, you can feel the heat of it spread through you, and what you learn from it is as clear as if you’re seeing with your own eyes. Any taste will give you a moment. But in the drink that comes with a critter’s last breath, you get a whole history. Everything it has done and felt comes to you like it is happening at the exact moment you are learning it. You take in a whole life with the killing drink.
I finished. My skin buzzing with another creature’s death and life, I felt I could run another ten miles and this time keep up with Mom no matter how fast she went. But I stood there, waiting to see what she would do.
She said, Leave the carcass. We’ll come back for it.
We went deeper into the woods, stopping by a slender branch of the river so I could wash the blood from my hands and face. As we walked, she didn’t say much, except to quiz me on the plants we found. Back then, I couldn’t identify too many, I was more keen on pointing out animal tracks and piles of scat.
You need to know these things, Mom said and showed me a patch of monkshood, which looked a little like wild geranium, same color only the buds was more clumped together. You can eat the flowers and leaves of the geranium, but the monkshood is poisonous. There are all kinds of plants and roots you can eat, but you have to be able to tell the good ones from the dangerous ones.
I don’t see the point in eating a plant, I said. You don’t get nothing from it the way you do a critter.
No, Mom said. But it’ll keep you going if you’re hungry and there’s nothing to hunt.
We walked a good bit, then turned round, made our way back to the marten. I slung it over my shoulder to take back and have Dad show me how to skin it.
Mom smiled.
What? I said.
It just reminds me, she said as we made our way to the trail again. There was this day, earlier this summer, you were here in the woods. Of course. I was in the kitchen. Making bread, I think. But mostly watching for you. You were gone all morning. When I finally saw you come into the yard, you had some dead thing slung over your shoulder. You’ve gotten so good with traps. The sun was shining in your hair, and you were already tan from being outside all the time. You looked like the healthiest person alive.
She looked down at me. Right then, she said, more than anything, you know what I wanted?
What?
I wanted to let you be, she said.
There was a churning in my head, her words tumbling over themselves and rearranging till they lined up another way. I began to lay each moment of the day next to another, like building a lean-to, at first all you have is separate branches but when you connect them, they create something whole, a safe place for you to stay. My surprise at Mom wanting to come into the woods with me. How her face hadn’t changed when she watched me drink. Her own words when I told her a plant wasn’t any kind of substitute for an animal. You can learn plenty of things just by watching and thinking. But certain things you can only know because you experienced them yourself.
I wanted to let you be, she’d said. But what I heard now was, I wanted to be you.
Why don’t you come out to the woods on your own? I asked her.
She studied the trees and the gray sky peeking between branches. Her hands tucked into the pockets of her Carhartts as she walked, her cheeks red with the damp chill that clung to the day.