Who taught you to hunt? I tried instead.
Who taught you?
I frowned.
You taught yourself, didn’t you? she said. You watched the woods and learned from observation. And then you caught your first animal. A vole, wasn’t it? And from that, you learned—what? Do you remember?
I thought back to that day, the first animal I ever tasted, even before I managed to kill something myself. I must of been only four or five. Stepping from the warm grass of the sunlit yard into the shadowy woods and finding the vole, barely alive, its scent was what drew me to it. It fit in my two hands cupped together. And when I tasted it, my head flooded with moonlight, a stirring, a twitching in my muscles, and I poked my head from my nest then run through a warren underground till I found my way to the surface, full moon overhead, bright as daylight.
I told her, I learned that if the moon is bright enough, a vole will think it’s daytime and come out to feed.
And when did you catch your next vole? Mom asked.
On a full-moon night, I said.
There you go.
I remembered, too, her finding me at the edge of our woods, and her arms round me as she carried me inside. How bright the bathroom seemed as she knelt before me and scrubbed my skin till it was almost raw and my face stung.
You didn’t want me to, I said.
To what?
Drink, I said. Did you?
She sighed. When I was a girl, younger than you are now, I just did what came natural. I never thought to ask anyone about it or find out if it was the same for other little girls. My brothers never hunted, not the way you do. The way I did.
The way your own mom done?
She shook her head. I never saw her hunt. We weren’t very alike, my mom and me. I used to hear stories about my grandmother, things that made me think we were the same. But I never knew her. They say she disappeared shortly after my mom was born. My own mother never seemed to know what to do with me. I think, sometimes, she was almost afraid of me.
She stopped, so I stopped, too. She bent a little so we was eye to eye, and I seen for the first time she didn’t have to bend as far as she used to.
I never wanted you to feel that way, she said. Once I knew that you took after me, I wanted— She brushed her hand over my hair. I wanted something different for you, she said.
Everything between us, everything we shared, hung in the air like a held breath, I could almost see it. I was afraid to say the wrong thing and bring the whole thing down.
I couldn’t help it, though. You don’t hunt no more, I said.
She didn’t say nothing. Just started to walk again.
You don’t need it? I asked.
She kept her eyes on the trail, but her thoughts traveled her face, I could see her working through a puzzle. Finally she said, You can learn to live without it. You just need a good enough reason.
What was your reason?
You, she said. When I found out I was pregnant with you. Everyone talks about how exciting it is when you know you’re going to have a baby. But no one tells you how scared you’ll be.
I thought of her own mom again, someone I had only seen in pictures, a frowning, fretful-looking woman who clung to her sons but seemed to keep her distance from the daughter who was always slightly blurry, never still long enough to take a decent photo.
You was scared of me.
Not of you, Mom said. Scared for you, I guess.
What’s that mean?
It started to rain then, the lightest drizzle. I could barely feel the drops on my skin, but the rain on the leaves of the trees built a cave round us, only the two of us enclosed in it together, no one else.
It’s kind of your job, she said, when you’re a parent, to be scared for your kids. I worry about all sorts of things. Not just for you, but Scott, too.
Scott was not like me at all, mostly content to stay indoors all afternoon, even when the sun come out for its slim few hours in the deepest part of winter and made the snow sparkle. I ached on days like that, fidgeted and burned till I burst through the door and sprinted across the snow. There was more difference between me and Scott than just him being a boy and me being a girl.
I worry about different things for Scott, she went on. I worry that he’ll get hurt.
I frowned.
That I’ll hurt him.
I’m talking more about the inside. He’s so quiet and tenderhearted. He takes in much more than you think he does.
I remembered the one time I had bit him, the taste of his blood on my tongue as I pulled away. The experience of him, his own experience. I knew after that day that he couldn’t bear shouting if he thought it meant a fight, and that he closed his eyes when someone else got a shot or cut themselves not because he was afraid of blood but because he could almost feel their pain himself.
We was nearly back home. I could see the dog yard and the house in the spaces between the trees. Everything quiet except the sound of the rain. Soon enough we would step out of this cave we had made, back into our regular life. But I stopped us, reached out to grab her hand. I could stop, I said. I wanted to take back the offer soon as I made it. But I didn’t.
Her hand was cold in mine. Do you want to?
The rain fell harder. I didn’t know how to answer her. There wasn’t no part of me that truly wanted to stop hunting. But I did want to please her.
We come to the trailhead, walking slow despite the rain. The dogs barked a greeting. Smoke curled from our chimney into the slate-colored sky.
You’re old enough now, she went on, you don’t need most of the rules I gave you. Except the last one.
Never make a person bleed, I said automatically.
She squeezed my hand, stopped me. I’m serious, Tracy. You’ve broken that rule too many times already.
I flushed. I could find Scott inside me, the feelings and experience I’d took from him. The alarm going off in Aaron’s head like a fire drill when he seen what I done to the cat. And before that, when I was even younger, and she’d tried to put me in kindergarten, the classroom was crowded and loud and bright, too much light, waves of color and faces and voices, I felt panic rear up in me. Then an arm reached too close, a curious hand touching me, and then a wail. And red. And hands pulling me off the little boy whose face was bleeding where my teeth sunk in.
I’m sorry, I said again.
She shook her head. It’s okay. But you can’t do it again. You hear me?
I nodded.
I mean it, she said. It’s fine to hunt animals all you want. You don’t have to stop that. But when it comes to people, you cannot break that rule. Promise me.
There was more I wanted to ask. Like why people and animals had to be different. Why learning from one could be easy, but when it come to the more complicated creature, you had to do things the hard way. If you had a way to be as close as you could to another person, why wouldn’t you use it?
But we was at the house now, Dad and Scott on the other side of the door, I could hear them in the kitchen, and Mom was waiting on my promise. So I give it to her.
6
I snuck out the next night, a run with four dogs on the line that took me farther than the night before, past the lake but not quite to the river. By the time my head hit my pillow I only managed a couple hours’ sleep before Dad poked his head in my room and said, Morning, Trace. Breakfast time.
He meant the dogs’ breakfast, not mine. My belly was still full from my night run anyway, I’d found two traps triggered with critters I bled right where I stood. I’d found a third trap, too. Its catch missing. About two miles closer to home than the first empty trap.