Then the dogs was barking, and Dad looked up to see the man stagger, fall. Dad dropped the axe he was holding. I watched him run to the heap of person. I was rooted where I stood. Thinking of the memory I’d woke with that morning. Mom asking, Have you ever come across anyone when you’ve been hunting?
Instead of what happened the day before, I remembered the time I come across a moose calf. The steel cable snare had been set too high, it caught the calf instead of the smaller critter it was meant for. I do not use snares unless I am waiting and watching, but there used to be a man who set traps so close to our property you could call it trespassing. The calf must of felt the cable round its neck and panicked, pulled at the cable, which only made it tighter, till the young moose was strangled. That’s when I come across it.
Tracy!
Dad’s voice jolted me.
Tracy, bring me a towel!
The stranger, motionless on the ground.
Move!
I tore myself from where I stood, run into the house. Then sprinted across the yard, it seemed to grow wider the longer I run, my legs wouldn’t move fast enough, till suddenly I was there, kneeling beside the stranger. The ground under him already red. The wound a puncture, a hole in the gut that opened and let the blood out.
Help me get him up, Dad said, and he pressed the towel against the wound. We need to get him to the clinic.
I leaned over the stranger. He had a set of old scars running across his face from eye to cheek, like claw marks, pink and puckered. I tried to recall the face that come at me in the woods the day before, whether I remembered scars, or the size of the hands that had grabbed at me. Were they the same size as this man’s hands, now gloved in his own blood? But when I searched my memory, I only seen a blur of green and brown, then the stars that had filled my vision. Then nothing.
I put my arm round him and made ready to help lift him when his eyes fluttered open. They locked on me, then got wide. He tried to speak, but all that come out was a wheeze.
It’s okay, Dad said. Stay calm. We’re going to get you some help.
The man clutched at Dad’s shirt. I staggered under his weight. He was taller than Dad and solid. We drug him like a felled tree across the yard and into the truck.
I’ll call you when I get to the clinic, Dad said.
Dad—
Shut the door.
He whipped the truck round, the tires spitting gravel. A cloud of dust left in his wake.
Quiet as a vacuum after so much commotion. The dust settling. My breath ragged, like I had just run a mile fast as I was able. The sky so white it hurt to look at it. Over in the dog yard, Marcey circled then settled in front of her house. Flash give a whine.
I tried to think, and tried not to think.
When I come upon that calf, I’d wondered how long it had been there, hanging by its neck. Not long enough to go cold or grow stiff, there was new snow all round but none on its body. I held my breath and waited. Watched for its flank to rise. A moose calf is big, they have real sharp hooves, and if it was alive I didn’t want to get too close, it might spook and clomp me.
I waited till I was certain. Then I used my knife.
But when I drew back from the slit I had made and the blood was spilling out, I heard the calf bleat. A sound so small I might of imagined it. Its eyes rolled, landed right on me.
And then it was dead, and it was dark outside, so much time had passed and I couldn’t account for any of it, except that I was still in the woods, running. I never give a second thought to that calf till I stood in the driveway with a layer of dust on my skin, thinking about my own knife, sheathed in the blood I’d cleaned off later on my pantleg, and about the stranger who’d stumbled into our yard, bleeding from a wound not deep enough to kill him.
When Scott was still inside Mom’s belly she would tell me, Put your hand here, and I would feel him kick. I pictured him like a sleek river otter, swimming with the current of her blood. Dad told me one time she wasn’t supposed to have another baby after it went so rough with me. The health aide warned her she would be sick and have to stay in bed till he was born, but Mom was fine. In fact, it was the only time I remember her skin looking warm and brown from the sun, she was fat and healthy all that summer, happier than I’d ever seen her. Planting her vegetables and weeding the raised garden beds right up till Scott come along. He was born in the clinic like regular babies, a skinny, long-legged thing. He smelled funny and looked like a hairless opossum. When he was small, I watched her bite his fingernails, one by one, and spit them out.
She said, Come away from there, Trace.
She didn’t like me standing over his bed.
Sit down, she told me. She lifted Scott from the crib then lowered him into my arms. Support the head, she said.
He was heavier than he looked. I was always pestering her to let me hold him. Now he was so close I could see the blue veins at his temples, just under the surface of his skin. He stuck his fist in his mouth and sucked on it.
Good, Mom said. You need to be gentle with him. Understood?
It was an accident, I told her.
You bit his finger till it bled.
He had screamed when I done that.
Be Gentle with the Baby wasn’t the only rule Mom give me when I was little. Rule Number One for being outdoors was Never Lose Sight of the House. After Scott was born, I could play in the yard and even go into the woods but not so far that I couldn’t still see some part of the house or the kennel or the dog yard. If I call you, Mom said, and you don’t come running, I’ll know you’re too far from home.
I was almost five, too small to trap or hunt, but I could run all day and never get tired. I wanted to be outside from sunup to sundown, even when winter come along and the days got short, the dark didn’t scare me and the cold never bothered me much. From far enough away, the windows of the house was just squares of light, when you slipped behind a tree the glare from the squares went away, the woods grew darker and you could see better. What was once just shapes and shadows sharpened to become a rock or a snarl of roots at the base of a tree.
Before I learned to read books, I learned to read the woods. I crouched against a tree trunk and learned why squirrels come down to the ground even though they could travel limb to limb. I learned that a chipmunk will make the entrance hole to its tunnel under a rock or a fallen tree so there is no mound of dirt to attract its natural predators.
At first I was content to sit and watch, it was like television. Except the chipmunk show and the squirrel show was better than anything on TV. You watch critters like them long enough, you learn their habits and, one day, when you are six or seven and you have found a large stone, you pick a tree near the entrance hole and do not move even when you hear your mom hollering your name. You sit, barely breathing, pretty soon all the sound drains away, except the sound of claws scratching against dirt, and then it pokes its head out but still you do not move, you wait till it darts across the ground right in front of you, and then you bring the heavy stone down.
That first time, I missed, I did not brain the chipmunk the way I intended but crushed its leg and when I picked it up to finish the job, it wriggled and bit me. I howled and dropped it, then stomped it with my foot. The blood come then, trickled from its mouth and nose.
After that, I wasn’t content to learn just by watching.
Rule Number Two was Be Home for Dinner. I heard Mom hollering then, she must of been shouting and calling a long while. When I come running into the yard, I could see through the kitchen window dinner was on the table.