My teeth wasn’t sharp enough to break an animal’s hide, but a person’s skin is not as tough.
Then Scott was crying, and though my stomach already felt better than it had in days, it also sunk.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I said. I didn’t mean to. I petted his shoulder, and he held his hand to his chest, the blood from it stained the front of his shirt. I didn’t mean to, I said again even as my mouth watered.
Mom come in then. Out, she said and swept Scott up in her arms.
But—
She was already in the bathroom, prying Scott’s hand open to clean the bite. Tracy, I said go. Just go outside. She kicked the door closed.
So that is how I come to catch my first hare, I didn’t wait to see if Mom would change her mind but run out the back door and deeper into the woods than ever before. Come upon some tracks in the snow I could not identify, then a tuft of fur caught on a twig. Then a pile of scat. I rolled the pieces between my fingers and tried to recall what animal it belonged to, these pellets was much smaller than moose scat, rounder and a little flat. When I come to a place where the tracks squeezed between two trees, I took my time setting the snare. Then I hid myself in the bushes.
It was a hare. It had dark tips on its ears and big, furry feet, so I knew it was a snowshoe hare, it could move through very deep snow real easy. When I seen it, my heart stopped. I held my breath and watched it follow its own tracks toward the two trees with the snare between them. When the hare hopped, it covered so much ground with a single stride, I wished for a moment that I could move like that. Then it was between the trees, it was caught and struggling, the snare tightening round its neck.
With no knife, I had a time killing it, but I managed. The blood come easily enough when I snapped the neck. I had my fill. The cold wind inside me stopped howling, and my own blood pulsed warm in my veins. I sat with my back against an alder, the midday sun finally inching its way into the sky and the trees all round me unveiling themselves in the weak light. The snow stained red from what was left of the hare, it was dead now but I could still hear it. It had squealed in its snare, before I snapped its neck, and I felt that squeal inside me, not just in my head but in my own throat, it tore at the soft lining there like I was the one who had screamed.
This was how I learned what I needed to know from the critters I took. Some learning, I had got from books. You open up a book and absorb the words and from that you know how to make a split stick trap or how to shelter yourself in the snow. It’s like drinking, you take it in and it is part of you.
The other kind of learning, you drink it in, too. It’s warm and it spreads through you, wakes up your muscles and sharpens your mind, and you can see clearly, not just with your eyes but with your whole self, and then you know what you didn’t before. How a squirrel plans its route from branch to branch. How a mouse will hear you before it ever sees you. How a snowshoe hare knows to run in a zigzag, not in a straight line, to confuse its predator. Every piece of knowing makes the next hunt easier.
I watched light soak into the woods and learned what I could from the hare. But underneath the hare’s experience, there was flashes of something else. The hare wasn’t the only thing I’d drunk from that day, I could still taste what little I’d got from Scott, too. And with that taste come a burning shame, not my own, but Scott’s. Along with it, his memory, now my memory, of waking that morning in a damp patch of my own piss. Satisfaction from the idea that come to me to hide my sheets and remake my own bed so Mom wouldn’t know. Little points of anger that shot out at my sister when she wouldn’t color with me, and the giddy, dangerous feeling I got when I kept goading her, like poking at a sleeping bear.
I knew my brother now in a way I hadn’t before. I had felt bad almost soon as I bit Scott, but now I felt even worse, like I had gutted him and looked inside and seen things he wouldn’t of wanted me to. I never felt that way when I learned what a squirrel or a vole had to teach me because how could I feel bad about being part of the natural way of things? But it was different with Scott.
Mom was waiting for me at home, sitting on the stoop, wrapped in her red coat and a wool hat on her head. Her eyes bloodshot and her face flushed.
She stood up. Fixing to say something or maybe yell or swat at me. Her face was a fast-moving cloud, changing second to second, it couldn’t settle on one emotion. Between anger and frustration and tiredness, I seen something else there, a look that happened so quick it was impossible to know what it might be. Except that for less than a second, when she looked down at the hare then right at me, it was like she seen a friend she recognized. Then the look was gone.
We don’t hurt people, she said.
I know, I told her.
No, Tracy, listen to me, she said. You can hit. You and Scott are going to fight, I get it. That’s natural between brothers and sisters. You can wrestle and slap and pull each other’s hair. I’d rather you didn’t, but I know it’s going to happen. But—listen.
She drew closer, took my chin in her hand. Locked eyes with me.
You must never make him bleed, she said. And not just him. Anyone.
Okay, I said and my voice was a whisper. My gut twisted in a knot. I couldn’t tell her I was sorry again.
You know the other rules.
I nodded.
Then you can remember one more, she said. Even if you break the others, you can’t ever break this one. You promise?
Okay.
Let me hear you say it.
Never make a person bleed, I said.
Her eyes darted to the hare that I had brought back for Dad to skin.
Good girl, she said.
3
All that weekend, Dad roused me soon as he was awake and handed me a list of chores. At first he stuck to his guns and give me only indoor chores, but I didn’t complain. I waded through piles of laundry and scrubbed the kitchen floor till it shined, cleaned every window and polished every stick of furniture and run the vacuum so much I couldn’t get its whine out of my ears. The whole time wondering what had happened to the stranger. Tom Hatch. If he was healing on a clinic bed in town. Or if he’d been healed and bandaged and was on his way back to wherever he come from. Or if he was gone altogether.
Eventually Dad run out of indoor chores and let me shovel snow off the porch and even tend to some of the dogs. I brushed Homer and Canyon, clipped their nails. Made my rounds through the dog yard dropping kibble into bowls and shoveling shit. In the evenings, I wrestled with whichever racing dog we’d let be the house dog for the night. Then I settled down and done the schoolwork Scott picked up for me each day. Even though I was expelled, Dad was set on me keeping up with what I ought to be learning. I kept my mouth shut, done the work. I could still be good, even if I had nearly killed a man. Even if I’d wished him dead.