They stood over the dead ten-point buck Marty had just shot. The action had quickened their blood, and despite the low temperature, neither of them felt the cold. Marty, in fact, was perspiring under his heavy coat.
“We draggin’ it back now?” he asked, his breath fogging out before his face as he looked up at his father.
His father smiled. “We ain’t got my deer yet.”
Marty returned the smile tenuously. “We gonna just let him lay here, pick him up later?”
“Can’t do that. We’ll tree-hang him, cut him so he bleeds out, then come back later and field dress him proper.”
“How we gonna do that?”
Marty’s father drew a coil of thin nylon rope from a coat pocket. “I’ll help you string him up; then I’ll show you what to do. Then you’ll do it.” He walked over to a tree about ten feet away and tossed one end of the rope over a thick branch about ten feet off the ground.
“I’m rememberin’ when me an’ my dad did this,” Marty’s father said.
“How old was you then?”
“ ’Bout your age. Like he was when his father before him showed him how it was.”
“Long time ago,” Marty said.
“Not so long. Grab on, son.”
Marty and his father clutched the deer by its antlers and dragged it over the snowy ground to the tree. It left a long red track of blood along the trail of their boot prints.
Marty’s father made a large loop in the rope and pulled it tight to the branch so a single strand dangled from the tree. He held the dead animal’s rear hooves together and wrapped the rope around them in a weaving motion, around and in and out between the slender legs, so they were tied firmly together. Then he looked around for a stout fallen branch, found one, and broke it over his knee so it was about two feet long. This he inserted in the slack in the rope and began to wind it, tightening as one would a tourniquet. The rope drew taut, and as Marty’s father rotated the branch, his arms well above his head, the deer raised off the ground.
“There’s a wire gizmo called a gambrel you can use to fasten the rear legs,” Marty’s father said. “We use rope. Always have, always will.”
When the deer’s antlers had cleared the ground, Marty’s father looped rope around the piece of branch so it was firmly fixed. He stood back, breathing hard, his breath steaming, and surveyed his work. The deer dangled awkwardly upside down, but the knots were tight and the rope would hold.
“Ain’t goin’ nowheres,” he said.
“Guess not,” Marty said.
His father unbuttoned his coat and reached inside. He drew out his long bowie knife from the sheath on his belt, and with one swift, powerful motion slit the deer’s throat.
Blood spurted from the great severed arteries, brilliant red and steaming on the white snow. The shock and stink of it made Marty gasp and step back.
“Mind you don’t get none on you,” his father said.
Marty felt sick to his stomach. He swallowed and tried to keep his voice as deep as possible, but it still broke when he spoke. “We goin’ lookin’ for your buck now?”
Marty’s father peered closely at him, as if trying to see into him, and smiled, then looked away, almost as if to see if there was anyone else in this part of the woods.
“Ordinarily we would,” he said, “but there’s somethin’ you gotta do first. Let’s jus’ take a little walk, wait for this fine animal to bleed out.”
Marty followed, not at all unhappy to be leaving the scene. As they walked away he could hear blood pattering on the ground. The sound of it, the scent and vivid red of the blood on the pure white snow, would never leave him.
They walked down to the lake, then along the frozen shoreline. Winter had hit with the lake level high, and the dark water that was flecked with ice looked to be halfway up some of the smaller trees. There was no sound in the winter woods other than the crunch of their boots in the snow, and sometimes in the frozen mud.
“There’s somethin’ Alma an’ me don’t much talk about,” Marty’s father said. Alma was his wife, Marty’s mother. He and Marty referred to her by her first name, because that’s what she demanded. His father looked over at him with a faint smile as he spoke. “The both of us—you an’ me—are from a family of hunters, descendents of Red Hawk, who was the most renowned hunter in the Chippewa nation.”
This wasn’t news to Marty. He’d even used the fact to earn some respect at school. Aside from family whispers, he had heard others mention Red Hawk and his father’s Chippewa lineage. He’d even read in some of the books in the school library about his ancestor, the legendary Red Hawk.
“You proud of who you are?” his father asked.
“ ’Course I am. Always been.”
“When my father was young, his father took him huntin’ when he was just about your age, an’ it was the same way with his father, all the way back to Red Hawk.”
“Family tradition,” Marty said.
“Oh, it’s somethin’ even more’n that.”
They’d left the lake and circled around and were back near where the dead deer hung from the stout tree branch.
When they approached the deer, Marty couldn’t believe how much blood was on the ground beneath the ugly jagged slice in its neck. There was so much blood around the gash itself that it made the cut look even deeper than it was, so it appeared as if the great animal’s head might fall off from its weight and the weight of the antlers.
Marty’s father reached beneath his jacket and drew out a different knife, large, with a sharp blade. About an inch from the knife’s point was a curved barb, jutting out about half an inch like a steel tooth.
“Take off your clothes,” he said to Marty.
“Wha—”
His father smiled. “Don’t be frightened. Jus’ go ahead an’ undress.”
Marty did as he was told, hanging his clothes over some nearby tree limbs, letting his boots sit on the ground with his socks in them. What had seemed a slight breeze became more brisk now, as if taking advantage of Marty’s nakedness.
His father smiled at him again, then turned his attention to the deer. He inserted the point of the blade in between its rear legs, then grunted with effort and made a long incision all the way down, even cutting through breastbone, almost to the gashed throat.
The deer’s stomach opened wide, and its entrails spilled out onto the ground. Marty recoiled from the fetid copper stench of blood and corruption. He could taste it along the edges of his tongue. A long gray section of intestine remained dangling from the body cavity.
His father flipped the knife around in his hand so he was holding it by the bloody blade. He extended the bone handle to Marty. “You finish the job. Ordinary way to do this is to lay the deer down, open it up more gentle, but we do it this way. This here’s a gutting knife. Some hunters like this kind ’cause it’s got a gut hook. You use that sharp barb on the blade to hook the deer’s insides. That’ll help you pull out the internal organs. You cut out the rectum an’ tie it with this cord, else wise you can have a hell of a mess. You gotta clean that deer out good so nothin’ll rot later on, so the meat’ll cure okay. You understand?”
Marty had never felt so naked and addled. His stomach was on a roller coaster. Bile rose bitterly in his throat. At first he thought he could stop it, but he had to turn away suddenly and vomit. His bare toes were splashed, and he moved back out of the way. That was when he noticed he was standing with his feet in blood. All around him was blood now mixed with vomit.
“Dad…”
His father moved the knife closer to him, and Marty took the bone handle and trudged through the snow and blood to the deer. He had goose bumps and was shivering, but not entirely from the cold.
The stench and heat of the deer almost overwhelmed him, and made him vomit again. But he steeled himself and found surprising resolve deep within him. A place in his mind he didn’t even know existed.