It was a clean heart shot. The buck died instantly. The kid stood looking down at it and there were tears suddenly. He wept quietly and the old man stood by and waited. When he wiped at his nose with his sleeve the old man handed him a knife.
“Cut the throat, Frank,” he said.
When the slash was made the old man drew a smear of blood with two fingers and turned the kid’s face to him with the other hand. He made a pair of lines with the blood on each of his cheeks and another on his chin and a wavy line across his forehead. His face was calm and serious. “Them’s your marks,” he said.
The kid nodded solemnly. “Because I’m Indian,” he said.
“Cuz I’m not,” the old man said. “I can’t teach you nothing about bein’ who you are, Frank. All’s I can do is show you to be a good person. A good man. You learn to be a good man, you’ll be a good Injun too. Least ways, that’s how I figure it works. Now you gotta give thanks.”
“Thanks?”
“To the buck. He’s gonna feed us for a good while, gonna give us a good hide to tan. So you pray and say thank you for his life on accounta he’s takin’ care of your life now. Our life. It’s a big thing.”
“How do I do that?”
The old man looked up at the sky. “I was never much for prayer. Least, not in the church way. But me, I figure everything’s holy. So when I say somethin’ I always just try’n feel what I feel and say whatever comes outta that. Always been good enough for me.”
“I feel sad,” the kid said.
“Yeah. I know. Speak outta that, Frank. What you say’ll be true then.”
The old man walked off and sat on a fallen log. The kid stood over the body of the buck and looked down at it. Then he knelt and put a hand on its shoulder. It was warm, the fur felt alive under his palm. He closed his eyes and let the sadness fall over him again. When the tears came he spoke.
“Thank you,” he said. “I’m sorry about this. Whenever I come here, I’ll think of you. I promise.”
It was all he could think to say. After a time he stood and wiped snot off on his sleeve. He looked up into a mackerel sky easing toward sunset. The act of praying made him feel hollow and serene all at the same time. It was an odd feeling but he felt better for having done it. A wind rose out of the west. It would rain soon. They’d have to work fast to field dress the buck and haul it down the ridge to where they’d left the horses. He looked at the old man sitting on the downed log staring up into the same sculpted sky. He followed the angle of his gaze and watched the sky again. Blue. He thought he understood what that meant now.
The gun became his when he turned eleven. By then he’d dropped moose and elk and black bear. He could track all of them through any kind of terrain and territory and the shots he took were always planned, sure, and deliberate. He learned the value of ammunition. He never wasted a shot. He tracked and waited and bided his time until the animal offered the best possible target. He never rushed. The old man taught him that a hunt was a process. There was a scale and a tempo to it that the land and the animal determined. A man, or a kid, could set themselves into that rhythm and follow it. When he did the kid found that time didn’t matter. What mattered was the process. He learned to pray before he went out and he learned to pray when he returned with game. Framed like that, a hunt became a ceremony. That was the old man’s word.
“Got to come to know that things get taken care of, Frank,” he said. “Me, I don’t know if I ever got cozy with the word ‘God,’ but I know something’s makin’ sense out of all of this. Man’s gotta trust that somehow. So I figure, what the heck? Even if I’m wrong, there’s worse ways to live than stopping to thank the mystery for the mystery.”
He liked that. When he stood out on the land he could feel it. It lay in the sense of being hollow and serene like he had felt after he shot the buck. It was in the sure heft of the gun in the crook of his arm and the knowledge that he could take what he needed and use it. Most of all, it was in the process of tracking game, letting himself slip out of the bounds of what he knew of earth, and outward into something larger, more complex and simple all at once. He had no word for that. Asked to explain it, he wouldn’t have been able to, but he understood how it felt against his ribs when he breathed night air filled with the tang of spruce gum and rich, wet spoil of bog. That particular magic that existed beyond words, beyond time, schools, plans, lofty thinking, and someone else’s idea of what mattered. The kid went to the land. It was all he needed. The gun anchored him there. It was how he came to understand the value of living things, by his ability to remove them. Taking life was a solemn thing. Life was the centre of the mystery. The gun was his measure. His hand on the velvet flank of the deer. A cry born of a loss he slowly came to understand was part of him forever.
“OKAY,” HE SAID. “But I gotta know what the deal is.”
His father sat on the edge of the bed, half dressed and the bony feet of him stuck out between cast-off clothing and junk, stark and pale as dead fish. He was smoking and he held it between the tips of fingers that were yellow brown and quivering. Deirdre sat beside him.
“What deal?” his father asked.
“How do you know you’re getting ready to die?”
“The liver,” he said. “She’s shot. All kinds of crap making its way into my body now.”
“From drinking, I suppose.”
“Yeah.”
He looked at his father sombrely and felt his anger rise. “But you don’t know it’s the end.”
“I feel it coming on now. Some days I’m good for nothing. Today’s one of the good ones. I shake a lot. Sweat then cold. Sometimes both at the same time.”
His father reached under the bed and pulled out a bottle and twisted the cap off and drank. He closed his eyes and breathed out heavy and lay back on the mattress with his head against Deirdre’s thigh. The woman looked at the kid and licked her lips and he could see the struggle for expression in the glassy booziness of her eyes.
“And you think I’m the one knows how to take care of you at the end.” He looked over at the woman. “You know what he’s askin’?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“You all right with it?”
“He’s an Indian.”
“That says it all for you, I suppose.”
“We all got a right to go out the way we want,” she said and smoothed the hair off his father’s brow and traced the lines of his face with one finger. The blue nail polish was chipped and broken and when she raised the hand back up to her own face it trembled and she reached for the bottle in his father’s fist. She drank and regarded the kid.
There were no words in him and he stood and looked at them and pinched his lips together grimly. He raised a hand as if to let it lead him to words but all he could do was curl it into a fist and shake it in the air. Then he turned and walked out the door and slammed it behind him. He strode down the hallway and stopped at the head of the stairs. He wanted fresh air. He wanted the street and the feeling of escape that would come from walking away. He paused and looked around him at the dilapidated ruin of the house. The handrail wobbled in his grip. He closed his eyes and wished for the old man’s counsel and the familiar air of the farm. But all he could hear was the sound of his heart hammering in his chest so that he sat on the stairs