Leave No Trace, page 14
Gillie nods. “Aye. But. Answers will come soonest. Clíodhna has plans.”
“Klee-nah?”
The sìthean doesn’t answer, jumping to her feet. Her blanket falls to the ground as she cocks her head, listening in the direction of the hunt.
“I must away,” she says. “Come with, if ye like.”
Don’t run, Stef wants to say. Instead she asks, “What’s happening?”
“Artio has come.”
Living in a Box
Tony and me sit up on that ledge and wait out the morning, not talking. Sun is coming up but it’s hiding good behind these clouds. Storm for sure on the way. If rain, not a problem. Snow—well. It’s early for big snow, but not too early.
At last we watch the others trickle into the field. Daddy first, then T.J. They stop where the trees end. No Stef. She’s babysitting. I think of Gillie and my heart falls into my stomach and I feel sick. Daddy points up at us and they wave. We wave back.
“Come on up!” Tony shouts but they just wave harder.
“Too far,” I say. “Can’t hear us.”
“Hmph,” he says, so we watch as Daddy takes T.J. to that grassy low hill at the far end of the field where you can be invisible until you want to shoot. A berm. Daddy sets up T.J.’s bow—another one of those complicated eight-million-dollar ones like Tony has with wires and pulleys, and they settle in for a wait.
Thing is, the deer should be here by now. Something’s spooking ’em, keeping’ ’em out of the field. I keep my eyes on the grass but sometimes I feel Tony looking at me, studying up and down. Then when he’s not looking at me I turn just a bit. His arms are soft orange-brown like tree bark and look like branches, the thick ones down below that hold everything else up, and when he moves them, cords stand up and muscles move. It’s like watching something grow.
“Fuck me,” he mutters after another bit of time. “You two ain’t exactly earning your keep today.”
“Bears,” I say. “Artie, maybe. Not hibernating yet, maybe. Deer know.”
“Jesus,” he says. “When did you decide this? That kid can’t shoot a bear. Thinks he can, but he’s just gonna get hurt if he tries.”
“Daddy can handle it,” I say. “He’ll be okay.” I don’t really think this, though. Fact is, I need to protect Artio, not T.J.—and I don’t know how I can keep the bear from getting shot if I’m all the way up here. If she’s roaming, I should try to get everyone out of her way.
“Y’know,” he tells me, “it’s giving me the hives you calling him Daddy.”
“He is.”
“For fuck’s sake, ain’t you old enough to say ‘Dad’?”
I don’t answer. I see it now—and I can hardly breathe.
Tony makes a swear and we both stand up.
The buck comes out of the west and is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. His chest is thick with pelt, getting shaggy for the winter, and his head curves up like he’s royalty. He has a rack of antlers big as tree branches. He’s a king. His eyes are half open, xamining the field and even from here I see his wet nose twitch, testing. He’s here to make sure it’s safe for the others; they’ve been waiting for him to show up. He’s in charge of this part of the forest; he’s doing what Gil would do if Gil could be here.
I know Gil gave me the okay to grab a deer but he couldn’t mean this one. It’s wrong to want to kill this beast. He’s the kind of animal Daddy avoids on a hunt out of principle, like he told me once. He only takes folks to animals that we can cut up and carry away in one go—smaller ones, ones who limp. Anything so young it has spots are no-goes, same as does carrying babies. This one has to be on that list.
“Wait,” I say, resting a hand on Tony’s tree limb arm. It’s solid and unmoving.
He shrugs me off. “Do not fucking interfere with this,” he hisses. “It’s what he’s paying you for. And if he misses, that’s what I’m here for.” He lines up his arrows and places them into the contraption.
Down on the ground, T.J. has his bow in hand, but it looks like Daddy’s giving him the same warning I tried with Tony. T.J. turns his back on him and holds up his bow, arrow nocked.
I think of Daddy, from one time a couple years ago. We were at the cave and he was gone a long time down inside it. When he came back he was talking to himself and his hair was all over the place and his beard had cobwebs in it. His face was dirty and it was a couple minutes before he saw me. I sat him down and gave him water and used a little comb to get those silky strings out.
“Sorry, kiddo,” he said after a while. His eyes were unfocused and looked not at me, but into the cave. “It’s a box, y’see. It’s a box I put myself in and turns out I brought you with me. Didn’t see it at first. Wasn’t a box then. Don’t know the way out, now. We’re in this box and the future’s in it and the past’s in it and I just wish to Christ I knew where the exit was.”
Daddy fell asleep sitting up. Was normal the next day.
Cage or box, it’s the same thing, isn’t it?
I feel like I’m in another box right now. I can’t change anything even though I know I have to. I’m stuck in place. See, what I figure is Daddy didn’t think about the what comes next part when he brought us to the forest. He wanted to keep us safe even if he was wrong about sickness and he brought food and clothes but he forgot about the last part. That part where you say “the end” and we all live happily ever after. ’Cause sometimes you don’t know when the end is coming until it pops up and surprises you.
T.J. has the deer in his sights. Tony also takes aim but holds it, ridges in his arms shaking from the pull of the string. Down on the ground, T.J. releases and his first arrow goes wild. The King Stag starts and his eye rolls. He’s going to run. T.J. lets another fly and it hits his rump. The King Stag makes a half turn—and that’s when Tony lets fly a single arrow. It lands perfect, deep in what Daddy calls the “boiler room”—right over the king’s front leg. The buck totters this way, that way, like he’s dancing, then goes to his knees. He leans forward like he might rise up once more and then—falls to his side.
My heart stops for a breath, then two.
Tony whoops and he’s already scrambling down the rocky slope before I can even clear my eyes.
It’s done now and we have to take care of business so I scurry after him. We run over to the buck and stand over him while his breaths get shorter and shorter. His shaggy chest pumps up and down, and life twitches out of him. I meet Daddy’s eyes and they’re wet too. He hasn’t moved from the grassy patch next to T.J. He shakes his head at me once, just a little, and I nod back. We feel the same right in this one minute.
A crow caws in the distance and I look up at the whitening sky.
“Jesus, that’s beautiful,” says Tony and he gestures at T.J., who scrambles over. They kneel in front of the deer. Tony grabs T.J.’s hand and presses it on the shaggy neck. “Feel there.”
T.J.’s pale face stills and his mouth hangs open.
“That’s it,” says Tony. “Last ebb in the artery.”
Daddy showed me that first time we killed a deer. Put my hand on its neck. It was like feeling a river going to sleep. My heart’s all fluttery and I can’t see for a minute.
“You piece of shit,” comes a voice from the treeline. “Y’all can go to hell.”
Stef. She’s here. And if she’s here—where is Gillie? I’m staring hard as I can into the trees but I don’t see the sìthean at all.
“Who said you could come?” Tony glares at her.
“I did,” says Stef, staring right at me while she taps on her watch face.
“C’mon, Stef,” T.J. says, his voice going up high at the end. “You knew what we were coming out for.”
Her look at him is so pointed I feel it. But she doesn’t cross the treeline. Doesn’t come out here with us.
Daddy jogs over to the carcass, gives me a wave of his hand. Wants me to go with Stef. But I have to stay, in case Artie comes.
“I’ll help cut,” I say and start bending down over the deer.
“Get outta here,” Daddy hisses at me.
“No,” I say and we lock eyes. “Won’t.”
I hear Stef clear her throat but I don’t look away.
“You will do what I say, boy,” says Daddy. “This is not the hill you want to die on.”
I lean over the stag’s neck with my knife and draw it across and steaming blood spills out. “Too late,” I say.
We stand up together and both have a knife in our hands. I don’t know what’s happening here but I also feel like I can’t back down. Part of it is my promise. But a bigger part is I’m tired of everybody telling me what to do all the time. Daddy ’specially.
“Hey, I don’t care,” says T.J. “Let him stay. More hands, goes faster. Right?”
Daddy and I are still eye to eye to eye to eye. I know this means the strop later on. But inside I’m crumbling. I don’t like Daddy being mad at me.
Tony hisses quietly, “Frog.”
I lower my knife. “Frog you,” I mutter and my shoulders go slump. I turn toward Stef and head her way.
“That’s right,” says Tony. “G’wan. Let the men do the work from here.”
I flinch at that and then I flinch again when Daddy chuckles at him. The backpack is already on the ground and Daddy’s dumping the organ containers all around.
“Tupperware?” I hear T.J. laugh. “That’s hilarious.”
Daddy starts showing him how they’ll ’viscerate the beast, then plunges his knife in the chest. The three of them hunch over the dead king and there’s a whiff of metal in the air. Blood. Blood smell carries.
I reach the edge of the forest and join Stef, wiping the knife blade on the grassy ground. “Where is she?” I whisper.
“Gone,” says Stef. “Back to her trees.”
What Needs Protecting
“Burt Reynolds FTW!” T.J. grins, now wearing smears of blood across his cheeks and forehead left behind by Samuel as part of what he called an “initiation” a few minutes back. Fresh blood from a first kill, you mark the hunter. Or the supposed hunter. Tony’s never seen the kid so unabashedly wild and happy; he really thinks he brought down the deer and all of his worries are solved.
Mission accomplished, thinks Tony. We can go home now. “You do know what that stands for, right?”
“ ‘Fuck the world,’ ” says T.J.
Tony laughs. “ ‘For the win,’ you goof. But yours ain’t bad either.”
He does like T.J. He’s not just a paycheck. The kid has layers. Top part is the classic brat, spoiled by too much attention and money for too little effort too early in life. That happens; Tony saw it even when he was overseas fighting and upper ranks promoted a shining star fast—only to see that particular star flame out. Give a man too much too soon and the best will try real hard but most fail to keep an even keel. What the financial guys say: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Tony gets that on a personal level now. He knows what it’s like to be out of your depth.
But beneath T.J. there’s more, a little kid still who wants to play and beneath even that there’s an almost-man who has a good heart and is far from stupid. It’s like watching a fledgling take to the skies, seeing T.J. go from nobody to somebody to being the only one who matters to millions, and it’s up to Tony to make sure he always soars and never falls. It’s almost like having a younger brother, just one who pays your bills and bosses you around.
Right now Tony feels particularly close with him, elbow-deep in slick deer viscera, the coppery scent of hot blood sending his own racing. This was a particularly magnificent beast, and while he’ll let T.J. take the credit—they already took about a dozen pictures Tony can upload to the Cloud once they get home—he’ll always know it was his own arrow that really took the stag, and from up on a cliff at distance. Tony’s shot from tree stands and cliffsides before, and getting up on the ridge early meant he could test for wind, so he was more than ready. He even had an edge, having tipped his arrows with paralytics so they wouldn’t have to track the wounded son of a bitch for hours or days once he got hit. Down for the count, and out.
Samuel extracts the heart from the deer, holding it up for examination. It’s a dark red, triangular shape outlined in pink and white stripes. “We get back, this gets eaten first,” he says. “It’s the trophy nobody sees.”
“People used to consume it raw,” Tony tells T.J. “Not so smart now. Heartworm and shit.”
“We’ll cook it,” says Samuel in his flat tone, and hands it to T.J. to put in one of the containers. Tony can still feel his anger radiating after the tête-à-tête with Jim—or whatever her real name is—it rises off of the old man the way their bloody hands steam. It was a strange, unexpected confrontation, and he wonders a moment why it was so important for the kid to remain in the field.
“It’s heavy,” says T.J., weighing the heart in his hands. He looks at it a long while, turns it over, and then places it gently in the Tupperware. “That which you kill, you own,” he muses.
“Read that someplace?” Tony asks.
“Just made it up. Maybe Stef can use it.”
Stef. Jesus, Tony almost forgot about the other shit that’s been stirred up since the night before. But he’s not concerned: Either of those two crazy girls let that thing escape, he’s got them by the short hairs. Samuel will freak out, and he’s pretty sure T.J. will find it disturbing in the extreme. Imagination has never been one of T.J.’s finer qualities.
Something the girl Jim said earlier: It’s forever? has been rolling around in his head. She meant, does the PEP strip these creatures of their magic forever. Well, no. Eventually that thing he shot will get its powers back. Tony makes a mental note to attend to it once they get back to camp. In this moment, though, his mind drifts to an open plain in Brittany. To when he was running. When they were all running together, fleeing the stench and the curdling music of the pits. Running to nowhere.
T.J. coughs and Tony starts. Right. T.J. is the unit now. They have their deer and their photos and that’s a job well done. When they get back to the site he’ll thump the thing and then announce they found this lost camper who needs to be taken to safety. So they’ll cut the trip short, and hey, T.J. got his deer anyway so let’s ride back home in triumph.
That’s the the plan.
T.J. finishes putting the heart away and burps the Tupperware like he was taught back at home, laughing. “I’m never gonna see leftovers the same way again,” he says, covering his face with his hand and coating it with more blood in the process.
“You look like you escaped from a horror movie,” says Tony.
“Six hands,” urges Samuel. “We can finish fast. Need to.”
“How come?” asks T.J.
“Weather’s gonna turn.”
Tony cocks his head at the sky. “Y’think?”
Samuel nods, gently extracting the stomach and intestines. He places the liver in a separate container. Tony knows they don’t want to taint the meat, so the bowel has to be handled carefully. “Gonna snow for sure,” says the tracker.
“Tasty,” says T.J. “Don’t think I’ve built a snowman since I moved out of Maryland. This trip just gets better and better.”
They fall to the job, cutting and peeling back the hide, exposing the innards and ribcage and muscle. Meat comes away from the stag in pieces that must be hacked down to fit in the containers, and as they turn to the task, the world around them all but vanishes.
But when the forest goes silent, Tony notices. The birdsong stops. Doesn’t fade, just cuts out. He lifts his chin, surveying the meadow.
The ground shakes.
Samuel pauses, breathing heavily; T.J. just keeps cutting. The earth unsteadies again and there’s a rustle of branches and leaves, a crackling just above the thudding, like lightning before thunder.
“Hey, what—” says T.J., looking up, and freezes.
Tony follows his gaze and his mouth dries. Perhaps three yards away, over by the western treeline, looms the largest black bear he’s ever seen. She’s standing erect like a human, loosely dangling gigantic forepaws tapering into shining spears. She’s about the size of a truck’s tractor unit, covered in shining ragged fur that’s even darker on her belly and legs. Her squarish head is topped off by curiously small ears, one of which appears chewed, and her eyes are equally as absurd: small yellow circles focused directly on the mutilated stag.
“Artie,” whispers Tony, without even thinking about it. “Artio.”
Then he makes the connection. Artio. A name from his boot camp classes. A name even more weighted than the Ghillie Dhu and even more magically dangerous. The blood cools on his arms and knees and he wants to shiver but holds steady. Thinks about his training. Thinks about what he needs to protect, what can be sacrificed, and where the exit is.
“Do not move,” whispers Samuel, crouching. “Get low.” He presses his belly to the ground, gripping his knife. Never takes his eyes from the bear. Tony does the same, and T.J. follows suit, hand scraping against Samuel’s bow. He lets out a little yelp, startled.
The yellow circles come to rest on the three men in the grass. The bear’s ears flatten against its head, taking them in. Tony’s heart pounds in his ears, blood surging. The answers to his evaluation arrive in this order: Protect T.J. Sacrifice Samuel. Exit into the woods.
I don’t have to run the fastest, he thinks. I only have to run faster than you.
“Shh,” Samuel shushes T.J., and between his teeth he says, “back up slow. Slow.”
Tony breaks away from the giant bear long enough to meet T.J.’s gaze. And to his astonishment, the kid is grinning. He mouths three words at Tony.
Burt. Fucking. Reynolds.
