no way around it. If this was to be a hit-and-run, it would be a fatal one. He couldn’t leave the deer to suffer, slowly twitching to death in the greasy moon-colored snow. Maybe other people could. He didn’t think about it.
But the deer was dead. Or looked dead, anyway. Wanting to be sure, Elwin lowered himself to the ground and pressed his ear to the deer’s chest, directly behind its foreleg. He listened, but there was nothing, not even the faintest quaver of a heartbeat—just the still, warm density of its body beneath him. He noticed a raw pink nipple, jutting from the white belly-fur. A doe, he realized, with an extra lump of sadness. Female deaths were always sorrier; with males, you could almost always cite a valid reason why they had it coming. The impact must have knocked the life right out of her, he figured, imagining, for the moment, that “life” to be something like the vaporous soul which, back in Catholic grade school, the nuns claimed you exhaled from your body at the precise moment of death, when it would go curling upward toward judgment like a campfire spark.
She was a pretty young thing, noted Elwin, who was now up on his knees and running a hand across her smooth dunnish fur. From this angle, it appeared she’d died a peaceful death: an obnoxiously anthropomorphic observation, he corrected himself, since in the wild there are no peaceful deaths—particularly deaths involving pavement. What a waste, he thought. What a stupid, stupid . . . waste. Stifling a nauseating rush of emotion, or maybe an emotional surge of nausea, he started to damn Fritz again, but then stifled that, too—Fritz had enough on his karmic plate. He warmed his palms on the doe’s chest, falling snowflakes bunching between his fingers. The doe’s eyes were open, aimed at the dead stubble of brush poking through the snow, just beyond the pavement edge. That’s where the vultures would begin eating, he thought. Either the eyes or the anus—they always started at the vulnerable parts.
What happened next, Elwin would later blame on the wine—far too glibly, however. He’d once overheard, in the college library, an undergrad telling a friend that he’d moved back in with his girlfriend solely because he’d “got drunk.” The friend protested: “After all she fucking did?” “Dude,” he said, with a wag of his head, “I don’t know. I was
drunk.
” The image of the kid staggering into an apartment with cardboard boxes of clothes and CDs, navigating stairwells in a cluelessly boozy stupor, had made Elwin chuckle aloud, mostly because it was so preposterous. The kid obviously lacked the mettle to confess, to his pal, that he was still in love with the girl in question, had forgiven her, couldn’t quit her—despite whatever crimes she’d committed, up to though probably not including faking seventeen years’ worth of orgasms. It was merely easier for him to pin it on a mind-bending beer buzz. So too with Elwin and the deer, though it wasn’t quite so obvious at the moment.
During his Grizzly Adams years (that was Maura’s phrase) he’d been fastidious about using every last bit of the deer he killed: the backstrap sinews for thread, the tendon sheath for glue stock, the hockskins for tool handles, the kidneys fried up in a pat of butter. He couldn’t recall the precise source of his hardcore purist ethic—the chapter and verse, be it Leviticus or Leopold, that had instructed him to squander nothing of his kill, not even the musky, fudge-textured kidneys of an old stringmeat buck—but it likely derived from all the Native American texts he’d absorbed while writing his dissertation on Ned Manx, the last fluent speaker of a Pomoan dialect, native to California, known as Xotc. Not that Manx himself had anything to do with it. The old man—he was 102 when Elwin finished his dissertation, 104 when he died—loved Chicken McNuggets,
Dragnet
reruns, and a syrupy homemade wine he called Hoopa Juice, the
But the deer was dead. Or looked dead, anyway. Wanting to be sure, Elwin lowered himself to the ground and pressed his ear to the deer’s chest, directly behind its foreleg. He listened, but there was nothing, not even the faintest quaver of a heartbeat—just the still, warm density of its body beneath him. He noticed a raw pink nipple, jutting from the white belly-fur. A doe, he realized, with an extra lump of sadness. Female deaths were always sorrier; with males, you could almost always cite a valid reason why they had it coming. The impact must have knocked the life right out of her, he figured, imagining, for the moment, that “life” to be something like the vaporous soul which, back in Catholic grade school, the nuns claimed you exhaled from your body at the precise moment of death, when it would go curling upward toward judgment like a campfire spark.
She was a pretty young thing, noted Elwin, who was now up on his knees and running a hand across her smooth dunnish fur. From this angle, it appeared she’d died a peaceful death: an obnoxiously anthropomorphic observation, he corrected himself, since in the wild there are no peaceful deaths—particularly deaths involving pavement. What a waste, he thought. What a stupid, stupid . . . waste. Stifling a nauseating rush of emotion, or maybe an emotional surge of nausea, he started to damn Fritz again, but then stifled that, too—Fritz had enough on his karmic plate. He warmed his palms on the doe’s chest, falling snowflakes bunching between his fingers. The doe’s eyes were open, aimed at the dead stubble of brush poking through the snow, just beyond the pavement edge. That’s where the vultures would begin eating, he thought. Either the eyes or the anus—they always started at the vulnerable parts.
What happened next, Elwin would later blame on the wine—far too glibly, however. He’d once overheard, in the college library, an undergrad telling a friend that he’d moved back in with his girlfriend solely because he’d “got drunk.” The friend protested: “After all she fucking did?” “Dude,” he said, with a wag of his head, “I don’t know. I was
drunk.
” The image of the kid staggering into an apartment with cardboard boxes of clothes and CDs, navigating stairwells in a cluelessly boozy stupor, had made Elwin chuckle aloud, mostly because it was so preposterous. The kid obviously lacked the mettle to confess, to his pal, that he was still in love with the girl in question, had forgiven her, couldn’t quit her—despite whatever crimes she’d committed, up to though probably not including faking seventeen years’ worth of orgasms. It was merely easier for him to pin it on a mind-bending beer buzz. So too with Elwin and the deer, though it wasn’t quite so obvious at the moment.
During his Grizzly Adams years (that was Maura’s phrase) he’d been fastidious about using every last bit of the deer he killed: the backstrap sinews for thread, the tendon sheath for glue stock, the hockskins for tool handles, the kidneys fried up in a pat of butter. He couldn’t recall the precise source of his hardcore purist ethic—the chapter and verse, be it Leviticus or Leopold, that had instructed him to squander nothing of his kill, not even the musky, fudge-textured kidneys of an old stringmeat buck—but it likely derived from all the Native American texts he’d absorbed while writing his dissertation on Ned Manx, the last fluent speaker of a Pomoan dialect, native to California, known as Xotc. Not that Manx himself had anything to do with it. The old man—he was 102 when Elwin finished his dissertation, 104 when he died—loved Chicken McNuggets,
Dragnet
reruns, and a syrupy homemade wine he called Hoopa Juice, the
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