by Rick Bass
The other man, who appeared to be a few years the elder— they looked like brothers, with the older one somewhere in his sixties, and fiercer-looking—interrupted before she could answer and said, “Those elk knew never to cross that fence during hunting season. That bull wouldn’t let them. I’ve been watching him for five years, and any time a cow or calf even looks at that fence, he tips—tipped—his antlers at them and herded them away from it.”
Jyl saw that such an outburst was as close to a declaration of love for the animal as the old man would be capable of uttering, and the three of them looked down at the massive animal, whose body heat they could still feel radiating from it—the twin antlers larger than any swords of myth, and the elk’s eyes closed, and still only what seemed like a little blood dribbling down the left shoulder, from the exit wound—the post-rut musk odor of the bull was intense—and all Jyl could say was “I’m sorry.”
The younger brother seemed almost alarmed by this admission.
“You didn’t shoot him on our side, did you?” he asked again. “For whatever reason—maybe a cow or calf had hopped the fence, and he was over there trying to get it back into the herd—he was over on the public land, and you shot him, and he ran back this way, jumped over the fence, and ran back over here, right?”
Jyl looked down at her feet, and then again at the bull. She might as well have shot an elephant, she thought. She felt trembly, nauseated. She glanced at her rifle to be sure the chamber was open.
“No,” she said quietly.
“Oh, Christ,” the younger man said—the older one just glared at her, hawkish, but also slightly surprised now—and again the younger one said, “Are you sure? Maybe you didn’t see it leap the fence?”
Jyl showed him the scratch marks on her arms, and on her face. “I didn’t know the fence was there,” she said. “The sun was coming up and I didn’t see it. After I shot, I walked into the fence.”
Both men stared at her as if she were some kind of foreigner, or as if she were making some fabulous claim and challenging them to believe it.
“What was the second shot?” the older man asked, looking back toward the woods. “Why did it come so much later?” As if suspecting that she might have a second animal down somewhere, back in the forest. As if this frail girl, this child, might have a vendetta against the herd.
“The gun went off by accident, when I walked into the fence,” she said, and both men frowned in a way that told her that gun carelessness was even worse in their book than elk poaching.
“Is it unloaded now?” the younger brother asked, almost gently.
“No,” she said, “I don’t guess it is.”
“Why don’t you unload it now?” he asked, and she complied, bolting and unbolting the magazine three times, with a gold cartridge cartwheeling to the black dirt each time, and then a fourth time, different-sounding, less full sounding, snicking the magazine empty. She felt a bit of tension release from both men, and in some strange way of the hunt that she had not yet learned, the elk seemed somehow different, too: less vital, in her letting-down. As if, despite its considerable power and vitality, her pursuit of and hunger for it had somehow helped to imbue it with even more of those characteristics, sharpening their edges, if only just a little.
The older brother crouched down and picked up the three cartridges and handed them to her. “Well, goddamn,” he said, after she had put them in her pocket and stood waiting for him to speak—would she go to jail? would she be arrested, or fined?—“That’s a big animal. I don’t suppose you have much experience cleaning them, do you?”
She shook her head.
The brothers looked back down the hill—in the direction of their farmhouse, Jyl supposed. The fire unstoked, the breakfast unmade. Autumn chores still undone, with snow coming any day and a whole year’s worth of battening down, or so it seemed, to do in that narrow wedge of time.
“Well, let’s do it right,” the elder said. “Come with us back down to the house and we’ll get some warm water and towels, a saw and ax and a come-along.” He squinted at her, more curious than unkind. “What did you intend to do, after shooting this animal?” he asked.
Jyl patted her hip. “I’ve got a pocketknife,” she said. Both brothers looked at each other and then broke into incredulous laughter, with tears coming to the eyes of the younger one.
“Might I see it?” the younger one asked when he could catch his breath, but the querulous civility of his question set his brother off to laughing again—they both broke into guffaws—and when Jyl showed them her little folding pocket-knife, it was too much for them and they nearly dissolved. The younger brother had to lean against the truck and daub at his rheumy eyes with a bandanna, and the morning was still so cold that some of the tears were freezing in his eyelashes, which had the effect, in that morning sunlight, of making him look delicate.
Both men wore gloves, and they each took the right one off to shake hands with her and to introduce himself: Bruce, the younger, Ralph, the elder.
“Well, congratulations,” Ralph said, grudgingly. “He is a big damn animal.”
“Your first, I reckon,” said Bruce as he shook her hand—she was surprised by the softness of it, almost a tenderness—Ralph’s had been more like a hardened flipper, arthritic and knotted with muscle—and he smiled. “You won’t ever shoot one bigger than this,” he said.
They rode down to their cabin in the truck, Jyl sitting between them—it seemed odd to her to just go off and leave the animal lying there in the field—and on the way there, they inquired tactfully about her life: whether she had a brother who hunted, or a father, or even a boyfriend. They asked if her mother was a hunter and it was her turn to laugh.
“My father used to hunt,” she said, and they softened a bit further.
They made a big breakfast for her—bacon cut from hogs they had raised and slaughtered, and fried eggs from chickens they likewise kept, and cathead biscuits, and a plate of delicate pork chops (both men were as lean as match-sticks, and Jyl marveled at the amount of work the two old boys must have performed daily, to pour through such fuel and yet have none of it cling to them)—and after a couple of cups of black coffee, they gathered up the equipment required for dissembling the elk and drove back up on the hill.
The frost was burning off the grass and the day was warming so that they were able to work without their jackets. Jyl was struck by how different the brothers seemed, once they settled into their work: not quite aggressive, but forceful with their efficiency. And even though they were working more slowly than usual, in order to explain to her the why and what of their movements, things still seemed to unfold quickly.
In a way, it seemed to her that the elk was coming back to life and expanding, even in its diminishment and unloosening, the two old men leaning into it like longshoremen, with Jyl helping them, laboring to roll the beast over on its back, and inverting the great head with the long daggered antlers, which now, upended, sank into the freshly furrowed earth like some mythic harrow fashioned by gods, and one that only certain and select mortals were capable of using, or allowed to use.
And once they had the elk overturned, Ralph emasculated it with his skinning knife, cutting off the ponderous genitals quickly and tossing them farther into the field, with no self-consciousness; it was merely the work that needed doing. And with that same large knife (the handle of which was made of elk antler) he ran the blade up beneath the taut skin from crotch to breastbone while Bruce kept the four legs splayed wide, to give Ralph room to work.
They peeled the hide back to the ribs, as if opening the elk for an operation, or a resuscitation—How can I ever eat all of this animal? Jyl wondered—and again, like a surgeon, Bruce placed twin spreader bars between the elk’s hocks, bracing wide the front legs as well as the back. Ralph slit open the thick gray-skin drum of fascia that held beneath it the stomach and intestines, heart and lungs and spleen and liver, kidneys and bladder; and then, looking like nothing so much as a grizzly b
ear grubbing beneath boulders on a hillside, or burrowing, Ralph reached up into the enormous cavity and wrapped both arms around the stomach mass—partially disappearing into the carcass, as if somehow being consumed by it rather than the other way around—and with great effort he was able finally to tug the stomach and all the other internal parts free.
As they pulled loose they made a tearing, ripping, sucking sound, and once it was all out, Ralph and Bruce rolled and cut out with that same sharp knife the oversized heart, as big as a football, and the liver, and laid them out on clean bright butcher paper on the tailgate of their truck.
Then Ralph rolled the rest of the guts, twice as large as any medicine ball, away from the carcass, pushing it as if shoving some boulder away from a cave’s entrance. Jyl was surprised by the sudden focusing of color in her mind, and in the scene. Surely all the colors had been present all along, but for her it was suddenly as if some gears had clicked or aligned, allowing her to notice them now, some subtle rearrangement or recombination blossoming now into her mind’s palette: the gold of the wheat stubble and the elk’s hide, the dark chocolate of the antlers, the dripping crimson blood midway up both of Ralph’s arms, the blue sky, the yellow aspen leaves, the black earth of the field, the purple liver, the maroon heart, Bruce’s black and red plaid work shirt, Ralph’s faded old denim. The richness of those colors was illuminated so starkly in that October sunlight that it seemed to stir chemicals of deep pleasure in Jyl’s own blood, elevating her to a happiness and a fullness she had not known earlier in the day, if quite ever; and she smiled at Bruce and Ralph, and understood in that moment that she, too, was a hunter, might always have been.
She was astounded by how much blood there was: the upended ark of the carcass awash in it, blood sloshing around, several inches deep. Bruce fashioned a come-along around the base of the elk’s antlers and hitched the other end to the iron pipe frame on the back of their truck—the frame constructed like a miniature corral, so that they could haul a cow or two to town in the back when they needed to without having to hook up the more cumbersome trailer—and carefully he began to ratchet the elk into a vertical position, an ascension. To Jyl it looked like nothing less than a deification; and again, as a hunter, she found this fitting, and watched with interest.
Blood roared out from the elk’s open carcass, gushing out from between its huge legs, a brilliant fountain in that soft light. The blood splashed and splattered as it hit the new-turned earth—Ralph and Bruce stood by watching the elk drain as if nothing phenomenal at all were happening, as if they had seen it thousands of times before—and the porous black earth drank thirstily this outpouring, this torrent. Bruce looked over at Jyl and said, “Basically, it’s easy: you just carve away everything you don’t want to eat.”
Jyl couldn’t take her eyes off how fast the soil was drinking in the blood. Against the dark earth, the stain of it was barely even noticeable.
When the blood had finally stopped draining, Ralph filled a plastic washbasin with warm soapy water from a jug and scrubbed his hands carefully, leisurely, precisely, pausing even to clean the soap from beneath his fingernails with a smaller pocketknife—and when he was done, Bruce poured a gallon jug of clean water over Ralph’s hands and wrists to rinse the soap away, and then Ralph dried his hands and arms with a clean towel and emptied out the old bloody wash water, then filled it anew, and it was time for Bruce to do the same. Jyl marveled at, and was troubled by, this privileged glimpse at a life, or two lives, beyond her own—a life, two lives, of cautious competence, fitted to the world; and she was grateful to the elk, and its gone-away life, beyond the sheer bounty of the meat it was providing her, grateful to it for having led her into this place, the small and obscure if not hidden window of these two men’s lives.
She was surprised by how mythic the act, and the animal, seemed. She understood intellectually that there were only two acts more ancient—sex and flight—but here was this third one, hunting, suddenly before her. She watched as each man worked with his own knife to peel back the hide, working on each side of the elk simultaneously. Then, with the hide eventually off, they handed it to Jyl and told her it would make a wonderful shirt or robe. She was astonished at the weight of it.
Next they began sawing the forelegs and stout shins of the hind legs; and only now, with those removed, did the creature begin to look reduced or compromised.
Still it rose to an improbable height, the antlers seven feet beyond the eight-foot crossbar of the truck’s pole rack—fifteen feet of animal stretched vertically, climbing into the heavens, and the humans working below, so tiny—but as they continued to carve away at it, it slowly came to seem less mythic and more steerlike; and the two old men working steadily upon it began to seem closer to its equal.
They swung the huge shoulders aside, like the wings of an immense flying dinosaur, and then pulled them free, each man wrapping both arms around the slab of shoulder to hold it above the ground. They stacked the shoulders in the truck, next to the rolled-up fur of the hide.
Next the hindquarters, one at a time, severed with a bone saw: both men working together to heft that weight into the truck, and the remaining length of bone and antler and gleaming socket and rib cage looking reptilian, like some reverse evolutionary process, some metamorphic errancy or setback. The pile of beautiful red meat in the back of the truck, though, as it continued to mount, seemed like an embarrassment of riches, and again it seemed to Jyl that perhaps she had taken too much.
She thought how she would have liked to watch her father render an elk. All gone into the past now, however, like blood drawing back into the soil. How much else had she missed?
The noonday sun was mild, almost warm now. The scavenger birds—magpies, ravens, Steller’s jays and gray jays—danced and hopped nearby, swarming and fluttering, and from time to time as Ralph or Bruce took a rest, one of the men would toss a scrap of gristle or fascia into the field for the birds to fight over, and the sound of their angry squabbles filled the lonely silence of the otherwise quiet and empty hills beneath the thin blue of the Indian summer sky.
They let Jyl work with the skinning knife, showed her how to separate the muscles lengthwise with her fingers before cutting them free of the skeleton, and the quartered ham and shoulder—the backstrap unscrolling beneath the urging of her knife, the meat as dense as stone, it seemed, yet as fluid as a river, and so beautiful in that sunlight, maroon to nearly purple, nearly iridescent in its richness, and in the absence of any intramuscular fat. And now the skeleton, with its whitened bones beginning to show, seemed less an elk, less an animal, than ever; and the two brothers set to work on the neck, and the tenderloins, and butt steaks, and neck loins. And while they separated and then trimmed and butchered those, Jyl worked with her own knife at carving strips of meat from between each slat of rib cage.
From time to time their lower backs would cramp from working so intently and they would have to lie down on the ground, all three of them, looking up at the sky and spreading their arms out wide as if on a crucifix, and would listen to, and feel with pleasure, the subtle popping and realigning of their vertebrae, and would stare up at that blue sky and listen to the cries of the feeding birds, and feel intensely their richness at possessing now so much meat, clean meat, and at simply being alive, with the blood from their labor drying quickly to a light crust on their hands and arms. They were like children, in those moments, and they might easily have napped.
They finished late that afternoon, and sawed the antlers off for Jyl to take home with her. Being old-school, the brothers dragged what was left of the carcass back into the woods, returning it to the forest, returning the skeleton to the very place where the elk had been bedded down when Jyl had first crept up on it—as if she had only borrowed it from the forest for a while—and then they drove back down to their ranch house and hung the ham and shoulder quarters on meat hooks to age in the barn, and draped the backstraps likewise from hooks, where they would leave them for at least a week.<
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They ran the loose scraps, nearly a hundred pounds’ worth, through a hand-cranked grinder, mixed in with a little beef fat to make hamburger, and while Ralph and Jyl processed and wrapped that in two-pound packages, Bruce cooked some of the butt steak in an iron skillet, seasoned with garlic and onions and butter and salt and pepper, mixed with a few of the previous spring’s dried morels, reconstituted—and he brought out small plates of that meal, thinly sliced, to eat as they continued working, the three of them grinding and wrapping, and the mountain of meat growing on the table beside them. They each had a tumbler of whiskey to sip as they worked, and when they finally finished it was nearly midnight.
The brothers offered their couch to Jyl and she accepted; they let her shower first, and they built a fire for her in the wood stove next to the couch. After Bruce and then Ralph had showered, they sat up visiting, each with another small glass of whiskey, Ralph and Bruce telling her their ancient histories until none of them could stay awake—their eyes kept closing, and their heads kept drooping—and with the fire burning down, Ralph and Bruce roused from their chairs and made their way each to his bedroom, and Jyl pulled the old elk hides over her for warmth and fell deeply and immediately asleep, falling as if through some layering of time, and with her hunting season already over, that year. That elk would not be coming back, and her father would not be coming back. She was the only one remaining with those things safe and secure in her now. For awhile.
She killed more elk, and deer, too, in seasons after that, learning more about them, year by year, in the killing, than she could ever learn otherwise. Ralph died of a heart attack several years later and was buried in the yard outside the ranch house, and Bruce died of pneumonia the next year, overwhelmed by the rigors of twice the amount of work, and he, too, was buried in the yard, next to Ralph, in an aspen grove, through which passed on some nights wandering herds of deer and elk, the elk direct descendants of the big bull Jyl had shot, and which the brothers had dismembered and then shared with her, the three of them eating on it for well over a year. The elk sometimes pausing to gnaw at the back of those aspen with roots that reached now for the chests of the buried old men.
