He spent several minutes scratching her ears and reassuring her, taking time to check the stitches on her belly and prod exploring pups back into the straw behind her. Sophie’s tongue lapped at his wrist and he touched her nose, warm and dry when it should be cold and wet. “You keep resting and get well, hear?”
He picked up her metal bowl and refilled it from a faucet low on the wall. He saw that there was still plenty of dry food if she grew hungry.
“Okay now, Sophie, okay.”
He backed from the barn with his axe and pulled the door closed, re-attaching the chain and padlock. He panned the flashlight beam over the crusted snow and cursed when he saw what he had missed earlier.
The snow had been churned by something outside the barn door. Keeping the yellow circle of light on the tracks, he followed them towards the Christmas trees until he could make out the shape of hooves. Large hooves.
He swept the beam of light across the trees and their shadows danced on the snow, but he saw no other movement. The tracks were a clear line of dark holes punched in the snow, leading into the firs, but there was no way in hell Gerard would go into the Christmas trees in pursuit of whatever had upset Sophie. Not in such close quarters. Not at night.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
- 1 -
The sun was yet to rise when something banged down onto the floorboards next to Hedde’s mattress, and she cracked open her eyes to see the scarred wooden stock of a rifle.
“Get up. There’s trouble.”
Hedde struggled up off the mattress, kicking herself free from twisted blankets. “Is it mom?”
Her uncle was a dark shape, but she could make out the shake of his head.
“Something nosing around the barn last night, really pissed off Etienne and Sophie.”
“Sophie?”
“Come out to the barn,” he said, clomping downstairs while she pulled on her socks and shoes and grabbed up her coat.
Outside, she shivered, warming her hands on the hot coffee while Uncle Gerard scattered handfuls of salt crystals across the smooth snow to make a path between house and barn. He set down the big salt sack and undid the chain before sliding back the door. She remembered the growl that had issued from the cavernous interior.
“You look in here yet?” he asked.
“I did, but I couldn’t see anything. Why is it locked?”
In answer, Gerard led her inside and took down the flashlight, aiming it at the den in back where Sophie guarded her pups.
“Need to keep her and Etienne apart,” Gerard said. “She had a hard birth, lost two of the pups. She’s hurt and too scared to think straight. If he comes near, she’ll attack him. She’ll tear herself open if she does.”
“Merde,” Hedde whispered, studying the fixed eyes of the dog until Gerard backed out of the barn, herding her behind him.
Back inside the house Etienne paced the kitchen, his claws scratching on the floor. Hedde scratched his ruff and he whined.
“What’s wrong with him?” she asked.
“He wants out. Etienne owns this ground. He’ll go after anything that comes onto it, any predator. He’s killed a coyote, a wild dog and, once, a bobcat. That’s what got his ear.”
“Really?”
“He won’t fuck around. He’ll go right after it and attack, so we need to keep him inside.”
“But he’s strong.”
“This thing is big, maybe too big for him. We need to kill it before Etienne gets out and hunts it down.”
Uncle Gerard opened the door to the basement and she remembered the meat-locker cold that flowed up and around her ankles.
“What’s down there?”
“Safe,” he said.
“What’s in the safe?”
He reached into the dark and tugged a string until a bare lightbulb glowed.
“Guns.”
- 2 -
The snow was gently falling, fat flakes easy to track as they drifted to earth, unlike the granular snow of deep winter, which rode in on fierce winds and stung like blown sand.
Wrapped around his lower face, Gerard’s scarf was icing from his moist breath in the dawn temperature. He wore layers on layers and two pairs of wool socks under water-proofed and lined hiking boots. He wore a small backpack containing various necessities and mittens over fingerless gloves. He carried a long arm in each fist.
His eyes watered in the tiny slit between his scarf and hat as he scanned the forest, still dark beneath the naked trees and even darker when they pressed into growths of tall evergreens. Snow muffled the sounds of the forest, and the crump of their boots barely disturbed the quiet.
Even anticipating the danger ahead, Gerard liked the woods at this time. In this season. They were far enough from the road to escape the growl of Ray Gleason’s snowplow and the salt trucks following behind. It was too cold and remote for idiots who thought hunting meant sitting in a blind with a six-pack and a rifle, and the animals who weren’t hibernating were wary and clever. The strong ones.
The fact that it wasn’t hunting season also meant he wouldn’t get shot by a weekend warrior from Massachusetts looking to bag a buck.
His niece struggled along behind him, too winded to complain. Her scarf, hat and shoulders were dusted with white, as if she had plunged face first into a bowl of powder donuts.
As smart as she was, it was abundantly apparent that she was quite out of her element.
Gerard stopped and held up a hand. Predictably, the girl stumbled right into his back and bounced off.
“Merde.”
Gerard heard a muffled voice, turning to see his niece sitting in the snow. The kid was bundled up as heavily as Gerard was, in Lucy’s old gear.
“Why’d you—” Hedde started to say, yanking the scarf down from her face.
“You need to learn to pay attention. This…” Gerard held up his hand, “means stop. And this…” he made a flattening gesture, “means get down behind the nearest cover, or go flat if there’s nothing.”
Their breath was already clouding in the cold. He watched her blink against the snow landing delicately on her eyelashes.
“Awake yet?” he asked.
“I’m too cold to tell,” she said.
The big man held out a hand and hauled Hedde to her feet. “Everything is done quietly. If you fall, don’t say anything, just try to do it quietly.”
He looked her up and down, waiting until she stopped brushing off snow to meet his eyes.
“Are you ready for this?” Gerard asked.
Her well-covered head nodded.
“This is bigger than a nod,” he said. “Say it out loud.”
“I’m ready.”
She took the .22 bolt action clumsily in her mittened hands.
“You told me you’re not a kid and I believe you. Today you prove it, understand?”
Hedde nodded and after a beat said, “Yes.”
“Have you shot before?”
“Twice with my friend Carol. They were .22’s like this but not with the bolt.”
Gerard nodded. “Have you hunted?”
Hedde shook her head. “No. I mean…it’s not what people do in Westchester and mom hates the idea. Dad…” She shrugged.
Gerard nodded again and produced a gleaming, brass bullet from his pocket. He took her rifle and loaded the round.
“One bullet?” Hedde asked.
“One round makes you careful. Do not screw up your shot.”
Gerard pulled several larger rounds from another pocket and loaded them into the .30-06 hunting rifle he held.
“You follow me and do exactly as I tell you. You only shoot if I tell you, got it?”
Hedde nodded. “Yes.”
“Now sling your rifle across your back and follow me. I don’t want you to trip and shoot me in the ass.”
Gerard pulled the scarf back up over his mouth and worked his way through the unbroken snow between the trees. Hedde imitated her uncle and pulled up her scarf, following in his wake.
A shelf of snow fell off a pine bough and triggered a minor avalanche. Gerard held up his hand and gestured. Hedde dropped into a squat as the snow cloud settled.
A few big flakes continued to fall and Hedde looked up between the branches to watch them swirl and drift. She remembered watching an old movie with her father, back when they did things like that. Robert Redford was a mountain man, fighting Indians in the snowy Rockies. Her uncle looked like that, part hunter, part moving pile of snow.
The barrage of emotional changes over recent days had left her strangely bereft of feeling. In that void where resentment normally curled in on itself, she felt an unusual awareness creeping in. So much so that this morning the snow and the quiet was something special. It was an out-of-place absurd thing to think, but somehow Hedde didn’t believe it was wrong.
Her uncle looked back, breath clouding around his head, and gestured Hedde forward. She rose into a crouch, like she had seen in the movie, and moved forward, trying not to pant or make too much noise.
“Snowing is good,” Uncle Gerard said so quietly Hedde almost couldn’t hear him. “Screws up the sight picture but muffles noise. You sound like a herd of cows.”
Hedde shrugged and snow slid off her shoulders.
“See up there?” Gerard said, and she followed his pointing finger. “Those marks on the snow are from a hare. I believe this is a regular run, so we’re gonna sit here and wait for him. Unsling your rifle. He will hear and see movement, so we sit still like two boulders in the woods.”
Hedde nodded and unslung the .22, wincing at all the noise. She settled down into a cross-legged position next to Gerard, butt sinking several inches into the white carpeting.
“The hare is your shot, so pay attention when I give you the signal,” he said.
Hedde nodded, holding the slim rifle at port arms, tired and cold and exhilarated all at once.
- 4 -
Hedde had fallen into a semi-doze, the cold transforming into a gentle warmth that made her eyelids droop.
She awoke to a gentle tapping on her hand and opened her eyes to look over at her uncle who appeared to be a simple feature of the forest covered in a blanket of new fallen snow. She looked ahead at the tracks.
And there it was. A lean, brown hare not even twenty feet away, huge ears up and twitching. Holy crap, she thought, only by force of will catching the words before they came from her mouth.
Carefully she slipped her hands free of the mittens one at a time and slid the index finger of her right hand through the trigger guard. The metal was so cold she almost hissed at the contact but fought it back.
Hedde lifted the butt of the rifle to her well-padded shoulder but couldn’t aim properly down the barrel, so she twisted her hips slightly.
Snow crunched beneath her seat.
The hare twitched and was gone. She jerked the rifle after it and fired, the high pitched crack of the weapon unbelievably loud in the quiet woods.
“I missed,” she said, lurching up to her feet.
“Stay still—” Gerard began to say in the split-second before snow-covered underbrush to their right exploded and a snarling something came boring at them, wings of white kicking out to either side of its charge.
Hedde was flying through the air before she knew it, her uncle sweeping her bodily off her feet as if she weighed no more than a rag doll. She landed on her back in a detonation of snow and, for a moment, couldn’t see anything.
The .30-06 roared and a massive wave of air seemed to press Hedde backwards. She fought up to see a dark, bristling form disappear into the trees as her uncle sat up, rifle held in both hands. The big man jacked another round into the chamber.
“What was that?” she asked, voice cracking.
“A boar. Wild pig.”
“That was a pig?” Hedde clapped a hand over her mouth but couldn’t hold back sudden hysterical laughter. Even Gerard smiled and made the harsh, barking sound that passed for his laugh.
“Come on,” he said, clambering upright. “I hit him good, left chest, I think, and he’s leakin’ like a faucet.”
Hedde picked up her rifle and then herself, shaking off snow. She saw a trail of scarlet splotches like brightly blooming roses leading into the brush.
- 5 -
The boar was hanging from a branch by its feet and Gerard’s big knife jerked across the pig’s throat with a sound like tearing plastic. A waterfall of black blood sprayed out and he placed a funnel beneath the wound to direct it into a plastic water bottle.
Hedde thought she might vomit. When her uncle held out the half-full bottle to her and said, “Drink,” she was fairly sure she was about to embarrass herself.
Instead she took the dripping bottle, held it up in front of her eyes and turned until she was facing east, where slanting rays of morning sunlight cut through the trees.
“Horned God and Green Man, Father of the East, we honor you,” she said, splashing bright drops onto the snow at her feet and placing the bottle to her lips before she could think. The hot liquid filled her mouth with a taste of pennies and meat before burning a path down her throat. She held the bottle back out to her uncle who took it and swigged deeply. Red drizzled into his beard, and Hedde could feel it staining her own pale chin. She imagined her blood-smeared face staring up at Susie-with-a-heart and her lips parted in something close to a snarl.
Gerard tipped a few drops of blood onto the snow in the direction of the dawn.
“Do you know why we drink?” he asked.
“To honor him?”
Gerard nodded. “You drink so you know what you’ve done and who he was. This one was a fighter, most likely escaped from some farm and took on every comer. He was old, tough and mean. He’s a part of you now.”
Hedde nodded, looking at the fresh bloodstains on her mittens. She had the feeling of something Indian happening. Something important.
“But I didn’t make the shot,” she said after a moment’s reflection. She felt a little drunk.
“Your partner’s shot is your shot. We hunt together.”
“I get it.”
“Do you?”
“I think so.”
Gerard looked down at her. “You were interested in the gun your father left for your mother. This is what guns do.”
He dug around inside his thick coat and produced a key on a chain. Hedde accepted it from him, the dull metal chain draping off the side of her palm like a dirty icicle.
“This was Lucy’s. It opens the door to the cellar, and the safe opens with her birthday,” Gerard said. “Tomorrow we’ll start working with the other guns to get you used to them.”
Hedde said nothing as she worked the chain over her head and tugged her hair free, unzipping her coat and loosening her scarf to shove the chain down inside her sweater.
“Good,” Gerard said.
He twisted the cap back onto the bottle and set it in the snow before turning back to the boar and ramming his knife into its sternum. Using both hands, he jerked the knife straight upward, and a bucket load of guts fell steaming into the snow.
Hedde said, “Yep,” and staggered away before vomiting forth a bright crimson spray. She felt ashamed and turned back to her uncle.
The big man seemed not to have noticed.
Hedde crouched and stuffed a handful of snow in her mouth to wash out the taste when he spoke.
“Go in my pack and pull out the garbage bag. I want you to stick in the liver for Sophie. She needs it. Throw in the heart for Etienne so he doesn’t get jealous.”
Hedde walked back to the blue-black pile of steaming guts and thought, they sure look like guts.
“Stop thinking about it as a pile of guts and look for shapes,” Gerard said.
She knelt in the snow and pulled off the mittens, wincing as she reached into the pile and started to separate the organs.
“This and this?” Hedde asked, holding up a slippery liver and surprisingly heavy heart.
“Yep. Leave the
rest, something will come along for it.”
Hedde stuffed the organs in the bag while Gerard laid out a canvas tarp and lowered the carcass onto it.
“Uncle Gerard? Why did we chase it? I mean, it was a dead pig walking after you shot it.”
Gerard tied the tarp around the pig and looped some rope through metal rings in the edge of the canvas. “Two reasons. We didn’t know it was shot dead, and if it was alive, it would’ve been dangerous to anything near these woods. More dangerous than ever. Second, best thing to do when you know there’s trouble is go out and meet it.”
“Then why did mom bring me to hide up here?”
He stood and looped the rope over his shoulder. “Because we don’t know where the problem is yet.”
- 5 -
Gerard dragged the boar in the canvas tarp out of the trees and into the fiel, enjoying the burn in his thighs. He could see the ghosts of previous paths where he had dragged the trees he felled, always dead wood, to his chopping spot under the hanging tree.
Hedde had asked to drag the carcass and Gerard had given her the ropes, watching as the teenager struggled to move the boar half a foot before stopping, eyes wide in surprise. He took the ropes back.
“Pig weighs near two-hundred pounds, even with its guts out,” Gerard said.
“Whoa.”
“Grab some snow while we’re stopped and wipe off your chin.”
Hedde’s face darkened. “It’s my first kill.”
He grabbed a handful of snow and wiped at his beard, the snow coming away pink in his hand. “It’ll be your last if your mom thinks you got hurt out there.”
Reluctantly Hedde bent and copied her uncle’s actions. “You think she’ll be back today?”
He nodded. “Or call.” He set off hauling the boar again and heard Hedde start up behind him.
The girl had done well for her first time. Didn’t matter that she puked because every time she was asked, the kid stepped up and met the challenge. Find her things to do, keep her learning, and she might sit on her fear and anger until Cat came back.
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