When the Killing's Done

by Boyle, T. C.

  Frazier doesn’t answer. He’s on the two-way radio he keeps snapped to his belt, chattering away in Kiwi with one of his hunters, part of a two-man team somewhere up ahead of them, apparently closing in on a target. “Royt,” he says, “royt,” already moving up the road, surprisingly quick for a man who always seems so sprawling and laid back, and how has she missed the rifle he’s somehow managed to sling over one shoulder? Her eyes jump to it, to the gleaming stock, the dark rubbed eye of the trigger, the lethal tube of the barrel. The realization comes to her then that this is the tool of his trade, that he’s as familiar with it as he is with his cell phone, the gearshift of the Toyota, the corkscrew he carries on his key chain. Why should this surprise her? Electrify her? Rivet her attention? Because she’s never fired a gun in her life, never even touched one, and here’s the rifle Frazier so casually and routinely employs, riding his back as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as if it weren’t for firing high-velocity copper-jacketed rounds into things, as if it weren’t for hunting, for killing.

  “No,” he’s shouting, “just go after them if you think you’re going to have a shot. We’re right behind you.” A glance over his shoulder for her, and she’s scrambling now to keep up—“I don’t think Alma’s going to want to shoot them herself anyway.” Feet churning, mud kicking up at his heels, he depresses the button for the crackled response, a thin all but incomprehensible Kiwi affirmative snatched from the ether. She can hear him breathing, the air sucked down in quick bronchial gasps. They’re moving more rapidly now, leaping puddles, dodging rocks, what’s left of the road veering sharply around its hairpin turns and up, always up. “Right, Alma?”

  She has neither time nor breath to answer. She grins to demonstrate how good a sport she is, concentrating on moving her legs, matching him stride for stride, though it’s an unequal contest because his legs are so much longer. Watching the gun, watching his hat and shoulders and the way his calf muscles ball and release beneath the ties of his gaiters, she follows him at a lively jog up the road to a point where a trail only he can see cuts sharply down through the chaparral to the right. She follows his lead, pitching headlong into the bush, snatching branches to keep her balance, all the while studying her feet so she doesn’t step in a hole or turn an ankle. They’re angling down—a hundred yards, two—before he cuts again to the right, bearing along the downside of the slope, and all at once she feels the weight lift from her, feeling good and alive and whole for the first time in weeks, taking in the views, the smells, the wet glorious creeping rejuvenation of the flora springing up underfoot and rising around her in a continuous weave of gray-green and bright flowering yellow that reaches to her waist and higher.

  She’s moving as fast as she can—bushwhacking, that’s what this is called—when the rain starts in. It begins as a soft rustling in the chaparral, as if the leaves were coming to life one by one across the hillside, and then it quickens till she can hear the insistent tap of it at the bill of her cap and feel its cold touch on her hands, her bare knees, the back of her neck. Everything smells suddenly of sage, a sweet clean release of perfume wrung out of the careening wet hillside by the force of the downpour. Below them, the sight line to the far side of the canyon softens, thickens, blurs. She’s wondering why they call this ridge El Tigre, when certainly there were never any tigers here, not even saber-tooths during the time of the pygmy mammoth, or not that the fossil record shows anyway. There weren’t even bobcats—no cats of any kind. But maybe it’s a question of perception—maybe the rock formation, as seen from below, suggests a sleeping cat lying stretched out on its side. Or there might have been a vaquero from the old ranching days who hailed from deep in the south of Mexico where the jaguars came out at night to seize the village dogs and maybe he acquired the nickname El Tigre because he exacted vengeance on them before he came to Santa Cruz and ran sheep over this hill. Or died here. In an accident, a slide, in mud like this.

  There is no sound but the soughing of the rain and the whisper of leaf and branch giving way as they wade through the chaparral, seeking the path of least resistance. Both her thighs are crisscrossed with abrasions and her forearms would be bleeding too if it weren’t for the sweatshirt, which grows heavier and denser by the moment. She’s sweating. Fighting for breath. Out of shape because she’s pregnant, because she’s put on weight, because she’s been tired in the evenings and spending her days at her desk instead of getting out for the hikes she used to take with Tim. She startles when a quail bursts out from underfoot, fans its wings and beats away downwind, and it costs her a step or two on Frazier, who’s already thirty feet ahead of her. She wants to call to him to slow down, but her pride won’t let her.

  It is then, just as she’s about to give it up and fall back, that the canyon erupts with the frantic baying of the dogs. The sound, ratcheting up in a series of furious yelps till it planes off in a single full-throated ecstatic howl—seems to be coming from somewhere below them, where the ridge falls off into its turnings and declivities. Frazier snatches a look over his shoulder and then he’s gone, plunging straight down in the direction of the noise, and before she can think she’s following him. Suddenly the vegetation is coming at her in a blind rush, bushes springing up to slam her in the ribs, snatch at her feet, shove her aside, but there’s no stopping her. The frenzy of the dogs strikes fire in her and there’s no question now of keeping up, her balance flawless, her feet hitting the mark over and over again as she fends off one catapulting branch after another and springs from rock to rock like a gymnast, finally overtaking Frazier as he pauses, hands on hips, to gaze over a sheer drop of forty feet or more. The dogs bay, nearer now. Bending low in a hunter’s crouch, he scoots along the crest until he finds what he’s looking for—a debrided chute of rock running with discolored water—and without hesitation he braces himself with both hands, flings his legs out before him and careens down the slope on his buttocks. All at once she’s in the water too—forty feet down and a jump at the end, her palms bruised, calves aching—watching for his signal. “Where are they?” she gasps, tugging at his arm as she scrambles to her feet.

  Before he can answer, three shots ring out in succession, a quick thin fretful sound like the snapping of a wet towel. The gunshots silence the dogs for a single suspended moment and then they’re noising again, barking now, snarling, until the final shot, the fourth, snaps suddenly through the din and they fall quiet once more. She looks to Frazier. He’s cocking his head to one side, listening, and his gun, his rifle, is in his hands now and before she can pick up the stealthy patter of advancing hooves the towel is snapping in her ear and the dark hurtling thing coming at them from the cover of the bushes is down and dead as if it’s been there all along, switched with the animate pig in some elaborate magician’s ruse.

  She smells the gun, the rain, the blood, and here come the dogs—a pair of Frazier’s prize Australian Bull Arabs, with their straining shoulders and their great wide heads and snouts and the light of the kill shining in their eyes. They break from the bushes in a rush and fall on the hog—a boar, a big boar with meshed white tusks—till Frazier calls them off and strides up to deliver the coup de grâce with the pistol he wears in a holster at his side. One more snap and the dogs sit back on their haunches. There are voices now, Kiwi voices, riding up from somewhere below. “You get him, Fraze?”

  “Never miss,” he shouts back. “But you lads’re getting sloppy. If he gets away, he’s going to be one tough hog to hunt down next time.”

  The rebuke hangs there in the air a moment, and then one of the voices below—she recognizes it as belonging to Clive Hyndman, a blond twenty-six-year-old with a perpetually peeling nose and legs so good he could have been modeling his khaki shorts for money—comes back at them. “We got the sow and three piglets. Didn’t even know the old man was there till he started running up the hill.”

  And Frazier, cupping his hands to his mouth: “No worries, mate. Just so long as he didn’t get away. Now, are you coming
up here or am I going down there?”

  She can hear them working their way up from below, a scratching and rustling accompanied by the clatter of shingle scattering underfoot. The dogs, slick with wet, settle on their haunches, the pig of no interest to them now—it’s the living pig that pushes their buttons, the fleeing pig, the mysterious thing that bolts at the sound of their conjoined voices and never stops till they’ve got it cornered and the man with the gun is wading in for the finale. She wants to sit down on the nearest rock—her legs are lifeless, numb, too weak to support her—but instead she finds herself standing over the carcass as if she’s willed it into existence. It’s bigger than she thought it would be, huge really, three or four hundred pounds, its fur brindled and shaggy, more like a sheepdog’s than the smooth brushed coat of the domestic hogs she’d seen rooting around the villages in Guam. Frazier’s first shot, the one from the rifle, severed the carotid artery and a loop of bright oxygen-rich blood arced away from the wound till the heart stopped pumping and the flow faltered like the choked-off stream of a garden hose. The blood shadows the carcass now, so dark it could be oil, as if the animal had stumbled and fallen in a seep.

  Rain stirs the dense tangle of fur, drops silently into the fixed and unseeing eyes, the delicacy of the lashes there, the canthic folds, the deep rich chocolate brown of the irises. She bends from the waist to see more clearly, ignoring the riveting of the rain. The hooves fascinate her. She’s never seen a hoof up close before—it’s so neatly adapted to its task, a built-in shoe shining and dark with the wet, as impervious as if it were molded of plastic. And the ears, the way the ears stand straight up, like a German shepherd’s, to collect and concentrate the sounds that only come to us peripherally. The heavy shoulders, the neat arc of the haunches, the switch of the tail. This wild thing, this perfect creature. She feels the sorrow in the back of her throat, the sorrow of existence, and if she could have brought the animal back to life, restored it to some other ecosystem where it could belong and thrive and live out its time under the sun, she would have done it.

  Frazier comes up behind her. “Five down,” he says, “and bloody hundreds to go.”

  She just nods. “It’s kind of”—and she feels like an idiot even before the words are out of her mouth—“neat, though. Healthy, I mean. A good specimen.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Frazier says, stepping forward to tap the carcass with the toe of his boot. “He’s in his prime, no doubt about it. Probably been out there making all the little piggies he can. But see this?” His boot poking at the jaws now. “These tushes? He could rip the guts out of a dog in a heartbeat with these things and no mistaking it. This is one mean animal. And you can tell by the way he was coming at us he didn’t really have any charitable notions in his head.”

  He’s right. Of course he’s right. These animals have to be eliminated and if you stop to see them as individuals you’re done. How many acorns will have the chance to germinate and grow into trees to shade the terrain and capture mist in their spreading branches because this pig at their feet won’t be there to glut himself on them? Five down. Hundreds to go.

  At that moment Clive emerges from the chaparral downslope, his shorter but just as sturdy and just as sunburned companion following close behind pulled by two more dogs on leashes. The men are dressed identically: gaiters, shorts, ponchos, wide-brimmed hats. Both carry rifles of the same make and caliber as Frazier’s. “Jesus, what a day,” Clive hollers in his high husky voice that always seems to be going hoarse on him. “I say we’re lucky to get what we got because the critters aren’t stupid—they’ll all be hunkered in cover while it’s coming down like this.” And then, as if just noticing her, he touches the dripping brim of his hat and says, “Hi, Alma. Nice day, huh?”

  The other hunter—he won’t look directly at her, not yet—lets go of the leashed dogs so they can rejoin their compatriots in a brief exposition of shoulder bumping and tail wagging. “That’s a trophy animal there, Fraze,” he says, nodding in the direction of the boar. “Wish you’d left him for me.”

  “Maybe Alma wants the tusks for a souvenir?” Clive says, giving her a sidelong glance.

  “Sure,” the second one says, and he looks up now and there’s no mistaking the intent of his gaze, a healthy young man out in the bush bereft of the company of women, and he’s dissolved her clothes, healed her abrasions and wiped her clean of mud all in an instant, “but as I’m sure she knows that’ll require hacking off the head and burying it for a couple weeks so the beetles and worms can get at it. Try to pull those things out otherwise and they’ll snap off every time.” He looks to the dead animal and then comes back to her. “I’m A.P., by the way, short for Arthur Peter—don’t think we’ve had the pleasure.”

  She takes the hand he offers—as cold and wet as hers—and murmurs, “I’m Alma. Nice to meet you. But maybe, given all that effort, we ought to just leave this one for the ravens.” Turning to Frazier, not for protection, not because the moment is awkward and she can feel the lust radiating like an aura from A.P. and Clive, but because she’s feeling good again, or better, and wants desperately to keep from breaking down in front of them, keep from showing weakness in the face of the killing and dying and death they take so casually. The necessary death. The death she’s ordered. As boss and overseer. “Right, Frazier?” she says, letting her voice rise in an easy jocular way.

  “Royt. But then, and this is always a worry once you start in on these things, you’re going to have an artificial blip in the raven population, you know that, don’t you?—and nobody can say what effect that’s going to have down the road on, say, the island scrub jay or the side-blotched lizard or any of the other species you’re trying to preserve.”

  “Okay then,” A.P. chirps, going down on one knee before the carcass, “let me just do some mouth-to-mouth here on this one and see if we can’t revive him—”

  They’re standing unprotected in the rain, deep in a wild canyon on an island off the Pacific Coast on which there can’t be more than twenty people total at the moment, discussing the cascading effects of the artificial removal of one species to favor another. In all her years in the library, the classroom, at her desk in her dorm writing papers and dreaming of the outdoors, she couldn’t have imagined this. It feels good, though. It feels right. Ignoring A.P., she says, “Of course I’m aware of that. Providing this resource for the ravens is going to increase their numbers exponentially and once the carcasses are gone they’re going to starve and die back, but not before robbing every nest they can and predating anything that moves . . . but we’ve got to take that chance. I mean, that’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”

  Frazier nods. “Just making a point,” he says. And adds, as a clarifier, “No worries.”

  One of the dogs whines. The rain, which has slackened, begins to pick up again. A.P., still down on one knee, still clowning, says, “Nope, there’s no bringing this one back.” And Clive, hands hanging at his sides and a fountain spouting from the crease at the brim of his hat, says, “What I don’t understand, ecologically speaking, is why don’t we get out of this rain someplace?”

  Lunch, shared round under the canopy of a bright blue plastic tarp Frazier weighted with rocks atop the ledge above them and strung across to the crown of an ironwood rising up from below, is heavy on jerky, PowerBars and dried fruit, though each of the men produces a foil-wrapped sandwich and Alma contributes half a dozen veggie cheese wraps she made up in her pre-dawn kitchen for just such an encounter as this. They’ve got a fire going and she’s grateful for that, shivering actually, the sweatshirt soaked through and propped up on a stick to dry or at least steam, and no, she’s not going to worry about the strict prohibition against open fires out here—not today, not in this mess. Frazier passes round his flask and she fits the cold metal rim to her lips and takes a burning hit like everybody else, feeling it work its way down her throat to ignite in the acid pool of her stomach, fire on fire. From there, it will be absorbed into her bloodstream w
here it will rise to massage the pleasure centers of her brain and plunge low to sweep through the embryo growing inside her, her daughter, and her daughter better learn to take it, to toughen up, that’s what she’s thinking. One hit. Half a shot. What harm can that do?

  “What’re you thinking, Alma?” Frazier asks, leaning in to poke at the fire.

  “I don’t know. Nothing, I guess.”

  “Another hit?”

  “No,” she says, waving away the proffered flask. Then she feels a grin coming on. “Or yes, hell yes—why not?” Another swallow, another burn. She’s feeling reckless, celebratory, proven—blooded, isn’t that what they call it? Shouldn’t Frazier be dabbing a handkerchief in boar’s blood and anointing her forehead?

  “That’s the spirit, girl,” A.P. says, and she passes him the flask, conscious now not only of his eyes on her but of something else too, a deferential note to the foolery, as if he were forcing it, as if, despite her passing illusion of solidarity, he—and Clive and Frazier too—can’t forget that she’s the one paying the bills here.

  The rain seems heavier now, if that’s possible. All four dogs, stinking and wet, have crowded in with them, tight quarters. The dead boar, a swollen shaggy heap sinking into its own fluids a stone’s throw away, is the only one not invited to the party, though in a way, he’s the guest of honor. It’s chilly. She edges closer to the fire.

  For a long while no one says anything, each occupied with his own thoughts, listening to the rain, the fire, feeling the surge of life all around them—the life of the wild that progresses minute to minute, day to day, in this very spot, whether they’re here to record it or not. The brandy is in her brain. She shivers again and leans forward to reach for the sweatshirt.