On the Free

by Coert Voorhees

  With the knife handle now properly wrapped for grip, she stands above the deer, thinking. She cleaned a fish once—as a fourth grader, when they lived in Montana, on a daddy-daughter corporate outing she went on with her mom—and what she remembers most is how bloody her fish had been compared to the kid next to her. She’d dug the knife too deep, rupturing the organs inside, and had ended up pulling out a gory mess.

  Okay, then. Step one: Don’t rupture the organs. She stands on each of the hind hooves so that the deer is spread-eagled, and she’s about to cut up from the anus, just like with the fish, when she realizes that she’s making this too hard.

  The easiest way not to rupture the organs is not to go anywhere near them. She and Santi won’t pack out the whole animal, so she doesn’t have to gut it. She just has to get at the meat. It doesn’t even need to be pretty. As long as they can eat it.

  She remembers how Tyler peeled the hide away before cutting out the meat, and since the throat is already gashed, she decides to start there. She kneels beside it and tries to stick the tip of the blade into the throat and down. The dead body wiggles as Amelia increases pressure behind the blade, and because she only has one good arm, she has to press her knee on the side of the deer’s head. It feels oddly disrespectful, like she’s adding insult to injury by smashing his face into the dirt.

  Eventually, she’s able to get the blade moving down the throat, taking care not to stab too deeply and cause a rupture, but progress is slow. The blade is chipped and dulled, and she has one hand to work with. Cut, put the knife down, peel the hide away, pick up the knife, and repeat.

  Though there’s not as much blood as she’d thought there would be, the knife’s cloth grip has become sticky with it, a magnet for tufts of gray-white fur. Sweat pours down the side of Amelia’s face. The hide peels away like a jacket zipping open, and when Amelia hits the end of the sternum, she follows the bottom edge of the ribs to one side.

  Twenty minutes in, she sits back on her haunches, realizing that in spite of her progress, all she’s done is expose one side of the animal’s ribcage. The deer looks like a flasher with half his trench coat open.

  She wanders over to Santi, a few feet closer to the river, huddled over a stick and working it back and forth with the Jerry-pants bowstring. A small pillow of wood shavings shrouds the base of the stick, and within arm’s reach, Santi’s made a pile of twigs. They range in diameter from toothpick to thumb-sized.

  “How’s the fire coming?”

  “Don’t rush me,” he says without looking up.

  “Okay, no problem. I’m just over there trying to skin a deer with one working arm. I could use two more.”

  His smile is forced, and sweat streaks his sunken face. “I’m getting there.”

  “I’m taking a break. Maybe you should—”

  “No.” He focuses back on the fire. “I’ve got this.”

  She’s about to argue, holding up her hand as if to motion for him to wait, but the sight of her own arm stops her cold. First, the blood: dark red and caked all the way up to her elbow in a kind of swirled paisley pattern. But it’s not just blood. Little pieces of deerskin, too. Gristle, maybe, and fat. And clumps of fur. Dirt and blood thick underneath her fingernails.

  Amelia drops her arm and shivers a little. With the sun dipping just below the ridge, the early evening air takes on the first hint of a chill, the shade now stretching all the way to the riverbank.

  Unable to scrub with her other hand, she plunges her arm into the water and rubs her palm on the riverbed, using the gritty dirt bottom like sandpaper, then does the same thing with the back of her hand. The fur comes off easily, but blood clings underneath her fingernails. She pulls her hand from the river to find that blood has also caked the lines in her palm, highlighting them like the routes on a map.

  “Fire!” Santi yells. “I made fire!”

  Amelia hustles over to Santi, who’s holding his face two inches from a tiny fire. He blows gently and lays the toothpick-sized twigs over the flame one by one. Then thicker twigs, and thicker.

  Soon, the flame reaches six inches, then a foot, and Amelia realizes that they’re going to be able to cook soon. Skinning the rest of the deer would waste time, so she pushes her fingertips along the back of the carcass as if massaging it, trying to imagine the muscle below, probing for a spot that most resembles the feel of raw steak. She settles on an area between the front shoulder and the spine, and she jabs the knife deep.

  There’s more blood now that she’s digging straight into the muscle, but it’s not flowing, so she must not be near an artery. The chipped blade catches on the meat as she saws it up and down, but it’s still sharp enough to carve out a strip going from the neck halfway down the back of the ribcage. Cut, pull back, cut, pull back.

  “Remind me never to piss you off.”

  Amelia looks up to see Santi watching her with his arms crossed, the fire burning more than a foot high behind him. With one last cut, she frees the strip of meat from the ribcage. Then she jabs the knife into the deer’s shoulder and holds the meat up as if it’s a medal. The cut may be uneven, with patches of bloody fur on one side, but it’s one step closer to her stomach.

  “We still need to skin this piece,” she says.

  “Should probably wash it a little too, don’t you think?”

  “What was that you said about not pissing me off?”

  Santi laughs and helps lift her to her feet. “My two hands and I will take care of this. You go find some cooking sticks.”

  “I thought you’d never ask.” She wipes her forehead with the back of her arm and goes to wash her hand again. Near the riverside, she spots some shrubs with branches the thickness of her index finger, and they look strong enough to hold the weight of a piece of meat. Plus, they’re green wood, so they won’t burn as easily as a dead tree branch would.

  Using her feet and hand, she’s able to break off a few. By the time she returns to the fire with an armful of potential skewers, Santi has cut away the hide and sliced the meat into smaller pieces.

  “This is at least a couple pounds here,” he says, cradling the meat in both hands. “You’re a straight-up badass.”

  A straight-up badass. Amelia smiles and watches him carry her kill to the river, where he kneels down and hurriedly washes each piece.

  He prepares two sticks, spearing a slice of meat for each of them, and he and Amelia sit across the fire from each other. The meat is lean and dark red, and when it touches the flame, it begins to sizzle. It smells so good that she wants to eat it the second it starts cooking. Even though she’s spent the last three years in Texas, it’s as though she’s never been around a barbecue before.

  Santi cracks first, pulling his stick back and gnawing on a piece direct from the flame.

  “Damn it!” he says, dropping the meat onto the ground. “Too hot!”

  He picks it up and makes a brief attempt to wipe the dirt away before biting down again and tearing the meat in half. He closes his eyes as he chews, and though Amelia swears she can hear the crunch of dirt between his teeth, he looks happy.

  When she can stand it no longer, she blows on her piece and then lays the stick on her lap so she can pull the meat free. She has never tasted anything like it. Grease collects at the edge of her mouth, drips from her fingers down the back of her hand. By the time she’s finished, however, she’s hungrier than she was when she started.

  “Pretty good.” Santi winks at her. “Could use some salt, though.”

  “More,” is all she can say.

  So she cooks more.

  Without another word exchanged, they cook and eat it all. Amelia’s hunger eases after the first few pieces, enough for her to experiment a little, alternating between medium rare and well done, between crispy and slow-roasted. She has no preference. Every bite tastes better than the last.

  When the pile is gone, Amelia lies on her back and moans. The sky beyond the treetops has turned a darker blue. Soon the sun will go down, and t
he temperature will drop, and she and Santi will share an open sleeping bag, as they have for the past two nights.

  “We should camp upriver,” she says. “In case a mountain lion wants to share.”

  “Or a bear. I don’t know which would be worse.”

  She sits up and immediately wishes she hadn’t. Her stomach is too full for such rapid movements. “Let’s cook as much as we can. Raw meat won’t keep overnight, and we still need enough food to get out of here—”

  “I have an idea,” Santi says with a snap of his fingers. He goes to the backpack, and after piling its contents on a nearby rock, removes the garbage bag liner. “Ta-daa!”

  They spend the whole evening cooking. Santi finding firewood, Amelia cutting strips of meat from the carcass, eating whenever she senses there’s more room in her stomach.

  “Here,” she says at one point, handing him a strip she cut from above the hind leg. “This must be the rump roast.”

  “Ha. Rump roast.” He threads the stick and holds the meat over the fire, and crackling starts immediately.

  She sits down next to him, and he glances at her, the fire reflecting gold off his face, and damned if her heart doesn’t skip a beat. Santi smiles, and though Amelia tries to look away, she can’t bring herself to. After Santi turns back to the fire, he leans to the side, nudging her shoulder with his own.

  “This is crazy,” she says.

  Santi laughs. “You killed a deer with a freaking spear. I built a fire with my bare hands. I’d say crazy is underselling it a bit.”

  “I did kill a deer with a spear, didn’t I?”

  “A homemade spear!” he says.

  Straight-up badass.

  44

  Because they went to different high schools, Amelia and Tyler had to scrounge weekday time in the evenings, usually at his house or hers, depending on whose parents weren’t home. In the last few weeks, though, they’d chosen restaurants and coffee shops instead. Neutral territory. No opportunity for physical contact meant no pressure to pretend they wanted any.

  A month into her senior year, they sat in the back corner of the crowded White Horse coffee shop. Even in early October, it was hot enough that they decided to take advantage of the air conditioning.

  They were supposed to be doing their homework. Amelia had a college essay rough draft due the next day, and she still didn’t know what to write about. She looked at the blank screen, then watched Tyler slowly turn a page of his book, and tried to remember the last time they’d really laughed together. Anything she said was the wrong thing, and anything he said just made her mad.

  They’d had rough patches before, and they’d always worked through them. She was his girlfriend. He was her boyfriend. Those were their identities at this point.

  “I’m getting a refill,” she said, and she realized that it was the first thing either of them had said since they sat down. “Want anything?”

  He shook his head without looking up from his book. Her binder fell off the table when she stood up, spreading its contents on the floor: an old essay on Heart of Darkness, a college essay topic checklist, some loose sheets of paper, the brochure she’d taken from the Bear Canyon Wilderness Therapy recruiter.

  She gathered everything up into a pile and dropped it back on the table. When she returned with her coffee, Tyler was slouched back in his chair, his legs outstretched, with the Bear Canyon brochure in his hand. “What’s this?”

  “A recruiter came to school today,” she said. “They’re looking for assistant trip leaders.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “You’re thinking about it?”

  “The girls at Bayou Banks would totally flip if I did.”

  “Yeah,” he said with a snort.

  “What is that supposed to mean? You don’t think I could?”

  Tyler glanced once more at the brochure and tossed it on the table. He sat up and went back to his book. “Never mind.”

  “No, not never mind.”

  “Let’s not do this here.”

  “Do what? What are we doing?”

  “You’re right, Miels. What are we doing?” He paused as if expecting her to answer, but she didn’t know what to say. “I thought so.”

  Her silence had apparently been enough for him.

  “So that’s it?” she said.

  “I guess.” He shrugged.

  “Why?” she said. “I want to know why.”

  “No, you don’t. You say you do, but you really don’t.”

  But she did. She wanted to hear it from him, and she wanted him to hear it from her. If they were going to do this, she wanted to get it all out in the open.

  Tyler looked around. Every table was full. He put his elbows on the table. “You think you’re different—those families at the club, the debutante parties, all of that. You make fun of it all the time like you’re different, but you’re not. You’re just like them.”

  “That’s not fair,” she whispered.

  “You used to be interesting.”

  “Used to be?”

  “I don’t know if you picked up the brochure because you really want to do this, or because you think it would look good on your resume, or because you didn’t want to offend the recruiter.”

  She knew she should fight back. She knew he was going too far and that she should stand up for herself, but she was just so tired. Yes, she was tired, but more than that, she didn’t fight back because she was thinking that maybe he was right.

  “You can keep my shirts,” he said, standing in such a way that she knew it was pointless to ask him to stay, “but I want my blue hoodie back.”

  He slung his backpack over his shoulder and turned as if to leave, but then stopped and tapped his finger on the Bear Canyon brochure. “You are who you are, Miels. No brochure is ever going to change that.”

  Amelia said nothing; she just watched him go. Only after he’d walked out the door and down the street did she notice that everyone in the coffee shop was staring at her.

  She leaned back and picked up the brochure and tried to disappear. By the time she took the first sip of her coffee, it was already cold.

  The most physically and emotionally demanding experience of your life is also the most rewarding. She knew she could do this. She had to, she realized. Not because she wanted to prove Tyler wrong about her, but because she knew he was right.

  She’d go home and tell her parents the news, and she’d fill out the application and send it in before she changed her mind, and then she’d get wasted and try to forget everything she ever felt about Tyler Stafford.

  45

  Amelia peels away the sleeping bag and sits up. She’s alone. The air is cool, and a thin layer of dew coats her face and neck. As has been her habit over the past few mornings, she takes a moment to categorize everything wrong with her body. The arm is still in pain, still splinted and tied to her chest. Her back aches from her waist to her shoulder blades—a newer pain, probably from spending so much time hunched over while butchering the deer.

  The outlook is not all bad, though. The bruises on her face seem less tender this morning. The crick in her neck feels better. And amazingly, she’s still full after feasting the night before.

  When she stands, the top of Santi’s head is visible above the riverside bushes. She slides her boots on and tucks the untied laces behind the tongues. Halfway to him, she hesitates. He’s sitting on the riverbank with the map in front of him, looking across the water at something in the distance. The ridgeline? Nothing at all?

  A branch snaps beneath her boot, causing him to turn back and look at her. His cheeks are less hollow than the day before. He smiles and waves her over.

  “Everything okay?” she says.

  “With my ass? You bet. Only had to get up twice.”

  “That’s a miracle. Did you eat already?”

  “Not hungry, if you can believe it. The food’s still there, though. I checked first thing.”

  “And the deer?”

  “Untouched,
as far as I could tell.” He gestures to the map in front of him. “We’re less than thirteen miles away from the access road. Now that I’m feeling better, we might be able to make it today.”

  Amelia sits next to him and pulls the map over her crossed legs. “I was thinking. We have food now, so that’s not a problem. If we follow the river from here, we still run into the access road. It adds . . .” She traces her finger along the blue ribbon and ballparks the distance. “Looks like four miles, but that’s a small price to pay in order to guarantee water.”

  “Seventeen miles? We can do seventeen, no problem,” Santi says. He laughs at the absurdity of his confidence.

  Amelia laughs with him. “Yesterday morning, eighteen miles felt like a death sentence.”

  “Yesterday I didn’t know you were a warrior princess. A lot can change in a day.”

  “That’s why I think we should stick to the river,” she says. “Worst case, the bank is impassable and we have to cross a couple of times, but we’ve already done that. Maybe it takes another day. Maybe two. But we’ll have food and water.”

  He nods. “They always say the best rescue is self-rescue, but even if following the river keeps us out here a little longer, it gives people the chance to look for us too.”

  Optimism is sneaky. She didn’t see it coming, and it’s here before she’s had the chance to put her guard up. Making her smile, making her notice the morning sun’s rays as they send narrow golden beams over her head.

  Objectively, they’re still screwed. Amelia’s arm is still broken. Santi still has giardia. They’re still in the middle of the most remote wilderness area in Colorado, possibly being followed by a lunatic with a rifle. But compared to dying of thirst and starvation, maybe a bout of diarrhea and a broken bone aren’t so bad. Even the thought of Victor doesn’t dampen Amelia’s spirits.

  While they pack up their gear, Amelia feels as if they’re already reminiscing, as if they’re already on the other side of this. As if they’ve already been found. Oh, here’s the deflated air mattress and sleeping bag we shared—pay no attention to the six inches of duct tape. Yeah, that’s blood on the chipped kitchen knife, but don’t worry—it’s not human!