She’d worn out the last of her dresses, so she stripped the scarecrow of its trousers and wore those now along with one of Emil’s heavy plaid work shirts. Hux was the only one who seemed to miss what she used to look like; when he was strapped to the cradleboard he’d suck on what was left of her hair.
“Mama,” he said the first day it was gone.
He kicked and wailed until Eveline set him down on the ground.
“Do you want us to freeze to death?” she said sharply.
The walnut stayed quiet.
Cutting wood and dragging it back to the cabin was hard work, harder than Emil had let on last winter. But it was good, clean work, too, which kept her mind from wandering into visions of Cullen and herself forever entwined on the cabin floor. If she didn’t pay attention she could cut off her hand with Emil’s ax, which Lulu taught her to sharpen on the rocks down by the river one morning near the end of October.
“I could keep the baby,” Lulu said that day.
Eveline touched the blade of the ax. The day was cool, the metal cold. The trees along the river shook their yellow leaves like fists. Snow was coming.
“How do you know when it’s sharp enough?” Eveline said.
“I just know,” Lulu said.
Of course Lulu couldn’t keep the walnut—they both knew that. Eveline would have to stay on her side of the river for the rest of her life.
“I’m not going to leave her in the middle of nowhere,” Eveline said. “Someone will adopt her. She deserves as much, don’t you think?”
“You’re the one with the coat,” Lulu said, and went back to sharpening the ax.
“I’ll give it back to you if that’s what you want,” Eveline said.
Gunther and Reddy had just come down from their cabin to the river, the opposite shore. Reddy waved to Lulu and Eveline. He began to lay putty down in the hull of the canoe, since the ice would be coming soon, and the canoe would have to be stored up in the rafters of their cabin. Either that or it would lay overturned in the chicken coop, and the chickens would have to come inside.
Gunther began to skip stones.
“Look at me, Hux!” he yelled. “I bet you can’t throw as far!”
Lulu set the ax down. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s got into me lately. I have a lot more feelings than I want. A lot more memories.”
Eveline touched Lulu’s shoulder. “Why did they leave you?”
“I don’t know,” Lulu said, looking at the cat’s paws on the river. “My mother dropped me at school and told me to mind my teacher and eat my lunch the same way she did every single morning my whole life. She didn’t say a word different.”
“This is different,” Eveline said gently.
Lulu handed her the ax. “I know.”
That afternoon, as the first snowflakes of the season fell, Eveline finally hit her target at its center. She strapped Hux to her back and went off into the forest, looking for the buck of all bucks, tracking disappearing footprints in the quickly falling snow. She heard the shots of other hunters in the forest, but she didn’t see their orange hats between the low-hanging tamarack branches, the dark green boughs. She walked for hours in the forest, turning in circles until she didn’t know quite where she was in relation to the cabin, until dusk came and she came upon a group of deer rubbing their antlers against tree trunks.
Hux was sucking on the end of her hair, gripping it with his fingers. Eveline kept him on her back. The walnut kept quiet.
The bucks looked at Eveline for a moment and went back to rubbing their antlers on the bark, as if she was different than the other hunters in the forest because she was a woman with a child in her belly and one on her back. The bucks weren’t afraid of her like she thought they’d be, like she hoped they’d be, which reminded her of a day last spring, after Emil had left for Germany and before Cullen had arrived in his stolen boat, when Eveline was up in the garden and a doe and her two newborn fawns came out of the woods.
That day, Eveline had set a blanket out for Hux to rest on while she tilled the soil and pruned back whatever was growing too leggy too fast. As she was slicing through a tomato vine, the doe and her fawns walked across the blanket. When Eveline noticed what was happening, her instinct was to run over and scoop Hux up in her arms, but something else told her to stand very still so she didn’t startle the doe. At first, Eveline was afraid the doe and her fawns would crush Hux with their hooves, but they didn’t. Eveline looked at the doe and the doe looked at her, as if they weren’t a deer and a woman standing in a meadow on a cloudy day in May. As if they shared something essential that protected them in each other’s company. One of the fawns stopped to drink her mother’s milk, nosing her way to the soft white fur covering her underbelly. The other one licked Hux’s hand until the doe nudged them along, and they disappeared into the woods again.
Eveline raised the bow and positioned the arrow. All but one of the bucks leaped off in different directions when she pulled back the bowstring to her ear. The last buck, the most royal of them all, stood staring at her, his dark eyes open and unwavering, listening for what she was going to do in the beat of her heart. Eveline was listening, too.
She counted twenty-six antler points. Twenty-six dollars Jeremiah Burr would place in the palm of her hand. Twenty-six ways to survive.
She thought of the doe and her two little fawns. Their extraordinary understanding.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, and let go of the bowstring.
The arrow pierced the buck through his neck, and he fell to the ground at once. When he tried to get up, his legs buckled. He didn’t try to get up again. Eveline untied the cradleboard and set Hux down in the snow. She walked over to where the buck lay on his side. He was panting, groaning, quickly losing the light behind his eyes. Eveline kneeled beside him. She stroked his fur, which a river of blood was turning red.
The snow was melting beneath him. Her.
The buck’s breaths got further and further apart until foam came out of his mouth, and he stopped breathing altogether. The forest seemed to stop breathing as well.
The terrifying stillness of that moment, the way the wind and snow stopped blowing, the way even the leaves stopped falling from the trees, made Eveline realize what she’d always known. Her husband was wrong about preservation. You couldn’t justify taking a life because it fit squarely into three paper rules. You couldn’t justify taking a life even if it meant saving your own. All you could do was live with what you’d done.
What you were going to do.
Before the stillness passed and Eveline covered the buck with a tarp—she’d come back with the sled tomorrow and tow him to the cabin—she felt the walnut kick low and hard. First a foot. Then an elbow. Then a fist.
Eveline took her hand off the buck’s underbelly and put it on her own.
“I know,” she said.
For the first time in months, she started to cry.
When Eveline finally found her way home again, she put Hux to bed and lit a cedar fire more for the sound of the crackling logs and the comforting aroma than for warmth. After roasting a potato and eating it while she stood over the kitchen sink, she took down Emil’s taxidermy manuals, praying she could do what they said she needed to in order to get her twenty-six dollars. She wondered if Jeremiah Burr would give her—a woman—the money for what he couldn’t accomplish himself. He’d made the promise to Emil, a promise she was counting on. She’d strap herself to Jeremiah Burr’s chair if she had to.
Of the tasks before her, first the buck’s head had to be removed from its body, then the contents of its skull removed, its flesh torn then sewn, its body drained of blood and packed with snow. Then came the butchering if she didn’t want to waste the meat—gruesome work Emil would never had let her bear witness to, let alone participate in.
Eveline dragged the buck back to the cabin on the sled the next afternoon. With a butcher knife, she separated the buck’s head from his body in the snow beyond the cabin.
His blood had frozen overnight. His heart.
Dear Emil, Eveline thought, but now there was nowhere to send a letter.
When night came, Eveline wasn’t afraid of it the way she was the first night Emil was wasn’t there with her, when she stood on the porch listening to the forest’s sounds. Since Cullen had come and gone, the only harm that lingered was the harm she could do to herself. Losing her ability to be afraid was a little like losing the vital red edges of her life. If there was no such thing as fear, there was no such thing as safety either.
Eveline took the buck’s head inside the cabin but left his body outside. At the kitchen table, she studied the manuals, thinking of the people far away across the world sitting at their own tables—walnut, oak, maple—eating supper, perhaps, in their own small ways defending their lives. With a metal spoon, she scooped out the inside of the buck’s head. The English manual urged caution. The German manual urged what, in their hard consonants grouping together like walls? Outside, Eveline heard Tuna chirping. She still wouldn’t fly south. Eveline thought about bringing her inside, but couldn’t bear to cage her.
Skinning the flesh from the buck’s head required Eveline’s complete concentration. While Hux slept in his crib, she put on a pot of coffee. She wound the radio Lulu had given her, and a Canadian program—the only thing besides static—came on. A Day in the Life of …, the announcer said from somewhere north of Evergreen. As she cut around the antler burs and tear ducts, she listened to a story about a woman from the northern reaches of Canada, who’d supposedly been raised by wolves. A group of scientists had found her in the wild and had taken her back to Ontario to study her.
Each time the announcer asked the woman a question, she’d howl, and the scientist who’d accompanied her on the show would have to answer for her.
Eveline had never seen a wolf in Evergreen; the trappers had gotten to most of them in the early part of the century, selling their pelts so women could have coats and men could have pride. The coyotes and caribou were mostly gone now, too.
Eveline skinned the buck’s head, careful around the veins and tendons.
“We assume she was separated from her family when she was two or three,” one of the scientists said about the wolf woman. “There’s a small window of time where animals will care for other stray animals. When the window closes, the stray animal becomes prey, and only the very strongest will survive on its own.”
“Does she speak English?” the announcer said.
“She knows a few French words. I can’t say them on the radio.”
“This is truly remarkable,” the announcer said. “What will become of her?”
“Rehabilitation into civilization,” the scientist said. “We’re hoping she’ll choose to live a normal life. One of our biggest challenges has been to get her to sleep in a bed.”
The woman howled.
“Ouch!” the announcer said.
“We haven’t been able to get her to stop biting people,” the scientist said. “You should see my arms. Her canines are extremely sharp. A dentist is going to grind them down next week.” There was a fumbling sound, a dropped microphone, a subduing. “You won’t be so powerful then, will you?” the scientist said, out of breath.
Let her go, Eveline thought.
She wondered how the scientist had convinced the woman to come south with him, to part ways with the wolves who’d fed and protected her most of her life. She imagined a tranquilizer gun, a howl that would break any breakable heart.
“What happens if you can’t rehabilitate her?” the announcer said.
The scientist cleared his throat, as if for a moment he was uncertain—regretful?—about what he’d done. “It’s our belief you can rehabilitate anyone.”
Eveline turned the radio off. Outside snow was falling; the sky was Chinook pink. Eveline thought about the wolf woman living in an apartment one day, one day going to work, one day cooking a meal on a stove, but at what cost? She hoped for the very least: that the wolf woman got another good bite in before her visit to the dentist.
When Eveline finished skinning the buck, she set the brown fur on a towel to dry. From the cupboards, she pulled out Emil’s container of beeswax, which she heated over the woodstove like the manual said. She found the bottle of sage oil and package of cotton she needed, along with what was left of the clay, to make a form for the buck. That was the peculiar thing about large animal preservation; a head on a wall wasn’t really a head at all.
Emil had said the difference between a good taxidermist and a great one was his ability, through preservation, to bring an animal back to life. Her ability? Eveline had never heard of a female taxidermist; even the animals, the specimens, were male. Which led her to thinking about what kind of expression Jeremiah Burr would want to see in the buck’s eyes. A man who wanted an animal head on his wall probably wanted nostrils flaring, exposed teeth, a fierceness that, to the customers who walked in his office, proved Jeremiah Burr’s ability to conquer what didn’t belong to him. To control it. Eveline knew she wouldn’t be able to capture the buck as he was when she put an arrow in him in the forest—calm and majestic, demure almost—if she wanted her twenty-six dollars.
Eveline looked out the window again at the falling snow. Preserving the buck would take another week or maybe more. She hoped Lulu’s truck would make it to Jeremiah Burr’s office, over the potato and alfalfa fields, around the bog, and whatever else stood in her way, and she hoped that no one she knew saw her when she was there.
When she’d done everything she could, Eveline checked on Hux and went out on the porch to say good night to Tuna, who huddled in the corner of the birdhouse. Eveline lifted the birdhouse off its hook. She wouldn’t cage Tuna, but they were bound together by sunflower seeds and time, and she wasn’t going to pretend they weren’t any longer. At the door’s threshold, where cold met warm, Tuna came out of the birdhouse. She stood on the snowy perch for a moment, and with a great lurch forward into the cabin, spread her wings.
Eveline finished preserving the buck’s head on a Monday morning. She cut and sanded a maple board to mount the head on. The fine, blond wood reminded her of the days Emil had worked on Hux’s crib before he was born and of the story he’d told her about the lost little girl. Now, when she thought of Emil, she almost couldn’t picture him.
Dear Emil, she thought, wishing for a campfire in the forest, a blanket around his shoulders. Hold on a little longer. Just a little longer.
Besides that one fist, that one foot, the walnut went back to being the walnut. She stayed so quiet Eveline sometimes wondered whether or not she was alive. If it had been Hux, Eveline would have gone to the midwife in Yellow Falls and made her listen for life with her wise ear. For the girl with black hair she saw in her dreams, Eveline did nothing because she couldn’t. Everyone knew Emil was gone, and no matter how serious Reddy was about taking on a second child and wife, she didn’t want that either.
In the afternoon, Eveline dropped Hux off at Lulu and Reddy’s cabin. Reddy went back across the river to help her with the buck. When they’d loaded it into the back of the truck, Reddy showed her how to work the pedals, which she could barely reach, since she was so short. Though he’d offered several times to go with her, at first claiming he needed a few things at the general store, in the end he sent her off to Yellow Falls alone.
“Thank you for watching Hux,” Eveline said, and put the truck in reverse.
“The chains are in the back,” Reddy said, in case it started to snow.
But it didn’t. Eveline and the truck made it to Yellow Falls without the snow chains. The tires caught on a patch of field ice only once.
Even though Jeremiah Burr’s office was on the very edge of Yellow Falls, she felt strange being in the vicinity of Main Street, hamburgers and ice-cream cones, after so many months away. Jeremiah Burr wasn’t expecting her, so she took a seat in the waiting room with Lulu’s coonskin coat wrapped tightly around her to hide her belly. The men in the waiting r
oom were called in first, even the ones who arrived after her, so that night was beginning to fall when Jeremiah Burr finally called her into his office.
“I don’t like to deal with women in matters of landholding,” he said before she had a chance to sit down. “Where’s your husband?”
“Germany,” Eveline said.
“There’s a war over there,” said Jeremiah Burr, a short man with ruddy cheeks and a sweaty forehead. His suit, though fine in material, strained at the seams.
“I’ve come about a buck,” Eveline said.
“I don’t hand out money to unfortunate wives, if that’s what you’ve heard.”
“My husband is Emil.”
“The taxidermist,” Jeremiah Burr said.
“You said you’d give him a dollar a point,” Eveline said.
“I don’t see him here.”
“I’m here in his place,” Eveline said. “I have a twenty-six-point buck.”
Jeremiah Burr frowned. “A female taxidermist—I don’t like the sound of it.”
Eveline glanced at the photographs on his desk, at the woman in each of the frames smiling serenely. In her face was a look of uncomplicated happiness, one Eveline recognized from her wedding photographs, a year and forever ago.
Jeremiah Burr glanced at the photographs, too. His face softened at the sight of his bride, who was probably at home making supper for him on the stove, laying out linens for the table, freshening herself like a daisy.
“All right. You win. Show me the buck.”
Eveline and Jeremiah Burr walked out of his office, through the waiting room, and out to the truck. “Now don’t get it in your head I’m taking it. I’m just looking. Times are hard all around. I’m not made of money.”
But he looked at the men in the waiting room when he said this, not at Eveline.
“You should sew or knit or something,” he said when he lifted the tarp and saw the buck and the fierceness Eveline had managed. “This is no work for a lady.”
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