What She Found in the Woods

by Josephine Angelini

  He smiles indulgently and nods. ‘OK. So right about now, you should be realizing that you didn’t actually kill anyone.’

  ‘Rachel killed herself because of me,’ I argue.

  ‘She killed herself. Period. When someone wants to die, they will find a way to do it.’ His voice roughens with anger. ‘And they’ll drag down anyone they can with them.’

  He turns sharply to the side, draws his bow, and looses an arrow into the ferns.

  ‘Huh. Look at that. No baby deer this time.’ He retrieves the arrow and strides back to me. His cheeks are flushed, and his thick chest is swelling with skipping breaths. ‘Not everything in the world is set up to teach you a lesson.’ He laughs through his frustration. ‘And as powerful as you are – and I know you are a terrifying force of nature – you aren’t powerful enough to be responsible for everything that happens around you. Sometimes things are completely out of your control. So, no. It’s not your fault.’

  But he wasn’t there. He doesn’t understand. ‘I heard a noise in the undergrowth, and I shot at it,’ I say, shaking my head. ‘I knew something was there.’

  Faster than I can see, he raises his hand and snaps his fingers next to my ear. My head flicks towards the sound.

  ‘Reflex,’ he says gently. ‘It’s a prey response. Humans turn towards unexpected or threatening sounds and go into fight-or-flight mode. Our species used to be hunted by everything that was in the undergrowth.’ He smiles at me, watching my face as I think. ‘You let the arrow go on instinct. Self-defence is actually a better way of defining it. Some people freeze, and some people shoot. You’re a shooter. It’s not bad or good; it’s how you’re wired.’

  I feel something in me uncoil.

  No. I can’t let myself off the hook that easily. Bo wants to see a better person than is actually here in front of him, so he does.

  But that’s not really it. He’s not making excuses for me. He knows I’m broken, but he also believes I’m getting better. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but his faith in me is so strong, it makes me become that better person he sees.

  It’s not the same as it is with my grandparents or my father. They only see what they want to see. Bo sees all of me – good and bad. He’s not insisting I’m something I’m not. He’s not shutting his eyes or walking away from me when I force him to open them.

  Bo sees the good person I could be if only I had someone who could accept the bad first. I couldn’t love him more for that. And as soon as the words run through my head, I realize they’re true.

  ‘I love you,’ I say. And it isn’t hard. It’s not forced or awkward. I laugh, but it’s a joyous laugh, not a bitter or sarcastic one. I laugh because I feel like sunshine inside. ‘I really love you,’ I say.

  ‘I love you too,’ he says, but his face is sad, and his eyes darken.

  I take a step back from him. ‘That wasn’t very convincing, Bo.’

  He captures one of my arms and pulls me towards him. ‘I know exactly what I’m feeling, and I know I’ll never feel it again. And the summer is half over.’

  There are so many times I look at Bo and think of him as younger than me because he’s less experienced in worldly things. But in this, in love, I know I’m less experienced than him. I don’t know if I’ve ever fully loved anyone, including myself, and Bo has spent his whole life surrounded by it.

  Benching, ghosting, breadcrumbing – I’m a master at all of these tactics, but I don’t know shit about love. And here he is, out in the middle of the woods, trying to find food for his family because he loves them. And he’d sweat and struggle and even kill to feed them.

  My mom once asked me to go ten blocks out of my way to Zabar’s deli to pick up some bagels, lox, and cream cheese crazy early in the morning because she had a craving, and I did it. That’s about the biggest favour I ever did for her. The biggest favour she ever did for me was to hire a really sweet nanny.

  OK, scratch that. I completely loved my nanny. I called her La-La because she was always singing, and I couldn’t pronounce her name anyway. She was an angel to me, and my mom fired her out of jealousy. That’s what I know of love.

  ‘What happens at the end of summer?’ I ask.

  He looks like he’s going to cry. ‘I have to go to school.’

  ‘Have to?’ I ask. It’s like I’m shrinking. My voice, my body, it’s all ravelling in.

  He nods and swallows. ‘It’s the deal. I leave the woods and go to school or my mom will turn herself in. She won’t let me stay. I told you.’

  I feel my face twisting into a snarl, and then the anger disappears. Of course Maeve would do that. She loves her son, and she won’t let him ruin his life for anyone. Not for her, not for me. She’s kicking him out of the nest in a month and a half. That’s all I have left of Bo.

  ‘Your mom’s absolutely right,’ I say in a flat voice. ‘You’re getting out of here. You’re brilliant and beautiful, and you’re going to add so much to the world.’

  He kisses me. Even if I won’t have him for much longer, knowing him at all is the real miracle.

  As he cradles the back of my head and lifts my weight to lay me down on the ground, I think of the girl he’ll meet at his Ivy League school. How she’ll marvel at her luck. If she’s smart. If she’s true. If she’s everything that I’m not.

  I’m not saying no, but Bo will only go so far. We’re still learning each other. We’re still learning ourselves. I don’t have enough experience to know what I like yet, but it seems as if everything he does is what I would have asked for had I known anything about it. Nothing is uncomfortable or awkward with him. Nothing he does is something he saw on Internet porn. It all flows, one thing into another. It’s seamless and seemingly random but guided by an invisible force. Like leaves on the wind. It might not be intercourse, but it is definitely making love.

  I’m a screamer. Didn’t see that coming.

  He falls asleep almost immediately afterwards, which is half infuriating, and half gratifying. I’m either not interesting enough to stay awake for, or I’m so damn amazing, his brain needs to shut down for a while in order to process.

  He doesn’t snore.

  I am awake. I am more awake than ever. I can hear everything. Moisture pattering through the leaves. Maybe it’s a light rain, or maybe the leaves are just breathing out water. It’s hard to tell when you’re on the bottom level of a rainforest. I hear a birdcall. Time passes. I lie on my side in the crook of Bo’s arm. The warm weight of him presses against my back. I’d rather yank out a tooth than give this up.

  And then . . .

  An enormous buck wafts out of the shadows from behind a great, mossy tree less than a hundred yards away. His thick antlers are only half grown and still covered in summertime velvet, but his body is so large that the lack of sound he makes creates a disconnect in the mind. Like seeing a ghost.

  The buck dips his head to graze.

  We must be downwind, Bo and I. The buck has no idea we’re here, our naked bodies obscured by ferns. This is just the kind of kill Bo and his family need. Without it, they might go hungry.

  If I wake Bo, he might unintentionally startle the buck. I’m lying on my left side, so my left eye is partially obscured by the leaf litter and the ferns. Just beyond my hand is the bow and quiver. The bow slips easily into my right hand. I take a breath and let it out before I ease myself towards the quiver.

  The buck keeps grazing.

  I slip an arrow out and, staying low, I shift my weight oh-so-slowly until my knees are under my torso. In yoga they call it Child’s Pose, but in my version I have a deadly weapon in my hands.

  Drip, drip, drip, is the only sound.

  I rise up on to my knees and draw in one motion. The buck looks me in the eye as I loose my arrow.

  He falls.

  He doesn’t bellow or screech. The only thing I can hear at this distance is the sound of his body crashing to the ground.

  I jump up, and I feel Bo startle and jump up behind me.


  ‘What happened?’ he yells.

  I’m too dumbstruck to speak yet. I point towards the fallen buck with his bow. Facing the buck, we both hear another sound coming from directly behind us.

  ‘No way!’ yells a young woman’s voice.

  ‘Raven?’ Bo says disbelievingly.

  His sister strides out from the deep cover of the mottled forest gloom. She’s moving fast, and as she passes us, I can see she’s covered in mud to camouflage her outline and her scent.

  ‘How did you do that?’ she growls over her shoulder in my direction.

  Bo looks at me, lost. I shrug back, and he and I pull on our clothes, then race to catch up with his sister, who is already crouching down next to the buck.

  She inspects the fallen beauty. ‘Right through the eye,’ she whispers. ‘How?’

  They’re both looking at me. The buck’s lungs heave out a death rattle in a wet rush of falling tissue and conquered life. The buck lies still. And that weight, or presence, or hum – whatever it is that separates the living now from the dead forever – it’s gone.

  Raven is still staring at me, waiting for some kind of explanation. Her distrust is mingled with curiosity and unwelcome respect. I don’t want respect for this.

  ‘I guess I’m good at killing things,’ I admit, ashamed, looking at the corpse at my feet.

  I turn and try to walk away, but Bo catches my arm gently and leads me back to the buck. I look into his eyes as he places my hands on the buck’s flank.

  ‘Thank you, brother,’ he says, like he knew him. Like this was one of his pals. ‘We needed you, and you came to help us.’

  Bo looks at me, his honest eyes digging deep. I nod and look down at the warm, caramel-coloured fur under my hands.

  ‘Thank you,’ I whisper. ‘And I’m sorry,’ I add.

  Raven puts a hand on the buck’s hindquarters, bows her head, and murmurs her gratitude.

  I can already feel his body cooling. I stare at him while Raven and Bo discuss the logistics of getting his huge carcass back to camp. Raven says that the rest of the family is scattered throughout the forest, each on a different game trail, so finding help would take too long.

  ‘Yeah,’ Bo says, nodding and frowning, ‘the plan was to split up.’ A thought occurs to him. ‘You knew I’d be on the river trail. What are you doing here?’

  The tone in his voice makes me look up from the deer and at them. Raven looks away uncomfortably, blushing and shifting. I laugh.

  ‘She came here to watch us,’ I say flatly.

  Raven glares at me, her face bright red. ‘I came to make sure my brother was hunting, and not . . .’ She trails off and makes a vague gesture towards me.

  Bo’s face flushes red at the thought of his sister watching what we just did. And she was watching us for a while, I’d bet. Maybe for the whole thing.

  I stand up. ‘So, rather than just being one hunter down, your family effectively loses two hunters today because you’re tracking your brother instead of the deer. And why would you do that?’ She shuts her mouth with a snap. ‘Your family needs meat, right? But proving you’re better than Bo was more important than that?’ I glance down at my kill. ‘Good thing I was here.’

  She keeps her mouth shut, and I nod. Good. Now she knows what the pecking order is. I start to walk away, but Bo grabs my arm.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he asks.

  ‘Back to your camp. We need help,’ I say, gesturing to the enormous dead deer.

  ‘We’ll butcher the buck right here so we can drag it back in sections,’ Bo says, shaking his head. ‘We can’t wait for help. We have to work fast.’

  I’m already getting queasy at the thought of butchering an animal. I’ve never even carved a turkey.

  ‘Why do we need to work fast?’ I ask. A weak laugh escapes. ‘It’s not like he’s going anywhere.’

  ‘No, but the bears are. Every bear in a ten-mile radius is going to smell this kill,’ Raven says, but with less acid than she usually has when she addresses me. ‘We have to work fast because they’re already headed this way. We’ll take the best cuts of meat back to camp first. And later we’ll come back with a rifle.’

  ‘If we come back. Might not be worth it,’ Bo says. He pulls out his knife. ‘Let’s get to work.’

  What comes next is the most gruesome twenty minutes of my life. While we butcher the buck, I try not to gag. I turn my head to the side and hiss breath in and out through my bared teeth. Bo calmly teaches me what the most valuable cuts are. It’s not just the meat, either. The liver is so nutritious that it’s one of the first things Raven wraps in ferns and lays on top of the long sticks she’s woven together with tree vines and . . . I don’t know, frigging fairy magic, to make a crude sledge.

  Bo’s tone is soothing and steady as he instructs me and encourages me, but I can see the strain around his mouth. A bear could come at any time. Or a mountain lion. Or a wolf. The sheer number of carnivorous animals in this area dwarfs the human population.

  After what seems like a purgatory of sawing and slicing and hacking, Bo is satisfied that we’ve harvested the best of the carcass that is in our ability to transport. He takes me down to the river to wash off the blood. We dunk and rinse in the frigid water and come up mostly clean, but there’s still blood under my fingernails. I’d have to scrub my hands with steel wool to get it all out.

  If I was cold from the water, that ends as soon as I start to drag my sledge. While Bo and I were butchering my kill, Raven made another sledge for each of us, and in between managed to load the hundreds of pounds of meat and organs that we hacked away from the bones on to them.

  We start out. Bo’s camp is miles away, uphill. The hour-long trek is torturous.

  I am one foot in front of the other. I am hands grown into wood. I am forward – one breath – one step. Then another. And another.

  I drag my dead behind me up a mountain.

  It’s strange. I just realized that when I’m with Bo, I never see dead bodies. When I’m with him, my ghosts are gone.

  ‘You can let go.’

  I blink.

  ‘Let go,’ Bo tells me.

  He unwinds my fingers from the sledge’s crude handles, and I can feel them creaking on the inside, like twisting wet rope.

  He leads me to a canvas folding chair and sits me in it while someone else deals with my sledge and its contents. The muscles in my forearms and calves twitch. Bo sees it and starts rubbing my overly taxed arms.

  ‘That was amazing,’ he whispers.

  ‘Amazing?’ I repeat, lifting my mouth into a wry smile. I motion to him and Raven, who is already recounting a heavily edited version of the kill. ‘I’m practically falling over, and you two aren’t even out of breath.’

  He smiles. ‘We’ve had more practice.’ And then he frowns suddenly, looking off as he rubs my twitching forearm. ‘I meant that shot. Right through the middle of his eye, straight into the brain. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  ‘Beginner’s luck,’ I say.

  ‘No,’ he replies with immediate certainty. ‘You’re a born hunter.’

  I nod, because I recognize now that this is completely true. Some people are born with perfect pitch, some people have eidetic memory, and I have this.

  ‘I’m good at killing things,’ I say again, but Bo immediately shakes his head and pulls me closer.

  ‘No, that’s not it.’ His fingers run down my arms. ‘The best death a buck can hope for is a quick, clean one. You gave him that. You are a hunter.’

  I see something flash through his eyes – regret, maybe. Something he did wrong, or didn’t do as well as I did. He’s measuring himself against me, and he thinks he’s coming up short. Even the notion is so stunningly off base that I fail to find a way to address it before we’re interrupted.

  ‘Rainbow, let her have a drink of water,’ his mother scolds laughingly. ‘She’s about to faint from dehydration.’

  I take the wooden bowl full of water offered to me
and tip it into my mouth. She leaves a bucket of the cool, sweet water next to my feet and angles the ladle in my direction so I don’t have to lean far to get it. She and Bo hustle off to orchestrate the unpacking of the meat.

  Sitting helps a lot. The water helps even more. When I’m finished, and ready to stand, I try to find Maeve and ask her what she wants me to do. The rest of Bo’s family notice that I’m done with my break and start to gather around me, waiting expectantly.

  It dawns on me that they all want to hear me tell the story, especially the little ones. Sol and Moth are crouched down in front of me. The interchangeable boys, Aspen and Karl, hover just behind my left elbow, trying not to look too eager.

  ‘I’ll take that,’ the smaller boy – Aspen – says as he gathers the empty bucket and bowl from my hands.

  ‘Rain says he didn’t see it, when you took down the buck?’ Karl says, eyes narrowed and lips tilted in a challenging smirk. He doesn’t believe I’m the one who made the kill.

  I look at Bo, and he smiles at me, tipping his chin as if to say, ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Well, Bo fell asleep,’ I say, feeling heat build low in my belly. I know he’s remembering the same things I am.

  ‘What?’ Karl sputters, disbelievingly, interrupting our communion. ‘Rainbow never falls asleep on a hunt.’

  Bo is grinning now. ‘I did,’ he admits. ‘Keep going,’ he urges me. ‘I’d like to know what happened.’

  I give a moment-by-moment recounting of my kill. I leave out that we were naked, of course, but I tell them everything I can recall. The sounds, the smells, the exact positioning of the buck in relation to myself. It’s fun, actually, being the TV instead of watching it. I can’t stop myself from re-enacting the grand finale for Moth. She gasps and covers her mouth when I pull my arms back, drawing an imaginary bow. When I get to the end of my story, everyone sits in silence for a while, just thinking it through.

  Moth suddenly springs up and grabs what looks like a toy bow and arrow from the side of the fire pit. She tries my move for herself, her tiny body straining to pull back the arrow. As small as that bow is, it’s no toy. Sol watches her little sister as she practises the move on her training bow carefully and then tries it once herself.