The Huntress, Part Two

On the front step, a massive granite slab she pauses and loads six cartridges into her rifle, a lever action Winchester .3030 with a shortened stock. The rifle is her own. The casings are shiny brass, the slugs dull grey lead. They are warm from her pocket. After chambering a cartridge and snapping the safety on, she rests the gun over her shoulder, holding the stock with her left hand. It smells of hoppe’s and oil and burnt gunpowder. The girl writes with her right hand and shoots with her left. No one understands this.

She melts into the woods and is alone. A web of stone walls speak of farms, hopes and boundaries, most forgotten. The walls run for miles through the woods. They are testaments to men’s back breaking labor clearing fields. The stones are granite, dark grey in the wet. Lichen is bright green. Fields, so much hard work to clear quickly fill with trees when the people go. Her small frame is an advantage in the woods, she moves without making a sound. Two oatmeal cookies are wrapped in waxed paper in her jacket pocket. She buttoned the pocket for safe keeping. She knows the streams and will drink from them.

Smells of leaf mold and fir balsam fill the air. She stops and takes in a deep breath and feels the cold rush of it, then moves on. The earth is wet, in places water squeezes up around her steps. Sound travels in the damp. She knows this. She places her feet flat and slow, careful not to step on any twig, and listens and looks. She looks at everything and nothing, she looks for shapes and movements out of the ordinary. Thus she walks.

The girl crouches in a low spot partly covered in beech thicket, she has seen deer droppings, small piles of dark glistening orbs, they are fresh, there are large tracks pressed into the leafy ground cover. The last shrubs and grasses to hold their foliage have been nibbled at.

She is quiet and waits. An hour passes and then a twig snaps.

Up on the ridge a buck, tawny grey brown and ghostlike materializes, it moves slowly, cautiously, it is cross wind of her and does not know she is there, it is out of range.

So she waits.

She will shoot only to kill. She must conserve ammunition and she will not allow herself to wound an animal, for that is cruelty. She knows the cruelty of shots to the withers or the gut, the animal running with its insides torn apart, losing blood, bellowing and gasping in pain. Cruelty knows many ways and she has seen it. Men whipping horses, men and women under the strain.

Her method and aim are precise, she is confident. She will make a shot just behind the front shoulder, a heart shot.

She waits.

The buck comes down the ridge, the cover becomes less, he is four points.

He comes within range but again into cover.

She waits. Waiting is a skill. The huntress feels her pulse rise. And the heat. The heat always comes before the killing.

The buck comes out of cover and is perhaps a hundred feet away.

She draws a breath and lets half of it go. In one fluid movement she raises the rifle snaps off the safety and takes aim. Her eye, the notch, the bead and the bore come in line with the heart.

The buck hears the tiny metallic snap, foreign to him and swings his head, anything foreign is feared. He looks at her, the worn tip rifle’s cold blued muzzle, and is about to leap.

But it is too late. She has squeezed the trigger, the hammer swings.

She has seen the dark fire in his eyes, the beads of moisture on the hairs around his nose, the hot exhales turning to grey condensation, his life breath.

Life and death are a chain of events. One shot splits through the forest, the sharp percussion carries and echoes.

Her father hears it and smiles and knows there will be venison on the table. He is rigging a plow to the tractor for snow. And then it is just the wind in the trees.

The buck gasps and feels heat searing through its chest and then nothing. Blood plumes behind its left shoulder. It falters and is dead before it collapses to the ground. It rolls down the other side of the ridge, out of view.

She hears it tumble, tumble, twigs snap and she runs to the top of the ridge and crouches at the spot. There is blood, bright red glistening on the brown leaf cover. She looks down the far side of the slope.

The buck lays near a rock outcrop and there is a man.

He has his knife in the buck.

There was only one shot, of this she is certain.

But the deer belongs to the hunter with their knife in it first.

The man has thus stolen it. He knows this, he looks around.

She sees the blade glint silver and red, the nervous working of it.

The man does not see her.

The blood flows.

She is outraged, but absolutely quiet. There is the heat.

The man is known to her.

She considers shooting him. For a good long moment she dallies this thought, his life hangs in the fine distinctions in her mind. But there is no fury.

She rises, chambers a new round in the .3030 and knows want.

Gordon Bunker