On hand and knee I crawled across that dirt, shoulders ducked close to the ground, and when I was so close my face was almost touching the hide of his back, his head and antlers yanking, trying to see me, I leaped from all fours and wrapped my arms around his neck.

Thrashing, risen up from the earth, that neck still alive. Every beast made for man, put here for him, but of course that's a lie. The buck fought for his own dominion, roared and shook his horns and yanked his neck and tried to throw me off. What I knew was that he wanted to live. Something I could never have felt for the dead man, the pull of a trigger too easy, a trigger something that makes us forget what killing means. But in my hands I could feel the pulse of the buck's neck, the panic in him, the terrifying loss, the impossibility that anything could ever be just, the tragedy of our own death, incomprehensible, and the will in us to disbelieve. In killing, I was taking everything. And what I destroyed could never be remade. I knew that and reached for my knife.

My left shoulder slammed against the ground over and over, and I was being shaken loose, gripping with that arm, and I would have let go if not for my grandfather watching. I had lost the desire to kill. I would have reversed time and not fired my rifle, let the buck leap into the brush and escape. I felt remorse, though I had no word for that at the time or even any possibility of understanding the concept. We were put here to kill. That was immutable. It was family law and the law of the world. And I reached for my knife because my grandfather was there to enforce. But who I was had changed. From that moment on, every kill would be bitter to me. Every kill would be something forced, something I did not want. And that's what would make me human. To kill out of obligation, to kill even when I did not want to.

I pulled my knife across the buck's throat, and it did not cut easily. I had to saw back and forth as the buck screamed like any human and flailed and thrashed and did not want to die. And even when no sound would come out, when blood was everywhere and the buck's throat cut and filled, I knew he was still trying to scream, and I'm glad I could not see his mouth or eyes and could see only the stiff hairs of his hide as he struggled and fell and shook against the ground.

Bathed in blood. The buck still jerking. And I just kept sawing, kept cutting deeper and deeper until I could feel the blade against bone, against spine, and then I let go of the knife and just held on until the buck moved no more.

No animal should be treated like that, Tom said.

Every animal is treated like that, my grandfather said. He still had his rifle to his shoulder, ready, barrel pointed at the ground just uphill from me and the buck, as if he might shoot again at any moment.

We've never treated a buck like that, my father said. Never in our lives. Never in all the times we've hunted here.

We've done the same thing every time.

No we haven't.

You think somehow you can be safe. You think you can be untouched. You think it's possible to be moral.

More philosophy.

My grandfather smiled then. Smiled at my father. Different than I had ever seen him do before. And then he turned, still smiling, and pointed his rifle at me. Time to gut that buck, he said.

I thought he was going to pull the trigger. I froze, just instinct, and my father and Tom froze also, and waited. Whatever happened, they were not going to interfere, apparently.

But nothing happened. My grandfather only waited, his rifle pointed at me, and I unlocked from the buck, pulled my arm free from under his neck. I hadn't realized one of my legs was around him, heel digging into his stomach as if into a stirrup. I freed myself and knelt in the dirt.

The buck's eye still open, and he did not look dead. Only stunned, held in suspension somehow, but his face still the face of something alive, still taking in the world.

I scooted around to the front of him, my back now to the men. I could feel my grandfather's rifle on me still. I turned my knife blade up and snagged the tip in the center of the buck's belly, white hide, and I was careful to snag only the surface. Any deeper and I'd cut into the pale green stomach sack and release bile.

I was facing directly into the sunset, downslope on this fire road, and the sun was lying fat on the horizon and burning hot in my face and the breeze had died. I don't know where it could have gone. I tugged lightly at the knife and the skin broke and the white hairs bloodless. The knife low and parallel to the cut, my fist lower against that belly, keeping everything at the surface, and as the hide parted a few inches the guts swelled into the gap, fragile membranes, slick and pooling in the light but I was partially blinded by that sun and worried I wouldn't see the tip catching a membrane, so I slipped my left hand in below the knife, fingers caressing the entrails and riding just beneath muscle, the blade skimming through above.

Ritual. What it does is make the horrifying normal. I was settling in to this gutting already, finding it easy, no longer feeling anything at all for the buck, for the life I had taken. The killing of a few minutes ago already far in the past, shielded. And the men calmed also. No more speaking, only standing in place and watching what they had watched a hundred times before and had themselves performed from the first day they were men.

A ripping sound through muscle and hide, tearing of all that had been woven together, the blade sharp and able to slide along that surface. An opening of all that had been concealed, the inner workings in each of us, a man not so different from a buck. Opening until the sternum, rib cage, brisket, end of the cut.

I wiped my knife on his hide and resheathed it, and then I opened that belly, both hands pulling the muscle away, dark cavern of heat and steam and walls of blood and bone, and it should have spilled out toward me, but the buck's belly was facing uphill and this would not work.

I grabbed his hind legs and stood with one foot on the stock of my rifle, to keep it pinned. I swung those legs straight into the sky and then heaved against them and this time the buck could not twist against me. This time I rolled him, hams first and gut and chest, then stepping forward to grab his forelegs and rotating those, too, and pulling at his antlers to flop his head.

I knelt, my back to the sun, the buck and men before me, and as I opened that cavern again all was made iridescent in the last light. The stomach sack the largest orb, green-gray with hints of pearl, the liver a deep red in loaves shaped and set here somehow and impossible. The intestine a yellowish and lumpy tubing. The diaphragm shimmering, thinnest of walls. All sliding toward me, spilling out against my knees. The breath of it.

I used my knife to cut the diaphragm in a large arc, thin sheen falling away to reveal lung and heart and rib, cut the esophagus, and felt in the intestines for the colon, stiff tube, raised this into the light and cut through then ran my hands along it to discharge the dark pellets until all was flat and smooth and empty.

I cut through the large vein and artery that fed the liver, resheathed my knife and reached in close and scooped everything toward me with both arms, gentle shifting of dough, my fingers easing apart membranes, but what was remarkable was how little was attached. These guts living separate from the rest of the body, in their own world. My face against his hide, his scent and sweat mixing with these other vapors, and my arms pulled from this other void unrelated to him.

My hands sliding along the walls, searching, and finally all was smooth and I scooted my knees back and pulled everything onto the dirt.

Save the liver, my grandfather said. Don't let that liver touch ground.

I made sure those dark red loaves floated on top of the ma.s.s that had become a creature entire, its own being. Something dredged up from the ocean, slick and shielded by no more than membranes, brought somehow to this dry slope of burr and thorn. Intestines like tentacles.

I would leave it here, and it would dry and pucker at the surface and deflate and be torn apart and eaten by coyotes and ants and everything else, but I knew that first I would have to eat part of the liver. I would have the first bite. I looked up and could see all three men waiting. Turned gold-red by the sunset, their faces no longer white, the landscape bled into them. My grandfather with his rifle held low now in one hand, no longer at his shoulder. Face creased and unreadable, gone, soulless, only waiting.

I cut away a hunk with my knife, a hunk the size of my fist. It had to be enough to fill a hand. How did I know that rule, and was it even a rule? Or was it a discovery repeated in each of us, inevitable?

I knelt before that buck, before the men, and lifted raw liver to my mouth. Still hot as I bit down through, and no resistance, only hot mush that tasted of blood. I could feel myself retching but held it back and chewed and swallowed and bit again and thought of the dead man, thought of eating his liver and could feel the bile rising, my chest and throat convulsing, but I held it in and swallowed again and could taste the inside of every man and beast, could taste that we are made of the same things forgotten and ancient beyond reckoning from when the first creatures crawled from the soup. Taste of seawater and afterbirth in my mouth, reminder of where we came from. And why hadn't I done this when I killed the poacher? It was the same. Everything was the same, and I should have tasted his liver and then his heart.

I mashed what was left of the liver into my mouth and made myself finish it. Poison catcher. A taste I wasn't sure would ever leave.

The sun gone down, in shadow now but still reddish, the men waiting. I had the heart still to eat.

Torn diaphragm sagging in remnants, lungs frothy looking, orange tinge to the red. As if our breath were foam, a reminder again of the sea, of our origins. And the heart hanging in place rigid and marbled in white, a thousand miniature designs reaching upward across its surface, every thread of muscle and blood and fat.

I grabbed this heart in one hand, tough and rubbery, same size and shape as a human heart, no different. My other hand holding the knife, reaching upward inside to find the large arteries and veins and cut through, vines in a forest enclosed. Severing all, and more blood, endless blood, running out now hot over my fingers. I pulled the heart free, held it in the open air and turned it over to drain onto the dirt, blood heavy and thick and pooling in the dust.

Domination. To hold a heart in the air still warm and take a bite from it. Proof that all was created for us, for our use. An a.s.sertion repeated and echoing through time.

I sank my teeth into the wall of that heart and it was so slick and rubbery I had to push it hard against my face. My teeth not made for this, not sharp enough, so I shook my head as I bit, tore at the muscle. My knife dropped and the heart held in both hands, and I was made a beast again, eyes closed and jaw working and the taste of blood and flesh in my mouth.

Now you're a man, my grandfather said.

Now you're a man, my father said.

I let that heart drop and roll away and I chewed until I could swallow, and I felt my life had begun. Eleven years old and now a man, blood all down the front of me. The sun fallen and the shadows darkening and the night a great embrace, a connecting of all things.

16.

THE BEAST IS WHAT MAKES THE MAN. WE DRINK THE BLOOD of Christ so we can become animals again, tearing throats open and drinking blood, bathing in blood, devouring flesh, remembering who we are, reaching back and returning. We rea.s.sure ourselves. The Commandments impossible, and we can only fail, so we need this rea.s.surance every Sunday that who we are has not been lost.

I swallowed that heart and was made whole. A generation completed, able to stand now before my father and grandfather. But there was more still to do. Dominion not yet complete. What made the buck a man needed to be removed also, and this the trickiest part, especially in failing light, darkness falling quickly.

I picked up my knife and knelt before his crotch, pulled at a leg to spread him wide. Continued the cut from his belly down farther now to his a.n.u.s. Grabbed his b.a.l.l.s and pulled, then sliced in close with the knife, flung the b.a.l.l.s into brush, scattering him into oblivion. Flayed that hide away across his inner thighs and pulled the sheath off his p.e.n.i.s, leaving only the inner stump of it, thin and rat-like, all hide gone.

The flies thick now, small satellites in the faint light, a madness always to their sound, creating an urgency in me. I carved down through muscle toward the pelvic bone, careful slicing. I needed to find the bladder and not rupture it. Urine would spoil the meat.

I didn't understand how the bladder had become hidden away like this. What was the plan or reason? I carved but was not able to reveal it. Reached in with my fingers carefully behind the meat and in among the bones, a place distorted by feel, and searched blind, hoping it would be small and could be pulled out through the hole for the p.e.n.i.s, but it was large and full and still warm.

My face in close, the flies landing on my cheeks and neck and I couldn't see what I was doing, darkness thickening and my hands buried inside the buck, but finally I was able to free the membranes around the bladder and felt it relax into my hand.

I cut carefully around the a.n.u.s, then pulled everything out through the hole: the colon, bladder, and p.e.n.i.s, which I had to push down into its own smaller hole with one hand while I pulled with the other, thin rat's tail disappearing.

I carried the entire a.s.sembly in both hands carefully and dropped it into the brush, away from the meat. Then I returned for the lungs, scooped out the frothy mess and tossed it into the brush handful by handful, feeling along the ribs for any I might have missed.

Well, my father said.

Yeah, Tom said. We should get the truck.

So the men left me. They walked up that fire road, apparitions receding, darker blots against the general darkness, and I was left alone. Scooped my hands in along the walls, but all was smooth now and drying out. My hands constricting as the blood dried on them, a tighter second skin.

I stood beside the buck and looked up at the sky, a deep blue, the stars appearing, north star low and bright. I was a man now. This fire road and slope a holy place, the sacrifice made, rituals performed. But it was better than that. I wish I could return to that moment. A new beginning, a kind of innocence, the old life and self burned away. Isn't this what we all want? And how many times do we experience it in a life? The moment never lasts long enough.

All was whole. This place I stood the only place, and this buck on the ground beside me my buck, and I had done what was required, my work finished, and the only light from this deep blue and the stars, no sign of other humans except this road, a swath cut into the brush, but if I could forget that and erase it then I could have been standing in any time, and this hillside and even the sky above belonged to me. I remember I spread my arms wide that night and felt I could extend infinitely. If I closed my fists and pulled inward, I could warp mountains, collapse ridges. All of this world within my grasp.

That night was mine. The men would walk up the fire road, take the fork to the sugar pines and the truck. We'd drive to camp and hang my buck head down alongside the dead man and I'd flay the hide from around the hams and punch my fist between hide and meat. I'd do this in lantern light, and dinner would be late, and I'd fall asleep exhausted. I hadn't slept during the afternoon nap or the night before. I lay back against the earth and could feel myself drifting off already, sleep an enclosure, muting all, but then I heard the truck start up, m.u.f.fled and far away.

I stood and felt dizzy. No food, no water, no sleep. And the struggle with the buck, having to wrestle and cut through his neck with my knife. Shoulder sore from being slammed against the ground. Poison oak spreading everywhere, a plague. I kept scratching, and that only made it worse.

I could see the tops of high trees far away illuminate for a moment in headlights. Trees farther up the mountainside, above the glades. The growl of the truck very faint. This ridge a kind of bow, blocking my view and burying sound, distorting sound to the point that the truck seemed only more and more faint. And then I saw white on treetops again farther up the mountain, and this was not right.

The cutover to this fire road was at the top of the glades, not higher. The headlights should not have been facing away. They should have been sweeping the air above me and backlighting the ridge and the sound coming closer.

What are you doing? I said aloud. The sound of the truck no longer constant but only momentary, interrupted, fading.

They were leaving me. My father and grandfather and Tom were driving back to camp without me and without my buck.

I searched for my rifle, found it still snagged, freed it and wiped the dirt and blood on my jeans. Then I ran up that fire road, no moon, very dark now, the road a slightly lighter black against darker black, an image against my eyelids when I blinked. No hope of catching them, but I ran anyway because there was nothing else I could do.

Heaving up that hill, legs burning, sc.r.a.ping against brush at the side then veering until I was at the top of the bow, where the mountain fell inward and the road leveled out, and I saw the white of the headlights far away on another slope, faint illumination of brush, and a wink of red.

I levered a sh.e.l.l into the .30-.30 and fired at where I had seen the taillights. I didn't think about it. I just fired. I was so angry. And the rifle kicked back hard against my shoulder. Not something I had felt firing at the buck, but now I knew the full jolt of it, unprotected by the thrill of killing, and my ears blanked out and I smelled sulfur and the truck kept moving, unaffected.

I stood there breathing hard. I couldn't hear a thing, only the static of my own head welling up.

Marooned on this hillside, abandoned by my kind. The dark bulk of the mountain rolling beneath me. The brush all around a malevolence, watching and waiting.

I was too angry to move. Just frozen with it, in disbelief.

But the truck wasn't coming back. It had vanished into another fold, and the temperature was falling fast, and I was wearing only a T-shirt and the buck was laid out on the road and it was miles back to camp.

I didn't know what to do, but I walked back down the road to the buck. There was no other option. I would need to try to carry the buck to camp.

I found him in the road, a shadow against other shadows, this night without a moon, and I knelt in front of the cavity, careful to avoid the pile of entrails. I felt around in the dirt for my knife, having to crawl like a blind man, my fingers sifting dust until I found the blade. I wiped it on my jeans and then I reached for his hind legs. The Achilles tendon and sack of musk, bitter and maddening, and I sliced the gap between bone and tendon, a natural hollow covered by nothing more than thin hide. I cleared both legs in this way then reached for the forelegs. These I snapped at the elbow, broke until the bone jutted out, and I slipped each foreleg through a hindleg, making a backpack. Those jutting bones slipped through and caught on the Achilles tendons.

My knife sheathed and rifle in hand, I lay down beside the buck, my back against his belly, and slipped his hooked legs over my shoulders, pulled his neck and head and antlers over my chest, cradled in close. Then I pushed up off the ground to a sitting position and struggled to stand.

The buck weighed more than I did. Maybe a hundred and twenty pounds, even without the guts, and the weight was the same as stone. Hard and unyielding and real. I took a step forward up that hill, and another, and my legs were shaking, my back caving. There was no way I could do this for a couple miles.

I did try. I kept moving, hunched forward and pulling and placing one leg and then another. His head and antlers thumping against my chest, a new kind of beast fused with man, walking together and sharing the same breath and blood. Hollowed out, but hide and hooves and antlers shielding the bareness and weakness of man. And what would I become? If I made it all the miles to camp, would I gain hooves?

I believed this animal could become me. I felt that. I was a child still, and so none of the boundaries of this existence were set. All was possible. Metamorphosis. Desire and will and despair strong enough to change physical form and find a truer shape. My legs thinned at the calves and feet hardening, shrinking, and my thighs strengthening and rotating at the joint. A ridge across the top of my skull and bone growing, my neck thickening against the weight. Hair across my arms more coa.r.s.e and dense and matting, skin toughening into hide. All sound magnified, coming closer, minute and exact, scent of every plant distinct, eyes finding light in shadow. All thought gone and replaced by the world. The immediacy and enormity of that world, and to become a part of it, finally, no longer removed. The curse of humanity is to lose the world, thought the loss of immersion.

No doubts, no indecision, only instinct. I was something entirely other than the buck. And the night was not immediate to me. I did not know every sound and movement, could not smell most of what was in the air. I had no hide to shield me.

If I could have transformed, I could have carried that weight. But I remained human and weak and faltered and fell sideways onto the ground, onto the buck, this backpack of flesh still warm.

I pushed his head and antlers away and slipped free of his legs and stood and didn't know what to do. The night black, truly black, the stars bright above but somehow casting no light on the ground. A separation of impossible distances, this lower world lost to the light.

I grabbed those horns and pulled the buck, dragged him across the ground, uphill. Walking backward, stooped over, pulling with everything I had, wandering over this dark earth dragging a dead body limp and heavy.

h.e.l.l not what we think of, populated and busy, torments everywhere and flames, figures hopping this way and that to distract and entertain. h.e.l.l will be solitary. Each of us dragging across an endless dark expanse, featureless. h.e.l.l will be an endless task. Nearly impossible to drag this body even a few more feet, my back in agony, and yet this will go on for a night entire, and then a confusion of nights and time lost and years pa.s.sing and lifetimes and finally geologic time, the surface shifting beneath my feet, mountains rising and forming and wearing away and still this dragging and each moment too much, each moment unbearable. h.e.l.l is time refusing to pa.s.s and the enormity of it waiting still to be pa.s.sed.

The body we drag in h.e.l.l is our own, all that we've been and the weight of that, pulling backward and not seeing where we're going, same as when we lived. Directionless, blind, pointless. Our suffering not building to anything, refusing meaning. Only dragging on.

The body catching on root and scrub and rock, snagging. Having to heave and yank but with no back left and thighs burning, and when the weight drags again it has gained resistance, the ground a gatekeeper, refusing pa.s.sage.

Our sight will be the first sense to go in h.e.l.l, because it was most precious to us in life. We'll have it only long enough to see the stars above and learn their distance. We'll spend some endless number of nights believing they might come closer, believing we might reach them. We'll come to rely upon them as a consolation, and without meaning to we'll begin thinking of them as a goal. They'll offer escape, another place, and then they'll seem fainter, less distinct, and this will last long enough we won't be able to remember whether the stars were ever more distinct but our desire for them won't have lessened, and then they'll suddenly be gone entirely, just gone and no light anywhere and we won't know whether we're still able to see or not. We'll want to rub at our eyes, poke and prod and try to bring them to life, but our hands will not be free.

We'll focus then on sound, the dragging of this body over rough earth. And because we'll have nothing else, we'll make a world of that sound. A scuff of hide over dirt all I could hear on this hillside, a heft and weight general and entire, but then sound separates and small stones shift beneath and roll and grind against outcrops of stone, small ridges like spine protruding, ripping at the hide, sound of tearing, and we can't know what we're dragging, an animal with stiff hairs or our own bodies because the sound of tearing is a sound of fear and can't be known. Hooves over the ground, we should be able to hear those, some track they make, but the dirt in millions of grains and hundreds of small stones and momentary drag across tufts of gra.s.s and sc.r.a.pe against root and brush are so many sounds all at once we become lost. Sound itself a landscape of h.e.l.l, no escape at all, and now we're dragging in two worlds that grow further apart, world of touch and world of sound, the body we drag no longer indicated and perhaps not our own.

Touch. Physical weight and strain, and this endless night colder and colder, all warmth fading and the sun never to rise again. m.u.f.fled world, blind and soundless, but not detached. Pain and nowhere else to focus but on that pain. The failure of the body, grinding of bone against bone, splitting of muscle, and nerves light up our dark sky. We have some sense of seeing again, but this time inside us, bright spots of grinding and tearing that race in slim lines, impulse and pattern, red network of pain, and seeing this removes us from it, limits what we feel, and we think we can manage, but then all goes dark again and now we know every pattern, every raceway, but only feel its surge, don't see a thing. Pain. The sensation of pain, always fresh. And there is no other sense. Taste and smell never mattered during our lives, and they don't matter in h.e.l.l. We've forgotten them. And though we continue to walk backward, dragging this weight, we no longer know because we've become lost inside ourselves, each h.e.l.l private and contained.

17.

THE NIGHT COLD, THE AIR SINKING AROUND ME. I COULD FEEL IT thin as it chilled, and I wanted some shield from it. Dragging that buck my only way of generating heat, but my strength was failing. Pulling in short yanks now, no longer able to keep the movement unbroken.

The buck was too large. I held those antlers and pulled but the rest of him was a weight formless and extending, the back half of him invisible to me now and fusing with the ground, sending shoots into the earth and anchoring. Flesh become root and curling around rock. No way to dislodge him. Grown in darkness, black sun.

This night a day that I could not see. His neck stretched as I pulled, his body elongating and springing back. My steps reaching nowhere and all reference gone. Eternity.

I was not going to make it. Shivering now in the cold, clammy from chilled sweat, my T-shirt thin. I dropped his antlers, a hollow sound that came from somewhere else, directionless, my body tilting, and set the rifle down carefully in that rack, where I would not lose it, and unsheathed my knife. I had to sever the back half of him, the part rooted in the ground, and I had to work quickly.

I knelt before him and cut through hide and flesh at the lower edge of his rib cage, where he was thinnest. Pulling the flesh taut and yanking upward with the blade.

Thick muscles of his back, pushing until blade met bone. I stood and leaped over him, become nimble in the darkness, same as any imp or devil, and kicked his spine. His back rubbery and resistant as a root, impossible to crack. So I knelt and took the knife in both hands, blade up, stabbed low into thick muscle, tore upward.

He was shifting in the darkness, changing shape, not wanting to be severed. The slope rolling beneath us, becoming steeper, and I held on to that knife, digging a trough.

The night colder and colder, the sun never to rise, flesh severed and thickening and severed again, and I seemed to make no progress. His back an endless thing, and so I must have been tearing holes all along it. But finally I came to bone, and placed my hand over his spine and there was no meat on either side and I could feel the rough discs laid one on another.