Beneath the Surface of Two Kills

No one knows these mountains like I do. The thick mists cling to the valley floors and obscure the high peaks, creating a ghost realm where islands of rock and battered vegetation drift, seemingly free of all moorings. The visibility alters by the moment, and sometimes it seems I am navigating as much by feel and memory as I am by sight and stars. I creak with oilcloth, the chink of traps. My quiver rustles near my ear, accompanying the wooden percussion of the bow and rifle hanging down my spine.

I come for the wargyu. You’ll remember their spiral horns from the picture books. You’ll have seen their blue-striped pelts, moth-eaten behind museum glass. You’ll have heard that they still exist in remote parts like this, grainy images turning up in the news.

Before you berate me, I am no poacher out for a greedy skin. Were I a fame-finder, I would have brought my camera instead of my bow. I am no thrill seeker, either. I would rather be home by a popping fire than traipsing these desolate peaks. I am merely fulfilling a court order.

I’ll admit it was clever of him to think of it. The wargyu walks that fine line between extinction and rarity. My quest for the Last Meal of His Choosing will buy him time; perhaps time enough for the capital laws to convert to those of leniency.

A thin stream of rocks showers from one of the cliffs nearby. They’re obscured by the mist, but I know the rocks fall far and bounce high, for there is time between the sharp impacts of stone on stone. The animal that dislodged them is hidden from sight. It could be anything: an ice-eating rootoola; a julmaro negotiating the mountain fissures with its curious, rocking gait; the wargyu I seek; even an entirely new species.

I push on, feel myself descend, the loose chunks of schist becoming increasingly shifty underfoot. The icy air is thick, hard to breathe. I am entering a valley and even though all about me is sparkling whiteness, I sense the press of cliffs to either side by the resonance of my tread. With nothing to catch my eye, nothing to do but carefully place each footstep on the uncertain ground, my mind wanders.

I wonder how he chose her. On the news they said it was random, but nothing is ever truly random. She must have given off something. Something that promised sport, titillation or some other reaction he craved. Something that made him select her after sliding his eyes past God knows how many pretty heads.

Had it been a flick of her hair? Had it been the briefest of glances across a room, a fleeting connection of the eyes? Had she excused herself in a doorway? Held a lift for him? Had she been rude, earning his ire? Had she done a kindness, triggering his infatuation?

The land rises marginally and the mist shifts. I discover scats among the stones. I crumble them through my fingers. They are dry, packed with pine needles and the glittering carapaces of digested insects.

Wargyu.

My eyes dart upward to the black stone ledges the fickle fog has momentarily revealed. Through the whiteness they loom like coal barges, but no animal stands atop their decks.

I set a trap among the stones, close to the scats. The creature passed this way once and it will do so again, for there is nothing so habit-forming in an animal accustomed to being hunted than a recollection of safe passage. It’s a cruel trap with jagged teeth and weighted springs. It may even be enough to sever a leg.

It matters not. I am not here to fetch back a perfect hide or win any welfare awards. If anything, I’ll need the animal to cry out if I am to find this fissure again and make my claim.

I take note of my surroundings, preparing to move on. Slivers of shale slither down a cliff face farther along the chasm, and I glimpse a creature outlined against the pallid sky watching me: a silhouette with the long delicate lines of a porcelain figurine, something that should be protected behind glass, cushioned upon a circle of felt.

Wargyu.

My heart bounds. It’s the first sighting in months; proof I haven’t been wasting my time.

I wonder if the creature saw me set the trap, if it guesses my intent. I remind myself it is just a dumb animal. The mist shifts and the wargyu is gone.

He said in his affidavit that he’d often watched her walking along the beach at twilight with her pet hund. He’d fixated upon the outline of her, made naked by the sheerness of her dress, and memorized the curve of her buttocks and breasts as reference material for his nighttime fantasies.

She’d noticed and waved up at him once. The hund had stiffened and barked. He’d disliked the animal. Said he thought it knew something.

I exit the valley and find myself on a stony plateau, thick with wind-spiralled dust and ragged scrub. There are more scats and here and there, the telltale six-fingered prints. It’s a female, this one, the fourth toe shorter than the third.

I set a second trap in a thicket where a tatter of blue fur wags in the wind. I tug wool covers over my boots to muffle my steps and set off, following the sketchy tracks.

The going is hard. The ice wind whistles through gaps in the slanted vegetation like the screams of slaughtered swine and sets my coat flapping like a tarpaulin. I am forced to tie the waterproof cloth against my body, lest the shivering thump the material gives out scare off every animal within a ten-mile radius. It’s tricky following prints as they’re slowly filled by dust, brushed aside by sweeping leaves. If not for the occasional pile of increasingly fresh scats and chance encounters with snagged fur, I could easily convince myself I am going the wrong way.

You’ll probably have heard by now that he followed her home. This makes it sound like he simply trailed her, as if, had she only turned around, she could have prevented her own death.

It wasn’t like that.

The details he had in his diary were frightening. I wouldn’t have thought it possible to glean so much about a person through a pair of binoculars. Without so much as a single conversation he’d discovered her penchant for wavy hemlines, string bikinis, dangly earrings and flip-flops bought from Sass. She’d never let her hair grow below her collarbone, and every Tuesday without fail she had changed the color of her nails.

It was always a Tuesday. The entries in his diary confirmed it. Purple, crescent-mooned with orange tips. Dark blue dipped in white. Cream with red dots. Yellow. Black dipped in magenta. He’d liked this latter combination, wrote “sexy nails” in felt-tip that day.

Her town only had one nail salon. He’d begun staking it out. Security footage from the time showed him holding this newspaper or that, never reading but peering, always peering, his eyes on the shop. It’s a shame no one noticed his obsession while she was still alive.

I wonder what tale he told the nail salon to obtain her name. I wonder if they kick themselves now.

Once he had her name, it was easy to locate her house. People put too much information on the skyweb these days. She’d had a thing for those “Win a Holiday” competitions.

I crest a small rise, a bit like a wrinkle in the plateau, and gaze across land as flat and rocky and blusteringly hostile as the land I’ve just crossed. Heavy mist obscures the mountains bordering the plateau, merging the periphery of the tableland with the bleached sky. Up here, the world truly might be flat. Had I not walked these lonely heights as a boy, I would be concerned about stepping off the edge.

I scan the horizon with my binoculars. Far ahead and to my right is a dark patch of vegetation topped in pointed crowns. Pines.

Before them, a creature poises in the open, staring in my direction. I can see why the long elegant head, with its corkscrewing antlers and facial bars of cobalt, were once prized by trophy hunters. I can see why the banded pelt once adorned runway collections and high couture. Even the tail bob, a brilliant tuft of white-tipped navy, was once a collector’s item, topping women’s fascinators at the racetrack and decorating gentleman’s lapels as one might once have worn a carnation.

It is nightfall by the time I reach the wargyu’s food source. Close up, the pines appear straggly and sick, bending toward the sunset with the prevailing wind. Shadows move among their flapping branches like live things. I tell myself there is nothing to fear from the knocking together of dying wood; the dry-bones rattle of broken, leafless limbs; the steady pitter-patter rainfall of brown needles.

The wargyu has disappeared into the thickening night mist, but I know the animal will return when hunger beckons. I set traps along the tree line before making camp downwind of where I last caught sight of it. I snuggle into a bed of leaf litter, hugging myself to keep warm, promising myself a fire once this messy business is done with.

As I drift into the hunters’ half sleep, I think of the maid who got away. She had only stopped by the house a moment to drop off mail and fold some clothes, but according to the cops, by the time she let herself in, he had already broken a small window at the rear of the house and gained entry.

I wonder if she’d felt his eyes crawl across her from some unseen vantage point, if she had even looked around, telling herself she was just being silly. She said during her interview that she had felt the hair rise along her neck and had left three items of clothing unfolded.

A nightmarish vision of the man ironing the maid on her own board intrudes my sleep. Her brown skin spits as it burns, the steam from the iron boiling like a kettle, rising upward in a shrill scream which merges with a terrible sound that jolts me from my sleep.

The ungodly noise accompanies a clanking of tethered chain. One of my traps has caught something.

I stumble through the darkness to find I have caught a julmaro. The creature’s single muscular foreleg is snared, cut halfway through the cannon bone. It thrashes—the powerful hind leg kicking, digging gouges in the hard dirt.

The creature’s scream is piercing, gets my heart racing and sets my teeth on edge. It reverberates off the nearby peaks and vibrates my ears and sinuses with a physical force, rendering me lightheaded and nauseated and completely incapable of rational thought. Desperate to stop the noise, I hook my hand around its gaping muzzle, crushing the animal’s mouth closed, but still the sound blares from all four nostrils.

Driven to madness, I slash the animal’s throat. The wail cuts to a pneumatic wheeze, thick with gurgling. The julmaro’s wide eyes stare into mine as its pulse ebbs into the dust.

The scream hangs in the mountains, in my ears, long after the animal is silenced. I pant heavily, feeling the night pushing in as calmness and sanity return.

Along with guilt.

I have violated this mountain sanctuary with the kill, the stench of blood, and it wasn’t even the right animal. I feel unseen eyes accusing me from within the curtains of mist. I wonder if the wargyu is among them.

I drain and gut the julmaro, spreading the steaming organs across the dirt and digging out the edible offal before setting about the hard task of cutting the carcass into portions. The meat and offal are wrapped in strips of pelt and hidden in gaps among the icy stones, their smell disguised from scavengers with pine needles and dried scats. The flesh should keep until I have achieved my task. As a hunter, I am not wasteful.

For several days, I hide and wait among the pines. Occasionally I see the wargyu in the distance (just beyond rifle range), but it avoids my hiding place where the blood of the julmaro is dry and black upon the stones, and glossy cravens squabble over chunks of frozen fat. I have plenty of time to ruminate.

Her death was quick when it came. He had seemed disappointed about that in the dock. It was the only time I ever recall him showing regret. He had planned on mutilation, he said, planned on taking her ears, her nose, her fingers. But in the end he had lost his nerve. Apparently, she wouldn’t stop crying, begging, calling out for help. He had eventually slipped the blade between her ribs just to shut her up.

He had wrapped her pieces in plastic and buried them remotely, but all in vain. The police scent-hunds had located her body the exact same day. It helped that they had known where to look.

It was joggers who’d noticed his car in the reserve that morning, who’d written down the make and plates and passed the information along to the police. It’s always the joggers who notice these little irregularities: the letterbox full of junk mail, the wandering child, the car parked all alone. Having just butchered the julmaro, I half expect a jogger to come trotting out of the mist, to stand and stare and take down notes on a small pad. In my more sleep-deprived moments, I almost fancy I do.

A crunch of ground frost and a thin branch snapping in a nearby pine alerts me to the wargyu’s return when it comes. Against the early morning light creeping through gaps in the mountains, I see her silhouette reach for more needles. She has outwitted my barrier of traps.

Never taking my eyes off her, I nock an arrow to my bow with steady hands (I’d use the rifle, but fear alerting her with the clunk of the bolt). My movements are slow and deliberate so as not to be noticed. The oilcloth across my back barely creaks as I line her up and draw back.

A shingle of rock slips away underfoot as I shift my weight. Curses! Her head comes up; the spoon-shaped ears fixing on me like sonar. She goes into motion, springing back from the trees. I loose the arrow, but it flies wide, lost to the plateau.

I haul my bulk into a solid run, tearing bolas from my belt as I go. She pelts away from me, but she is off balance in her surprise, bereft of her natural grace and speed. I see her stumble as my feet luck onto perfect purchase in the half light. My aim with the bolas is far better than with the arrow. The heavy rocks whirr around and around, trussing her legs together tightly as she sprawls into the dust. For all her leggy size, the wargyu has none of my bulk. I fling my weight against her ribs, pinning her struggling body down. She ceases fighting, and utters a mournful bellow of terror and resignation.

I slip my knife from my belt.

As I raise the steel, ready to draw the whetted edge across the trembling throat, I look into the creature’s eyes. The wargyu stares back without blinking as if, by keeping its eyes open, it can somehow freeze time or stave off the approaching darkness. There are wrinkles around those eyes, a genuine expression of fear. I have all the power. We both know it. As I stare back, the wargyu emits a soft, mewling cry, as if pleading for its life.

Was this the look he had been confronted with in the living room of her home, her wrists and ankles bound with duct tape? Had she pleaded with him? Said she wouldn’t tell anyone? And, if she had, had he for even a second considered taking a different path?

I stiffen my knuckles around the hilt of the knife. The wargyu flinches, though I have not moved, and lets out another quivering mewl.

Even though I name myself Hunter, my chest tightens with the act I am about to commit. The creature lying in the dust, the new sun illuminating blue highlights in its coat, is unique. Its death will be a crime in and of itself.

At the same time, the wargyu’s death will trigger his. The woman from the beach will finally get her justice.

Our breaths puff whitely as we stare at one another, predator and prey. Then the sun spears through a gap in the distant mountains, turning the crisp gray fog into veils of gold gossamer and the shale ground into stacked bullion. The wargyu’s eye catches the light and flares iridescent purple. The animal shifts its weight beneath me, sensing my fading resolve.

I grit my teeth and bring down the knife. The wargyu’s bellow echoes across the plateau, reverberates off the mountains.

In my hand, I have her left ear tip, banded in blue and white and dripping with red. I also take a fistful of tail, pushing the thick, white-tipped navy hair into a pocket of my coat.

I untie the bolas and release the animal. She bellows as she gets to her feet, and for a second I wonder if I’ve made a mistake, if she might try to gore me for my act of mercy. Then she shakes her head, flicking blood onto the golden dirt and trots away into the mist.

Once she has vanished, I dig out my cache of julmaro meat—the last piece of evidence I’ll need to present to court—and turn toward home, neutralizing and gathering my traps along the way.

The Justice Department won’t bother testing the flesh, not when presented with the wargyu’s ear and tail hair. There is no clear distinction between two kills, once you cut beneath the surface.