Jonah fetched his .30-.30 carbine rifle from the corner of the cabin and levered its action. He worried his thumb over the hammer, worn so smooth he needed to be mindful not to let it slip and fall, fire the rifle accidentally.
From a shelf above the woodstove, he took an oil can and a hank of flannel shirt, ambled onto the porch where he sat with the carbine across his lap.
The afternoon had fallen cold. The season had turned and there wasn’t any turning it back.
Jonah curled his palm to the rifle barrel, feeling its length as a finish carpenter feels a hand-turned spindle for imperfections. Cold. Always cold. Even in the hot guts of summer. That steel. He smoothed his palm over the walnut stock, wood grain like lines of a topographic map.
He’d killed a lot of deer with the rifle, but sensed this year’s deer would be his last. This winter would be his last. If Lucinda could turn on him, what was left?
Nothing.
He ran the oiled rag over the carbine’s receiver, worked it inside the action, inspecting the black. With time, things grew only dirtier.
How easy it would be to put the rifle muzzle to his forehead and use a stick to pull the trigger.
How many times he’d imagined it.
Legions.
Each day’s urge stronger than the previous day’s urge, for going on ten thousand days.
Yet he couldn’t.
Didn’t dare.
He got up and drank spring water percolating from a nearby ledge. At his ramshackle smokehouse, he jiggled a screwdriver set in the broken handle, opened the door, and took stock: a lone rack of jerked hare meat. He brushed away mouse droppings and grabbed a chunk of hare and sucked on it.
He took up the rifle and sneaked under the hemlocks’ dark canopy, searching the woods for a flick of a white tail, twitch of an ear, the horizontal animal darkness among the vertical tree world.
Jonah knelt at a track in the muck, the dewclaws set deep, toes splayed. A good buck. He’d seen it three months ago, in the green summer fields, antlers in velvet. Others had seen it; the young men tooling back roads in pickup trucks. They’d come up here soon, scouting for the buck they knew would head into the beeches for mast. If Jonah had his way, the deer would be jerky by then.
Jonah’s knees clicked as he rose and picked his way down along the brook, the brook’s music masking his noise.
He left the brook to work the edge where the spruce met beeches, skirted above a mess of blackberry cane, and leaned against a beech trunk shattered by lightning.
He watched the blackberry cane, motionless. His mouth grew dry. His feet cold. The winter wind watered his eyes.
Down below, in beech whips, a flick of motion. He squinted. Blackberry cane leaned in the wind.
Another flick.
A deer, bedded down? He’d shot more than one deer in its bed. But he couldn’t make it out clearly.
His eyes were spent. Like the rest of him. Buck or doe, he’d shoot it. One shot. He couldn’t afford anyone to hear more than one shot before the season started. He didn’t need a game warden up here. He didn’t need anyone up here.
Flick.
He squinted.
Whatever it was, it was in the thicket, hard to sneak a shot in there. He moved his head the slightest to gain a new angle. Flick. Deer. Or coyote? He’d eaten coyote. He’d eat it again.
He shouldered the .30-.30, rested his elbow on his knee. He pressed his cheek to the stock and eyed down the barrel, took an easy, long breath. Let it out.
He set his thumb on the hammer. His heart beat. His eye caught movement. Low to the ground. His finger curled against the trigger.
Flick.
Damn if he could tell what it was. Meat, that much he knew. He worked the hammer back.
His thumb slipped on the worn hammer. The hammer fell.
The rifle bucked. Roared.
His ears rang and the sweet biting odor of cordite filled his nostrils.
Nothing moved.
He scrambled down the ridge, his hip aching.
At a blowdown, he looked around. He could see nothing.
Where had it—
He saw.
Beneath the sprawling nest of branches and vines.
A pit.
Like the one from so many years ago.
Was it the same pit?
No, he was too far up in the Gore for it to be. Wasn’t he?
Whatever he’d shot was at the bottom of the pit.
His heart drummed as he pushed back the fallen limbs and creeping vines. Thorns clawed at his hands as if to protect what was down there.
He peered into the pit, and reeled backward.
No.
He looked up through the crowns of the trees high above where turkey vultures carved an arc in the sky.
He looked back down.
It was still there.
She was.
Impossibly.
A child.
A girl.
A naked, bloodied, dead girl.