Of course Lolly screamed in the morning when she discovered the antelope hanging in the pump shed off the back door of the house. When Sarah reached home in the middle of the night Frank got up and congratulated her and before going to bed Sarah moved the three empty suitcases Lolly had put in the corner of her room. Imagine that bitch using my room for storage, Sarah thought. At Frank’s urging Sarah moved the carcass up to Tim’s, adjusting the propane to forty degrees, a good hanging temperature for both beef and wild game. She’d wait a week before butchering and wrapping it for the freezer. Rover was enthused when she fried up the slices of heart and shared it.
They had taken an extra day getting home because Terry wanted to see the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers up between Sydney and Williston, a beautiful and historically significant place. Sarah, however, was distracted by the idea that she would have to make a trial run into Karl’s territory. She couldn’t just go in cold and do the deed. There was also a nagging sense that she shouldn’t have identified the idea of shooting Karl with having shot the antelope. She was a good student of history and knew that humans find it altogether too easy to shoot one another, but then sanity fled too easily and when they drove home on Route 2 across the top of Montana and stopped at a diner at Wolf Point there was a trace of Karl’s odor of yogurt, breath mints, and cow shit and she again felt murderous. Only fifteen minutes later out in the parking lot she saw a group of local Anishinabe Indians getting out of an ancient car and thought that of all Americans along with the blacks they were the people with the right to shoot people. She stood there in the cold wind hoping that at some point soon her brain would stop being a shuddering elevator.
The winter started out difficult but resolved itself in purposeful physical exhaustion. One morning a week before Christmas Lolly had said to her, “If you hang out with horses and dogs you’re going to smell like horses and dogs.” This was at breakfast and Sarah answered, “I like the smell of horses and dogs better than I like the smell of people.” Lolly huffed off into the bedroom and Frank gave Sarah a lecture on civility which she thought was unwarranted. She went on a hard ride in the snow on Lad and Rover caught and ate a whole jackrabbit leaving a big smear of blood on the snow. When she got back to the house she packed up essentials, including frozen packages of antelope, and moved up to Tim’s where she played the piano for hours. She wept briefly then figured weeping wouldn’t help one little bit. She thought of the damage people do to each other, sometimes incalculable, and then there was the damage you could do to yourself by toughening up. While she was playing the piano it occurred to her that the least tough woman in the world, Emily Dickinson, was one of her favorite poets. Despite this she felt she had no choice but to become prematurely older and austere. She would live in this cabin like a cloistered nun and then finally leave town and try to find another life.
When school started again she joined the volleyball team to spend more time with Marcia and being tall she quickly learned how to spike the ball with brutal speed and to feel the tranquillity of exhaustion. She joined the track team and ran the eight hundred meters or half mile. Beginning in February the track team worked out in a wealthy rancher’s horse arena which was larger than the school gymnasium. The girls’ team ran in circles on a mixture of sawdust and dirt for an hour each day. They ran as fast as possible to keep warm because the arena wasn’t heated. Sarah liked it but not as much as running outdoors. The good part was that in the first ten minutes of running you would rehearse your mental problems and after the ten minutes all of the problems would drift away. She quit her Bible Club sham which anyway no longer fooled the older boys who badgered her. One day while she was talking with Marcia in the school hall the goofy son of the local Baptist minister passed her a note that read, “Can you take seven inches?” Sarah passed the note to Marcia who slugged the boy knocking him to the floor.
Sarah got up at five A.M. and studied and read. She then fed Rover and Lad and took Rover for a short walk. Unlike at her home down the hill Rover would come into the cabin and he slept at the end of the bed which kept Sarah’s feet warm. For protection against the unknown she kept Tim’s pistol under her pillow. Frank had helped her build a shed for Lad next to Tim’s porch. Hay was expensive but Terry would swipe it from his dad in pickup loads and haul it over with Marcia. Terry and Marcia were Sarah’s only social life except for an occasional weekend visit to Terry’s mother Tessa to borrow books. Tessa had Sarah reading George Eliot, Henry James, and Stendhal. She liked Stendhal but the others were too claustrophobic.
One Sunday afternoon while she was playing Schubert Frank came up to make peace and offer a compromise. He said that Lolly thought she had driven Sarah out of the house and Sarah said, “She did.” Frank asked if for his sake Sarah would have dinner with them at least twice a week and Sarah said yes mostly because she was tired of cooking all of her own meals. Then Frank entered an area that startled her. He had been talking to his sister Rebecca down in Tucson about their family problems and Rebecca had sent a ticket for Sarah to come down for a visit and see if she might like to attend the University of Arizona. At first Sarah said no because she had intended to use spring vacation to do a reconnaissance on Karl over in Meeteetse. She changed her mind and said she would visit her aunt because she wanted to ride on a plane and she could always skip school when the snow melted and it would be easier to investigate Karl’s environs.