Jonathan and Gene took turns dragging the carcass back a couple of miles to the cabin.
Conner and Michael were already there, the doe strung up in the barn, the meat settling and cooling in the cold air, their clothes spattered with blood.
“Red in tooth and claw?” Jonathan said.
“We’ll cut her up,” Michael said. “Eat good tonight.”
That was what the first two days were. Hunting during the day, eating and drinking at night, trying to reclaim a heritage lost on American men. They were living at the edge of civilization, raging against the darkness and the loss of existing in the modern world.
Those couple of days were the last good memories Jonathan – or any of them – had from that trip. Perhaps even from life itself in the ten years since.
It was the fourth and final day of the trip when the world came to a sudden halt. The week had gone spectacularly – Jonathan, Conner and Michael had all bagged deer. The fishing had been solid, and the nights around the fire were full and true, with the fire keeping their collective fears at bay. Gene remained at a loss for a trophy. After a morning in which they all came up empty-handed, they decided to put down the rifles and go on a day-long bender.
But as night grew heavy, they fell into that state of mind in which one drunken idea builds off another and another until they were challenging each other to do something dumb. They teased Gene for coming up short, and by night he was growing angry, saying that he would go out into the night with one of the hand-held spotlights and bag a night kill. The deer see the light and stand up straight and tall, eyes shining yellow in the dark, the same way they do in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle. Despite spending the entire week hiding from the overwhelming darkness of Coombs’ Gulch at night, they suddenly thought it was a fantastic idea. They already had a freezer full of meat and fish. If they took another deer, they’d have to strap it to the roof of the SUV. But then they could drive it victoriously back into Pasternak and drop it off to Bill Flood as a thank-you for letting them rent the cabin.
Gene grabbed his bolt-action rifle and Jonathan took the mini-spotlight from the SUV. But as they donned their gear, their spirits changed; it wasn’t about getting Gene a deer or showing off for the locals. It was something deeper, something more challenging. They had spent the entire week staring out at that darkness in the forest with a brooding, nibbling fear in their guts. It wasn’t about hunting now; it was about proving themselves, about venturing out into that darkness to show they were unafraid of that ancient terror. The joviality became more somber. They all sensed it; like ancient man, they all knew there was something other out there, and now, in their drunkenness, they prepared to face it.
Michael took a bottle of whiskey to keep their blood and courage flowing, and, together, the four of them stepped away from the light of the cabin and the drone of the gas-powered generator and into the dark silence. They found the nearest deer path and made their way to a small ridge, using only their flashlights. They knew that just a hundred yards away the creek that bifurcated Coombs’ Gulch lazily rolled over rocks and between grassy tuffets. The four of them settled down behind a hillock rimmed with shrubs, and Gene put the butt of the rifle into his shoulder, sighting down the scope but seeing nothing in the night.
Jonathan switched on the spotlight, and the world was suddenly cast in shadow and light, the long grass around the creek bed seemingly inter-dimensional, waving slightly as if in a breeze, an entire universe hiding just behind each individual stalk. The light reached out and showed the immense cold and darkness beyond its reach. They were all stunned for a moment, staring out at that strange, inverted world, until Gene spotted two glowing animal eyes at the edge of the darkness. They were high off the ground, too high for a deer. Gene sighted in; the others saw the eyes shine for a brief second – so quickly that ten years on they would each wonder to themselves if they saw anything at all. Jonathan didn’t recall seeing the body of what could only be a moose, or the largest stag in history, but he remembered the eyes lighting up and glaring at them for that brief second. Jonathan tried to say something – he couldn’t remember now what he meant to say – when Gene fired and the deafening crack echoed over all of Coombs’ Gulch. Gene was always a sporadic, impulsive man. He fired and the eyes blinked out of existence.
Gene was up and over the hillock before the rest of them, whooping it up. “I know I got him! I know it! A perfect shot, center mass! I know it! Did you see the size?”
Gene was running, stumbling through the underbrush toward the creek, the image of his big, burly body charging out through the corona of the spotlight toward his kill forever etched in their memories.
Then suddenly he stopped his joyous
