Hunting Accident

                                                                   

“It’s five. I’m going home.”

She put her name tag in her purse and walked to her car. It was evening; the air was cool. She could smell garbage from the dumpster in the alley, leaves, the ground.

Tilde was a hunter.

For years she had driven gravel roads and cruised the edges of public land in remote areas watching hunters in orange, spread out like punctuation marks on the landscape. There was so much game and she worked out what it would take for her to have her own successful hunt. Variety of landscape appealed to her and each time she always chose a new area of the state to hunt.

Although she hunted with a rifle, she practiced with a bow in the summer to steady her nerves. Bruce, her neighbor, stood on the other side of the waist-high chain link fence that separated their properties to watch Tilde and tell her about bitcoin and blockchain and the coming of a cashless society.

Unless she was drunk, words were like puzzle pieces and she was always looking for the edges or the corners. Her last relationship was over a year ago and had dissolved on the final night she’d seen him.

Wine slurred, she’d, “I’m gonna go. You’re not what I thought that time before all this,” and she held her hand out in front of her like she was waiting for change.

“Whatever you think. I love you,” he had replied.

She broke it off after that. She didn’t need it and had spent Christmas, mercifully, alone.

The alarm startled her at 4:30 am. Fours hours of driving to get there and another six hours before she took her shot.

It was her uncle that first lit the fire to hunt, but its importance to her and who she was only grew from there. He had a hunting shack and Tilde and her dad and uncle were all there that weekend. He asked her to make him another Windsor Coke. Her dad had already gone to sleep and her uncle retold the stalk of the fat doe that hung heavy and dark from the limb of an oak outside.

“Sit by me, Tilde. Tell me about the boys at school. Is there someone special?”

He’d cast that look in her direction before, but now, with her dad asleep in the next room, there was nowhere to hide. She remembered the chewed down fingernails sunk into the flesh of his thick fingers and oversized hands. The year Tilde turned eighteen, her uncle was killed in a hunting accident.

The wind was light and in her face. She had followed the minimum maintenance road on foot until it ended at the edge of a bog. She looked out to the west and saw that the sun was about to begin its descent. The trail wound to the left around the edge of the bog until it turned up a small ridge of oaks still clutching their leaves. She imagined a doe looking for acorns or maybe even a buck; she climbed the hill to the top and saw the other one just a little taller beyond. She carefully and painstakingly made her way to the dry creek bed below and up the other side and followed it until it dropped off down to the edge of the lowland. The vague impression of a game trail wound along the base of the ridge and turned into the bog and further on the tamaracks were already turning yellow and the shadows were dark between them. 

An hour ago she had started with a dime sized drop of red on a piece of birch bark. Crows bickered overhead now while she scanned the ground. Last year there had been snow. It was always easier in the snow. She leaned down close to the ground, stared and shifted her view.  Blood on the curled edge of an oak leaf. Still wet. She had learned that the best thing to do was wait. Be still. Don’t rush. The rifle hung from her shoulder and she cradled the butt of the stock in her palm when the dry crack of a branch drew her attention.  Only her eyes moved. She waited. There. She caught the flick of orange. 

Her rifle was a sporterized 30.06, converted after WWII. It might have cut the lights out of a German or Japanese soldier. It had been her dad’s and her grandpa’s before that. The worn wood of the stock was comforting against her cheek. She thought of her uncle. He had been her first--still emotional rather than clinical but she learned fast. Now her target sat on the ground behind a thin tamarack tree.  

She relaxed, exhaled and pulled the trigger. The figure slumped forward and tipped sideways, partially hidden in the grass. She slid her arm through the sling, walked out of the woods, and looked forward to the long drive home.