She was surprised by how hard it was to follow his blood trail:
only a damp splatter here and there, sometimes red and other times drying
brown already against the yellow aspen leaves that looked like spilled
coins — as if some thief had been wounded while ferrying away a strongbox
and had spilled his blood upon that treasure.
She tried to focus on the task at hand but was aware also of
feeling strangely and exceedingly lonely — remembering, seemingly from
nowhere, that her father had been red-green colorblind, and realizing how
difficult it might have been for him to see those drops of blood. Wishing again
that he were here with her, though, to help her with the tracking of this animal.
It was amazing to her how little blood there was. The entry wound,
she knew, was no larger than a straw, and the exit wound wouldn’t be much
larger than a quarter, and even that small wound would be partially closed up
with the shredded flesh, so that almost all of the blood would still be inside
the animal, sloshing around, hot and poisoned now, no longer of use but
unable to come out.
A drop here, a drop there. She couldn’t stop marveling at how few
clues there were. It was easier to follow the tracks in the soft earth, and the
swath of broken branches, than it was the blood trail —though whether she
was following the herd’s path or the bull’s separate path, she couldn’t be
entirely sure.
She came to the edge of the timber and looked out across a small
plowed field, the earth dark from having just been turned over to autumn
stubble.
Her elk was collapsed dead out in the middle of it —the rest of the
herd was long gone, nowhere to be seen — and there was a truck parked
next to the elk already, and standing next to the elk were two older men in
cowboy hats. Jyl was surprised, then, at how tall the antlers were —taller
than either man, even with the elk lying stretched out on the bare ground;
taller even than the cab of the truck.
The men did not appear happy to see her coming. It seemed to
take her a long time to reach them, and it was hard walking over the furrows
and clods of stubble, and from the looks on the men’s faces, she was afraid
that the elk might have been one of their pets, that they might even have
given it a name.
It wasn’t that bad, as it turned out, but it still wasn’t good.
Their
features softened a little as she closed the final distance and they saw how
young she was, and how frightened — she could have been either man’s
daughter — and as she approached there seemed to be some force of
energy about her that disposed them to think the best of her; they found it
hard to believe, too, that had she killed the elk illegally she would be
marching right up to claim it.
There were no handshakes, no introductions. There was still frost
on the windshield of the men’s truck, and Jyl realized they must have jumped
into their truck and cold-started it, racing straight up to where they knew the
herd hung out.
Used to hang out.
Plumes of fog-breath leapt from the first man’s mouth as he
spoke, even though they were all three standing in the sunlight.
“You shot it over on the other side of the fence, right, over on the
national forest, and it leapt the fence and came over here to die?” he asked,
and he was not being sarcastic: as if, now that he could see Jyl’s features,
and her fear and youth, he could not bear to think of her as a poacher.
The other man, who appeared to be a few years the elder —they
looked like brothers, with the older one somewhere in his sixties, and fiercer-
looking — interrupted before she could answer and said, “Those elk knew
never to cross that fence during hunting season.
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