Excerpt from By Way of Water by Charlotte Gullick, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He walked back into the living room, his candle shadow roaming the walls.

"What's she doing up?" He pointed the knife at Justy. "She couldn't sleep." "Then she can help."

Dale shook her head. "No. She shouldn't see." Jake walked to the door. With his free hand on the knob, he said, "Bundle up. It's cold." He went out. Dale worked her slight body into the windbreaker and brought in wood for the fire. Then she wrapped herself in a denim jacket and went into their bedroom. She came back with a quilt she laid on top of Justy, kissing her on the forehead before heading out into the night with a deer bag—two old sheets she'd sewn together last fall that they'd wrap around the body after it was skinned. Wood shifted in the stove and Justy stood. She picked up the nearest candle and walked to the bedroom. Neither Micah nor Lacee stirred as she searched for Lacee's cowboy boots. Someday the boots would be all Justy's, but for now she usually wore them only when Lacee gave her permission. Justy returned to the living room, placed the candle on the floor and slid the too-big boots on her socked feet. She walked to the door, grabbed Jake's logging jacket and stepped into the night, the boots clicking on the wooden porch. As she moved slowly in the dark, she smelled the old sawdust, gasoline and earth worn into the pores of Jake's jacket, what she thought of as his summer smell. At the edge of the porch, she stopped. Before her, caught in the headlights of the truck, Jake and Dale worked on the body of the doe hanging upside down between them. The deer's hind legs were suspended by short lengths of rope from the lowest branch of the ancient Douglas fir just outside the fenced yard. Justy stepped down into the snow, placing the boots in Dale's footprints. Neither Jake nor Dale heard her approach, and she stood back, watching them work. Jake cut the skin away with quick, deft movements. He wielded the knife with precision, pulling on the hide after a series of horizontal cuts. Dale pointed the flashlight at the point of contact between knife and hide. They moved their way downward, each yank of skin separating from the body with soft tearing sounds. They worked without speaking.

Snowflakes landed on Justy's hair, melting their way to her scalp. She remembered the look of amazement on Dale's face in the parking lot and felt the waves of relief and regret washing through Dale now. The deer's eyes were clouding over into a smoky green, like the river in springtime. Behind the smokiness, the doe's eyes watched them from a farther and farther distance. She's swimming away, Justy thought. It made her think about the photos Jake kept tacked on the barn wall. He had ten of them, stories that marked the years of his life. In one, he and the grandfather Justy didn't know squatted, both holding rifles in their left hands. With their right hands, they each supported the head of a buck, holding on to the many-pointed antlers. In the photos, the men smiled similar smiles, but Jake was the darker of the two, his mother's blood tinting his skin the slightest bit. "Over here," Jake said and pointed with the knife. Dale stepped closer and brushed into the deer's ears. Justy shifted her weight quietly and did a quick tally of the pictures both Jake and Dale guarded. Dale kept her five photographs in a white envelope in the towel drawer, under empty paper bags with the towels on top. Dale looked at them only in the morning, after Jake had left for the woods in the dark of early day. Justy had seen her from the hall, sliding her fingers over the past. Justy knew both sets of pictures, knew Jake refused to look at the one wedding picture because Dale's adoptive mother had hidden it when a neighbor remarked that Jake looked like an Indian. These people confused Justy—this man and woman before her in the night. She wanted to know why they each kept a photograph from the year before her birth, when Kyle had still lived in town, when Jake and Kyle still played music and Dale sang—"like a bird," Lacee said. Lacee also said that it was during the pregnancy with Justy that Dale had stopped singing, when she promised two things to Jehovah. And here Jake and Dale were, standing in the middle of one of the broken promises, hovering on the edges of legal life once again. A poached deer didn't seem that bad to Justy, not when she was this hungry. For her own sake, Justy wanted Dale to break the other promise, too, just once, so she could hear Dale and Jake in harmony. She shivered inside Jake's jacket. The deer's hide was almost off, and its head kept disappearing behind its own skin. Justy wanted to see its eyes once more, but she stayed put, wiggling her toes to keep warm. Jake grunted and Dale moved again to shine the light where he wanted. Blood dripped from the cut jugular vein onto the snow at their feet. Crisp air and the odor of warm flesh swirled around them; they were almost done. Justy watched Jake's hands, saw the strength in them when he yanked on the hide, watched his face to see how this day and night were settling on him. Each time he pulled at the skin, he thought of Sullivan and his smug smile. Dale was worried about the double offense—how it was not just a poached deer but also female. She tried to keep her thoughts from the mining company, how they'd written a formal letter about any poaching on the land, making eviction entirely clear. Dale returned to her favorite passages from the Psalms, sliding away from the reality of her own bloodied hands.When the deer was relieved of its skin, they both stepped back. So did Justy.

Copyright 2002 by Charlotte Gullick. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher, Blue Hen.