5. Chapter Five
Chapter Five
Eliza
I went after the deer because the cans wouldn't last and a deer was the difference between living and the other thing.
That was the math, and I checked it three ways.
The food he left me bought weeks, not a winter.
Even rationed to the bone, even with the jerky and the beans stretched into spring, the numbers ran out somewhere around the worst of the cold, in that dead stretch of February and March when nothing grows and nothing moves and the mountain just waits to see what it can keep.
Cans got me to the edge of that and no further.
Meat got me through it. Real meat, a whole animal, butchered and frozen and rationed—that was a different kind of math, the kind with a future on the far end of it.
So when I cut the track that morning, fresh in the new snow below the ridge, I didn't think the way I should have. I thought about the future.
A big track. A buck, by the spread and the depth, moving slowly, dragging one hind leg in a way that printed wrong in the snow.
Injured already. Something had been at it, or it broke through ice, or caught itself in deadfall—didn't matter.
An injured deer was a slow deer, and a slow deer was one I could actually catch, and my whole body lit up with a hunger that had nothing to do with being careful.
I should have been careful.
I took the rifle and a knife and left the station with the light still gray and went down the track.
The cold was the hard dry kind that day, no wind, the snow squeaking like packed sugar under my boots, my breath freezing in my eyebrows.
I moved the way I taught myself to move, slow and quiet, reading the story the track told.
The buck was hurting. It stopped often. It leaned against trees.
I could see where the bark was rubbed, where it stood and gathered itself before pushing on.
It was dying slow, and I was going to make it quick, and it was going to keep me alive, and for the first time in a long while I felt something I was afraid to call hope.
I tracked it the better part of two hours, down into a draw where the pines grew close and the light went green and dim.
My legs burned. I ate half a can of beans before I left and I could feel even that thin fuel guttering in me, the way a body running on empty spends everything it gets the second it gets it.
But I was close. The track was fresh enough now that the snow hadn't started to crust in the prints. Minutes ahead of me. Maybe less.
I came around a stand of deadfall and there it was.
Down. On its side in the snow at the bottom of the draw, ribs heaving, one back leg bent under it at an angle that explained the dragging.
A big animal, bigger than I let myself hope, enough meat on it even winter-lean to change everything.
My heart slammed. I raised the rifle, settled the front sight behind its shoulder, took up the slack in the trigger the way my hands knew how to do without me—
And then it lifted its head and looked at me, and I saw its face, and my finger stopped.
Wrong. Everything about it was wrong. The eyes had gone the color of spoiled milk, filmed and clouded, no shine left in them, and they didn't track me the way a frightened animal's eyes track the thing that's going to kill it. They just rolled, loose and searching. A thread of black drool roped from its mouth and froze in the fur of its jaw. The skin around its muzzle had pulled back from the teeth. Where it breathed, the breath came wet and rattling and far too fast. Under the deer smell of it there was another smell, rotten and old—the smell I knew from the worst days on the road. The smell of a thing that was dead and hadn’t stopped moving yet.
It wasn't injured. Or it was, but that wasn't what was killing it.
It was turning.
I heard the stories, traded around fires the same as all the others—that it started getting into the animals, that the deer and the bear and worse were carrying it now, changing in ways nobody understood.
I half believed it the way you half believe everything you don't see yourself.
I was seeing it now. The thing on the ground in front of me had been a deer and was becoming something else, and the meat on its bones that I tracked for two hours and pinned my whole winter on was as good to me as poison.
It tried to get up.
The broken leg wouldn't hold it but the rest of it didn't seem to care, didn't seem to feel it, and that was the most wrong thing of all—a living deer screams and favors a break, and this thing just dug at the snow with its good legs and dragged its ruined body toward me with its milky eyes rolling and that wet rattle coming faster.
I understood in my gut that it wasn't trying to flee me. It was trying to reach me.
I put the bullet in its skull.
The crack of it slammed off the walls of the draw and rolled away through the pines, and the deer dropped and was still, and I stood there shaking.
Steady hand gone now, finally, shaking like the cold had gotten into the bone—and I looked at all that meat I couldn't eat and the bullet I couldn't get back and I wanted to scream.
I spent a bullet. I spent two hours and half a can of beans and the last of something I didn’t know I still had. And the mountain shown me a buck big enough to save me and made it rot in front of my eyes, just to prove it could.
I didn't scream. I made myself stand there and breathe through the rotten stink and think, because panic was a luxury and thinking was free.
Infected. This high, this deep into winter, when the cold was supposed to slow them, freeze them, keep them down in the low country where it was warmer.
That was the thing the stories all agreed on, that the mountains in winter were the one place they didn't go.
It was half the reason anybody lived up here at all.
And here was one, turned and hunting, two ridges from where I slept.
That scared me worse than the wasted meat. I didn't have a word yet for why. I just knew the rules had a crack in them, and I lived this long by trusting the rules.
I was still standing over it when I heard the snow.
Boots. Coming fast and not bothering to hide it, down the slope behind me, and I spun with the rifle up and my heart in my throat before my brain caught up and sorted the rhythm of that stride out of every other thing it could have been.
Him.
He came through the deadfall with his own rifle in his hands and his eyes going straight past me to the dead thing in the snow. Whatever he was about to say died on his face when he saw it. He knew. One look and he knew exactly what he was looking at, the same way I had.
"You hit it?" he said.
"In the head. Just now."
"Before that. Did you—l…" His jaw worked. "Did it get on you. Blood, spit, any of it. Did it touch you."
"No." And then, because his face had gone to something I hadn't seen before, something with real fear under the steadiness: "No. I shot it from here. It never reached me."
He crossed to the deer anyway and crouched over it, not touching, studying the milk eyes and the black drool with a grim flat attention. I watched the cost of it move through him. This wasn't a man being careful. This was a man doing a sum he didn't like the answer to.
"This is wrong," he said, low, almost to himself. "They don't come up this high in the cold. They never have. Five years, and they've never once—" He stopped. Looked up at me. "How long were you tracking it?"
"Two hours. From below the ridge."
"Which direction was it headed when you cut the track?"
I had to think. "Up. It was moving up the mountain. Toward…" Toward the high country. Toward, I realized, his eighty people, wherever they were, though I didn't say that. "Up."
Something closed in his face. He stood, and for a moment he didn't say anything at all, just looked up the draw the way the deer had been heading, and I saw him filing it the same way I filed things, into the part of him that was always doing math about danger.
Whatever the sum was, it frightened him, and a man like that didn't frighten easy. That frightened me.
Then he seemed to remember I was there, half-starved and shaking over a wasted kill, and the grimness gentled.
"You tracked a wounded deer two hours down into a draw alone, on no food, with infected on the mountain you didn't know about," he said. "Trigger, you have got to be the most stubborn person I have ever—"
"I didn't know it was infected. The track read injured. It was good meat, far as I could tell." My voice cracked and I hated it. "I needed it. The cans don't last. You know they don't last, you did the math your own self. I needed this deer."
He looked at me, and he didn't say come down to his camp, and he didn't say let me help you, and he didn't say any of the things he said before that I'd thrown back at him.
He just looked at me standing there over the ruin of my whole winter with a spent bullet and shaking hands, and something in his face understood it completely, and that was so much worse than an offer.
An offer I could refuse. I had no defense at all against being understood.
"Come on," he said finally. "I'll help you get back up to the station.
Not down to mine. Just back up to yours.
You've burned everything you had getting down here and you're not going to make the climb on shaking legs in this cold without going down somewhere I can't find you.
That's not an offer to anything. That's just me not leaving a person alone in a draw to freeze. "
I wanted to tell him no. The word was right there, the way it was always right there, the reflex I built my whole life around.
I looked up the mountain at the deep cold I'd have to climb back through, and I felt my legs trembling under me, and I thought about milk-white eyes coming uphill toward something warm, and for once the no wouldn't come.
"Just to the station," I said.
"Just to the station."
"And you walk in front. Where I can see you."
The corner of his mouth moved, not quite a smile, like he knew exactly what it had cost me to let even that much go. "Wouldn't have it any other way."
He went first, up out of the green dark of the draw, breaking trail through the snow so I could walk in the easier prints he left, and I followed a careful ten feet back with my rifle in my hands and my eyes on his shoulders and the wasted deer going cold behind us.
Neither of us said anything for a long time.
The light came back as we climbed out of the pines, gray and flat and ordinary.
But I kept thinking about the way his face had closed when I said the deer was heading up the mountain. Like I handed him a piece of something he already started, against his will, to assemble.
I didn't know yet what it was.
I'd find out. We both would.