Chapter 2
One Year Later
The elk lay curled on the snow, its light brown back facing the boy.
Zach stared through the haze of his frozen breath at the antlers extending above the animal’s bulk.
He had never seen an elk asleep before. Had never stumbled across any wild animal asleep.
Though of course he knew animals must sleep.
Must spend much of their time, just like he did, vulnerable.
Zach glanced over his shoulder toward the trail where his father waited just out of sight for him to do his business in private. The sun hit his eyes and he sneezed, whipping back to see the elk’s response.
Nothing. It might be hurt. Or dead.
Driving over Independence Pass in the fall, his mother had spotted a distant elk herd and pulled over.
They’d passed the binoculars she always kept in the car back and forth between them, watching two bull elk clash as the cows and calves they fought over either disinterestedly grazed, or were forced to hurry out of the way to protect themselves.
Thinking on that violence, Zach pictured the elk rising, tossing its head. But as he edged in front of it, what he saw was so distant from all he knew that all previous experience was whisked from his mind, useless, and he blinked slack-jawed at what lay there, trying to understand.
From shoulders to snout, there was only bone.
The elk’s spine lay neatly on the snow, extending out from mottled red and brown muscle where the neck had met the chest, bloodlessly cut as though cauterized.
The vertebrae rested in a precise and graceful arc that ended at the animal’s stripped skull.
The boy’s eyes tripped over the seven points on each antler, their weathered brown contrasting jarringly with the whiteness of the peeled skull.
All the exposed bone—from the rungs of the spine to the inside of the head visible through the vacant cavity of the one-time nose—appeared almost antiseptically clean.
Slick square teeth sat secure and yellowed in matte, pale jaws, interlocking into a tidy rictus smile.
Together with the contradiction of bright scrubbed bone protruding from intact muscle, Zach immediately saw other paradoxes that made his breath shorten, his stomach twist. There was no blood.
No tracks traced around the animal’s head and neck, not even its own.
The body, the bones, rested as if on display.
A fresh earth smell, similar to the scent of the atmosphere before an electrical storm, flared then faded as the wind blew the body’s scent toward him, its appeal disorienting.
Everything about the elk was foreign and unfamiliar, except for the fact of its deadness.
The absence of life was so universal in its natural unnaturalness that Zach immediately thought of his mother.
The eye sockets stared so evenly past him, so reminded him of the way his mother’s eyes had gazed through and beyond him, that he instinctively covered his face to hide the unsettling sight of the overclean bones.
“Daddy?”
He cringed at the childlike word, but there was only silence. He tried again, correcting himself. “Dad?”
The angle of the wind, the odd acoustics of the winter forest, let Zach hear his father mutter low, “Son of a bitch, what now?”
For Christmas two years ago, someone had given his sister a stuffed octopus that could be flipped inside out.
Flip one way, pink, fuzzy, and smiling. Flip the other way, green, slick, and glowering.
As he changed the octopus back and forth, switching Outerself to Underself, Zach had thought only of his father.
Impossible to know which was the true face, which was the inside-out one.
Did it even matter if it usually smiled, soft and comforting, when you were aware of the furious, slippery thing forming its innards?
“What is it?” Bram called out.
“Can you come here? Please?”
Zach clenched his hands into fists in his mittens, fingernail tearing at the cuticle of his thumb.
“Just has to make me come to him,” Bram said, talking to himself again.
Zach heard his father leave the trail they were following to the backcountry hut, the sound of his inexperienced wallow through the powder distinctive. He winced at Bram’s stream of muttered irritations over the way Zach was interrupting his progress uphill toward his all-important goals.
Maybe the absence of elk brain, the winding away of veins, the plucked eyeballs, the vanished heft of scraggly neck mane, the evaporation of flesh and sinew and life itself, would be enough to prevent his father going to Underself, crossing arms and squinting down at the boy with an exhalation of disappointment.
“Now what is the big—”
Bram paused where Zach had first spotted the elk, not yet positioned to see the strangeness.
“Dead?”
Zach nodded.
“Did you touch it?”
Zach opened his mouth but instead of speaking he shook his head. He saw himself as a fish thrown on a bank, mouth silently opening and closing. He was sure he appeared as stupid as his classmates did when they imitated him trying to say something, anything, when he was nervous.
“You gotta be able to speak up, kid, or else people will walk all over you.”
Zach kept his eyes on the elk as his father approached. The plates of its skull fit together like puzzle pieces, the thin lines between them like the rivers tracing through the topographic maps his mother had taught him to read.
He balled his hand inside his mitten, the nail of his index finger ripping the corner of the cuticle from his thumb. He folded its bloodied stickiness into his palm. Squeezed.
Bram stopped short, shocked to momentary stillness at the sight of the full body. “Holy shit,” he said flatly, then moved closer.
Zach’s shoulders relaxed as his father’s taut irritation dissipated into interest. Bram squatted down and poked at a piece of the whitened spine with the metal tip of his ski pole, knocking a vertebrae askew, then prodding the furred body, the skull.
Zach backed away at seeing the perfection of the bones’ alignment set off-kilter, recoiling at his father’s interference for reasons he couldn’t quite assemble.
“The hell?” Bram said as he jabbed, his sharp gaze now judging and evaluating only the elk, in a way that allowed Zach to speak with no hitches or hesitation.
“What could have killed it? Done all”—Zach looked over the split body, the precision of the cut chest muscles—“this?”
Bram stood. “Maybe the back was under snow, but the head and neck got eaten by something? It’s been warmer last month or so. Could’ve melted, I guess?”
“There’s no tracks,” Zach said.
Bram’s gaze swept over the snow, then up to the sway of the pine branches and aspens rimming the clearing. “Birds must’ve picked it clean.”
Zach frowned. Could birds have fished out brain and tongue and meat? No trees cast shadows across the elk that would have led to uneven melting. And how could anything, even birds, have left the snow bloodless?
“It doesn’t smell bad.”
“True.” Bram agreed. “Probably still frozen.” He jutted his chin toward the animal’s tail. “The back leg’s different. Something was at it for sure.”
Zach had been too occupied with the bright white bones, the strangely surgical appearance of the sliced neck, to notice the leg.
But as he moved next to Bram, he saw that his father was right.
The back right leg lay askew, its skin and muscle torn and gnawed.
Yet despite the leg’s more visceral appearance, it struck Zach as somehow less disturbing, but more explicable; the expected signs of a carrion scavenger.
Near the tail there were even depressions that might have been prints, windblown or melted at the edges beyond recognition.
“But the head, and the neck? It’s—don’t you think it’s—not right?” Zach asked.
They stared down at the meticulousness of the cut chest muscles, the scrubbed vertebrae, the way even the pin-width lines between the skull’s plates were scoured clean and bloodless.
“Doesn’t really matter what happened,” Bram said.
“But it’ll be a great story to tell the guys—outdoor danger and all that.
And tell you what, on the way down we’ll take the skull and antlers with us.
I bet someone’d pay a couple grand for it.
Great find.” Zach straightened with pride as Bram slapped a hand on his shoulder, gave a crooked smile.
“You might not even need to ask that tightwad aunt of yours for the cash to get your sister a birthday present.”
Zach acknowledged the indictment of Aunt Felicity with a noncommittal bob of his head.
“I’m kidding,” Bram said. “But we’ll see what we can get for it, huh?” He pointed at the body. “It all comes down to eat or be eaten. You’re stronger, better, you win the game.”
Zach nodded, as if his father was saying something new, something profound.
But it was comforting, Bram’s return to his confident baseline, the way he transformed the elk from frighteningly wonderous to a thing monetized, his neat appropriation of the scene as simply more evidence that things worked the way he already thought they did.
“Most people would be bothered, seeing this,” his father said. “Don’t like facing how things really are, what the meat they eat looks like before they pretty it up. Not us though.”
“Not us,” Zach echoed.
“Your sister, though?” Bram chuckled. “She’d probably puke.”
Zach kept his face smooth. Bonnie caught the slugs and spiders that disgusted him with her bare hands, popped them into jars, sketched them before setting them free, each time a little closer to the illustrations in her favorite science books.
The art teacher had even pinned to the classroom corkboard his sister’s pencil drawing of a sparrow killed by striking a school window.
Bonnie’s labels of the bird’s broken parts hung over the students like a cautionary tale: Bent wing. Soft neck. White eyes.
No, it was Zach who felt nauseous.
“Okay.” Bram clapped his hands, Zach startling at the ricochet of the sound around the clearing.
“Let’s get this show on the road. See if Ginny has managed to clean and prep the place.
Everything’s gotta be perfect for these guys—perfect!
Arlo’s the one to impress. Firm handshake, strong ‘hello,’ and then you be seen but not heard, right?
Except with this Russ kid, Dave’s son. Make sure he likes you.
Keep him entertained and out of the way.
And since Dave’s the one who insisted this be a father-son thing, your line is ‘Wow, Mister Dowling, this boys’ trip is the best thing ever, what a great idea, so glad to be included, blah, blah, blah,’ got it? ”
Zach nodded enthusiastically, familiar with this lecture by now, aware of the excitement he was supposed to show. Because there were stakes his father was nervous over, but it was important to pretend his father could never be nervous about anything at all.
As Bram turned toward the trail, Zach averted his eyes from the awkward way his father’s skis lapped, nearly causing him to fall before he managed to disentangle himself and move away.
Despite himself Zach stared toward the elk again, then shook his head as if to shake off the influx of grotesque imaginings—yellow slit pupils, dripping teeth, surgically sharp curled claws peeling back the elk’s layers.
Zach deftly oriented his own skis and hurried after Bram.
Skin crawling with the sense that something watched him from the trees, gut creeping with fear over the residual presence of a predator, Zach paused to shoulder his heavy pack where he’d left it at the side of the trail.
He pawed distractedly at his pockets, unable to shed the sense he’d left something important behind.
Bram came into sight above, wearing his own pack and pulling the sled full of supplies he’d restrapped to his waist. His father traveled inefficiently but quickly, strength making up for his inexperience.
Although the trail was obvious, well packed by previous skiers over the course of two nearly snowless months, Bram paused to look for the blue plastic diamonds nailed into trees marking the route to Pantheon Hut.
Without turning to check on Zach, he went around a bend and vanished.
Zach lowered his head to let the crown of his skull take the brunt of his father’s indifference before following up the trail.
In motion, discomfort in his abdomen reminded him what he’d forgotten.
He’d never relieved himself. But he didn’t dare ask Bram to stop and wait for him again.
Didn’t dare pause and fall farther behind.
And together with the frigid air he gulped down the elk’s uncanniness, its meticulous dissection, and felt the indelible image of it lodge somewhere at the base of his throat.