Raymond Kills a Deer
Halfway through November.
Toward evening and raining.
At the meadow's edge:
low
brown
sudden
hawk. Hunter. She
who is terror to those who shudder against the earth
moves in silence
through the gray rain.
Feather soft she moves,
cold and soft,
her talons hung beneath her
limp
as broken fingers.
That night the first snow falls and whispers against the windows:
Raymond. Raymond!
Come out of your house and kill again.
He twitches in his sleep,
in his dream he sees
a bloody carcass steam and drip.
Out in morning dark he pushes through the new snow
watching the ground,
picks up a track and follows, then
strikes off tangentially, slides across the sidehill
and circles broadly away from
what he thinks is the buck's intention,
settles under a hemlock
on a ridge of maple, ash and beech
and waits, shivers, in the dawn.
Below him, a brown spot behind gray trees.
Raymond watches down blued steel.
The buck takes a step, waits.
His eyes scan the hill,
only his ears up, pricked forward,
move.
The shot resounds three miles across the valley
strikes a ridge, returns. The deer goes down,
then rises and is gone.
He slants down the sidehill on three legs
drawing a red line
behind himself.
Seven o'clock.
Raymond will watch the drip
of this life,
follow this
unravelling thread
all day.
Off the hardwood ridge, through cedars and swamp,
over a softwood knoll, across a brook and on,
never faster than he has to, keeping just ahead
of his assassin, the murdered beast flees and bleeds
on fallen logs and withered ferns, dragging
his shattered leg through the new snow.
Across a pasture, into the sugarbush, through a sag,
down a logging road
and on.
Here, at the brook where the buck drank,
Raymond dips down, drinks too, and rests;
eats his lunch. His sandwich tastes like blood.
Later, further on, where the buck rested:
the red, red, bright-red snow
packed from his ragged shoulder.
He who is dead
is dying.
Yet he goes on.
Now Raymond sees him just ahead bounding into thick spruce.
More blood now
waist high on branches, more and more.
Then, under a wind-felled naked maple,
finally,
the killer and the killed.
Raymond pulls the hammer back and finishes
what he began
nine hours earlier.
The buck shivers;
his mouth foams blood;
his eyes bleed.
Twitch, twitch.
Twitch.
Twitch.
Quick
and simple
as that.
Raymond sits at the murdered head,
strokes the murdered neck
speaks softly words of comfort.
He rolls his sleeves.
Knife in at the sternum
slices to the anus.
He dumps the steaming stomach and intestines on the ground,
cuts away the diaphragm, extracts the lungs, the broken heart,
puts the liver in a bag.
Where life was,
a hole gapes.
Fat shimmers white in blood and bile.
Off the ridge now, in the dark, he comes,
bloody to the shoulders, dragging,
200 pounds of deer.
Red-faced, sweating
he moves through the cold
and starless night.
From where the rear hoof scrapes the woodshed floor to antler tip,
eight feet, this creature stretches,
hung.
Raymond! Supper.
I'll be right in, Ann.
Don't be long.
Raymond leans against the woodshed door and wonders for a moment
why he took this life.
He knows the gutless carcass does not die.
He knows this winter it will rise again and run
down long red alleys through another misty wilderness
around his bloody heart.
But what his mind can comprehend is not enough.
There are too many lives in this life,
too many deaths,
and no amount of thought can save him from his grief
for dying things, not even knowing
resurrection,
sure
and green
as spring.
from JUDEVINE, Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 1999 by David Budbill |
