9.22

The cold air crackled with the sounds of their footsteps. Each leaf sounded like it had fallen from the trees aeons before, not weeks. Their breath curled up in billowing plumes of white and dissipated into the branches above. It was cold, but not frigid. The wood was still, but not silent.

The two men walked to the stand in the back of their property. "Who's up, dad?"
The men paused to listen to a distant crash in the woods.
"You want to take it?" His father's gruff voice seeped into the trees and disappeared. It was a suggestion he had never heard before; his father always went into the stand while he waited in the blind.
"Sure, dad. I won't let you down." He grinned. It was time.

He climbed into the stand with the rifle slung over his shoulder. He wrapped his scarf tighter around his neck and settled into the chair facing the clearing ahead of him. For a few minutes, he could hear the muffled sounds of his father's preparations below him, and then all was silent.
Eternity.
The waiting put pains in his feet, but he did not shift. His arms ached from the mass of the rifle, but he didn't move. His legs lost circulation and his nose turned to ice and his eyelids grew heavy, but he continued to scan the edge of the woods for prey.

Four hours. Monotonous. Hours swollen with the weight of suspense. Four hours and nothing. From below, his father's voice cracked out: "You need a break?"
He coughed. "I've got it."

Their wait went on. A partridge family crossed the field. A fox kit rolled out of a bush and was dragged back by his mother. Two geese, late for the time of year, honked heading south. Still, but not silent. He sat up a little straighter. Was it--it could be. Was it?
Motion stirred in the underbrush on the other side of the clearing, forty yards away and through a layer of branches. He whispered "Dad!" and tightened his grip on the gun.
"Breathe," came the inaudible reply.
He breathed. He remembered to wait for his shot, to steady the gun and aim with the whole of his body. He remembered to wait. The deer stepped out. It was a doe, small and unimpressive. She was his. He breathed out, slow. A bird call came rasping from far ahead. He breathed in. The doe turned and looked away from him. He held his breath. Two seconds would solve it. She stepped forward. He breathed out as his finger rolled in on his palm as his eyes bored deep through the sight and into the back of the doe and the whole wood thundered with the sound a soul makes when it snaps in half, like ice (beautiful and brittle) or wrought iron (seeming-strong, but carefully forged) or a soul, his soul, sped up a million times and set (finally) on its last trip to the woods. But the sound, to him, was indescribable because he didn't know what that sounded like.
The doe jumped, wrenched, and threw itself away from the sound. He dropped from the stand, almost landing on his father, and hooted victory. He ran straight to where the doe had stood and stopped to stare at the trail through the woods. Branches lay snapped, bushes crushed, and leaves muddied. Twenty feet of carnage and a thrashing doe kicking her front legs in the autumnal wrack.

His father closed with him, and put a firm hand on his back. The younger man stepped forward and stood next to the struggling deer.
"End it," came the command.
He drew his knife. The doe's life flowed slow. She kicked and rolled her eyes, thrashing, gouging great rifts in the leaves. He knelt, his eyes too-wide. His hands shook.
"You took her in the spine. End it."

He lifted his arm.

"End it, son."

He locked eyes with the doe and breathed too-fast without knowing.
His father's knife made a soft thump as the old man buried the blade in the quivering animal. He left his son sitting in the ruinous remnants of the kill and walked away.