‘Thank you, brother,’ he says, like he knew him. Like this was one of his pals. ‘We needed you, and you came to help us.’
Bo looks at me, his honest eyes digging deep. I nod and look down at the warm, caramel-coloured fur under my hands.
‘Thank you,’ I whisper. ‘And I’m sorry,’ I add.
Raven puts a hand on the buck’s hindquarters, bows her head, and murmurs her gratitude.
I can already feel his body cooling. I stare at him while Raven and Bo discuss the logistics of getting his huge carcass back to camp. Raven says that the rest of the family is scattered throughout the forest, each on a different game trail, so finding help would take too long.
‘Yeah,’ Bo says, nodding and frowning, ‘the plan was to split up.’ A thought occurs to him. ‘You knew I’d be on the river trail. What are you doing here?’
The tone in his voice makes me look up from the deer and at them. Raven looks away uncomfortably, blushing and shifting. I laugh.
‘She came here to watch us,’ I say flatly.
Raven glares at me, her face bright red. ‘I came to make sure my brother was hunting, and not . . .’ She trails off and makes a vague gesture towards me.
Bo’s face flushes red at the thought of his sister watching what we just did. And she was watching us for a while, I’d bet. Maybe for the whole thing.
I stand up. ‘So, rather than just being one hunter down, your family effectively loses two hunters today because you’re tracking your brother instead of the deer. And why would you do that?’ She shuts her mouth with a snap. ‘Your family needs meat, right? But proving you’re better than Bo was more important than that?’ I glance down at my kill. ‘Good thing I was here.’
She keeps her mouth shut, and I nod. Good. Now she knows what the pecking order is. I start to walk away, but Bo grabs my arm.
‘Where are you going?’ he asks.
‘Back to your camp. We need help,’ I say, gesturing to the enormous dead deer.
‘We’ll butcher the buck right here so we can drag it back in sections,’ Bo says, shaking his head. ‘We can’t wait for help. We have to work fast.’
I’m already getting queasy at the thought of butchering an animal. I’ve never even carved a turkey.
‘Why do we need to work fast?’ I ask. A weak laugh escapes. ‘It’s not like he’s going anywhere.’
‘No, but the bears are. Every bear in a ten-mile radius is going to smell this kill,’ Raven says, but with less acid than she usually has when she addresses me. ‘We have to work fast because they’re already headed this way. We’ll take the best cuts of meat back to camp first. And later we’ll come back with a rifle.’
‘If we come back. Might not be worth it,’ Bo says. He pulls out his knife. ‘Let’s get to work.’
What comes next is the most gruesome twenty minutes of my life. While we butcher the buck, I try not to gag. I turn my head to the side and hiss breath in and out through my bared teeth. Bo calmly teaches me what the most valuable cuts are. It’s not just the meat, either. The liver is so nutritious that it’s one of the first things Raven wraps in ferns and lays on top of the long sticks she’s woven together with tree vines and . . . I don’t know, frigging fairy magic, to make a crude sledge.
Bo’s tone is soothing and steady as he instructs me and encourages me, but I can see the strain around his mouth. A bear could come at any time. Or a mountain lion. Or a wolf. The sheer number of carnivorous animals in this area dwarfs the human population.
After what seems like a purgatory of sawing and slicing and hacking, Bo is satisfied that we’ve harvested the best of the carcass that is in our ability to transport. He takes me down to the river to wash off the blood. We dunk and rinse in the frigid water and come up mostly clean, but there’s still blood under my fingernails. I’d have to scrub my hands with steel wool to get it all out.
If I was cold from the water, that ends as soon as I start to drag my sledge. While Bo and I were butchering my kill, Raven made another sledge for each of us, and in between managed to load the hundreds of pounds of meat and organs that we hacked away from the bones on to them.
We start out. Bo’s camp is miles away, uphill. The hour-long trek is torturous.
I am one foot in front of the other. I am hands grown into wood. I am forward – one breath – one step. Then another. And another.
I drag my dead behind me up a mountain.
It’s strange. I just realized that when I’m with Bo, I never see dead bodies. When I’m with him, my ghosts are gone.
‘You can let go.’
I blink.
‘Let go,’ Bo tells me.