He unwinds my fingers from the sledge’s crude handles, and I can feel them creaking on the inside, like twisting wet rope.
He leads me to a canvas folding chair and sits me in it while someone else deals with my sledge and its contents. The muscles in my forearms and calves twitch. Bo sees it and starts rubbing my overly taxed arms.
‘That was amazing,’ he whispers.
‘Amazing?’ I repeat, lifting my mouth into a wry smile. I motion to him and Raven, who is already recounting a heavily edited version of the kill. ‘I’m practically falling over, and you two aren’t even out of breath.’
He smiles. ‘We’ve had more practice.’ And then he frowns suddenly, looking off as he rubs my twitching forearm. ‘I meant that shot. Right through the middle of his eye, straight into the brain. I’ve never seen anything like it.’
‘Beginner’s luck,’ I say.
‘No,’ he replies with immediate certainty. ‘You’re a born hunter.’
I nod, because I recognize now that this is completely true. Some people are born with perfect pitch, some people have eidetic memory, and I have this.
‘I’m good at killing things,’ I say again, but Bo immediately shakes his head and pulls me closer.
‘No, that’s not it.’ His fingers run down my arms. ‘The best death a buck can hope for is a quick, clean one. You gave him that. You are a hunter.’
I see something flash through his eyes – regret, maybe. Something he did wrong, or didn’t do as well as I did. He’s measuring himself against me, and he thinks he’s coming up short. Even the notion is so stunningly off base that I fail to find a way to address it before we’re interrupted.
‘Rainbow, let her have a drink of water,’ his mother scolds laughingly. ‘She’s about to faint from dehydration.’
I take the wooden bowl full of water offered to me
and tip it into my mouth. She leaves a bucket of the cool, sweet water next to my feet and angles the ladle in my direction so I don’t have to lean far to get it. She and Bo hustle off to orchestrate the unpacking of the meat.
Sitting helps a lot. The water helps even more. When I’m finished, and ready to stand, I try to find Maeve and ask her what she wants me to do. The rest of Bo’s family notice that I’m done with my break and start to gather around me, waiting expectantly.
It dawns on me that they all want to hear me tell the story, especially the little ones. Sol and Moth are crouched down in front of me. The interchangeable boys, Aspen and Karl, hover just behind my left elbow, trying not to look too eager.
‘I’ll take that,’ the smaller boy – Aspen – says as he gathers the empty bucket and bowl from my hands.
‘Rain says he didn’t see it, when you took down the buck?’ Karl says, eyes narrowed and lips tilted in a challenging smirk. He doesn’t believe I’m the one who made the kill.
I look at Bo, and he smiles at me, tipping his chin as if to say, ‘Go ahead.’
‘Well, Bo fell asleep,’ I say, feeling heat build low in my belly. I know he’s remembering the same things I am.
‘What?’ Karl sputters, disbelievingly, interrupting our communion. ‘Rainbow never falls asleep on a hunt.’
Bo is grinning now. ‘I did,’ he admits. ‘Keep going,’ he urges me. ‘I’d like to know what happened.’
I give a moment-by-moment recounting of my kill. I leave out that we were naked, of course, but I tell them everything I can recall. The sounds, the smells, the exact positioning of the buck in relation to myself. It’s fun, actually, being the TV instead of watching it. I can’t stop myself from re-enacting the grand finale for Moth. She gasps and covers her mouth when I pull my arms back, drawing an imaginary bow. When I get to the end of my story, everyone sits in silence for a while, just thinking it through.
Moth suddenly springs up and grabs what looks like a toy bow and arrow from the side of the fire pit. She tries my move for herself, her tiny body straining to pull back the arrow. As small as that bow is, it’s no toy. Sol watches her little sister as she practises the move on her training bow carefully and then tries it once herself.
‘Wait. How did you generate enough force from your knees?’ Sol asks, confused.
‘Some women have a lot of power in that position,’ says a male voice.
I spin around and see that Bo’s father has joined us. I stare at him. He looks away from me, disconcerted, and finishes answering his daughter’s question.
‘You couldn’t make it using just your arms, Sol. But most women have very powerful muscles in their thighs and pelvic floor, and enough flexibility in their lower backs to create the torque necessary. It’d be a tough shot, though.’
Sol rocks up on to her knees, testing it out again, but this time trying to use her deepest belly muscles. She nods, as if to admit she could imagine it working.
I look down at my hands, remembering the shot, and realize my left forearm is injured. I have a series of red welts on the inside of my forearm that are quickly turning purple. I wasn’t wearing an arm-guard, and the bow-string skipped across my arm during release. I have no idea how I’m going to explain that to my grandparents. It looks like I was raked with claws or beaten with a cane. There is literally no scenario in my life that would explain these marks in a non-violent way.