CLOSING IN

by N.A. Jong

I was surprised that, from far away at least, the moose reminded me of a horse, which reminded me of being rich. I had thought of them as being gawky things with overly large snouts and big, bulky bodies that balanced precariously on spindly legs. The moose was maybe a hundred yards away. My father had woken me at three in the morning. We’d spotted the moose the week before and had tracked it for three days. It was the first day of the season.

The moose didn’t seem to know we were there. My father and I were huddled in the willows up on the hill. We began to make our way down the valley wall, disturbing as little of the vegetation as possible. The reindeer moss crackled beneath our feet. The broken parts clung to my sneakers like tiny white antlers.

The moose was a young bull, my father said, and showed me how to read the rack: the points on the main palms reached gracefully to the sky and out to the sides of the animal’s massive head; there were two brow palms, too, which pointed down and curved inwards toward the sloped face. If a hunter couldn’t get close enough to see how big the rack was, he said, he would have to count the brow tines. At least three on each side made it a legal kill. Through the binoculars I could see that our moose had seven clearly defined tines, three on one side and four on the other.

The afternoon was fading and the air was getting cold. The sun was golden against the tundra. The valley looked like it was blanketed in a green and orange patchwork quilt. It smelled different here. I was used to the city, which had no smell of its own. I breathed in deeply.

That’s Hudson Bay tea, my father said without turning around. He bent down and yanked on a delicate branch from a low-lying shrub and handed it to me. The plant was hardy-looking with a woody stem and sharp, pointed needles. It was very aromatic. I pulled off a single blade and held it to my nose. It was pungent but pleasant. I thought I might take some home for my mother when I returned to the city at the end of the summer. She liked making her own potpourri.

Is it edible? I asked.

Won’t kill you, he said. Supposed to be good for you, but too much’ll give you problems, you know what I mean. Here he gestured to his gut and I nodded.

I brought the tip of the blade to my mouth and bit down carefully. It was bitter. I spit it out and my father laughed and started walking again. I scraped my tongue against my teeth and spit again, following him, but the taste lingered. I tucked the sprig into my pocket.

Stalking the moose for so long had given me an appreciation for the animal. It was graceful and lanky and magnificent—not at all awkward. Princely, even. We were close to the ravine now and my father put his finger to his lips. He nodded at me. It was time. He crouched down and set his pack on the ground. The barrel of the rifle left streaks of black oil on his glove when he gave it a stroke. He looked at me and handed me the gun.

We’d been practicing on rusty fifty-gallon drums in the field all summer. I was good. Without a scope, I could hit a target within a few inches from fifty yards away. Double the distance and my accuracy was about the same. My stepmother excused me from chores after dinner when I had target practice with my father. Sometimes we’d set up cans and rocks along the empty drums near the river, then we’d hike up the peak and see how close we could get. By the end of July, I was hitting as many as my father.

Well I’ll be damned, he said, clinking his beer bottle against my root beer, never seen anything like it! Sometimes he’d tug on my braids. I’d never been hunting before and I didn’t want to go. I was too young, anyway. Fourteen. Sixteen was the youngest you could be for a permit. And my father was a stickler for the rules.

But after a couple of months of target practice, one day up on the hill my father turned to me and said, I’m taking you this year. He didn’t have to explain, I knew: he was taking me as his partner on the hunt. The season opened in August, two weeks away.

The gun, a .30-06, felt heavier than usual when I took it from my father. I recalled the first time I’d shot it, before the ice had melted on the hilltops several months ago. My father had warned me about the recoil.

Lean your shoulder into it, he’d said, pushing my shoulder forward as I tried out the scope. Just brace yourself.

Although I was expecting the kick, I wasn’t ready for it. I don’t know where that first shot went. I’d been crouching on the gravel, my elbow propped up on one knee, the other leg tucked beneath me. When the rifle kicked, I hung onto it. The barrel went up in the air and the recoil forced me backward. My father laughed and said, Well, what do you think?

Now he was nodding at the moose in the distance. I looked at the bull. I had never been this close to an animal so large before. It was burying its face in the willows, tugging at the branches and working its lantern jaw. I looked back at my father. His face shifted. He took the gun back from me. Then he turned away to check on the moose.

My father settled into a crevice between two tangled willow bushes and took aim. He crouched down and took his time, maybe a few minutes, moving his weight from one side to the other. He didn’t turn around or say anything. I was watching his back. He didn’t move for a long time. I heard that familiar crack. It was loud and out of place in the stillness of the afternoon. I looked over at the moose, which had swung its head in our direction. Gazing around from side to side, it didn’t seem bothered. Then it turned around and began to trot away.

Dad, I whispered, and he put a hand out behind him, forcefully, still not turning. It meant I should keep quiet.

We sat like that for a while. The moose slowed down. One front leg buckled, and then the other. It collapsed in an elegant pile. Its shoulders heaved up and then slumped down.

Now! My father slung the rifle and his pack over his shoulder and began running through the brush. He moved swiftly and surely as if there had been a path. Behind him, I tripped on a mass of gnarled roots. The branches were dead and gray. They looked like broken limbs. My palm was bleeding. I wiped it on my jeans and kept running. My father was a long ways away now.

He was normally quiet when we went out shooting, but in the last few weeks he’d been coaching me step by step.

Don’t go for the head or the heart, he said, it’s a long shot and you’ll risk injuring it. He said that a shot to the head or the heart might not bleed much and it would make the moose harder to track. If it were wounded, it would find a place to die and then it would be very difficult to find.

And, he said, it would die in misery. You shoot to kill, you understand?

I nodded.

Now the lung, he said, bringing a fist to his chest and thumping so that I could hear a hollow sound, that’s the best. You have the best chance of making a lethal shot. It’s the biggest target, and you can hit both of them when it’s standing broadside to you, like this, and he kicked an empty fuel drum nearby that had been tipped over on its side.

I nodded again.

Plus they bleed out in the lung, not the meat. You shoot ‘em in the heart, or anywhere in the muscle, you’re gonna taint the meat. You’ll be eating spoiled meat all year. Like that shit Leroy brought over, you understand?

I understand, I said.

My uncle Leroy had sent us over a hindquarter of caribou one summer when my father was laid up with gout. My stepmother, Valerie, had made a big fuss over the meat, telling Leroy it was too much, but he just kept on saying it wasn’t, and that we had to take it or we’d hurt Sheila’s feelings. Sheila was my aunt. My father didn’t want the meat, but we took it anyway. After Leroy left Valerie cut the hindquarter into steaks and roasts. The saw caught on something during the butchering and Valerie worked a smashed-up bullet out of the flesh with her fingers. It made a plinking sound at the bottom of the slop pail.

The caribou meat tasted rancid. I wasn’t allowed to say bad things about Valerie’s cooking. I swallowed the mouthful and cut my potatoes from Valerie’s garden in half, then in half again. I pushed them away from the meat. My father took a bite of roast and spit it out on his plate.

Jesus Christ, he said. It’s all bled out.

Valerie couldn’t eat it, either. Over the next week, we tried some steaks and another roast but all of them were ruined and we found two more bullets.

Three shots in the hindquarter, my father kept saying, thing must have bled to death.

No wonder Sheila insisted, Valerie said.

When he had coached me on how and where to shoot a moose, my father told me the reason for the spoilage. An animal must be bled right away. If it’s not, the blood will begin to coagulate and will remain in the blood vessels and the meat. It affects the taste and sometimes ruins it. It’s the mark of an inexperienced hunter.

But we ate the rest of the meat anyway.

You don’t waste, said my father.

Yes, Valerie said, we must always be grateful for what we have been given.

It’s different for Leroy, you know, my father said, he don’t need to hunt like we do.

Then why does he do it? I asked.

For fun, I guess, my father said.

The moose was lying on its side. Partially chewed leaves hung from its mouth. My father took a tarp from his pack and spread it out on the ground. We tucked one edge underneath the top of the groundside flank. I grabbed fistfuls of plastic and yanked, working around the outer edges of the animal while my father pulled the legs in the opposite direction. I stopped to take off my jacket when I began to sweat, and then again to put it on when the air became too cold to bear without the extra layer. My father waited without a word. Finally the tarp was underneath the carcass.

He began working right away, instructing me to hand him tools from his pack. He worked swiftly, breaking the silence only when he needed something from me. I didn’t help dress the moose.

Up close, the antlers were covered in rich brown velvet that had been worn bare in some places. They reminded me of the lumpy, uneven velveteen pillows on the couch at home, another craft project of my mother’s. I leaned in closer to get a better look. The animal’s eyes were halfway open, making it look sleepy and dull-witted. What struck me most were its eyelashes, easily as long as my pinky finger. They were thick and straight, blonde at the roots and dark at the tips. I needed suddenly to touch the moose’s face, to run my fingertips along the worn velvet and feel the eyelashes kissing my skin. I bent down. The eyelashes were bristly and pliable.

A burst of steam rose up, heating the air around us and filling it with the heavy stench of blood and innards. My father was in the cavity now. I couldn’t help myself; I gagged.

Come on, he said, what are you doing? Grab this. He held the hind leg, near the hoof, high up in the air.

Here, now, he said, handing it over to me. It was heavy. When I took it, it sagged a good six inches. The leg was all bone and muscle. I wrapped one hand around the ankle and stood almost underneath the haunch, using my other hand to prop it above my head, making a teepee shape with my body on one side and the moose’s leg on the other. The hair around the ankle was coarse and it pricked my palms. My father worked swiftly, pulling out the organs and laying them neatly into the white plastic garbage bags I’d laid out for him on the tarp.

Liver, he said, tucking it into one bag and reaching for another, heart.

Just as my arms were beginning to tingle, he told me I could let it down. The leg stayed in the air. I wondered if rigor mortis were already beginning to set in or if it was because of the cold. I flexed my fingers and they were stiff too. Everything was happening very fast.

Tongue, said my father, and he produced a grayish, flabby-looking thing almost the size of my forearm. It still had speckles of green on it. My father slid it into a bag and handed it to me along with the liver and the heart.

Off to your stepmother now, he said. She’ll know what to do with those.

The temperature had dropped so much that my father’s breath was hanging around his mouth as he spoke. The sun was still high in the sky—it wouldn’t start setting again until fall—but the light was thinning now. The valley looked yellow and bleak.

I wanted to ask if he needed me to come back—how could he do it without me, his partner?—but he had already turned back to the carcass and I knew he didn’t expect me to return. He didn’t need me. The moose’s face was no longer grand as it had been earlier or cartoonish as I had imagined it would be. My father’s crimson-stained gloves had left sloppy red marks around the face and mouth, and the hindquarter I’d held a few minutes before was still propped in the air like a lewd invitation.

The tundra in the valley was marshy and brown and the dried-up grass on the tussocks made the hillside look like a sea of bleached blonde heads. I took the sprig of Hudson Bay tea out of my pocket and breathed in, but the scent was gone.

Suddenly the stench of the carcass was overwhelming. I began to run back to the cabin, at least four miles from where we were now, the garbage bag of organs swinging against my leg as I ran. The flimsy, transparent plastic revealed everything except the stench.

About half a mile upriver from the cabin, the hillside sloped and stretched into a flat plain that broke off in a bluff over the river. Here, at least a dozen different types of wildflowers grew and the river spilled over an outcropping of rocks into a small waterfall where the fine mist created a perpetual rainbow on sunny days. Over the years, during my summers here, I had come to this place often. Every spring with the snow melting off the hills and running into the valley, the course of the river changed slightly and some years the waterfall was all but underneath the flow of the water. This year the display was as dramatic as I had ever seen it. On the few hot days of the summer I had lain back on the biggest rock slab in the middle of the river and dangled my legs over the edge, savoring the cool rush of water over my feet, the mist on my face, the sputtering droplets that leapt up and licked my arms where I’d pushed up my sleeves. It was too cold for that now; in a few weeks it would begin to freeze at night and there would be thin skins of ice over the puddles on the tundra.

I chose a spot beneath an old willow with widespread branches, whose silvery trunk disappeared like a crooked elbow into the ground. I bounced on the balls of my feet; the permafrost below was springy, spongy. Between the grassy plateau and the gravel bar I found an area of exposed bedrock and I worked a flat oblong piece back and forth until it came loose. It bit into the earth like a sharp incisor. I kept digging until the hole at the base of the willow was half my arm’s length, scooping out the layers of gravel and sediment and setting all of it aside in a wet pile. Water seeped into the bottom of the hole and curled around in gray-brown swirls. My fingers were raw from the digging and when I spread them apart to work out the stiffness, there were black half-moons where the dirt had wedged underneath my nails.

I opened the plastic bag. Despite our carefulness with the tarp, the organs were covered in debris, tiny leaves and stems clinging to the congealed slime. I brought the bag to the river’s edge and submerged each organ one by one, letting the current rinse them clean again. I watched the debris float away, watched it sink to the bottom. Then I walked back to the willow. The liver was ice-cold. It went in first. Then the tongue, and last, the heart. I replaced the soil and patted the top of the mound, placing the slab of bedrock on top before folding up the garbage bag and heading back to the cabin where my father and Valerie were waiting.

by N.A. Jong