TRACKING
by Joe Cusick
Inspired by David Quammen's short story "Walking Out," Tracking" similarly uses the rustic imagery of hunting and the natural world. Like "Walking Out," this piece touches on the complexity and inherent trauma of parent-child relationships, as well as singular scarring events. "Tracking" pays homage to the interpersonal dynamics of "Walking Out," as well as Quammens ability to describe the outdoors, and the trepidation that comes with them.
As a boy, the passing highway reflectors used to remind me of shooting stars in the night sky, and dad's truck was like a spaceship entering the milky way. Now, the strobing lights just keep me in my path on late nights and early mornings.
I'm taking Lucille out for her first hunt this morning. She's 13 now, a year older than I was on my first. Her mom didn't really go for the idea, but she doesn't have full custody so I still have a say in what Lucille does on weekends, for now. At her age, I don't see anything wrong with learning the brutal and cyclical way of life. Hunting did this for me. Lucille may start to feel grateful for staying in my trailer if she learns how great it is to not sleep in a snowy field, waiting to fire a shot at a toothed animal that might want to take you.
I hear her stirring now behind the rumble of rubber on the highway and my stereo softly playing Gram Parsons. I glance toward the passenger seat, and she has her legs tucked underneath her rear while she's sitting, her cheek resting against the seatbelt. She yanked it hard to set the lock before going out cold. The truck's scent of coffee and blowing engine heat against the freezing November morning makes the cockpit feel like a worn in sleeping bag.
"How much longer now Dad?" She mumbles, still keeping her eyes closed and rolling her neck like a bird.
"About 30 minutes," I say, "Just go back to sleep, I'll nudge you when we get there."
The drive from our trailer in Clinton to the hunting spot outside of Deer Lodge isn't far and is all public. The huge chunk of land belongs to the state prison and I just assume use it if that's where my tax dollars are heading anyways. It's about an hour drive, but any time spent asleep in the car at five in the morning for a teenager is like a bullet train.
We're driving down the dirt road now and my wipers squeeze off large snowflakes that transform into droplets on the hot windshield. We bonk along a few potholes, and Lucille inhales a sharp breath to let me know she's awake.
"We're almost there now," I say.
She told me that she wanted to go, and it didn't take much persuasion. Lucille was always curious when it came to the idea of death. She hovered over my mom's casket at her funeral. She would take sticks and poke dead squirrels or birds that the cat dragged in. She wanted to know what it was like, to see something die, and she said that she wasn't afraid of the cold or bears either. I told her that was alright, and I was proud of her for being so willing.
I turn into an unassuming pull off in the road and announce, "We're here." I turn the key and we both sit silently listening to the soft crackling of the engine before gearing up.
Lucille carries her grandfather's short, bolt action 243 Winchester rifle with an oversized sling around her shoulder that needs constant readjusting. The gun leaves her small, thin body leaning on one side because of the weight. She mimics me as I thread my laces through the upper eyelets of my boots and then unfold my soft woolen pants over the laces. By the time I'm finished, she too looks ready to go.
Her brown hair hangs out of her tight black beanie and her smooth cheeks glow rosy and flush from the gusts of cold air. I can’t remember having skin like that. I’m old and leathery now, and my stubble protects my face from the cutting wind. I wear a cap with ear flaps, still speckled with paint from the job site. We both have a similar slender build and pale skin, but Luce ended up with her mother's dark eyes.
I hand Lucille her pack and she throws it over her shoulders with a soft grunt. I put mine on then load up the mag of my 270 caliber. She looks at me and I can tell she wants a loaded gun. I decide not to let her as we have a lot of walking ahead and I wouldn't want her to slip on the ice and make some kind of fatal, unforgivable mistake.
"Alright," I whisper, my soft voice setting the tone of stealth for the rest of the hunt. And without another word, we begin walking through the fresh powder snow.
My shins trudge through the deep snow and the rigorous movement of my legs sends beads of sweat down my temples. The sifting motion of walking in the snow causes large, coagulated chunks of ice to collect on my wool pants. Lucille follows behind in my path, chomping at my heels like a junkyard dog. The light of day is coming on fast, and the soft blending of white snow and sky create a disorienting environment of homogeneity.
And then we cut a track. A young deer, from this morning. Couldn't be more than a yearling at best. But Lucille was so excited I couldn't turn her off the trail.
"Yep, looks like we found one, Luce. You just stay behind me while I break trail. Keep your eyes peeled. It could be right up ahead."
She's tiptoeing behind me like Elmer Fudd for twenty minutes without a fleck of distraction before we cut another track, this one crossing the deer's. It is the track of a man. A footprint. I hadn't seen any other cars when we parked this morning, so I doubted it was another hunter. The tracks had less flakes on them than the deers, meaning they were even fresher, and there was no bootprint in the track. They were the shape of shoes without traction or soles. Just the smooth print of a shoe. And a large one. I stare at the track for a while.
"What is it," says Lucille. "Did we lose the deer?"
Puzzled, I take a few seconds to respond. I answer, "No, hun' that ain't it."
I pull her up beside me and show her the track. The track of a large footed, bootless man. Lucille is hasty to explain the track away and tells me that it must be another hunter, someone who parked nearby where we couldn't see. But where we pulled up this morning was the only parking I could remember for this spot.
Lucille is already twenty yards away, breaking trail behind the deer track and waddling through snow up to her lower thighs. I spin around slowly, glancing through the timber at the horizon to see if I can spot the culprit of the mysterious footprints, but find nothing. I catch up with Lucille.
It's not long before we reach the meadow. In the past, this is where I'd gotten lucky. I crouch and Luce follows in my footsteps. We enter a sheltered tree-well covered with large pine boughs and we sit on our packs in the indented snow. I pull up my binoculars and begin glassing the meadow, looking deep into the edges of the tree line, into the aspen brush for bedded deer, and at unassuming specks of fur standing out in the middle of the open snow. Lucille begins to look through the scope of her rifle but I take it from her and stick three rounds into the magazine.
"Be careful" I tell her, and carefully hand the rifle back.
We glass for probably 20 minutes when I spot the fluttering tails of three fleeing whitetail deer silently heading into the thick timber and brush across the meadow. "Fuck" I whisper under my breath, just quiet enough for Lucille not to understand what I said.
"What?! What?!," she says to me, at the maximum decibel to be considered a whisper.
"We lost them, must have winded us," I tell her. I'm not sure if she understands what that means, she only nods then hangs her head in disappointment.
I continue looking through my binoculars to see if perhaps we missed one, maybe there was a deer somewhere out in the open, frozen in fear and petrified in their state of flight. I don't see a deer, but I see the movement of brush and small swaying lodgepoles out of the bottom right corner of my binoculars. A large man stumbles out of the woods into the meadow. Even from two hundred and fifty yards I can see that he is shivering, cold and weary. Maybe he is a hunter. I can see the cuffs of his orange pants sticking out from below what looks like a large wool blanket wrapped around his upper extremities.
"I see.. .something," I try to tell Lucille calmly.
"What?! What?!" She says again. She begins to pull up her rifle to look through the scope into the brush but I slap the barrel down towards the ground and hand her the binoculars.
"It's a man," Lucille says, matter of factly. "He just fell."
She hands back the glass and I look again, and see the man's figure facedown in the deep snow. "Ehhhhhhhh," I grumble. "We better check it out.
We grab our things and walk out from the sheltered branches. In the meadow the wind pushes clouds of snow into our eyes, and I can see clumps of ice gathering in Lucille's lashes. When we get close to the man, probably within 20 feet, I let out a loud "hello!" and "hey there!" to see if he stirs, but he lies eerily still.
"C'mon dad, we have to help him," Lucille says, and I grumble again. Seems like trouble to run into a freezing man alone in the woods.
We approach his body. I bend over and give his shoulder a good shake to rouse him. Again, no movement. I reach under his chest and flip him over onto his back to get his face out of the snow. He is a large man, at least six foot and well over two hundred pounds. Lucille helps by flipping him over from his knees.
When I see his face I can already tell that he's cold. Very cold. He has specks of white on his nose and cheeks: frostbite. He is a native man, from what I can tell at least. He has a darker complexion and it wouldn't be unlikely to run into a Salish or Kootenai this near to Flathead Reservation up north. I even used to have a Salish neighbor. Her son was in and out of jail for fentanyl until she finally lost him to an overdose. Later, she lost her husband when they couldn’t keep paying for his insulin shots. After all this, she had wandered off drunk from her trailer, wailing and stumbling down the highway with the plastic bags and tumbleweeds. I haven’t heard of her since.
I tell Lucille to look away as I hold my hand up to his lips to feel for the warmth of his breath against my knuckles. Sure enough, he's still alive.
After a long pause, I say, "We have to move him," and I reach through the blanket under his armpits and begin pulling him toward the nearest timber. This way he's out of the wind and deeper, drifting snow.
I'm wet with sweat and down to my white undershirt by the time we reach a suitable tree to lean him up against. I cover him in a few of our extra layers. Lucille looks scared and I can see her eyes welling up with tears. She says again, "you have to help him."
"I'm trying," I say, under my breath.
I keep moving to stay warm and grab my kindling wrapped in a cloth from the bottom of my pack. I matte down some snow with my gloved hands and lay a few logs down as a barrier for the fire against the snow. Lucille helps by grabbing some dried pine boughs with red needles from beetle kill and we get a good fire going within ten minutes. Then we wait.
It's nearing 10am by the time we see any more life out of the man. He is sitting downwind of the fire, and he slowly opens his eyes against the billowing smoke. A look of confusion overtakes him, and I can tell he is unsure if he has passed into another life or is still dreaming.
He meets my gaze and his body jolts where he's sitting. "Easy," I tell him. "You were likely to freeze to death out there, we're just trying to help.
He sits still again, and turns his head, noticing Luce. She asks timidly, "are you okay?"
The man clears his throat and says “yes," in a deep, scratchy voice seasoned with bourbon and cigarettes. "Yes, I just got lost." He pauses for a long time. "I went looking for my dog last night after I let him out before bed. Still can't find him."
"Don't worry about that now," I say, "you were almost stiff and gone when we found ya."
There's another long pause and the man readjusts his position against the tree and crosses his arms tight around his large chest below the blanket cloak. I look down at his feet and see the smooth soles of his white slip on shoes.
"I take it, those are your bedtime slippers," I say, pointing at his feet. "Not the best footwear for romping around out in the cold."
"I didn't think I would be gone long," he says, "just got carried away, after my dog."
"Well we're well equipped to take care of you, my daughter Lucille here and I. We were out looking for a deer this morning when we ran into you. Mighty lucky if you ask me. You need any water or food?" I say.
He says "sure" and I hand him my canteen. He gulps and water drips from the corners of his mouth when we hear the distant sound of barking and howling.
The man jumps to his feet and stumbles again to the ground, his legs still weak and tense from his bout of hyperthermia. I tell him again to take it easy, that there are probably just a few coyotes out in the distance, but he still frantically tries to get up and run away.
That's when I hear the dogs again, this time louder and closer, and the sound of several men yelling and directing them.
The man must hear them too because he's staggering again to his feet. Just like a deer, I can tell he's paralyzed in the moments before fleeing.
Lucille and I remain motionless and silent as we try to decipher what is happening. The man's eyes see our guns leaned up against a pine tree behind us, opposite him and the fire. He attempts a sprint around the fire toward our weapons.
"No!" I yell. I snatch the man's ankles from my sitting position and he falls into the snow on his chest. Lucille lets out a blood curdling scream. I cling on top of the man's back to hold him down but he's strong, and continues crawling toward our guns. I can hear the yells of the men saying "I see him!," and they're getting much closer.
The stranger swings his elbow hard into my side and I feel the crack of a rib. I let out a squawk and fall off of his back into the snow. I knew what was coming next. He was on the run, and I thought for sure he was going to take the guns and hold Lucille hostage before the marshall could get him. I get to my hands and knees and look up to the man's back still stumbling toward the rifles.
"Stop!" I yell, getting up and running toward the man, but he stops me with another punch in the gut and I crumple.
I'm now laying on my broken ribs and watching the sideways man's legs reach the tree. Lucille is still screaming. I see him drop to his knees and throw the wool blanket off his shoulders and into the snow, revealing his bright orange jumpsuit and bare arms with nondescript tattoos. I guess he could have been a hunter. He reaches for Lucille's small Winchester. He grabs the bolt and loads a round into the chamber. "No," I grumble again, but he pays no attention.
The marshall is here now and yells "there!" and the native man quickly looks in that direction and then back to the rifle. He points the gun up toward the sky, puts the barrel in his mouth, and with his long, powerful arms, puts his thumb on the trigger and pulls.
Lucille is screaming but she sounds like she’s underwater. I can’t hear the thud of the man’s body hit the ground because my ears are ringing and my eyes are burning an image into my head. The marshall’s dogs are on the body, sniffing and drooling and biting. A man touches my shoulder and says something but I can’t hear him. I can’t hear anything. The ringing never stops.
Joe Cusick is a recent college graduate from the University of Montana with a B.A. in English Literature. Although he may never achieve his goal of writing like Harrison, McGuane or Proulx, Joe lives like a westerner through fly fishing for trout and hunting for wild game in his home state.
by Joe Cusick
Inspired by David Quammen's short story "Walking Out," Tracking" similarly uses the rustic imagery of hunting and the natural world. Like "Walking Out," this piece touches on the complexity and inherent trauma of parent-child relationships, as well as singular scarring events. "Tracking" pays homage to the interpersonal dynamics of "Walking Out," as well as Quammens ability to describe the outdoors, and the trepidation that comes with them.
As a boy, the passing highway reflectors used to remind me of shooting stars in the night sky, and dad's truck was like a spaceship entering the milky way. Now, the strobing lights just keep me in my path on late nights and early mornings.
I'm taking Lucille out for her first hunt this morning. She's 13 now, a year older than I was on my first. Her mom didn't really go for the idea, but she doesn't have full custody so I still have a say in what Lucille does on weekends, for now. At her age, I don't see anything wrong with learning the brutal and cyclical way of life. Hunting did this for me. Lucille may start to feel grateful for staying in my trailer if she learns how great it is to not sleep in a snowy field, waiting to fire a shot at a toothed animal that might want to take you.
I hear her stirring now behind the rumble of rubber on the highway and my stereo softly playing Gram Parsons. I glance toward the passenger seat, and she has her legs tucked underneath her rear while she's sitting, her cheek resting against the seatbelt. She yanked it hard to set the lock before going out cold. The truck's scent of coffee and blowing engine heat against the freezing November morning makes the cockpit feel like a worn in sleeping bag.
"How much longer now Dad?" She mumbles, still keeping her eyes closed and rolling her neck like a bird.
"About 30 minutes," I say, "Just go back to sleep, I'll nudge you when we get there."
The drive from our trailer in Clinton to the hunting spot outside of Deer Lodge isn't far and is all public. The huge chunk of land belongs to the state prison and I just assume use it if that's where my tax dollars are heading anyways. It's about an hour drive, but any time spent asleep in the car at five in the morning for a teenager is like a bullet train.
We're driving down the dirt road now and my wipers squeeze off large snowflakes that transform into droplets on the hot windshield. We bonk along a few potholes, and Lucille inhales a sharp breath to let me know she's awake.
"We're almost there now," I say.
She told me that she wanted to go, and it didn't take much persuasion. Lucille was always curious when it came to the idea of death. She hovered over my mom's casket at her funeral. She would take sticks and poke dead squirrels or birds that the cat dragged in. She wanted to know what it was like, to see something die, and she said that she wasn't afraid of the cold or bears either. I told her that was alright, and I was proud of her for being so willing.
I turn into an unassuming pull off in the road and announce, "We're here." I turn the key and we both sit silently listening to the soft crackling of the engine before gearing up.
Lucille carries her grandfather's short, bolt action 243 Winchester rifle with an oversized sling around her shoulder that needs constant readjusting. The gun leaves her small, thin body leaning on one side because of the weight. She mimics me as I thread my laces through the upper eyelets of my boots and then unfold my soft woolen pants over the laces. By the time I'm finished, she too looks ready to go.
Her brown hair hangs out of her tight black beanie and her smooth cheeks glow rosy and flush from the gusts of cold air. I can’t remember having skin like that. I’m old and leathery now, and my stubble protects my face from the cutting wind. I wear a cap with ear flaps, still speckled with paint from the job site. We both have a similar slender build and pale skin, but Luce ended up with her mother's dark eyes.
I hand Lucille her pack and she throws it over her shoulders with a soft grunt. I put mine on then load up the mag of my 270 caliber. She looks at me and I can tell she wants a loaded gun. I decide not to let her as we have a lot of walking ahead and I wouldn't want her to slip on the ice and make some kind of fatal, unforgivable mistake.
"Alright," I whisper, my soft voice setting the tone of stealth for the rest of the hunt. And without another word, we begin walking through the fresh powder snow.
My shins trudge through the deep snow and the rigorous movement of my legs sends beads of sweat down my temples. The sifting motion of walking in the snow causes large, coagulated chunks of ice to collect on my wool pants. Lucille follows behind in my path, chomping at my heels like a junkyard dog. The light of day is coming on fast, and the soft blending of white snow and sky create a disorienting environment of homogeneity.
And then we cut a track. A young deer, from this morning. Couldn't be more than a yearling at best. But Lucille was so excited I couldn't turn her off the trail.
"Yep, looks like we found one, Luce. You just stay behind me while I break trail. Keep your eyes peeled. It could be right up ahead."
She's tiptoeing behind me like Elmer Fudd for twenty minutes without a fleck of distraction before we cut another track, this one crossing the deer's. It is the track of a man. A footprint. I hadn't seen any other cars when we parked this morning, so I doubted it was another hunter. The tracks had less flakes on them than the deers, meaning they were even fresher, and there was no bootprint in the track. They were the shape of shoes without traction or soles. Just the smooth print of a shoe. And a large one. I stare at the track for a while.
"What is it," says Lucille. "Did we lose the deer?"
Puzzled, I take a few seconds to respond. I answer, "No, hun' that ain't it."
I pull her up beside me and show her the track. The track of a large footed, bootless man. Lucille is hasty to explain the track away and tells me that it must be another hunter, someone who parked nearby where we couldn't see. But where we pulled up this morning was the only parking I could remember for this spot.
Lucille is already twenty yards away, breaking trail behind the deer track and waddling through snow up to her lower thighs. I spin around slowly, glancing through the timber at the horizon to see if I can spot the culprit of the mysterious footprints, but find nothing. I catch up with Lucille.
It's not long before we reach the meadow. In the past, this is where I'd gotten lucky. I crouch and Luce follows in my footsteps. We enter a sheltered tree-well covered with large pine boughs and we sit on our packs in the indented snow. I pull up my binoculars and begin glassing the meadow, looking deep into the edges of the tree line, into the aspen brush for bedded deer, and at unassuming specks of fur standing out in the middle of the open snow. Lucille begins to look through the scope of her rifle but I take it from her and stick three rounds into the magazine.
"Be careful" I tell her, and carefully hand the rifle back.
We glass for probably 20 minutes when I spot the fluttering tails of three fleeing whitetail deer silently heading into the thick timber and brush across the meadow. "Fuck" I whisper under my breath, just quiet enough for Lucille not to understand what I said.
"What?! What?!," she says to me, at the maximum decibel to be considered a whisper.
"We lost them, must have winded us," I tell her. I'm not sure if she understands what that means, she only nods then hangs her head in disappointment.
I continue looking through my binoculars to see if perhaps we missed one, maybe there was a deer somewhere out in the open, frozen in fear and petrified in their state of flight. I don't see a deer, but I see the movement of brush and small swaying lodgepoles out of the bottom right corner of my binoculars. A large man stumbles out of the woods into the meadow. Even from two hundred and fifty yards I can see that he is shivering, cold and weary. Maybe he is a hunter. I can see the cuffs of his orange pants sticking out from below what looks like a large wool blanket wrapped around his upper extremities.
"I see.. .something," I try to tell Lucille calmly.
"What?! What?!" She says again. She begins to pull up her rifle to look through the scope into the brush but I slap the barrel down towards the ground and hand her the binoculars.
"It's a man," Lucille says, matter of factly. "He just fell."
She hands back the glass and I look again, and see the man's figure facedown in the deep snow. "Ehhhhhhhh," I grumble. "We better check it out.
We grab our things and walk out from the sheltered branches. In the meadow the wind pushes clouds of snow into our eyes, and I can see clumps of ice gathering in Lucille's lashes. When we get close to the man, probably within 20 feet, I let out a loud "hello!" and "hey there!" to see if he stirs, but he lies eerily still.
"C'mon dad, we have to help him," Lucille says, and I grumble again. Seems like trouble to run into a freezing man alone in the woods.
We approach his body. I bend over and give his shoulder a good shake to rouse him. Again, no movement. I reach under his chest and flip him over onto his back to get his face out of the snow. He is a large man, at least six foot and well over two hundred pounds. Lucille helps by flipping him over from his knees.
When I see his face I can already tell that he's cold. Very cold. He has specks of white on his nose and cheeks: frostbite. He is a native man, from what I can tell at least. He has a darker complexion and it wouldn't be unlikely to run into a Salish or Kootenai this near to Flathead Reservation up north. I even used to have a Salish neighbor. Her son was in and out of jail for fentanyl until she finally lost him to an overdose. Later, she lost her husband when they couldn’t keep paying for his insulin shots. After all this, she had wandered off drunk from her trailer, wailing and stumbling down the highway with the plastic bags and tumbleweeds. I haven’t heard of her since.
I tell Lucille to look away as I hold my hand up to his lips to feel for the warmth of his breath against my knuckles. Sure enough, he's still alive.
After a long pause, I say, "We have to move him," and I reach through the blanket under his armpits and begin pulling him toward the nearest timber. This way he's out of the wind and deeper, drifting snow.
I'm wet with sweat and down to my white undershirt by the time we reach a suitable tree to lean him up against. I cover him in a few of our extra layers. Lucille looks scared and I can see her eyes welling up with tears. She says again, "you have to help him."
"I'm trying," I say, under my breath.
I keep moving to stay warm and grab my kindling wrapped in a cloth from the bottom of my pack. I matte down some snow with my gloved hands and lay a few logs down as a barrier for the fire against the snow. Lucille helps by grabbing some dried pine boughs with red needles from beetle kill and we get a good fire going within ten minutes. Then we wait.
It's nearing 10am by the time we see any more life out of the man. He is sitting downwind of the fire, and he slowly opens his eyes against the billowing smoke. A look of confusion overtakes him, and I can tell he is unsure if he has passed into another life or is still dreaming.
He meets my gaze and his body jolts where he's sitting. "Easy," I tell him. "You were likely to freeze to death out there, we're just trying to help.
He sits still again, and turns his head, noticing Luce. She asks timidly, "are you okay?"
The man clears his throat and says “yes," in a deep, scratchy voice seasoned with bourbon and cigarettes. "Yes, I just got lost." He pauses for a long time. "I went looking for my dog last night after I let him out before bed. Still can't find him."
"Don't worry about that now," I say, "you were almost stiff and gone when we found ya."
There's another long pause and the man readjusts his position against the tree and crosses his arms tight around his large chest below the blanket cloak. I look down at his feet and see the smooth soles of his white slip on shoes.
"I take it, those are your bedtime slippers," I say, pointing at his feet. "Not the best footwear for romping around out in the cold."
"I didn't think I would be gone long," he says, "just got carried away, after my dog."
"Well we're well equipped to take care of you, my daughter Lucille here and I. We were out looking for a deer this morning when we ran into you. Mighty lucky if you ask me. You need any water or food?" I say.
He says "sure" and I hand him my canteen. He gulps and water drips from the corners of his mouth when we hear the distant sound of barking and howling.
The man jumps to his feet and stumbles again to the ground, his legs still weak and tense from his bout of hyperthermia. I tell him again to take it easy, that there are probably just a few coyotes out in the distance, but he still frantically tries to get up and run away.
That's when I hear the dogs again, this time louder and closer, and the sound of several men yelling and directing them.
The man must hear them too because he's staggering again to his feet. Just like a deer, I can tell he's paralyzed in the moments before fleeing.
Lucille and I remain motionless and silent as we try to decipher what is happening. The man's eyes see our guns leaned up against a pine tree behind us, opposite him and the fire. He attempts a sprint around the fire toward our weapons.
"No!" I yell. I snatch the man's ankles from my sitting position and he falls into the snow on his chest. Lucille lets out a blood curdling scream. I cling on top of the man's back to hold him down but he's strong, and continues crawling toward our guns. I can hear the yells of the men saying "I see him!," and they're getting much closer.
The stranger swings his elbow hard into my side and I feel the crack of a rib. I let out a squawk and fall off of his back into the snow. I knew what was coming next. He was on the run, and I thought for sure he was going to take the guns and hold Lucille hostage before the marshall could get him. I get to my hands and knees and look up to the man's back still stumbling toward the rifles.
"Stop!" I yell, getting up and running toward the man, but he stops me with another punch in the gut and I crumple.
I'm now laying on my broken ribs and watching the sideways man's legs reach the tree. Lucille is still screaming. I see him drop to his knees and throw the wool blanket off his shoulders and into the snow, revealing his bright orange jumpsuit and bare arms with nondescript tattoos. I guess he could have been a hunter. He reaches for Lucille's small Winchester. He grabs the bolt and loads a round into the chamber. "No," I grumble again, but he pays no attention.
The marshall is here now and yells "there!" and the native man quickly looks in that direction and then back to the rifle. He points the gun up toward the sky, puts the barrel in his mouth, and with his long, powerful arms, puts his thumb on the trigger and pulls.
Lucille is screaming but she sounds like she’s underwater. I can’t hear the thud of the man’s body hit the ground because my ears are ringing and my eyes are burning an image into my head. The marshall’s dogs are on the body, sniffing and drooling and biting. A man touches my shoulder and says something but I can’t hear him. I can’t hear anything. The ringing never stops.
Joe Cusick is a recent college graduate from the University of Montana with a B.A. in English Literature. Although he may never achieve his goal of writing like Harrison, McGuane or Proulx, Joe lives like a westerner through fly fishing for trout and hunting for wild game in his home state.