Once Upon a River Page 0,33

back legs as though trying to run. Margo took the army knife out of her pocket, unfolded the biggest blade, and sliced through the deer’s jugular, an act that took some strength. She folded up her knife with the blood still on it, wiped her hands on her jeans, and only then did her hands start shaking.

Margo sat down cross-legged beside the doe’s warm body, sick about what she’d done. She stroked the rough fur stretched across the cage of ribs as the body grew cool. After a while, she heard the approach of another deer. She remained still while it passed close to her and went down to the water. She watched it drink its fill, lift its head, and look around. She wondered how the deer could be completely unaware of the dead doe and of Margo when both were so near, not twelve yards away. The deer climbed the bank, and Margo was once again almost sure it was a buck. It paused and sniffed the bark of a wild apple tree and took interest in something. It pawed at the ground. It reared up and put its front hooves on the tree, so it was standing on its back legs, exposing its chest and balls. Then the buck nosed upward and bit at something in the crook of the tree. Margo fired her second slug into its heart. As the deer hit the ground, it seemed to sigh. From its mouth tumbled a gray bird, a mourning dove, with its dark eyes bulging and darting and then closing.

She suppressed a cry of surprise. She’d never seen or heard of a deer eating a bird. There was still more to learn about life along the river. She moved in and nudged the deer’s chest with her foot to make sure it was dead, and a flurry erupted beside her as the dove woke up and launched itself into the air.

Margo had to sit still for a while and survey the mess she’d made. After killing the doe, she should have unloaded the shotgun. She was hunting out of season, so killing either deer was already a crime. She promised herself if she ever killed a doe in the future, she would gut it and skin it, same as a buck. She ate female rabbits and squirrels all the time. But not this time, not this doe. She covered its body with leafless branches, frozen leaves, and snow and hoped no one would come upon it. She rolled the buck over onto the big sled and pulled it slowly upstream, over the snow.

By the time Brian got home, after he’d had a few beers at The Pub in Heart of Pines, Margo had dressed out the deer on a vinyl tarp and deposited the guts in the river, hoping they would float away.

At first Brian seemed shocked to find her with a deer out of sea-son, but he produced a hacksaw and helped her take off the legs. They tied a rope around its neck and strung it up in a tree behind the

house, out of sight of passing boats. He offered to help her skin the thing and seemed glad when she declined his offer. He sat on a stump, sipping from a half-pint bottle, while she worked. He told her a story about his buddy skinning a deer by tying up a golf ball inside the

deer’s skin between the shoulders and making a knob out of it. Then his buddy tied a rope around the knob, tied it to a four-wheel-drive truck, and drove slowly.

“Hide peels right off in a minute,” Brian said. “You wouldn’t believe it. Wish I could show you.”

“Did you ever hear about a deer eating a bird?” she asked.

“I’ve seen a deer eat a fish. Paul said I was crazy, but I know what I saw.”

She nodded.

“It was when we was kids, and I’d caught some carp nobody wanted to eat, and I dumped them in my ma’s garden. I’ll be damned if I didn’t look out my window that night and see a deer eating them.”

“Why would it eat fish?”

“I don’t know. Protein? Calcium? Because it tastes good? Same reason we eat fish.”

“How about a bird?”

“I haven’t heard of that.”

Margo liked having something new to wonder about, how or why one deer might need something different than what the others needed. More happened in this world than a person would come up with on her own. When she was finished skinning