Cloven Hooves. Megan Lindholm

The icy air condenses as it flows into the room, making great ghost fogs that venture a short way into the house before disintegrating. He shuts the door quickly behind him but not before I have slipped out. He does not notice me, or he ignores me; it doesn’t matter which, it amounts to the same thing. I shadow him as he steps from the porch.

      With night has come a greater cold. It is a cold that freezes the tiny hairs inside my nose, that makes my eyelashes stick together for a fraction of an instant when I blink my eyes. I push my muffler up over my nose and mouth to shelter my lungs from the icy air, and try to resist the temptation to lick my dry lips. All moisture has been frozen from the air, and the snow is a dry dust that creaks under my father’s weight as he makes his way across the yard. We move slowly, drifting in the night like bodiless shadows, not stalking the moose, but moving easily and quietly in the darkness.

      The old bull lifts his head. A frozen cabbage leaf dangles from his pendulous lips. He alone watches us, his ears cupping toward us like petitioning hands. He gives no sign of alarm, issues no warning snort. He only watches. I wonder if he knows what is to come.

      My father stops and I halt behind him. We stand silently. He doesn’t turn to look at me, but proffers the six-cell flashlight he has been carrying. “Put the spot right behind his ear,” he says. I nod as I take the flashlight, but he doesn’t see me.

      He doesn’t need to turn and watch me nod to know I will obey. He is my father. He rules this night. He is the one who knows where to send the bullet to drop the moose. On other nights, he has stood in this yard and shown me the constellations. He has shown me Sputnik winking by, and told me that if I want it badly enough, I can go to the moon someday. He believes this of me, that I can do anything I want, if I want to do it badly enough. It is both terrifying and uplifting to have someone believe in you so. I point the flashlight at the young bull we have chosen. I watch my father lift his rifle to his shoulder. When he is ready, he makes a tiny move that is less than a nod. I push the button on the flashlight.

      The light explodes, bursting the moose into reality. The shadowy shape leaps into detail, frosted whiskers drooping from his muzzle, shaggy hair on his neck, a great fringed ear, a single lambent eye capturing my light. In less than a breath, the rifle explodes beside me, and the moose falls, dropping from my circle of light into death and darkness.

      It is done.

      I click off the light. We stand in the darkness together, my father and I, looking at the thing we have done.

      Animals are put together so neatly, almost as if they were intended to be taken apart. Interior organs packed together like a Chinese wood puzzle, awaiting the human hand, bared to winter but warm with fresh blood as it snakes in to lift the liver up, free it with a swipe of the knife. I put the liver in the bowl that is nestled in the snow, and surreptitiously take a lick from the knife. Electric. Fresh blood is electric on the tongue, like sparks snapping inside my mouth. It warms me, almost. An hour has passed since the shot, and I have not been inside. My toes are wooden inside my mukluks. I should have worn more socks.

      My father’s flashlight finds me. “Did you get the heart and liver?” he asks, and I nod briefly toward the heavy bowl. He tosses the tongue he has just freed, and I catch it deftly in the bowl. I rise with it and start toward the house. “Take the knives,” my father tells me. “They need sharpening again.” They lie in a row on the packed snow beside the body, and I stoop awkwardly to gather them. Their metal blades are cold, and one sticks painfully to my bared fingers.

      I am halfway to the house when Sissy reaches me. She comes from the warmth and light, and I can tell she still has her hair curlers in under the woolen knit cap she wears. “I’ll take them,” she tells me eagerly, and I let her. She would rather take the gut meat into the house, rather sit by the table with the oil and stone and put the edges back on the knives, than crouch in the darkness by the fallen moose, rendering it into meat. I do not understand her.

      I think about it as my father and I work to break the moose up into smaller pieces. Some of it is hatchet and ax work, some of it is for the meat saw. Head off, front quarters, hindquarters, backstrap, neck. My sisters are sickened by this work. They flee the great darks and the heavy cold of the night, they shun the bright blood and the musky smell of just downed meat. Even my father does this work grudgingly, thinking of getting up at six tomorrow to go to work, wondering if we will be caught poaching, cursing when the heavy head refuses to come free of the neck section. None of them feel it the way I do.

      They can no more understand what I feel than I can comprehend their feelings. I know what they think. They feel debased by this confrontation. Meat from the store in cardboard trays wrapped in plastic, meat with tidy price stickers and labels, that meat is food, is flank steak, chuck roast, ground round. None of it is labeled, “Cut from the shoulder of a large dead animal in a snowy field at night.” There is nothing to remind them that the hide was pulled away from the flesh while it was still warm, and the steam rose into the night to the greedy waiting stars. They do not want to remember they are predators, carnivores. They’d rather eat the flabby muscles of an animal raised hock-deep in its own shit, castrated and injected and inspected, a smack in the head to fell it, a large white room to chill it, humming machines to cut it into neat slices. De-animalized meat. The thought disgusts me, as they are disgusted when they think of their sister putting her knife to the dead flesh of an animal, kneeling on it as she pushes the blade into the dead flesh. Once the guts are out of the way, the hindquarters are separated from the rest of the animal at the place where the ribs stop and only the spine connects. We hurry, hacking at it with knives and saw and hatchet, trying to ruin as little steak as possible. Then the hindquarters are spread, to reveal the inner side of the backbone, and we work down it with a hatchet, and then knives, cleaving it into the separate legs.

      “You done?” my father asks, and when I nod he takes a grip on one hindquarter and heaves it up. I help, guiding more than lifting, and the leg is dumped onto a piece of polyethylene sheeting. I am obscurely shamed that I could not lift the moose quarter by myself, and so I am determined that I will at least ferry it to the garage on my own. There my father will tie a piece of yellow nylon rope to it, piercing through the leg between the bone and the long tendon, and hoist it up to the rafters and let it sullenly drip blood for four or five days. Bleeding the meat, this is called, and it is important, for otherwise the meat will be tough and taste gamey. But for now my father has turned back to his butchering, is using the hatchet to chop through the vertebrae. A tiny fragment of splintered bone flies up to sting my cheek. It reminds me of what I am supposed to be doing.

      The piece of black polyethylene is the size of a bed sheet. I turn my back to it, grip two corners of it, and bring the corners up over my shoulders like a harness. The moose leg is heavy, but the polyethylene is slick against the snow. Once I have it moving, it glides along over the snow behind me. When we reach the packed snow of the driveway, it moves even more easily. I roll the leg off the sheeting onto clean snow by the garage, and run back for another load.

      Before midnight, all the meat is hung. My father and I contemplate it. It swings slowly, eerily, with gentle creakings. The garage is unheated, but it leeches enough heat from the house that it stays just above freezing. The slow patterning of blood drips will continue to speckle the concrete floor. We nod in satisfaction, and my father slowly tamps tobacco into his pipe. He lights it, sucks it noisily to life, and then turns away from the moose. I pull the string that turns out the light. We step out of the garage into the night, and he reaches up to pull the heavy door down. We are in the blackness of night again.

      My father’s streamer of pipe smoke rises up, like the steam from the moose’s exposed entrails. He has shoveled snow over the gut sack to hide it. By morning it will have frozen solid. The dogs will dig down to it, and spend weeks nibbling and licking at the frozen delight until it is gone. There remains only the head. We both know that.

      “Get rid of the head,” my father says simply, and turns toward the house. I watch him go. The windows of the house are warm and yellow. I know that by now my brothers and younger sisters are in bed, probably my older sisters as well. The skin of my face is so cold, it feels like a stiff cardboard mask. I can move my toes, pressing them down hard against my mukluk soles, and awaken them to pain. The moisture of my breath has frozen into a solid cake of frost