The Last One(44)
Though she’s seen many dead animals, Zoo’s never seen a deer strung up like this. “Its eyes look like marbles,” she says as she deposits the token.
“Looks like dinner to me,” says Tracker.
“You know how to dress it?”
Tracker nods. Intellectually, Zoo is interested in learning how to skin and gut an animal, but her stomach churns at the thought of getting all that gore on her hands. She wants to eat the doe; she doesn’t want to be the one to butcher it. And despite her good cheer, she’s exhausted. All she really wants to do right now is sit with her back against a nice, straight tree and close her eyes. “I’ll collect some wood and start a fire,” she says, tapping the fire starter that hangs from her hip.
“Not here,” says Tracker. He already has his knife out.
“Why not?”
“The blood and offal might draw in predators. Cut back toward the stream and find a site with easy access to water.”
Zoo won the Solo Challenge and she’s the one who chose him; shouldn’t that make her the leader? And yet she turns away and does exactly as he says. Before viewers see her walk off, they’ll see a clip from that night’s confessional. “Cooper is obviously very experienced,” she says, adjusting her glasses. Sweat has plastered a clump of hair to her forehead, and countless flyaways frame her face. “There’s no way I’d be in the lead right now without him. Plus, I think he’s just a bit of a stoic. No wasted movement, no wasted words, you know? I admire that, I could stand to be more like that. I’ve already learned a lot from him. If my choice is between keeping my mouth shut, doing what he says, and learning more, or”—she briefly employs air quotes—“?‘standing up for myself,’ you better believe I’m going to keep my mouth shut.” She laughs. “Which doesn’t come easy.”
Tracker makes his first cut at eye level, approximately an inch away from the doe’s anus. He saws a circle, then with his free hand pulls out the rectum, which he ties shut with a piece of string from inside the bucket. Off camera, the Expert has appeared. He was politely rebuffed upon offering advice, and sees now that Tracker indeed does not need his help. He stays and watches, however, since he’s being paid to be here and the next team isn’t yet close.
Tracker ties off the doe’s urethra, then cuts a long line through her hide, end-to-end. Before he digs out the first organ, his cameraman prods him to speak with “You’ve got to narrate some of this, buddy.”
Tracker pauses, his knife pressing up on the doe’s skin from her insides. “You need to be careful not to contaminate the meat,” he says, resuming his work. “That’s why I tied off the anus and urethra and that’s why I was so careful to avoid piercing the stomach. Now I’m going to sever the animal’s windpipe.” Tracker crouches by the doe’s head and reaches deep inside. When he withdraws his hands, they’re thickly red and holding not only a windpipe, but the deer’s heart and lungs. He drops the organs into the bucket and then pauses and turns to the camera. “Watch this,” he says. He reaches back into the bucket and pulls out the pink lungs, which hang limply from his hands. Then he lifts the severed windpipe to his lips and blows into it. Nearly every of the millions of viewers who watch this moment will recoil as the lungs inflate, quickly and hugely, like balloons. Balloons that curve into angularity and are netted with tiny blood vessels. Tracker pinches the windpipe closed and holds the inflated lungs away from his body. There is blood on his lips and his torso is eclipsed by the two pink lobes, which looked so small a moment ago. It is immediately clear that deer lungs could never fit inside a human rib cage.
Tracker lets the lungs deflate, then stands still for a moment, thinking about when he first saw someone do what he just did. He was eighteen, taking a three-week wilderness survival course after graduating from high school. His eight-person group had just slaughtered and skinned a ram under the guidance of their instructor, who then took the lead in gutting, narrating her actions as she made them. Then, with utter nonchalance, the tiny, athletic, black-haired white woman lifted the lungs to her mouth and blew. That was the moment when everything changed for Tracker, when he knew: We’re all meat. Before that trip, he was on course for a very different life; he had vague thoughts about becoming an accountant or maybe going into IT. But a combination of having consumed fewer than one thousand calories over the previous four days, physical exhaustion, and realizing his own mortality made him determined to change all that. And though it would take him years to obtain proficiency, he fulfilled the ultimate human dream of figuring out exactly who he was meant to be. Unfortunately for Tracker, who he’s meant to be isn’t paid well and he has a cancer-ridden mother to care for. Staggering hospital bills have brought him here; this is his because that will never be shared. He turns back to the hanging carcass and carefully withdraws its bulging stomach.
Black Doctor and Banker reach the box. They choose the duck. “It’s like chicken, but richer,” says Banker.
“I know what duck tastes like,” Black Doctor replies.
They follow the direction indicated on the back of their token and find a mallard hanging from a tree. Black Doctor takes the lead in plucking and gutting the bird; he may not have a surgeon’s hands, but he dissected a cadaver in medical school. Between that long-ago experience and the Expert’s off-camera guidance, he does just fine.