The Marsh King's Daughter(28)

I pulled off my mittens and dropped them in the snow, then clicked off the safety and slid my finger through the trigger. I could feel my father watching. In my head I heard his instructions: Keep your elbows down. Put your support hand farther forward on the forestock; it will give you better control. Watch carefully. Always follow up on any deer you take a shot at. Never assume you missed completely. I held my breath and squeezed. The gun exploded against my shoulder. It hurt, but no more than when my father hit me. I kept my eyes on my buck as the herd scattered. A heart or a lung shot will make the deer jump and run off at full speed. A gut-shot deer holds its tail down and hunches its back as it runs away. My deer did neither. My shot was clean.

“Come.” My father got to his feet and stepped to the side so I could take the lead. I broke trail through snow higher than my knees until we came to the carcass. The buck’s eyes were open. Blood ran down its neck. Its tongue hung out the side of its mouth. My buck didn’t have horns, but this time of year, I didn’t expect him to. His belly was huge, and that’s what was important.

Then the buck’s belly moved. Not a lot. Just a ripple or a shiver, like when my father and mother rolled around under the bedcovers. At first I thought the deer wasn’t dead. Then I remembered that anaconda swallow their prey whole while it’s still alive and you can sometimes see the prey moving inside. But deer didn’t eat meat. It was a puzzle.

“Hold the legs.” My father rolled my buck onto its back. I moved to the rear and took one leg in each hand to keep the buck steady. My father slid his knife carefully through the white belly fur and opened the buck’s stomach. As the slit widened, a tiny hoof appeared, and then another, and then I understood that the deer I had shot wasn’t a buck at all. My father lifted the fawn from the doe’s belly and laid it in the snow. The fawn must have been close to being born, because when my father cut the birth sack, the fawn thrashed and kicked like it wanted to stand.

My father pressed the fawn into the snow and exposed its neck. I pulled out my knife, remembering to stay to the side so the blood sprayed away from me and not toward. As my father field-dressed the doe, I followed his instructions with the fawn: “Find the sternum. Feel for the place where the breastbone ends and the belly begins. Okay, now cut the belly from the sternum to the crotch. Take it slow. You want your knife to penetrate the hide and the membrane beneath it, but not to pierce the guts. Good. Now pull the guts out like this, starting from the crotch and working your way up, cutting the membranes that link the innards to the spine as you go. Now cut the skin around the anus and pull the colon out of the body cavity. Good. Okay. That’s it, you’re done.”

We cleaned our hands and knives in the snow. I dried my hands on my jacket and pulled on my mittens and looked down proudly at my gutted fawn. The fawn was too small for more than one or two meals, but the hide looked big enough for my mother to make me a pair of spotted mittens.

My father heaped the steaming entrails into a pile as aandeg and his friends waited noisily in the trees for us to leave. He lifted my doe easily across his shoulders. I did the same with my fawn. The fawn was so small and light, as I followed my father back to our cabin, it felt like nothing at all.

—

OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL WEEKS, my mother worked on my mittens. There was a lot of stretching and rubbing and pulling involved. Native women used to chew the skins to soften them, but my mother’s teeth weren’t that good. My mother rubbed the fawn’s hide back and forth, back and forth over the top knob of one of our wooden kitchen chairs, going over and over a small section until it was soft and then moving on to the next.

My father tanned the skin with the hair on because a fawn’s spots don’t go all the way down. He used the fawn’s brains for tanning. We could have tanned our hides the Indian way by weighting them down with rocks in a cold stream and letting the force of the water and time loosen the hair. But we weren’t going to eat the brains anyway, and this way they didn’t go to waste. Each animal’s brain is just the right size to tan its hide, my father said, which told me the Great Spirit really knows what he’s doing. After you scraped off every bit of flesh from the hide, you cooked the deer’s brains with an equal amount of water and mashed them into an oily liquid. Then you spread your hide on the ground or on the floor with the skin side up and slopped half the brain mixture on. The trick was making sure the hide had just the right amount of moisture after it finished soaking. If the hide was too dry, the brains wouldn’t penetrate the skin. But if it was too wet, there wouldn’t be any place for the brains to go. When you finished, you rolled up the hide and left it overnight in a place where animals couldn’t get to it, and the next day, you unrolled it and did the same thing again. Once the brains finished working and you scraped off all the hair and washed the hide, the next step was to soften the skin, which was where my mother came in.

I realize I haven’t said much till now about my mother. It’s hard to know what I should say. Aside from wondering what she was going to fix for dinner when I came home hungry from my wanderings, growing up I honestly didn’t give her much thought. She was just there, hovering in the background, doing the job nature assigned to her by way of procreation by keeping me clothed and fed. I know she didn’t get the life she deserved or wanted, but I don’t think living in the marsh was as bad as she liked to claim. There had to have been times when she was happy. I’m not talking random, fleeting moments, like when the family of baby skunks that crossed our yard every evening during the spring made her smile. I’m talking times when she was well and truly happy. When she could step outside of herself and look down objectively as if from above and think, Yes, I like this. Right here, right now. This is good.