The Only Good Indians(20)

“And that’s when it started snowing heavy,” Lewis tells Shaney, touching his face with his fingertips like feeling those cold dabs again.

She doesn’t say anything, is just watching, soaking all this in. Not because she wants to know, Lewis doesn’t think, but … is it more like she knows he needs to say it? To have told someone, at least?

“Old-time buffalo jump!” Gabe called out then, and he vaulted right the hell off the ledge, slid on his ass down into that jumble of dead and dying elk.

Lewis and Ricky and Cass picked their way down after him, unsheathed saws and knives, and got to work. Inside of five minutes it was clear this was going to be a haunches-only affair—already big wet flakes were finding their way into the red body cavities, dissolving instantly against that steamy heat. But pretty soon the flakes were going to start winning that little war, no longer melting but piling up, making these carcasses look like giant stuffed animals slit open, all their batting leaking out.

Gabe and Cass doubled up on the one bull that fell, trying to keep his cape intact, since Gabe knew a back-alley taxidermy guy who’d do a mount for meat, so long as he picked the cuts. Ricky was on a monologue about how this Thursday, Thanksgiving, was going to be an Indian holiday this year, with the four of them bringing in a haul like this.

“Thanksgiving Classic,” Gabe said, giving what just happened a proper name.

Cass whooped once, setting that name in place.

Lewis whipped his hand over his head about the cow he’d just dressed out in record time—it’s a rodeo thing, is deep in his DNA—and moved on to the next, the young cow, but when he dropped to his knees to make that first cut from her pelvis to her sternum, she found her front legs, tried to climb up out of the snow.

Lewis fell back, called over to Cass for a rifle. He never once looked away from this young elk, though. Her eyes, they were—don’t elk usually have brown eyes? Hers were more yellow, almost, branching into hazel at the edges.

Maybe it was because she was terrified, because she didn’t understand what was happening. Just that it hurt.

The shot that brought her down had caught her midway through the back, from the top, and taken her spine out. So her rear legs were dead, and her insides were going to be a mess as well.

“Whoah, whoah,” Lewis said to her, feeling more than seeing Cass’s rifle plunk into the snow just short of his right leg. He felt down for it, that young elk still struggling, blowing red mist from her nostrils, her eyes so big, so deep, so shiny.

“And I couldn’t find a shell,” Lewis says to Shaney. “I thought I was out, that I’d used my last up by the truck, when everything was crazy.”

“But you had one,” Shaney tells him.

“Two,” Lewis says back, looking down at his hands.

This close he didn’t need the scope or a sight.

“Sorry, girl,” he said, and, careful of his swelling-up eye, lined the barrel up, pulled the trigger.

The sound was massive, rolling up the slope and then crashing back down.

The young elk’s head flopped back like it was on a hinge, and she sank into the snow.

“Sorry,” Lewis said again, quieter, so Cass couldn’t hear.

But it was just hunting, he told himself. It was just bad luck for the elk. They should have bedded down with the wind in their favor. They should have pushed through to some section the hunters didn’t have access to—that trucks can’t get to, anyway.

After the shot, Lewis looked behind him for some buckbrush or something to hang the rifle from, but then a sound brought him back to the young elk.

The sound was the crust of snow, crunching.

She was staring at him again. Not dead. Her breath was raspy and uneven, but it was definitely there, somehow, when no way should it have been. Not after having her back broken, half her head blown to mist.

Lewis took a long and involuntary step back and fell, jammed the butt of the rifle down just ahead of his ass so he could be sure where the barrel was going to be, because he didn’t want it driving up under his head, trying to separate his jaw from his face.

She was trying to stand again was the thing, never mind that the top of her head was missing, that her back was broken, that she should be dead, that she had to be dead.

“What the hell?” Cass called over. “My rifle’s not that off, man.”

He laughed, leaned back down into the big cow he was insisting was his. Lewis had his right leg straight out in the snow, was feeling in all his pockets for one more shell, please.

He found it, ran it into the chamber, working the bolt back and forward to be sure the cartridge seated right. This time, talking to the young elk the whole while, promising her that he was going to use every bit of her if she would just please die, he nestled the barrel right against her face, so the bullet would come out the lower back of her skull, plow into her back where she’d already been shot once.

Her one yellow eye was still watching him, the right one haywire, the pupil blown wide, looking somewhere else, someplace he couldn’t see without turning around.

“So that’s where I put the barrel this time,” Lewis says to Shaney. “I figured—I don’t know. That first shot must have glanced off her skull, right? Looked worse than it was. So this time I didn’t want to give it any chance to bounce off. The eye could be like a tunnel in—into her.”