Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [109]
In every creature’s death is the promise of your own. Kip hadn’t thought of that for decades. It was a truth back in the midfifties, when his father uttered the tenet, and it was still truth today. That the thought, simple enough in its wisdom, had been spoken by a man deeply involved in the production of apparatus that promised death didn’t preclude its veracity. To the contrary. Mr. Calder had known whereof he spoke. Walking along this hot sandy road, blinded by the light, his son remembered what had prompted those words.
The buck was already dead. Young Kip and Brice had found him down in Bayo Canyon, big muledeer with an eight-point rack, as Kip recalled, which made him about half their age at the time.
—What do you suppose got him? I don’t see any wound.
The beast had bled from its nostrils, and a thick dusty tongue protruded inelegantly over its teeth. Flies walked it and hovered in a feverish cloud above the carcass. Late morning.
—Heart attack, maybe, answered Kip.
—Deer don’t get heart attacks.
—You know nothing, boy.
Brice countered, —Do too, boy.
—Anything that’s got a heart can get a heart attack, okay?
—Maybe there’s something on the other side.
Together they rolled the deer over from left to right, Brice wrenching its hind legs and Kip the forelegs. The animal must not have been dead all that long, since there was still some flex and play in its limbs. The flies rose and scattered, then returned. No sign of any injury, though the boys noticed a bald patch along its tawny flank.
—What’s that?
Kip shrugged.
—Maybe it ate something, a rotten buffalo gourd or something.
—Buffalo gourd wouldn’t kill a buck and it won’t make one bald, either.
—But I mean something like that.
The two kids stood sentinel over the body, silent for a time. A lone hawk voyaged a broad thermal some thousand feet overhead. Kip remembered it had been one drought of a day, hot and mute but for the nazzing of flies, summer’s end then as it was now. He’d walked away into the shade of a squat black ponderosa whose top had been lobbed off by a lightning strike, then returned, breaking the silence.
—I got an idea.
—Count me out, said Brice.
—You don’t even know what it is.
—Whenever you get ideas about things like this, they never turn out good.
—Chickenshit.
—Like I say, count me out.
—Listen, it’s already dead, isn’t it? So there’s nothing we can do to change that, am I right?
—So then what?
Kip lowered his voice. —You know how they have those trophy heads up in Fuller Lodge?
—Forget it.
—Well, why not? Look how handsome he is.
—I don’t think dead deer heads should be on people’s walls.
—Where should they be? Out here where coydogs and buzzards and flies eat them?
—We ought to bury him is what we ought to do.
Kip laughed. —You know how long it’d take us to dig a hole big enough to bury this guy? Forget that. My dad’s got a hacksaw. We’ll come back down before dinner and cut off the head about here. Bleed it in that tree a couple days, scoop out the guts and stuff. We get us a piece of ply over where they’re building that addition on the middle school and saw out an oval for the mount—
—You got it all figured out.
—You with me?
—I already told you.
Without glancing at the corpse again, they began walking west up the canyon trail toward the Hill. After lunch, Brice accompanied Kip to the construction site, where they rummaged a piece of wood from the scrap pile, then returned to the spot where they’d discovered the deer. Several black crows winged away downcanyon from perches on the buck’s cadaver, and the cloud of flies had thickened.
—Get, go on! Kip shouted, running ahead of Brice.
Kip’s friend remained reluctant to participate. Over a peanut butter and chokeberry jam sandwich, he’d asked his mother about those heads over at the lodge, and how they stuffed them.
—Why do you ask?
—No reason.
—What’re you boys up to? she’d answered