Rancher places a hand on Exorcist’s shoulder. “Fighting won’t accomplish nothing,” he says. “Come on.”
“You are mistaken,” says Exorcist slowly, leaning in even closer to Waitress, “if you think I will forget this.” A wisp of wind blows one of Waitress’s curls forward to brush his chest. “Nor will I forgive. I am a godly man, and my God is one of wrath.” He spits onto the ground, the glob landing next to Waitress’s sneaker, then pivots and walks away.
“Psycho,” whispers Waitress, but it’s clear she’s shaken.
At the stream, Banker calls, “I think I found a track.” Black Doctor hustles over to see. It’s the same hoofprint that Tracker showed Zoo, and Zoo’s footprint is etched softly in the dirt a few inches away.
Carpenter Chick and Engineer are the next to reach the second Clue, but Air Force and Biology are not far behind—when they spy the boulder, the other team is still standing beside it. It’s an awkward moment; the contestants don’t know if they should acknowledge one another or not. The editor takes this awkwardness and spins it into mutually disdainful silence.
Air Force sees the first hoofprint and is caught in indecision. He doesn’t want to give the direction away to the other team, but every second spent pondering how to gain an advantage over Carpenter Chick and Engineer is an additional second separating him and Biology from the two teams ahead. He decides that is the greater concern and calls to his partner. Carpenter Chick jerks her head toward him like a scent hound.
Soon all four contestants are moving north, Air Force and Biology in the lead by about ten feet.
“It crossed here,” says Tracker, upstream.
Zoo is about to ask how he knows, then decides to try to figure it out for herself. She squats by the grassy bank. She doesn’t see any sign of the prey they’re following, but notices that the stream is shallower here, that they are at what appears to be a natural crossing.
Then she sees it: fresh scrabble marks in the far bank, the mud there rich and overturned. “The far bank,” she says.
Tracker feels something he hadn’t expected to feel: pride. He’s proud of his verbose and jolly teammate, for not asking him for help, for finding the sign—the most obvious sign, at least—for herself. “There’s also this rock here,” he says, pointing to a small round stone that’s been kicked up from the streambed and lies atop a bigger rock, breaching the water’s surface.
“Oh, yeah,” says Zoo. “It kind of looks like a cairn.”
A cairn is exactly what the small rock centered on top of the larger rock is meant to be, albeit a shorter, more subtle one than would usually be constructed. The Expert built it to draw the eye.
Zoo and Tracker cross the stream. Zoo leaves several dirty tread marks on stone, which she notices, but Tracker’s already moving on and she follows. The trail is obvious from here, matted grass and snapped brush. They follow it toward a copse of birches. A wooden box hangs from the closest tree.
Tracker opens the hanging box. The inside of the lid has HUNGRY? painted across it.
“Yes,” chirps Zoo. “Yes, I am.” She and Tracker peer inside.
The box contains five circular tokens hanging on pegs. Each token features a different etching: a deer, a rabbit, a squirrel, a duck, and a turkey.
“What do you think?” says Zoo. “Deer?”
“That’s what we’ve supposedly been following,” says Tracker, which she takes as assent. Zoo extracts the token. It’s the size of her palm and made of birch. She flips the token over. On the back is a bearing: nineteen degrees. She sets her compass.
Banker and Black Doctor have nearly passed the crossing when Black Doctor says, “Hey, are those footprints?” Banker slips and leaves a tear in the far bank. With each crossing, the path becomes more obvious.
The trees around Zoo and Tracker thicken, then thin, and then they see it: a doe, hanging from her hind legs in a tree. Her tongue lolls from her mouth about two feet off the ground. Next to the dead doe is a tarp with a bucket and cast-iron skillet on top of it, as well as a small box with an etching of a deer and a token-sized slot.
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.”