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.
Tracker walks into Zoo’s small camp carrying the bucket and the cast-iron skillet. His hands and wrists are covered in drying blood, which lends his dark skin a matte coating but is otherwise hard to distinguish—until his palms are exposed. Normally a soft peach color, his red-brown palms cry of slaughter. Zoo is tending their fire and is unfazed. But she has a thought: If Tracker were white, would the starker blood-to-skin-color contrast bother her more? She suspects that it might.
“How’d it go?” she asks.
“We have tenderloin for dinner,” Tracker replies.
“Awesome.” Zoo takes the heavy skillet and turns back to the fire. “I’ll start cooking if you want to clean up. I—”
“Thank you,” says Tracker.
A jolt like electricity runs through Zoo. She pauses, skillet in hand, and listens as Tracker walks away.
When he returns from the stream, Tracker’s hands are clean and his lips loose. “There are a couple of things you should know about tracking,” he says. The meat sizzles in the pan, crisping in a thick layer of fat that Zoo melted like butter. “The first is that you need to start with the big picture. Don’t look for a footprint, look for a trail. It’s easy to get lost at the micro level when all you need to do is take a step back. An animal or person moving through the woods might not always leave a track, but they’ll always leave a trail. Overturned leaves, snapped branches—things like that. Anything recently disturbed will have a different color or texture from what’s around it. You need to train your eye to look for these macro differences. For example, scan where I came from. Can you see my path?”
Zoo turns to look. She’s squinting.
Tracker admits via confessional, “I’ve had many great teachers in my life. I’m honoring them by helping her. Besides, even if she gets better, she’ll never match me. Not in time to win.” Zoo’s husband will watch this scene and think, She’s done it again, eased some crotchety bastard out of his shell. He will marvel, as he has marveled before, at how easily she can win over anybody.
Tracker says to Zoo, “Don’t look, scan. And if you don’t see anything, change your perspective—go high or low. Watch for changes in the light.”
Zoo widens her eyes and drifts her gaze along the forest. She stands. She remembers approximately where he walked, but is trying not to rely on memory. “There?” she says, pointing. “The leaf litter looks a little different there.”
“Exactly,” says Tracker. “I walked heavy, to make it clearer. Also, I followed your trail. Most animal trails won’t be so pronounced, but this is a good place to start.”
“That was you walking heavy?” asks Zoo.
Tracker surprises them both with a laugh. “The shoes help,” he says, picking up a foot and wiggling his toes. And then—this isn’t why he’s here—his face falls to neutral. “We’re losing light. I’m going to put this in the water to keep it from spoiling.” He takes the bucket, which still contains several pounds of muscle and fat, and turns away.
“How do you make sure nothing gets it?” asks Zoo.
Tracker pauses. “I’ll cover it with a flat rock. That should be enough to deter most animals.”
After he walks off, Zoo says to the camera, “I don’t know what’s gotten into him, but I like it.”
The next two teams to reach the wooden box do so in close succession. Air Force is the first to see it, and at his urging Biology races ahead before Engineer and Carpenter Chick notice. She chooses the rabbit, then jogs back over to her partner.
“Turkey?” asks Carpenter Chick seconds later.
“Yeah,” says Engineer, “that’s got a lot more meat than a squirrel.” The teams separate and find their prey. With guidance, they prepare their meals and shelters. The sun has nearly set.
The trio is still a mile from the boulder. Exorcist is fuming. He feels unappreciated and spiteful. Waitress is glaring hatred at the back of his head, and Rancher is striding along, wary of the both of them. Anger makes Exorcist careless. He trips over a rock and falls to the ground.
“Motherfucker!” he yells. The expletive is easily censored, but his rage cannot be. Waitress and Rancher recoil, and many viewers will do the same.
Exorcist pulls himself up on one knee and waits, head hanging. His shoulders pulse. He can feel his monstrous self trying to break free. He knows he can’t let it. If he does, he’ll lose control, and he’s done terrible things after losing control.
He used to have a wife. Young love: They married at nineteen. Life did not go as planned, and Exorcist’s inner monster grew fat on disappointment. One night, his wife complained about money and Exorcist lost control. He struck her, hard, with a closed fist, fracturing his fourth metacarpal and knocking his wife out cold. He remembers watching her head snap back, and how her blond hair whipped like a fan, and then her collapsing to the carpet, where she lay, unmoving, among a month’s worth of crumbs and cat hair. Her stillness—he thought she was dead. She came to, and left him that night. The blood vessels in her left eye had burst. The last look she ever gave him haunts him still; it was as though Satan himself was reflected in that bloody eye.
The producers know nothing about this incident. Exorcist’s ex-wife didn’t press charges, so there was no criminal record for them to find. But at least one person who will watch this moment knows of it; she lived it. The ex-wife will watch Exorcist’s explosive crouch and think, Oh, no. And when Exorcist leaps to his feet, whirls to face Waitress, and sneers, “Stupid bitch,” she will feel Waitress’s fear as her own. “Run, honey,” she will plead, but where her own instincts tend toward flight, Waitress’s are to fight. Waitress rears to slap Exorcist, but Rancher grabs her in a bear hug and pulls her back.
“Let me go!” Waitress yells, kicking. She’s taller than Rancher; he can barely hold her.
“You’ll be disqualified,” says Rancher.