Water dripped down her face, and snowflakes began to melt on her hands. The snow surprised her, and for the first time she wondered how far she might be from the truck. She tried to remember how many times she had stopped to tie marking tape. She couldn’t remember, and yet she felt certain of the path she had taken since setting down her quiver, and once she had retrieved her quiver, she could use her compass.
She snapped the rope from the elk’s right hindquarter and began removing the hide from the meat. The snow picked up. Branches broke behind her, no doubt from the wind, or was there something in the grouping of pinyon just beyond her? Maybe a deer. And she realized how crazy she was to have made this hunt alone. She wasn’t a young girl hunting deer behind her grandfather’s property. The rack on this elk was four points on each side. The time it would take her to quarter the elk, bag the meat, and begin packing it out could take her into the night. The others had planned on heading home to the front range that day. They’d all been tired and ready to get back. As it was now, the three of them would be up all night getting the elk out of there. She’d been thinking only of herself. Wasn’t that the hell of it. That was the thing. And as Amy Raye worked as quickly as she could, as her knife made clean slices between the hide and the meat, her arms and coat and pants covered in blood, she began to regret everything she had done.
After she had skinned the shoulders and hindquarters, she severed the cartilage and connective tissue of each of the joints. She placed each quarter in a game bag. Then she removed as much meat as she could from the neck and cut out the backstrap that ran down both sides of the elk’s spine. She placed these in a fifth game bag. All the while, the sky grew darker, the temperatures dropped, and the snow continued to fall. She would sever the head from the spine when she returned with Kenny and Aaron. For now, using the extra rope, she secured one of the front quarters, a good sixty pounds, onto the top of her pack. She used the remaining rope to drag each of the other quarters at least fifty yards to a divot in the ground beneath a mature juniper. She cut several boughs from another tree and covered the meat to help it stay dry. But after dragging these quarters, after lifting and pulling them over rocks and deadfall, her arms and legs quivered from the sheer fatigue of it all. And so she pushed herself harder. She needed to make time before dark and cursed the fact that she had not packed extra batteries for her headlamp. Even if she’d had her headlamp, going over this terrain would be tricky. As she returned to retrieve her pack, she hastened her steps, all the while watching the ground for deadfall and jutting rocks. And then came the impact to her head, a heavy jab from an overhanging branch. The force of it knocked her off balance so that she almost fell backward but instead rocked forward and landed on her hands and knees. This was not the first time that day that she’d hit her head on a jagged limb. The junipers, especially, were twisted and gnarly, their trunks like petrified wood.
She felt light-headed when she stood, and also a throbbing pain. She pressed her palm where the limb had made impact, and when she did, she felt the tear in the fleece, and soon after the warm blood against her hand. She removed her hat and, using her fingertips, inspected the wound. If she had been home, she would have cleaned the cut properly and would most likely have gotten stitches. She replaced her hat, pressed her right palm against the gash, and continued to apply pressure for a few minutes until the bleeding slowed.