I’d helped Todd take down a number of stands similar to this one at the end of the final rifle season the year we had dated. Because many of the men Todd guided were from out of state, he would set six or seven of these small platform blinds before he guided folks out. Then at the end of the final season, he’d have to bring all the stands in.
After Todd and I had broken up, I saw him one other time, though I could never be sure. Joseph was three years old. We were on our way to Boulder and had stopped at a gas station in Silverthorne. After I had filled up my tank, I parked off to the side of the convenience store. I held Joseph’s hand and he and I walked toward the door. Then I saw a man get out of an old Montero next to one of the pumps, and in those two seconds I could have sworn the man was Todd. The man had not seen me. I picked Joseph up in my arms as if any moment he would be taken away. We entered the store and headed straight for the restroom. And after we had washed up and I had calmed down, I knew what I had to do. We walked out of the store, but the man was gone.
I never told anyone about that day, but always it was in the back of my mind, as if I had deprived Joseph of his father. Perhaps I was depriving him now.
It was a beautiful day, really, as I sat in the tree stand, with the kind of blue sky Colorado is known for stretched vast above me. And only eight weeks before, Amy Raye had sat in this exact place. She had been right here. I tried to piece together her morning, the direction in which she had released her arrow, the distance of the shot, how the elk had appeared to her. Had she been cold? What had the air felt like? The sun would have risen from behind her, and I imagined that also. And with all these thoughts I wept quietly for the woman I didn’t know. She would have died alone, as had Brody. No one would ever know her last thoughts. And I hoped she had seen something beautiful, maybe the falling snow, or the sculpted rocks that defined so much of this area. It would have been only this great wilderness that would have been witness to her passing.
I’d had similar thoughts when Brody died. No one had seen him fall. People could only speculate what had happened to him. It was those same people who would not let me see his body. When my father drove me to the scene, the field Brody’s parents had leased about five miles from his house, a field I would pass on my long weekend runs, there were already many people standing around the scene of the accident. He had fallen from the combine, and I did not know why. Was he reaching for something? Had the machine struck something in the field? No one was sure, but he had fallen, and there was a lot of blood. I screamed, but I don’t remember screaming. People told me they had to restrain me. They thought they were protecting me. They thought I couldn’t handle what I would see. But I know if I was screaming, it was because they wouldn’t let me through. Brody was mine, in the same way that I was his.
There had not been a viewing at the funeral home.
“Dad, what happened to him? Please tell me,” I had asked my father.
“They think something got caught on the wheel and he had reached down, but he lost his footing.”
“And then what happened?” I wanted to know.
“The machine ran over him. Pru, he was unrecognizable,” my father told me.
“I would have recognized him,” I said.
—
I climbed down from the stand and retrieved my knife from my pack. Then I walked to the tree from where I’d found the arrow and removed the orange marking tape. I cut several small boughs, some with pinecones, a few with juniper berries, and tied their ends together with the nylon tape. With the swag beneath my arm, I climbed back into the stand. Using the climbing rope, I secured the swag just above the seat of the stand. “There were people who loved you,” I said. “I hope you know that. I hope you are at rest.”
DEER
AMY RAYE