I’m sorry, baby.
I don’t know why I expected anything else. Moose versus pickup. There’s only one way that story ends.
Sad but true.
You’re not gonna say I told you so, are you?
How about I love you.
That’s better, he said.
When the tow truck arrived, the hooked cable was wrapped around the animal’s still-intact rear leg and those who remained helped guide the body up the ramp and onto the bed of the truck: Grace and the sheriff and a deputy and a couple of wool-shirted men from town. Bill held the moose’s great head in his arms, the animal’s breath blowing against his chest in a great flood of exhaling air, and he remained there at the edge of the bed even after he had laid its head down upon the cold steel, its deep brown flanks growing darker as the buildings and forestland around them drifted into their night colors.
Grace’s hand was on his shoulder. You don’t have to, you know. We can call IFG.
No way I’m doing that, he said.
OK, she said. Earl wants to take him up to Muletown Road.
He know someone to butcher it up there?
I don’t know, Bill, she said. Probably. You want him to just lay out there?
No, he said. Maybe. Coyotes and bears could get a meal out of it.
So could some family. Of people.
He looked at her. Her dark eyes. Her brown hair in its loose curls, moving to shadow. Muletown, he said at last. All right.
THEY FORMED an unlikely caravan then: the sheriff, with his lights flashing, followed by the tow truck carrying the incapacitated moose, then Grace and Bill, the two of them side by side in Bill’s truck, moving up the highway to the north and then onto Muletown Road and into the deep forest, following that path to a turnout where the sheriff exited his cruiser and waved the tow truck back until the metal platform of its bed extended off the shoulder and into the trees.
They parked and watched as the bed tilted and the winch unspooled and the moose slid from the metal to the dirt and grass, tilting at an odd angle and actually rolling over once, its three good legs flopping around the orbit-line of its body before coming to rest.
When the sheriff unholstered his pistol, Bill cleared his throat. I think I better do it, he said.
You sure about that? the sheriff said.
I’m sure.
The sheriff looked at Grace for a moment. Bill did not know if she gave some sign of her acquiescence to such a plan, but the sheriff’s pistol went back into the holster on his belt. He nodded at Bill and then stood there, waiting.
The moose lay in the ferns and grass under the cedars, silent but for its breathing. Bill had removed the rifle from the case, the same Savage 99 he had owned since he was a teenager. His actions now were not unlike those he undertook when loading the dart gun with its tranquilizer. He pressed the cartridge into the breech and then stood with the lever down, the breech open.
He could feel Grace near him somewhere, her hand, or perhaps her quiet voice nearby. The sheriff. The tow truck driver. A deputy whose name he did not know.
You know where to hit it? the sheriff said.
Bill did not look at him and did not answer. He could feel, once again, the animals in their dens, their noses lifted to scent the air, watching him with their poised and myriad senses even from all these many miles away.
Above him, above them all, the sky had gone full dark and stars seemed all at once to rise from the tops of the trees, their pinpoints wheeling for a moment across that black expanse only to return once again to those needled shapes, as if each light had come up through the soil, through the epidermis of root hairs and into the cortex and the endodermis and up at last through open xylem, the sapwood, through the vessels and tracheids, rising in the end to the thin sharp needles and releasing, finally, a single dim point of light into the thin dark air only to pull one back from that same scattering of stars, the cambium pressing down the trunk, pressing back to black earth. Time circling in the soil and the silver-tipped needles. Time circling in the big sage and cheatgrass of everything to come before.
He pulled the lever back to the stock, the breech closing with a smooth almost silent whisper. I’m sorry, he said, not to the sheriff or to himself but to the moose before him in the underbrush. Then he lifted the rifle to his shoulder, leaned forward until the barrel was just a few inches from the hard curl of its skull, and squeezed the trigger.
2
1984