Gatac

  It was sleeting that day in the forest and the wood on her Mauser rifle1In particur, a Mauser Karabiner 98 kurz, a WW2-era bolt-action rifle that served as the primary infantry rifle of the Wehrmacht throughout the war. After the war, many of them were brought to the US and adapted for civilian use, i.e. ‘sporterized’ with new stocks, telescopic sights or even adaption for other cartridges. They still make perfectly good hunting rifles. was slick in Anne's hands, though not quite so much as the stones Dad and she were treading on as they made their way downhill. Up high on the mountains, the forest was thin enough that a bright summer day was still bright through the sparse canopy, but with the winter rolling in, the clouds seemed to blend into the crowns above the two of them, just a dark ceiling under which they went about their hunt. Dad was trying mighty hard not to cough, though every now and then he slipped up and let out a sound. He had his own Mauser to take care of, and a pistol besides, while Anne had the shotgun2I didn’t name it in the narration because to young Anne, it was ‘the shotgun’, but this is an Ithaca 37. Not just because that’s another sly Odyssey reference, but also because that’s an extremely common pump-action shotgun with a history of dependable service in the US military. slung across her back next to her daypack. They looked so much alike, even without the dull red fnnel of their matching hunting clothes and the worn wooden stocks of their matching longarms, but sometimes Anne wondered if those were all they had in common. Oh, she loved and honored Dad, of course, and he had taught her much about the art of hunting and surviving, but there were times when he made her wonder if she had a father as well as a teacher. Mom often said Dad was hurt very badly, though try as she might, Anne had never seen a big scar or noticed any impairment. But as Anne was growing out of being a girl and becoming a woman, she was starting to understand that sometimes you could have a pain inside others couldn't see, and even if the pain inside Dad wasn't the one inside her and Mom, Anne knew it was real.

  Mom and her, Anne grimaced as she chastised herself; the thought distracted her long enough to step on a twig, and even though Dad said nothing, it just added to the flush in her cheeks.

  “Stay here,” Dad said as he crept up at her side. He took a swig from his fsk to calm his throat. “They'll be at the pond. I flush 'em, you shoot 'em.”“Okay,” Anne said. “Do you want the shotgun?”“No, you keep that ready,” he said. “Don't miss, Anne.”“I won't,” Anne said. Her father stalked off into the forest before her.

  Anne carefully leaned her Mauser against a nearby tree, then unslung the shotgun and id it on a snow-free rock to her right. It wasn't a pretty side-by-side scattergun the city folk took for their weekend trips. Anne wasn't sure if it was ugly or such, but it certainly had its inelegant lines, most gringly the big metal block of the receiver that seemed too rge for the wooden buttstock to the rear of it. The Mauser was prettier in her eyes, but part of it was she had rebuilt it with Dad — sanded and finished the repcement stock all by herself in fact. When she grasped it again and brought it to her shoulder, she could feel how right it was for her, how every hour of adjusting and redoing it had added up to a weapon that was hers and nobody else's. It could make a girl — a woman — proud.

  She lowered her stance, using her daypack as a barrier between her right knee and the ground while she settled her left leg forward, using the her bent knee as a resting point for the ft of her arm just above her left elbow. Her right arm wrapped into the rifle's sling while her right foot made for a more or less reasonable approximation of a stool. She would've preferred to just lie down, that was more stable and less tiring, but lying in the snow was just asking to catch the same cold as Dad, and so Anne stayed uncomfortable and waited.

  Dad was a good hunter: not only a good shot, but a good stalker, closing in on the most skittish bucks with an ease Anne admired. A city hunter with a step as quiet as him wouldn't have turned down the shotgun, not when he could have turned closeness into an easy kill, but Dad wasn't like that. There was no good kill but one that ended a life cleanly and spoiled as little meat as possible. Once, when she was still learning, Anne had shot a young buck in the chest and missed his heart, so he ran for his life even though he wouldn't make it, and they had to chase him for a quarter of a mile and Dad had to put him down with the Colt, two shots to its quivering head, and it had barely had any meat on its bones to begin with. It was a lean month, and Dad had said that even if the government had let him take another buck, he wouldn't have done it. Dad never spoke well of the government and Mom always said she preferred it out here. Anne only knew government as something you had when you weren't living by yourselves in a hut on a mountain, so what business they had with how many whitetails Dad shot wasn't quite clear to her. Were they just struggling to think of numbers to put in Dad's file — and here Anne thought what a file could be, like a — like a book? But with loose pages and no story in it at all, just names and dates and numbers and words that didn't quite make sentences. In any event, she knew Dad had a file and Mom had a file, with the government…somewhere. She wondered what was in her file —

  The whitetail broke out of the bush about 70 yards away, and Anne's hands tightened around the Mauser. Her first instinct was to just shoot it, and that was a hard instinct to get rid off, though she had it well under control then with years of hunting behind her. No, the real question was this: could she get a good shot at her target? It required a good peek at the deer; a buck, obviously, and an eight-pointer at that. Anne's hands tightened. She'd helped Dad take a tenner once, and taken plenty of young bucks and does, but an eight-pointer, all by herself — oh, they'd eat well tonight if only her shot was true.

  “Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you,” Anne mumbled to herself, “and as I gave you the green pnts, I give you everything.”3Genesis 9:3.

  The buck had its head up. By the antlers, she could see him scan the woods for what he had just fled from. It would be his end, standing out there and not continuing his flight, but Anne had learned not to think of the deer as lesser beings for doing so. After all, they came by their food as honestly as her family did. Running from a threat that wasn’t chasing them wasted hard-earned energy. And the Lord hadn't made deer to run for very long. Put your mind to it and have a way to keep tracking it, and you could jog after a whitetail for a while and watch it drop from a heart attack, but where was the compassion in that?4If haven’t already heard, humans make very good persistence hunters. Many animals are faster than humans in a sprint, but very few have the energetic efficiency to keep it up long enough to escape us. Further, humans can carry food and water with them while they continue the hunt — hunters can follow game animals for the better part of a day without much in the way of rest. And all of that in a package that also has pretty good heat management and adaptability to a wide variety of climates. This is held as one reason why we domesticated wolves into dogs: they were one of the few animals who were able to keep up with us. Anne brought the rifle up slowly, aligning the hooded front sight post with the notch in the rear. Snowfkes drifted past her as she tried to slow her breath, fearful that the buck might notice her breath fogging out in the cold, but she quickly realized she had a bigger problem: the buck was facing her, and so she couldn’t pce a bullet in its heart. The brain, then, or the backbone — much smaller targets.

  Anne's breath slowed to a crawl, but her hands were already quivering from the cold. It was all she could do to pull the rifle tighter to her shoulder and grit her teeth, trying to tense every part of her body except for her trigger finger. Every moment she spent gently squeezing the trigger was one where the buck could jerk its head away, or her hands start shivering worse, or her finger slip, or —

  He looked at her. Honest to God, he looked at her, looked her straight in the eyes. Then he dropped to the ground. Then Anne heard the echo of the shot she had taken. Her heart jumped. She knew it was wrong to take joy in killing and even worse to take pride in it, but darn if it wasn't a particurly square-on shot, straight through the left eye into the brainpan. It was a good shot, a real good one, and she felt cheer in her heart when she slung the Mauser over her back and grabbed her pack and the shotgun to rush forward. It sure looked like it had died before hitting the ground, even, but if there was any chance it was still clinging to life, still in anguish, she had a duty to hurry to its side and end it quickly.

  She came up to it and indeed it was no longer in pain, felled in a single heartbeat by her good shot. Anne got down to her knees next to the buck, id down the shotgun and folded her hands as she closed her eyes.

  “Dear Lord,” she said, “thank you for the beasts that you have provided us, that we may eat of them; thank you for guiding our hands, that we may not make them suffer; and thank you for teaching us the proper art, that we may not waste your gifts. Amen.”5This is one I (badly) made up, so don’t bother looking for it.

  She already had her knife out to start dressing the buck when Dad stumbled toward her, clutching his Mauser in his right hand.

  “Good kill,” he said.“He was close,” Anne said. “It was either the head or let him go.”Dad nodded. “Dress him and bring him home,” he said.“Of course,” Anne said. “Can you hold the legs?”Dad shook his head. “This one's all you. See you on the mountain.”

  Half an hour ter, Anne was crying, but it wasn't because she was alone, or because night was falling, or because the buck's empty eye was staring at her while she bagged its heart and liver. No, it was her body crying, from snow blowing onto her face, and she had no chance to fix a cloth over her nose and mouth because the buck's warm blood on her leather gloves wasn't just the only thing keeping them from freezing and seizing up on her when she needed a few more minutes of finesse from them, but it was also a constant reminder that the buck was still warm. A warm corpse wasn't good. Warm meat rotted, and what she had to do to cool it quickly was finish gutting it and bleeding it as well as she could. But the darn buck was just too big, not like the does she'd handled before, and those eight points she'd been so proud of were getting in her way with every step she took around the carcass to reposition it. With a final cut and yank, she got the windpipe out and tossed it onto the pile with the rest of the guts; let the crows have their feast, too. She climbed over the buck, then started tying it together, just to keep the limbs from smacking around and catching on things every time she had to move the body. Ten minutes ter, she could barely feel her fingers anymore, but on a third try she fixed the st knot on her rope and slung the improvised yoke over her shoulders. And Lord, you could tell how much the buck was too big for Anne by the blood that poured out when she dragged it uphill. Anne felt numb just watching it.

  She wasn't going to be home that night.

  The sun had to have set some time even if Anne hadn't seen it all day through the clouds. She thanked the Lord for the full moon He had sent to help her in this trial, for she could imagine few things that would have made her night even harder than being cold, tired and with no fire in the dark of the forest at new moon. First she'd found a dead branch of birch tree and stripped the bark, then wrapped it back around the branch with some wire to build a torch.6Everybody’s always talking about campfires, but if you’re gonna be out and about during the dark with no fancier tools than a working knife, knowing how to improvise a torch is a good skill to have. That in turn gave her just enough light and warmth to start gathering the wood for a small fire. When she lit the stack, it felt like the Lord was reaching down from the heavens themselves to wipe the frozen tears from her face. How warm and bright it was! She crouched down next to it, held her stiff hands close to the fme, and just basked in it for a moment or a minute before she heard Dad's voice.

  “You didn't make it far,” he said, beside her with his own Mauser in the right hand and his fsk in the left. “And you're not done.”“I can't carry him alone,” Anne said. “Dad, please. I need your help.”“You dragged him this far,” Dad said. “Now listen, Anne. You want to lie down and sleep. I know. But if you lie down in that snow with no insution or shelter, you won't wake up again. And if you don't hang that buck up high away from your camp, you won't even make it that long until the bears come. You know they're looking for a good meal before they go to sleep for the winter.”“I just want to go home,” Anne whispered.“You can do this,” Dad said. “Warm up and eat a bite from your pack, even if you’re not feeling hungry. But don't sleep, Anne. You've got work to do.”

  Anne took a few minutes to admit to herself she couldn’t stay like this. The fire was too small to st the night and the small clearing offered no shelter from the elements. At some point she just stood and got down to it. She didn't keep track of how long it took to throw the rope yoke over a strong branch on a nearby tree and pull up the buck's body, but it was a grand production and by the end of it her quivering hands could barely tie the rough knot that would keep it up there. If anything, sheltering was even worse. Anne wandered around the hillside for what felt like hours, taking care to gnce back at the st glowing embers of her little campfire. It wasn't doing her much good in the distance. Just the thought of having to build an overnight fire on top of proper shelter wore her down further.

  “Up against the tree,” Dad advised. “Plenty of fallen branches to build with.”“I didn't bring my sleeping bag,” Anne said. “You never said we were staying the night. Just one st doe, you said.”“And what do you think your pstic bags are?” Dad said. “There are still dry leaves under those branches. Fill a sack and climb in, it'll help against the cold and snow.”7Obviously, bringing a proper sleeping bag is the better option. A roll of heavy-duty pstic garbage bags is not that heavy, though, and in a forest type setting you should have a ready supply of leaves to stuff them with. Wet leaves still work but are less comfortable. Outside of a forest, you’ll have to make do with other pnt matter. In an urban environment, you can substitute loose paper, packing peanuts and such.“Dad — ”“You'll get through this,” Dad said. “How about this: you work and I will tell you anything you want to hear about. It'll keep you awake.”“Okay,” Anne sighed. “What do you want me to ask?”“Anything,” Dad said.“Okay,” Anne said. “What's Korea?”

  It was a wicked ploy, but Anne got what she wanted. Dad told her about Korea while she built another fire and a shelter and a sleeping bag. He told her it was a nd far away, but not too unlike this pce up in the mountains, with swamps between them, and people whose nguage Dad didn't speak. While he talked, she borrowed his hatchet and split a fallen trunk into fifths, ying down one perpendicur to her campsite and putting the others in a fan on top of the base log.8Oh, there are so many different kinds of campfires. This one’s not so good for cooking, but it’ll throw a lot of heat into one particur direction and burn quite a while without having to add more wood. He told her he was there many years ago to fight in a war, and he gave her dates, the names of his friends, talked about all the pces they went. Kindling that Anne had dried and warmed against her body on the walk served to feed the fire. By its shimmer, Anne arranged branches into a lean-to roof. She stuffed a pstic bag with leaves, as many as she could find, and crawled inside.

  The snow didn't let up all night.

  She could barely fit into the pstic sack even with her legs and arms drawn in tight, the leaves in the sack weren't all that dry either and for a while she wasn't sure if the cmmy feeling all over her was her own sweat seeping out or the wetness of the leaves seeping in. And the smell! She didn't dare take off her bloody clothes in the cold, no matter how many bears might track her by it, but she kept the shotgun with her cradled to her chest in the pstic bag. At least the fire kept her warm, even if she had to climb out twice to shift the logs. The other thing was Dad kept talking. A few times it seemed like he stopped and waited for Anne to fall asleep, but every time she would think of another question and ask him, and he would answer it. He told her all the things he hadn’t before, it seemed. There were few among them that Anne liked hearing.

  So Anne didn't sleep that night, but she also didn't die.

  By noon the next day, Anne's right boot wasn't all tight anymore. At first, it had been just a cold spot as she trundled through the snow, trying to drag a buck her size and half that again up the darn hill to their house. It had actually come as a pleasant surprise; her feet had been hot for hours, surely sore and bloody, and though she still had spare socks in her pack — Anne never went into the forest without a pair of spare socks or two — she was afraid that her feet had already swollen.9This really sucks and shouldn’t happen to you during normal hiking when you have a chance to take breaks as needed, but in extremis, you may have to just keep going. It’s exactly as painful and bad for your foot as you think it is, but taking the boot off to treat your foot may result in not being able to put the boot back on over the swollen foot. At that point, you’re pretty much stuck wherever you chose to stop. In a survival scenario, this can get you killed.In any sort of marginally saner situation, though, do stop, do nce and tape blisters, do air out and rest your feet and do change socks while you’re at it. Whatever you’re doing with that hike probably isn’t worth the damage you’ll do when you ignore your feet. I’m a casual hiker at best and I’ve lost a toenail by ‘powering through’. Be smarter than me, please. Anne was learning to do all kinds of things she didn't know could be done, but trekking three more miles uphill on winter rock without shoes was past the realm of the possible and square in the domain of a miracle. And though she tried — oh, how she tried! — Anne had, in her heart, never believed in miracles.

  When the forest seemed to only get denser and darker, and the hillside steeper and slippier, Anne said her prayers, all the ones she could think of and a few she made up, but eventually exhaustion and sucking in the cold mountain air stole from her the strength to speak, and without the words to accompany her footsteps, all she had were their echoes pinging off the trees. Ahead, she saw Dad waiting for her at the crest of the rock. He stood at the tail end of a trail she knew. Anne felt like her battered feet, knotted-up shoulders and cracked lips had amounted to something.

  “Good,” Dad said as she pushed past him. “Now it's just the creek ahead.”“Hurts,” Anne coughed, sounding like she was hacking up steel wool.“I know,” Dad said. “One foot in front of the other, Anne. You can do this.”“Tell me,” Anne gasped. She set her right foot in front of her left, then her left in front of her right. She stopped, but not to give up. Instead she sucked as much air into her lungs as she could, then turned to Dad and met his eyes for one st question. “Dad…how do you kill a man?”“I don't want to talk about it,” Dad said.Anne somehow managed to suck in even more air for her second go, puffing up her chest even as moving her shoulders from their cramped position brought a new wave of pain flooding in. She took one more step, toward Dad. “Well, that's too darn bad, Dad!” she snarled, and didn't take it well when her attempt to cuss him out made Dad ugh. “Tell me or...” She trailed off. She had nothing to threaten Dad with; nothing she was willing to carry through with, in any event.“You already made it this far,” Dad said, still ughing. “What’s the point of giving up now?”“I don't care,” Anne said. She sucked saliva down her throat as if that would help, but when it didn’t, she just powered through the pain of speaking. “I don’t care anymore! I am sick and I am spent and I plum can’t go on. I plum can’t go on, Dad. I should…I should be lucky to make it home alone, nevermind the load. I can’t do this.”“So what?” Dad said, his cheer turning to anger on a dime. “You'd let his suffering and my teaching and your own efforts go to waste, just because you think you're tired and hurt? You don't know the first thing about being tired and hurt, Anne.”“I know I am tired of not being good!” Anne said. “And I know it hurts that…that you and Mom kept everything from me! If I don't know a thing, it is because you never taught me!”Dad looked at her. It was the face of her sternest teacher but she could see in his eyes she'd struck true. “We just want to protect you,” Dad said.“Protect me from what, Dad?” Anne asked. The wind in her face seemed to freeze her tears to the corners of her eyes.“From the world,” Dad said. “The world off this mountain. It will crush you.”“So what if it tries,” Anne said. “You raised me strong. I can handle myself.”“It’s not about strength,” Dad said. “You could be strong like…like Samson, and still never stand a chance. What do you think your strength matters against four billion people?10It’s pretty wild that as of this writing barely two generations after this scene is set, there are twice as many people living in the world. I don’t believe in the concept of a Malthusian catastrophe but just the idea of the resources we need and our impact on the pnet should give everyone pause. The world out there only accepts submission. You see…for a long time I thought if I submitted, if I gave enough of myself, it would give me a good life, eventually. I found your mother and she gave me so many good things, but the world…that world only takes away from us. No, your virtues won’t help you there. It is nothing like what you know. This here…this here is a better pce than any other I've been, Anne, and I've been many pces. And the…heck of it is, I can’t give you the choice to see for yourself. You’d see things that’ll haunt you until you breathe your st.” He sighed. “I don’t want that pain for you, Anne.”“Did you truly think,” Anne said, “this could be a new Garden? That I could know paradise if I never tasted the fruit?” Anne spat onto the ground. “What you taught me as righteousness is nothing but convenient lies, then?”“Don't you speak like that,” Dad said. “Don't bspheme the book. You know your mother’s heart would break to hear you speak like this.”“I suppose it would,” Anne said, “but you don't care, do you?”

  Dad looked away from Anne's face, tried to collect his thoughts. His shoulders slumped.

  “Your mother is a good woman,” Dad said. “I knew she would raise you properly. I knew she would never act selfishly. Two things I couldn’t cim.” He scoffed. “You’re right. I’m not a believer. Your mother kept faith through it all when I never had any. But I gave her my heart and through it all we made this a good pce, for you. If we have not been forthright about everything, then it is because we truly think it is for your own good. Everything we have done, everything we sacrificed…was for you.” He paused. “But words are cheap and there’s no proof with me to make my case. I didn’t mean to test your faith, yet here we are. If your strength is truly spent now, you should go. Drop the load and go.”

  But she couldn’t. Anne couldn’t just leave it all behind and her shamed silence showed it pinly.

  “What you’re asking about,” Dad continued, “maybe I told you one too many times why we kill beasts. But I also taught you how and I think I taught you well. So there you have your answer. If you treat him like a beast, killing a man is the easiest thing in the world. There’s more if you want to hear it, but none of it will help you.”“Tell me, Dad,” Anne said, quieter now. “Please.”“Fine,” Dad said. “You have to keep moving. You'll catch your death if you don't keep moving.”

  Anne grunted as she turned and leaned forward away, rope yoke digging into the meat of her shoulders and biceps as she tried to get going again. Right foot in front of the left. Left in front of the right. Step by step, she started off again, dragging the buck further up the trail, while Dad thought on his next words. It wasn't what he wanted to say, but it dawned on him it was what he had to say, and so he began in earnest.

  “In Korea, we were coming up on a little creek, too,” Dad said. “They called it the Han. Lots of soldiers on the other side, in every hole and behind every rock, it felt like. We shot the ones we could see and threw grenades at the ones we couldn't, and when we walked past one that was still alive we stuck him with our bayonets until he was good and dead. You've seen a doe twitch on the ground, looking to you for the final mercy. I taught you decency because I had none. I just killed them. See, a man can be strong like Samson and he can be brave like…David…and he can be given the finest gun, but if you shoot him he falls to the ground same as any other beast. It may break your heart or it may not, but if you’re good at it, it’s easy in its own way. Your mother and I…we were good at it. I never got used to it, though, how easy it is. See, you think it shouldn't be easy, because a man can build a house or write a song or start a family, all these beautiful things that set us apart from the animals. It should be hard. I — before I came to Korea, I believed a man is a special thing and that providence protects the deserving among them, but in reality, there’s nothing special, no deserving or not deserving. Killing a man is the easiest thing in the world. You shoot him true. That's how you kill a man and it doesn’t matter who he is or what he did.”“Did you kill a lot of men?” Anne asked.“Now, I taught you to dress a kill,” Dad said. “Gut it and bleed it. And I told you not to come near any bodies you didn't drop. When a bear thinks you're coming to steal his kill, he'll fight, and you don't win a fight with a bear, even if you walk away.”“…yes?” Anne said.“What I'm saying is you don't know how bodies rot, you've never watched it up close,” Dad said. “The sight, you get used to. It’s the smell. Like when you cut too deep gutting a whitetail. Now imagine it coming from a man’s body. He’s staring up at you while you look at the family pictures from his pack. He’s staring at you and you don’t dare touch his face, not even to close his eyes. It seems sacred to you despite all. Imagine stacking those bodies, fathers and brothers and sons all, still staring at you, and you’re stacking them up because the ground is frozen so hard you can’t dig graves to bury them in. Not that you have the strength left to do it. Imagine your best friend in the world saying there's so many of them we should be using them for sandbags.11It should not surprise you to hear that I did not just come up with this idea out of nowhere. In Jon E. Lewis’s A Brief History of the First World War, he quotes the diary of a Canadian NCO fighting at Ypres in 1915 who reported the sight of Gurkhas (Nepalese soldiers of the at-the-time British Indian Army) using dead Germans to fortify a position instead of sandbags. I am also told this tactic was ter taught to US forces at Recondo School, though I can’t source that. You want to jump him and throttle him for saying it, you truly do, but you don’t. You just say no. And you don’t say no because it would be wrong. Once you’ve seen that, once you’ve…done that, you’ve gone past ‘wrong’. You say no because you’re thinking of the smell and everything that follows. You’re thinking it’s gonna rain and the runoff will carry the rot down into your foxhole. You’re thinking a bloated corpse isn’t going to be as stable as a sandbag when you rest a rifle on it. You’re thinking it won’t stop a bullet and that’s the whole reason we’re even considering this. The man you killed an hour ago is no longer a man. He’s an inconvenience. That’s what it’s like to kill a man.”

  Anne imagined it. It was right to take a deer and bleed it and part it, if you had need of its bounty. Its life would sustain yours, then. That was how the Lord provided. It was permissible to kill in defense, she thought, and in war…well, the chosen people had often gone to war. Yet what Dad said gnawed at her. Supposing someone came here to do harm to them, to kill Mom or Dad or her — they should have a good reason, but whatever could it be, and what if they didn’t? What if they just killed and killed, like a rabid animal, and…what if? Anne turned back to look over her shoulder at Dad. She couldn’t think of any reason to hurt him, but Anne had quite the imagination, so she thought: what if, and what then? All too quickly, she got her first glimpse at the truth. Just like this dead deer was proving to be such a burden when she should feel gratitude for its sacrifice, so surely it had to be after killing a man, when the blood cooled and the moment passed. No matter your intent, at the end of it you had destroyed a life and were left with a body to deal with. To hear Dad speak of it…

  Dad tried to swallow a sob, but didn't quite make it. “Yes,” he said.

  The creek wasn't too deep, but it was a wide one, crossing the trail ahead. It would have reminded Anne of a desert highway if she'd ever seen the sands of a desert or knew what a highway was, even. Standing at its southern bank, she caught her breath and granted her pain a chance to catch up with her. Then she leaned forward again, a breath hissed free from between her gritted teeth, and she walked again. Her first step into the cold stream immediately flooded her leaky right boot, but she took more steps. She clenched her jaw. Her eyes, long squinting against cold wind and tears, closed completely, and she just powered on. Left foot in front of right foot, right foot in front of left, right in front of left, left right right left left right right —

  Anne felt the ground coming at her almost before she knew she'd slipped on the slick stones in the creek's bed. Her hands were still hooked into the rope yoke and were of no help in breaking the fall, so she plunged shoulder-first into the cool water, matching her aching muscles against the edgeless pebbles beneath her. In her panic, she took some water into her mouth, spent too much energy to spit it out and try to roll onto her back, twisting herself up in the ropes behind her. Now she was on her side, soaking in the cold water that washed over her back, and she barely had the strength to keep her head from dipping to the side and back into the water.

  “Anne!” Dad cried. “Come on, you have to get up!”

  In her life, there were many things she had to do, but Anne also wanted so many things. She wanted to be a good woman. She wanted to be herself with none to contradict her. She wanted to make Dad proud. She wanted to have a sure faith like Mom. She wanted to be anywhere but home and see the world that had been kept from her. She wanted to know what it was like to truly love someone and to truly hate someone, how to meet for the first time and how to part for the st time, how it felt to be with child and how it felt to kill a man; all those childish curiosities in her Dad’s tale had not nearly quelled. She wanted to die and live forever in the eternal kingdom of the Lord. She wanted to lie in her bed and sleep.

  But Anne never got what she truly wanted.

  She wasn't quite sure when it had happened, but at some point, she had simply run out of room inside her for pain and exhaustion, and though her arm protested mightily when she twisted around and freed it from under her chest, it still obeyed her. The devil pulled her head from the river’s cold embrace and shouted oh so loudly in her ear to rise. She listened to him. With two gloved hands in the water pushing up from the pebbles, she got back to her feet. Reddened water dripped from her just as surely as the creek washed away what blood was left in the buck's carcass. Her blue lips whispered no prayer as she shuffled away from the creek, driven by that hideous strength12A C.S. Lewis reference to css things up a bit. inside her.

  Anne woke up in bed — her bed — inside the cabin to the sound of Mom stirring a pot on their stove. She was tucked in tight under a thick duvet, and though most of its heat had been spent, she still felt the warmth of a hot-water bag on her belly. Her right arm seemed stuck somehow, but eventually she managed to work her left arm free and lift the duvet a little, catching a breath from the rush of cooler air over her face.

  “Mom?” she said.

  The stirring continued for a moment before Mom lifted the pot off the stove and onto the ceramic tile surface of the small kitchen counter she had built for the hut. She then rushed to Anne's side, and while the smile on her face was mostly genuine, Anne could tell the exhaustion hiding behind it.

  “Hello, Anne,” Mom whispered. “How are you today?”“I suppose I am…well,” Anne said. “But I don't recall getting here.”Mom nodded. “You and your father got up to some brave things in my time, Anne, but you just had to do one better, didn't you?” she said. “You were a sorry sight when you stumbled through our gate. Chilled to the bone, a sprained wrist and not an inch of you wasn't covered with cuts or bruises, not to speak of your feet. You slept through the first two days and the rest of the week you were talking to the angels and the Lord.”“…I almost died,” Anne said, looking down at her right wrist and feeling the wooden splints between thick yers of bandages. “People…die so easy.”Mom smiled. “Oh, your father's wisdom, I take it?” she said. “I never took it to heart too much. You listen to me now, Anne: the Lord God has not made a trial He will not make us strong enough to endure. Remember your Isaiah.”“But they that wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,” Anne said. “They shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”13Isaiah 40:31.“You heard the words,” Mom said. “And you listened.”“Yes,” Anne said. “Can I get up?”“I don't rightly know if you can,” Mom said, “but you certainly may.”

  Anne pushed the duvet further off her and sat up against the pillow, making room to swing her legs over the side of the bed. It was difficult to stand up with only her left hand to help push her, but after a few seconds she was on her feet. The hot-water bag plopped to the ground. Anne turned to try to kneel down and pick it up, but Mom was already bending down for it.

  “You go on and sit by the stove, get yourself warmed up,” Mom said. “And stir the stew if you can. I will make your bed so it is nice and clean for you tonight.”“Okay,” Anne said. Left foot in front of right foot, right foot in front of left foot. Even without dragging the buck through the snow, walking was still difficult. “Where is Dad?” she asked.“Oh, he is still sleeping,” Mom said. “Your little adventure took a toll on him, too, though he won't hear me say it. It has been quite a week taking care of the two of you, I should have you know.”“I am sorry, Mom,” Anne said. She was right up to a low stool by the stove, but feared that if she sat now, she wouldn't be able to stand again for a while. “We just…we should have let the buck go.”“You would have been wise to,” Mom said. “But there is Simmons pride in the both of you. So do the shadows of our own desires stand between us and our better angels, and thus their brightness is eclipsed.”14From Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge.“…I don't know that one,” Anne said.Mom smiled at her from behind the duvet being folded in her hands. “You wouldn't,” she said. “But you should know about pride from the Proverbs,” she said.“Pride goes before destruction,” Anne mumbled.Mom nodded. “And a haughty spirit before a fall.” 15Proverbs 16:18, of course.