When he reached the parking lot he locked the gate behind him and started the truck and turned out off the gravel, tipping down onto a road that tunneled through a verdant shadowland of bull pine and lodgepole and red cedar, and then on along the river, its surface, in the fading light, the color of dead fish, and at last lurched out onto the highway.
All the while he could feel their eyes upon him, even now, even as he downshifted, turning through a forest going slowly dark, the stand before him faintly blurred and drifting with low strips of tattered white clouds, like a forest out of some fairy tale where bears and men and wolves sometimes swapped bodies to fool women and children into trust and sometimes committed acts of murder, these images encircling him as they sometimes did on the birch path from the trailer to the big gate, even though he knew, of course, that such bleak thoughts would do nothing for him in the hours to come. Yet there was little to brighten them. Such calls as he had received over the years had most often ended in death. The doe he had called Ginny had been the first, if it had indeed been her in the road, broken-spined and crying. The image of her came to him as he drove, not of her in the agony of her final moments, but as a small frantic creature hanging nose-down from a fence, the day he and his uncle had rescued her. But the highway was an abattoir, and with an animal of this size—a full-grown moose—it was likely there would be nothing he or anyone else could do except what had to be done. He had brought the rifle in response to such odds but despite this, despite everything he knew, he still held out some hope that he would not have to use it, that somehow the animal would have suffered some superficial injury and he would not need to remove the rifle from where it lay with the dart gun in the zippered case beside him. When his voice spoke into the engine hum of the cab it was to this falsehood: You know there is no truth in it at all. Every scrap a lie.
And indeed when he pulled the truck to the side and stepped out onto the street at last, the scene was much as he knew it would be. The pickup that had struck the moose sat in the center of the road at the edge of a scant collection of battered businesses cut into the surrounding forestland, its hood crushed nearly to the windshield, the animal a few dozen yards before it, one rear leg clearly broken, swinging and dragging from its new hingepoint, its hip likely shattered as well, its faltering motion like that of a crab or an insect, or like some newborn of its own species, unsure of its footing, head swinging back and forth as if on a pendulum and chocolate brown eyes rolling in their sockets. And then its sound, the sound of an animal of blood and bone that seemed to call out to him and to him alone—Come! Come to me!—a call not unlike the honk of a goose or the weird blast of a tuneless horn, each note short and rising in volume and then cut off as the lungs were emptied, and each loud enough that Bill nearly brought his hands up to shield his ears.
The sheriff said his name and Bill glanced at him briefly and then returned his attention to the moose. A young male, a bull, not more than a year old. Bill walked sideways around it, toward its head, the sheriff following his motion. The moose’s eyes rolled, brown and wet, watching him, watching them all. How long? he said.
I think they called you right after, the sheriff said. So half an hour maybe. What do you wanna do here?
As if in response, the animal started its terrible bleating honk again, mouth open, body once again lurching forward, slowly, as if possessed of some awful errand, down the street and toward the town. Bill moved as close to it as he could, squatting before it on the asphalt, voice calm even as his heart beat wild in his chest, his own blood pulling toward the animal all at once as if magnetized by the agony. Shhh, he said. It’s gonna be all right. We’re here to help. It’s gonna be all right.
The moose quieted again and he stood slowly and stepped backward to the sheriff. Who ran into him?
Some mechanic from Sandpoint, the sheriff said.
He OK?
In the hospital. Broke his ribs up and slammed his face into the wheel. There anything you can do here? I’m supposed to call the new Fish and Game guy.
You haven’t called them yet?
Not yet. You want me to?
Not very much.
Then it’s slipped my mind.
Bill glanced back at the smashed truck and then to the moose again. A half hour ago it had come down from the mountains, perhaps following a line of fragrant moss in the trunks of trees that lined a muddy creek bottom, and now it stumbled along that scant black road among men and women and children gathered for no reason other than to watch it go to ground.
He breathed out, slowly. There was a tightness in his chest and a feeling that he was caught up in something of which he could not let go.
When he looked to the street beyond, he caught sight of her pickup as it trundled between the buildings and then came to a stop. She leaped down from the cab in her purple coat and came to the moose, kneeling directly before the animal much as he had a few moments before, her voice the same quiet hush as his own, the moose’s head moving, the breath coming in bursts of hot steam.
He turned away now, returning to his pickup, opening the door to pull the canvas gun case toward him and unzipping its front pocket. Two or three loose shells spilled out onto the seat and he scooped them into his hand and then, from the pocket, extracted a small black box, inside of which rested a hypodermic needle and two vials of clear fluid, and a plastic tube containing a thin dart with a brilliant red tail. The shells he returned to the pocket, zipping it closed. Then he set to filling the dart, first sucking the fluid from one of the vials and then holding the syringe up to the light and squeezing a small quantity into the air before slipping the needle into the larger bore of the dart and pressing home the plunger.
When he looked up from his work, Grace was there, her eyes wide.
I was loading point eight carfentanil, he said. Is that what you want?
She sighed, her breath outspiraling into steam. He’s got a broken hip.
You sure?