Urge to Kill

They walked down to the lake, then along the frozen shoreline. Winter had hit with the lake level high, and the dark water that was flecked with ice looked to be halfway up some of the smaller trees. There was no sound in the winter woods other than the crunch of their boots in the snow, and sometimes in the frozen mud.

“There’s somethin’ Alma an’ me don’t much talk about,” Marty’s father said. Alma was his wife, Marty’s mother. He and Marty referred to her by her first name, because that’s what she demanded. His father looked over at him with a faint smile as he spoke. “The both of us—you an’ me—are from a family of hunters, descendents of Red Hawk, who was the most renowned hunter in the Chippewa nation.”

This wasn’t news to Marty. He’d even used the fact to earn some respect at school. Aside from family whispers, he had heard others mention Red Hawk and his father’s Chippewa lineage. He’d even read in some of the books in the school library about his ancestor, the legendary Red Hawk.

“You proud of who you are?” his father asked.

“ ’Course I am. Always been.”

“When my father was young, his father took him huntin’ when he was just about your age, an’ it was the same way with his father, all the way back to Red Hawk.”

“Family tradition,” Marty said.

“Oh, it’s somethin’ even more’n that.”

They’d left the lake and circled around and were back near where the dead deer hung from the stout tree branch.

When they approached the deer, Marty couldn’t believe how much blood was on the ground beneath the ugly jagged slice in its neck. There was so much blood around the gash itself that it made the cut look even deeper than it was, so it appeared as if the great animal’s head might fall off from its weight and the weight of the antlers.

Marty’s father reached beneath his jacket and drew out a different knife, large, with a sharp blade. About an inch from the knife’s point was a curved barb, jutting out about half an inch like a steel tooth.

“Take off your clothes,” he said to Marty.

“Wha—”

His father smiled. “Don’t be frightened. Jus’ go ahead an’ undress.”

Marty did as he was told, hanging his clothes over some nearby tree limbs, letting his boots sit on the ground with his socks in them. What had seemed a slight breeze became more brisk now, as if taking advantage of Marty’s nakedness.

His father smiled at him again, then turned his attention to the deer. He inserted the point of the blade in between its rear legs, then grunted with effort and made a long incision all the way down, even cutting through breastbone, almost to the gashed throat.

The deer’s stomach opened wide, and its entrails spilled out onto the ground. Marty recoiled from the fetid copper stench of blood and corruption. He could taste it along the edges of his tongue. A long gray section of intestine remained dangling from the body cavity.

His father flipped the knife around in his hand so he was holding it by the bloody blade. He extended the bone handle to Marty. “You finish the job. Ordinary way to do this is to lay the deer down, open it up more gentle, but we do it this way. This here’s a gutting knife. Some hunters like this kind ’cause it’s got a gut hook. You use that sharp barb on the blade to hook the deer’s insides. That’ll help you pull out the internal organs. You cut out the rectum an’ tie it with this cord, else wise you can have a hell of a mess. You gotta clean that deer out good so nothin’ll rot later on, so the meat’ll cure okay. You understand?”

Marty had never felt so naked and addled. His stomach was on a roller coaster. Bile rose bitterly in his throat. At first he thought he could stop it, but he had to turn away suddenly and vomit. His bare toes were splashed, and he moved back out of the way. That was when he noticed he was standing with his feet in blood. All around him was blood now mixed with vomit.

“Dad…”

His father moved the knife closer to him, and Marty took the bone handle and trudged through the snow and blood to the deer. He had goose bumps and was shivering, but not entirely from the cold.

The stench and heat of the deer almost overwhelmed him, and made him vomit again. But he steeled himself and found surprising resolve deep within him. A place in his mind he didn’t even know existed.

He did something like turning off his mind, and set to work with the knife.

“Use your hands,” his father said. “Both of ’em if you have to.”

Marty continued gripping slippery, sometimes still-warm internal organs, cutting them free and pulling them from the bloody cavity, dropping them to the saturated ground at his feet.

“Hollow him out good,” his father said encouragingly.

Marty worked harder and harder, not so much minding the blood now. What he wanted to do—what he had to do—was finish field dressing this deer so he had the approval of his father. Of his father’s father…

When the carcass was nearly hollowed out, he heard his father say, “Now rub the blood on yourself, Marty. All over yourself.”