A Particular Deer
just in time for hunting season
The young man stared out at the cotton field, where at least twenty-five doe and small bucks were grazing on weeds. The sun was setting low on the field and the pines.
All was quiet except for his and the old man’s breathing. He stared out of the open window hole and tried to focus on each individual deer.
“I thought they’d be bigger,” he whispered.
“You thought they’d be what?”
“Bigger.”
“Naw, they aren’t much bigger than a big dog. At least those ain’t. Let a big buck come out and you’ll see how much bigger they can get. Wide and tall. But these are just little ones, even the old mamas.”
The eighteenth deer picked its head up from grazing and was looking back at the woods.
“But I can’t see how you’re studying the size of ’em when there are damn near thirty deer out in front of us.”
“Is that not normal?”
“Normal? To see this many at one time?”
The young man noticed by now that the old man repeated almost all of his questions back to him. He’d paid for the five days of hunting, so he’d ask as many dumb questions as he could think of. He nodded back.
“Well, I guess it ain’t too unusual. But if you’ve never seen one before, I’d say this many on your first hunt is pretty lucky. Hell, I can’t remember how long it took me to see this many. But it wasn’t my first time. I can tell you that.”
The young man nodded again.
Around them, in the dark green plexiglass deer stand, was not much more space than a half-bathroom. There were two chairs, one big desk chair that he was in and another smaller swivel chair with no back for the old man. Behind them was a small plastic shelf with a couple airplane bottles of cheap whiskey and propane refill canisters for the tiny heater on the floor. The wind bit at his face through an open window. The old man said that was good, they wanted the wind coming toward them.
“Can I see the binoculars real quick?”
“Sure, see ’em all you want.”
The young man studied the way the deer ate. Slow and sort of goofy. He was so amused that he lost track of how long he’d been watching this one particular doe chew on what the old man had called thistle. He’d fallen into a dream state, most likely caused by the lack of sleep he’d gotten last night in the long drive out to wherever he was right now. Bumfuck, Egypt, the old man had called it. He’d also called it Bumfuck, North Carolina. He expected to hear another variation of it by the end of the week.
A crash to his right startled him. He yanked the binoculars off. Something had fallen to the floor with a bang. Like a jet had taken off in the deer stand. His heart beat fast.
“Shit. Damnit. Where’d it go?” the old man said, yelling in a whisper.
The young man looked back out of the window and at least half of the deer, maybe fifteen of them, were staring at the stand. Some of their white tails up stood straight up.
“Where the hell did it go?”
“What did you drop?”
“My cough suppressor. Dropped it out of my coat pocket. There it is, under your chair.”
The young man reached under his chair and picked up the black tube. He handed it over and looked back out the window. The deer were running away.
“They’re running away,” he said.
“What? Oh. They’ll come back. Give ’em a minute.” He continued to fumble with the tube in his hands and eventually put his mouth on it and forced a cough out. There was no sound.
“Huh. Alright.”
The old man turned and looked at him for a minute with his eyebrows furrowed. Then he smirked, a soft smile on a hard face.
“Son, you think I’ve never dropped this thing in here before? Or anything else? I’m clumsy as hell. It’ll be alright.”
No more deer appeared for the rest of the evening. Shadow took over the field and everything else until he couldn’t see anything.
“Alright. You got everything? Go on out the door, I’ll hand you the gun and lock up,” the old man said. “There’s always tomorrow.”
#
The young man drove up to the house, if you wanted to call it that, at one in the afternoon. The North Carolina sun shone down from above in a way that made you thankful for the winter cold. The house, a mobile home resting on cement blocks in a large yard of now-dead grass, and all of its flaws were brightly detailed by the sunlight.
An old man sat in a cheap-looking lawn chair beside a rusty truck, pulling on a cigarette and drinking out of a plastic water bottle. He didn’t stand when the young man pulled into the yard. He didn’t stand when the young man got out of his car. He didn’t stand when the young man walked up to him either.
“You Chris?” the old man asked between tobacco drags.
“I am.”
“Well, welcome,” he motioned about him.
“Thanks,” the young man replied. He looked around the yard for a moment. “Beautiful place out here.”
“You should see it when everything ain’t dead.”
“I bet.”
“Pull you up a chair. Walk over there to the barn and grab one. There’s beer in the fridge if you want one.”
“Okay.” He started to walk away and turned back. “Do you want one too?”
“What, a beer? Oh, no.” He looked at his watch. “It ain’t but early afternoon.”
The young man nodded in momentary disbelief before heading over to the barn at the corner of the yard. He’d seen pictures of places like this before. It had a green door and a political sign on the side that he tried to ignore. Inside was a whirlwind of items, machinery and tools. It had a concrete floor and a cat that scurried away from him when he walked inside. He flipped on the light switch for the back of the room and saw dozens of deer antlers hung up on the wall. At first, he tried to figure out which one was biggest or which had the most number of antlers, but he figured it would take too long. They all looked nearly the same. Eventually he turned his focus back to the lawn chairs hung on a nail on the wall, grabbing one and walking back outside.
“No beer?”
“Maybe later.”
“Alright.”
They continued to sit in silence for another minute or so. The young man went to pull his cell phone out of his pocket and the old man started talking.
“You ever been deer hunting?”
“No, sir.”
“What made you want to pick it up now?”
“It looked fun, I guess.”
“Which part, the sitting around or the watching the same field all evening? Or maybe the coming back tomorrow and doing it all over again?”
The young man didn’t know what to say.
“I’m just messing with you. It is fun. We’ll have fun. So have you hunted anything else?”
“No, sir.”
“Alright. I’m assuming you’ve shot a gun.”
“Yes, sir. I’ve shot about everything.”
“About everything, huh? At ranges?”
“Yep.”
“That’s about right, I reckon. Alright. Well, ask me any questions you have. We have a couple of hours until we need to go. Maybe 3:30 or 4. Your bunk is in the house yonder. Feel free to get it set up now or later. I picked up some pizza earlier that we can reheat for dinner. Sound alright to you?”
“What kind of pizza?”
“What kind of pizza? That’s your first question? Pepperoni. You’re a funny guy. Two pepperoni pizzas. I swear, I hope your questions turn into hunting related shit eventually.”
For the better part of the two hours that needed to pass before his first hunt could begin he didn’t know what to ask so he didn’t ask anything. Eventually, the sun met its resting place at the scheduled time of their departure. The old man got up without saying anything and walked over to his truck. He pulled out a rifle, walked back over and handed it to him.
“Hold this for a second. Let me get the cart. You got an orange hat, don’t you?”
“Orange hat?”
“Figures. I’ll grab that too.”
The old man went into the barn for a moment and came outside with an orange baseball cap in his hand. He walked around to the other side of the barn and the next thing the young man saw was an old golf cart pull around the corner. The old man drove up and beckoned for him to take the passenger seat. The hat sat on the dash.
“Just set the gun in between us. And put on that hat. You don’t want to get shot by somebody sneaking around here. Everything looks like a deer when you want one.”
They rode in silence to the stand. It was chilly and the wind whipped through where there used to be a windshield on the golf cart. The drive to the stand was five minutes or so, just down the farm drive through hundreds of acres of fields that just recently were layered with cotton. Now they were barren.
“You see that?” the old man said as they pulled up to a path in the woods beside the farm road. He pointed out to the field.
The young man squinted hard and saw three dots at the back of the field.
“Deer?” he asked.
“Correctamundo. You’ve already figured that out at least.”
The young man stared out at the barely moving dots on the brown horizon. He could just make them out as their shape and color stood out against the pine trees.
“It’s that easy? They’re just out there?”
“Listen here, buddy. It ain’t hard to kill a deer. They’re all over the damn place,” the old man said. “But it is hard to kill a particular deer. That’s the tricky part. And that’s where I come in.”
He jetted the cart down into the forest path and parked the golf cart off to the side behind a bush.
“We walk from here.”
#
The two got back to the house, “basecamp” the old man called it, and they ate a quick pizza dinner and went their separate ways for the night. The young man sat in the bed, a full-size in a small room hung with mounted deer heads and turkey fans, and scrolled through social media videos. He found himself watching firsthand videos from the war taking place far away from him and later on found himself watching a video of two men, doing what looked to be a private act in a field before being struck by a small missile and disappearing in a plume of dust and dirt and smoke. He turned his phone off for a moment and looked around at the deer heads on the walls. He reached out to touch one and pulled his hand back quickly as his fingertip touched its nose. He realized that it wasn’t going to bite him or do anything else, so he put his hand back on it and rubbed around on the fur and leathery snout. Then he touched the antlers and lay back down on the bed and stared at it some more.
Could he kill something like that? Could he kill at all? He thought he could. He decided to watch more hunting videos to put that idea to the test again. He’d already done this a million times and the outcome was always empty until it would hopefully happen sometime on this trip. This time he watched a compilation of “great hunts” on YouTube. There were men shooting from ground blinds into herds of deer and downing mammoth bucks and women shooting bows from trees, stabbing numerous-antlered whitetails in the heart and dropping them quickly. It all seemed so impersonal and yet, there was a pleasure in it that he couldn’t shake the interest in. This made him think more about those war videos, and the last one more so in particular, so he shut the phone off and went to sleep.
He awoke to the old man standing at his bedside in the still dark morning hours.
“You ready?”
The young man looked around the room, regaining his memory of his surroundings and why the hell he was there and why the hell this man was standing over him and what the hell he should be ready for.
“Sure. Yeah.”
“Alright, meet me outside when you’re dressed. And not until after you’ve brushed them teeth. Woowee.”
The young man jumped out of bed and walked across the hall to the tiny bathroom. He turned on the light and was blinded for a moment, dumbly reaching around for the toothbrush he’d laid on the counter the night before. Once done, he splashed some water on his face and pulled on jeans and the camo coat he’d bought for the trip. He grabbed the orange hat from its perch on a dining room chair and slapped it on his head on the way out.
Outside it was cool, but lighter than expected with a near full moon. The old man stood beside his truck, one hand holding the gun, the other on his hip.
“Hurry up. You’re killing daylight.”
“It’s not daylight yet.”
The old man stared at him for a moment.
“You paid me already, I guess. Let’s just head on back in the house then, get some shut eye.”
“No, no, sorry. Let’s go.” He grabbed the rifle and hopped in the passenger seat of the golf cart. Later on he’d tell the young man that he liked the golf cart because it was quiet and easier to hide in the woods. He just kept the gun in the truck in case he saw a buck worth killing while driving around.
The two men sat in the stand waiting on any sign of deer. It was a still morning. Even the birds weren’t stirring. Around 6:30, the world’s brightness growing quicker by the minute, the old man jumped out of his seat and grabbed for the binoculars.
“Son of a bitch, let me see those.”
The young man sat back and watched him look out of the stand at a field of nothing. He scanned hard, squinting until his eyes closed and he had to reopen just a bit like he was trying to make a faucet drip. Then he saw it, a speck of orange. Like one dead pixel on a huge screen.
He reached down and picked up the rifle to get a better look.
“What is it?”
“It’s a damn orange hat.”
“An orange hat?” He lifted the covers from the rifle scope and started to look down the barrel. “Like somebody is back there?”
“Fuck yes. Like somebody is back there.” The old man removed his eyes from the binoculars and glanced over at the young man. “Put that down. What the hell are you doing?”
“I just wanted to get a better look, sorry.”
“I don’t aim to kill him, son. Unless you’re a good enough shot to just maim him. Just hold on.”
The old man swung the door open and threw his arm out, waving his own hat wildly. The young man put his eye on the scope while the old man did this and watched as the bright speck didn’t move for a moment and then suddenly disappeared into the green and brown of the pine and oak tree background.
“Them sons of bitches. I can’t stand that shit.” The old man pulled his head and arm back in and the young man sat up quickly. “You can’t have anything these days, lest you have somebody coming on your land trying to take it from you. I hate a damn poacher.”
The young man sat there, continuing to scan the field and stay out of his way.
“Just give me a minute to calm down, alright? Just keep watching the fields. They’ll come out as long as that fella don’t come back. Just keep watching.” He grabbed the cough suppressor tube and hacked into it.
The young man heard a rustle then, to his left, and he looked over at the tree line near the base of the stand. A head popped out, small and brown, followed by a small body. It was a little doe. He didn’t say anything, he just watched. None had gotten this close yesterday. It couldn’t have been more than fifteen yards away. It moved gracefully into the field. Behind it followed two more, one slightly bigger than the others. Their legs were so thin that he wondered how they could even stand, much less run so fast. Beside him, the old man coughed again into his tube, but the deer didn’t notice and he barely did either.
Then, another rustle behind them. The three does turned their heads to the tree line. The young man turned his too. First he saw a creamy white horn poke out, followed by more of the same. Then the head, much larger and taller than the does in front of it. His heart beat wildly and he sat motionless in fright like the morning air. The buck poked its neck out for a second longer, before returning to the woods.
“I saw one, I saw one,” he said frantically, his eyes still on the tree line for any more sign of the buck.
“Saw what? I can see those does.”
“No, no, I saw a buck.”
“Where?”
“It was right there. It stuck its head out and then pulled back in. It looked huge.”
“Stuck its head out and went back in? Playing hokey-pokey with you?”
“I swear it did.”
“Alright. Well, he’s just looking around. They’re smart creatures, especially old ones with big racks. That’s how they got this way in the first place, not sticking their neck out for too long. Give it time. How many points did he have?”
“I don’t know. It was too quick to count.”
“Too quick. Count quicker next time.”
With that, they sat in silence for the rest of the early morning hours. The young man watched the does eat their fill before returning to the woods where the buck of his YouTube videos awaited somewhere. Near 9:00, he heard the old man’s stomach grumbling and glanced over.
“Guess it’s about time, huh?”
“If you think so.”
“Yeah, I think so. I think I’m hungry as shit. Come on.”
#
It is mid-afternoon, two months before. The young man sits at his home office desk on the second floor of his townhome that sits in a suburb on the edge of his sprawling city. There is a small plot of trees behind his house that he looks at behind his computer screen. The entertainment is usually squirrels.
Today, he sees a deer. It is small, like a little dog. Its face looks like a baby’s. He questions how he would even know that. He’s never seen a deer in person before. Maybe never at all. He questions how he even knows it’s a deer. Regardless, he assumes it is a fawn, a word he heard at some point before.
The young man watches it walk around slowly, looking back and forth from the row of houses to further into the woods. He suddenly has an urge that he’s never felt before. He wants to kill it.
A memory comes back to him. He is driving down the highway to the grocery store. He is sixteen years old. Something large and dark appears in front of him and he jerks the wheel as the animal thuds against the front bumper. He yells a curse word and slowly pulls off onto the side of the road, only thinking about how pissed his parents will be at the damage. He gets out and, turning at the front right wheel, he sees a very large, very dead vulture stuck in the front vent. He is in awe of it. He reaches out and touches it. It does not respond in kind.
Its neck is snapped and hanging loosely. He feels happy and he doesn’t know why. A car slows down beside him and asks if he needs any help.
The young man stops his thoughts at this and leans back. He looks at his computer. There are no new emails to distract himself with. He leans forward again and looks out the window. The deer is gone. He scans quickly. He barely sees it now, it has moved deeper into the trees, but the plot is barely a forest and there is no vegetation to shield it from view. Just pine trees planted in near perfect rows.
It stands perpendicular to the young man. He can see all of its tiny body. He wants to kill it.
“What the hell is wrong with me?” he whispers. The deer looks up at him. He realizes the window is open and he’s spooked it.
He feels the urge to take a picture, but while reaching for his phone with his eyes still on the fawn, he knocks over a can on his desk. It clatters around before softly falling onto the carpet. He shoots his gaze back up. All he sees is the white tail of the deer as it flees from his noise.
He looks around the room as if there might be someone or something that could laugh the moment away or explain the unexplainable feeling to him.
The young man looks back at his computer and starts typing, “private deer hunting trips north carolina.”
The first link takes him to a Facebook page called Sandy Creek Hunts. There are pictures of whitetail bucks and the murderers of them holding their antlers or cutting back their hides as the deer hang from meat hooks. In one photo, he finds the proprietor. He is an old country man. Harmless looking.
The young man finds the telephone number and writes it down in his cell phone notes app. His laptop pings with a new email alert and he slouches back in his chair.
#
The second evening was a bust. Rain suddenly poured in like the ark was necessary and they hadn’t been chosen. The old man cooked up fried chicken and rice and they ate in the living room, watching hunting shows and sitcom reruns in mostly silence.
Just as the young man was falling asleep in the living room recliner, the old man spoke, without turning his head.
“What made you want to come hunt?”
“I think you already asked me that.”
“Well, what was your answer? I’m old.”
“That it looked like fun.”
“Right, right. I don’t think you ever told me what part of it looked like fun.”
“I don’t know, I guess.”
“Everybody knows what they like about something if they think it looks like fun. I like football, it looks like fun because they run fast and I’ve never been able to run fast and they hit each other hard like real men ought to. That’s why it looks like fun.”
The young man sat in silence, looking at his fingernails. He tried to make an answer up in his head. He looked up and the old man was looking at him, his forehead wrinkled.
“I guess the thrill of the hunt.”
“Well, you went to the wrong place for that, buddy. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but there ain’t much thrilling about sitting in a deer stand.”
“What makes you like it then?”
“Who says I like it?”
The young man didn’t answer. The silence lasted for a minute or so.
“I like it because I like to eat deer meat. It tastes good. And I get a kick out of watching these deer all the time. And every once in a while, seeing a good client get their first buck and watching them carry it out of the woods and skin it. See their eyes light up when they hit one just right and it falls pretty fast. You know what we call that? DRT. Dead right there. Anyways, I don’t like it because of no damn thrill though. I haven’t shot a deer in years.”
“Really? When was the last one?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I guess that big one on the wall over there.”
The young man turned and looked back at the deer he’d already studied a handful of times while they ate and watched television. Its head and neck were huge, and they supported antlers that were so tall, thick, and numerous that it looked fake.
“You kill one that big, at my age, or whatever age I was back however many years it was, you stop killing. Go out on a good one. It don’t get much better than that.”
The old man quickly put the footrest on his recliner down and stood up.
“I’ll see you in the morning. That big one that you apparently saw will be back out. He was just testing the waters today.”
The next morning, the young man was up and dressed, sitting on the side of the bed in darkness when the old man came in to wake him up.
“Well, hot damn. I wouldn’t have pegged you for a go-getter. Maybe you’ll surprise me. There’s an egg sandwich on the counter beside your hat. Meet me outside when you’re ready.”
The deer stand had already grown usual by then. The young man knew where everything was without looking. He turned the heater on first this time, before the old man could make an attempt. He opened the windows and hung them up to put the wood shooting blocks in the bottom of the frames. Then, he grabbed the binoculars from their hook and scanned the tree line.
“Aren’t you just a regular through and through? Full of surprises. Full. Of. Surprises.” He sat back in his chair and watched the young man hunt on his own.
After a while of watching for naught, the young man asked, “How do you get them to come back every year?”
“What makes you come back to the same old place every year?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on now.”
“I guess comfort.”
“Good answer. These deer don’t have to search or fight for anything. They sleep in the woods, unperturbed, they wake up and walk into a field with weeds to eat or a lane with corn all over the ground. It’s practically paradise. They’re like pets. Undomesticated pets.”
“Huh. So, you just condition them to like it here?”
“What’s that? Aw, no. These animals ain’t smart enough to be conditioned. At least not most of them. They just like food and safety. For the most part, I provide that. I spend a thousand dollars on corn every year—now that’s paid for by a couple of guys like you coming into town, but what a deal that is. It’s almost not even wild for ’em anymore. It’s like being a child in a good home. Except the rule is that if you get too big and just a little too dumb, somebody might shoot you. I guess that ain’t too much different from the real world anyways.”
“How do some of them get smarter than the others?”
“Experience. Age. Maybe they get shot at one time and remember. Probably something in their instincts that tells them ‘I’ve got a big ol’ rack on my head, so I shouldn’t stand out in the open for too long.’ I don’t know, can’t say I’ve ever studied deer brains. Just usually the bigger ones know how to keep their heads down.”
While the old man finished his pondering, the young man spotted movement at the back of the field. He snatched up the binoculars and looked. It was the deer from the day before. It stood tall, walking closely behind and towering over two does. He counted the number of points in its antlers. Eleven.
“What’s that?”
“He’s out again. At the back.”
“Hand me them.”
The old man watched the deer for a moment and put the glasses back down.
“Well, I’ll be. How many you think he’s got?”
“Antlers?”
“No, children. Yes, antlers. Don’t back off the genius you’ve been surprising me with all of a sudden.”
“Eleven.”
“Hot damn. You sure?”
The young man looked out the window for a second and put the binoculars back on his eyes. He counted slowly.
“Yes.”
“You’ve got pretty damn good eyes. Alright. He’s a little far out there, so you can tell me right now if you’re a former Army marksman or we can just wait on him to come on.”
The young man didn’t answer. Silence returned and they watched on. The old man scanned the tree line back and forth, intermittent coughs allowed, while the young man started on at the three deer. They moved slowly, a painstaking, frustrating pace that never seemed to bring them any closer to him. He thought they must be eating slower than usual. The day before, they had felt like racers, eating their food as quickly as possible before heading back into the relative safety of the forest. Now they grazed like cattle. The old man glanced over at him and could sense his frustration. He looked out the window at the small troupe of deer. They had moved somewhere around forty yards, still leaving around four hundred to go.
“You want to shoot him, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir. I do.”
“That makes sense. Biggest one in a while. Probably the biggest one you’re ever going to see.”
The young man nodded back at this as his brain swam. Two weeks earlier he’d seen the small doe, childlike and nervous for what might be watching it. A moment millions of people have regularly.
“Go ahead and get the gun up. Can’t hurt. They’re steadily making their way over and we’ve got nothing but time. You better thank God this ain’t the evening and we ain’t racing the dark.”
He got the gun up gingerly, even as the deer stood more than plenty far away for them to make any noise quieter than a gunshot and remain undetected. He put it up through the window and onto the shooting block. He flipped open the scope covers and looked through at the deer. It was facing him now, head on, and looking up, almost as if he was challenging the young man. As he watched, his finger instinctively made its way to the trigger.
“Wait, hold on a second,” the old man said.
The young man took his eye off the scope. The frustration began to well up in him.
“What is it?”
“I swear to God, if it ain’t that man again in the back of the field.”
“Where?” the young man said, looking back through the scope. He couldn’t see anything, just the deer standing there, now with its side turned, mocking him.
“Same place as last time. Hold on, let me wave him off again. Maybe it won’t scare the deer too bad.”
The old man leaned out of the stand door again, waving his hat and not making a sound. The young man watched through the scope. The deer perked up and looked over at the stand.
“Shit,” the young man said. “Stop it. Stop it.”
“What?”
“You’re gonna scare it off.”
“That don’t matter much to me. I got bigger issues right now.” He continued to wave the hat. “God, I hate these sons of bitches.”
The young man bolted the gun and took the safety off. He aimed down the scope sight, putting it over the shoulder for bullet drop—something he’d heard on the internet. Then, he fired. It was quick. The trigger was light.
“What the hell are you doing?” the old man yelled, pulling himself back in the stand.
The young man looked on and the older one met his gaze. The deer lifted its tail, white as snow, and darted towards the woods. As it ran across the middle of the field, the young man bolted the gun again, ignoring the old man’s question, and shot once more. The deer fell. He sat back and took a deep breath.
“I couldn’t miss my opportunity.”
“Jesus Christ. Well hold on.”
The old man looked down the field again and could find no trace of the orange hat.
“Alright, maybe you scared him off. Come on. It’s a long walk.”
When they got to the deer, it was dead and its eyes shone nothing back but black. It had a hole in its shoulder. Blood sprang from the hole and its mouth. It was huge in its lifelessness, bigger than before.
“Well, you are one good shot, huh. Hot damn. That’s a good one. Let’s go check on that man, see if he’s still around. We’ll come back.”
The young man stood there still-like, watching the deer for any trace of life, with the gun in his hand pointed at its head.
“Trust me, buddy. He ain’t going nowhere. Jesus. What a day and it’s just the morning.”
They arrived at the tree line and in the shadow of the woods, the sun still in its earliest daily ascent and behind the pines’ lazy and porous covering, lay the man of the orange hat. The old man ran over to him.
He was somewhere around the young man’s age, maybe younger. He wore a camo jacket and camo pants. His face, long and covered in a scraggly and patchy beard, was frozen in a manner of appropriate shock. There was a hole in his stomach and he was already no longer alive. Blood seeped from his mouth and from the hole in his gut. Standing in the shadow of this morning, the young man’s thoughts rang back then to the first hunt, just days before, as the deer had migrated to the darkest places in the field for cover and safety.
He liked how he felt then. He felt proud. Nothing was around him anymore, no sound broke his ears, no light pierced his eyes. He was alone in the moment. He had killed, not once, but twice.
“Son of a bitch, son of a bitch,” the old man yelled.
“What should we do?”
The old man took a deep breath and looked around for a minute.
“Do you want to get out of this?”
“What?”
“You heard me. This is a quick decision moment, son. No fucking around.”
“Yes, yes. I guess I do.”
“Hell yeah you guess you do. I’ll be back in a minute.” He started to walk off and turned back around. “Just stay right there. Don’t do anything crazy. You’ve already done enough of that.”
The old man was gone and back faster than he could take stock of the situation. He had gloves and a shovel and two buckets filled with water in his truck.
“Why are you helping me?”
“I told you already. I fucking hate poachers.”
They worked in silence, carrying the body into the woods and digging a deep hole in the Carolina clay. The old man cleaned the place up quickly and yanked the deer up into the truck.
“I liked doing that,” the young man said.
“Mm. Some people do.”
“You don’t think I’m crazy?”
“No crazier than the rest of the world. Just don’t go telling anybody else about it. They won’t agree”
The young man nodded.
“How do you know how to do all of this? Cleaning it up and everything.”
“What did I tell you earlier? The ones with the big racks know how to keep their heads down.”
He paused and took a breath. He wiped the sweat off his brow.
“And I really fucking hate poachers.”
Joshua Trent Brown is a writer from North Carolina and a fiction editor at JAKE the mag. He has fiction in more than a dozen cool publications like HAD, JMWW, and A Common Well Journal. His first novel, The Walls Are Closing In On Us, will be published by Malarkey in 2026. You can read more of his work at https://trentbrownwrites.squarespace.com/fiction or find his stupid ideas on Twitter @TrentBWrites.