Matthew Null: Allegheny Front

The haunch moved: a doe. Crosshairs swung after.

Revealing the white underthroat that men seldom see, she balanced artfully on hind legs to pluck the wine-dark fruit hanging in the sumac. Her weight tugged off a fist of berries. Each bone-colored limb quivered in the air. Snow sifted down, snow that would be gone by noon.

Sull Mercer eased the.270 into the cleft of his shoulder and took a rest off one knee. His rifle was scoped with a 3x9 Leupold — an expensive piece of equipment — but Sull would have told you it was anything but a luxury. It found the tuck behind the doe’s shoulder, that corridor to heart and lung. When she passed into a notch between shagbarks, a chance would flicker. For three decades now, this rifle had been comfort in his hands — the bolt worn smooth of its checkering, the burled walnut dark with weather and age. A twig popped under his shifting heel. No more than the crack of a finch’s bone.

The doe stamped a foot. Moments ticked by. She performed an elaborate dance, dropping her head and bobbing it up, then back down again and on and on, ears switching, goading him to move. She was an old doe, barren now, and knew threat by its first name. If the flag of Sull’s face rustled in the greenbriers, she’d crash through the brush. He held.

His wife craved the liver. He pictured the doe bearing it to them in her body, a gift.

She took a step, with a slight slew-footed twist of the foreleg. Sull flinched. He knew this deer! Before his son Eric had gone to the penitentiary, Sull helped stalk her at the abandoned quarry, where she’d bedded with a lone fawn. This dance had saved her life then. Eric was young, impatient. He tossed four careening shots as she ran. A wild clean miss, each one. It was everything Sull told him not to do. All three sons had learned it over the years, a psalm: One cartridge, one kill. The rest is just slop. In a voice chilly as spring water, Sull had told him, “You work that bolt like an automatic, don’t you? Maybe they drafted the wrong one of you.”

Eric didn’t speak to him after that. It made Sull bite his lip to think it now. But Sull was calm, even as the doe’s stormy eyes slid over his body. He’d killed enough deer to hang every hook in a slaughterhouse, and few things excited him now that his children had gone on. The doe put forth a tentative hoof. The crosshairs leapt and a peal of thunder rattled the woods. Wrens vanished from the sumac into that pure balance: receding echoes, an expanding silence.

A fox had taken five of the Rockinghams Sull raised as a crib against lean winter months. They didn’t need the hens, really, with the grocery selling them on the cheap, but he nursed their absence like a blister. The thought of a deer hanging — the lactic acid breaking down, the meat’s surface curing to a glossy black rind — made him feel confident in his sustenance.

She didn’t travel a yard. The bullet had ripped a wet socket through the heart, and the doe collapsed as if her knees had turned to stove ash. Hind legs kicked convulsively, brooming leaves. Sull kept the scope on her as she seized, then thumbed on the safety when death was sure. Approaching, he checked his pocket for the familiar heft of the Schrade. She was hoary with age across the muzzle and shanks. Nicked, scalloped hooves. A fleeting regret: perhaps he should have killed something tender and young. Her muskiness drifted up to him. The body had a catatonic beauty, a still life. The exit wound, a slight red star, told a perfect shot. Shame no one else would see it. Marion would be happy for the liver, though, and maybe the twins would come down from Michigan to hunt Thanksgiving. After their discharges, Joel first and Jeffrey eight months later, they had found good union jobs in an auto plant and married Midwestern women about as quick as boys can find them. Sull and Marion couldn’t blame them. Anyone here with any ambition did the same. Ambition, they all said, chewing the word.

Sull was pleased and sad the hunt had ended so early, but it would give him time that evening to open the gilt-edged King James and glean its comfort. But the day itself comforted more. A windless cold, the kind that keens the senses and brings a gift of ice to the lungs. He’d have Marion write about the doe in her letter to Eric. After pulling the doe onto a rotten quilt of snow, Sull shucked gloves and jacket and rolled his sleeves. He gutted as if he were trying to ration motion itself. After years of fieldwork, he performed the ritual with surgical efficiency. The heart belched a ragged last beat. He fished out a rope, tied it round her neck, and quartered uphill. Innards left her body with a wet sigh and steamed. Arms gloved in blood, he plucked leaves off her eyes and mouth and smoothed the fur tenderly. Pooling blood began to congeal and maroon. He rubbed snow on his knife and hands. Foxes would find the gut-pile and stick their muzzles into the rich leavings, all the way up to their eyeballs. They would eat the pink snow itself. Then buzzards, considerately stripping earth of the dead.

Dragging the body, he thought of his hens. No tracks printed on the raked earth, no cabbage-sized hole marring the drywall. After three nights yawning with a snake-charmer.410 in his arms, Sull dug the rusty leg-hold traps out of the attic, a pair of size two double-coilsprings and a big Newhouse Three. The hinges ached. With a steel brush, he brought iron back to life and nursed the springs with beeswax in the worst, twangiest spots. He baited them with meat scraps, which shriveled untouched till they resembled dried mushrooms. This fox was awful.

A grouse flushed from an upturned washing machine. Snow gave way to leaves and a dump where greenbrier stitched the work of generations: bald tires and log-chains rusted into solid piles, gallon jugs and stripped sedans. He skidded the deer onto a logging road that died into the slope behind his house. Pausing to catch his breath, he saw the silhouette of a great dark hawk that lit on the electric pole near the drive. It shook its vast wings of parasites and tucked them back. Sull’s face grew hot. Dead hens. No tracks. He’d been a fool.

He dropped the rope and leaned into his shot. When he pulled the trigger, the hawk stiffened and fell. Sull ran with an old man’s jauntiness and found it buckling in the gravel. Scaly, cadmium talons gripped for empty air like palsied hands. Guard feathers obscured the chest, but his bullet had torn a red void out its back. A wing flapped. Turning the bird over with his boot, he saw it was a mature bald eagle. He grinned. It died then.

With a dull hammer, Sull nailed the eagle to the side of the barn, a derelict creamery, to ward off other predators. The parchment skull gave easily under the sixteen-penny nail, its honed point shining, and the sharp wedge of beak caved to the hammer-blow. He stood back to admire his handiwork. The screen door cracked in its keeper. The pitcher in Marion’s hand was lacy with suds. “You scared me,” she said, with a pinched look. “I dropped a dish.”

“Sorry. I seen this on the light-pole. I shot him. Weren’t no fox. An eagle!” Breathing hard, he wiped his smiling face on a shoulder. Sweat had turned his gray hair the dark, wet sheen of merchant pig-iron.

“You allowed doing that?” she asked.

“Yeah I am,” he said curtly. He spoke through a fixed smile, as he tended to do when flustered. He’d expected her to beam. “Shot us a doe. She’ll eat good. Hose in the garage?”

“Is where it always is. You remember the liver?”

“Shit.”

She flinched at the word. He’d left the tender organ buried in the gut-pile like a precious coin. Marion’s favorite part, if a tad rich for his palate. She had reminded him of it three times. He picked shyly at his hammer-welted fingers. Blood had troughed blackly in the folds of knuckles.