Three Times Out
Lynn Kozlowski

Meadow

He took off early from work and got me out of school. He got us as quick as he could up into the woods. We took old logging roads to the crossing of a small brook. When the road ended, he stopped on the road. He waited to let me put rubber bands over the ends of my pants and to spread a bug repellent on my hands and face. He even let me wear this hat I'd sent away for that had fine netting coming down from the brim on all sides. "Do what you want, " he said, "but get going with it." I followed him through the woods going as fast as he did. We went along by a narrow brook, coppery and dark in the old forest. The ferns glowed green from lines of sun getting through. He stopped to wait and started again when I caught up with him. I was breathless trying to keep up. Black flies were gathering around us. The trail went into a broad opening one step from the woods into an open meadow with sunny sky and separate white clouds. At the edge of the meadow was a beaver dam with water backed up against a mound of peeled sticks. The coppery water turned black in the channel. The meadow was filled to its sides. The trees in the middle were dead and stripped as if from a fire. The ground was boggy around the spread pond's edge. Thick grass came up between the woods and the pond, beaver-gnawed stumps here and there in the field. He walked into the water. "Come on," he said. He said, "If you get wet, you get wet." He walked into the water up to his waist. Berries were ripe all over a mossy rise next to me. The clouds and sky were reflecting off the dark smooth water. Lily pads spread out into the pond. He walked by a stand of alders and cracked off a brittle limb to get by. He was getting himself next to the slow channel. He baited his hook with worms--no slick business with a fancy fly. He sank his line. Branches and mud were tangled in the cool water. He said, "Get in. Come on. Today. Today."

Woods

He is showing me. He takes out his compass and shows me how to pick a mark to hit, and we head for it. He is shaping out an angled route to get us back by dark. Snowshoes are work. Bearpaws, he calls them, oblong hoops criss-crossed with lacquered gut. We are alone in the woods, bright with a new inch of snow. In a clearing, a deer is quiet on its side, blood sprayed all around, her throat torn. Steam rises from her snout. My father strokes her side like she is a horse he cares about that is down. He lifts her front leg to get her on her back. He pulls his knife a few times over her belly. The skin tears apart along the line of strokes. He moves the doe back on her side, and a bag slips out onto the snow. He works his knife on that bag and a wet, fully-shaped fawn opens up out onto the snow. Steam comes off it in a cloud. The snow where it lands melts into slush. The fawn is hairless and rubbery looking. It shifts and settles, as if trying to get comfortable. Its eyes are sealed under skin. A miniature deer, a rare find, perfect. My father stands up and looks around the woods. Shadows from the woods come over the deer. My father arranges the little one out next to the doe. He lays them out in kind of a picture, both on their sides, legs stretching out straight. For himself, he cuts off the tail of the doe. "Here," he says, and, in one cut, he makes me a little deer's foot. The stump beads with blood. The muscle gathers from the nub of bone. There is nothing to what he hands me--skin, soft bone. He walks fast, to make up time, me working to keep up. We get as far as the first road back. I am out of breath. I can't just drop it. This stump of leg is nothing I want. I shake it at him, behind his back. I can't let go. Letting it go is more than I can do.

Camp

We left the rifles lying out, lightly oiled and empty, side by side on the long tables, and went back into the sleeping room, following the men who had the lanterns. I was let to use a cot next to my father's bed way back by the wood-stove. Nobody had pillows, except one fat old guy who had two. I balled up a flannel shirt to use. That's the kind of thing I saw most everyone doing. My father rolled out his sleeping bag over his bed and went back to playing at cards in the kitchen. The older men grunted as they sat. They stripped off boots and socks and moved them down to the stove. Longjohns was as naked as these men got. The far lantern was choked off. One of my uncles came in with a pail of water for the deer mice. He propped a board for a runway up over the edge, to end just one small mouse jump away from an apple in the middle. The apple was stuck through with a stiff wire and fixed to hang there over the center of the bucket. My uncle spun the apple. I had never slept in a room with no ceiling or no inside walls. It was a long room, pine-knotted, its details lost in the dark pitch of the roof. No proper walls facing in. No interior roof over my head. The lantern by the stove was choked off. The stove was bringing sweat up into the air from boots and socks. Rowed out on each side of the room were brothers and uncles and cousins and other men and boys I had never been out with anywhere before. Some guy was ripping out big snores. Some guy kept up making a fast blowing sound. A mouse spun off into the water. Above me in the dark rafters, I heard pecking at wood. I pulled down into the sleeping bag, to warm my head and muffle out the noise--closing in the musty smell of the bag. In the heavy air, I tried to close myself down into sleep. I had hoped to go all night without turning out over onto the floor or doing some other dumb thing, but I woke toward morning--having to take a leak, having to try to do a quiet get up and walk out into the cold to the outhouse from the farthest end of the room to do that from. I heard a mouse drop into the water. One man stopped up his steady snoring, then gasped a huge breath, and started ripping away hard again. It was starting to become gray in the room. My father turned over toward me. His sour breath carried over into my mouth. Heavy breaths washed over into my face. I saw detail rise on my father's face as the daylight came up. I watched him sleep without turning away, neither of us turning away, me seeing the hard hair forced out through his sleeping skin. He made faces. Expressions passed in and out across his face. His eyes swept around under their lids. He winced and snarled and clacked his teeth. I watched him until the first blank opening of his eyes, the opening of his eyes before anything came to his focus, before he blinked and rubbed his eyes and saw me there in room that was rousing all around us--my eyes closing to open a few moments after his.

© 2002 by Lynn Kozlowski