The Place Between the Stars

“The Place Between the Stars” is an essay from the forthcoming book Salmon Weather: Writing From the Land of No Return by CMarie Fuhrman, available March 2025.

T

he red dot appears and disappears. A memorized pattern. Slide the safety up, the red dot disappears, and the rifle will not fire; down, and the trigger is free. This I learned young. This was part of my raising. Clear and open the chamber before anything else, never point the barrel at something you aren’t planning to kill, keep the safety on until you are ready to shoot. The red dot is gone. I have the rifle pointed at a cow elk. The crosshairs jerk around her body, I push the safety back on. She turns her head to look at me. Others are standing with her, more cows. Five, at least. Some behind her. They are all outlined by a sky going blue to grey. Even if I could steady the crosshairs, the bullet could pass through. Caleb waits in the trees, not wanting to scare the small herd. I kneel and then lie prostrate on the frozen ground, but the ridge they walk is too high for a lying down shot. Safety on. I sit and balance the barrel on my knees.

Same position, different animal. A buck. Late October, five years earlier. We had walked the trail to Krassel Knob in the dark before morning following only the red bean of the headlamp. I was warm with a strange sense of safety. The 30.06 over my shoulder protects me from anything outside the red beam. In the early dawn light, I lay down twice with the rifle pointed at a deer. The first time, a small buck, probably too far away anyhow, spooked at our scent. The wind favoured the animal. The second time, I belly crawled for 50 yards toward a small herd of lounging does, certain a young buck would be in their midst. Finally, they rose and ran, and there was no buck.

Morning had become late afternoon and we had become louder, hunters turned hikers, cutting our way through a ravine that would take us back to the trail. Caleb was carrying the gun as sometimes he does when we are moving fast, lightening my load. I will always remember the sun on that day. The way it poured into that late October landscape, turning grass golden, gilding the tops of trees rising from the steep hillsides. The sun lay like a tired mother in the bottom of the ravine when a buck stepped into her light. He paused as mule deer are wont to do, then spooked. Like us, he was moving fast, unwittingly, but filled with other desires. He looked right past us in our slipshod camo. His nose lifted to air, smelling something. The does on the hillside, perhaps. He was stupid with lust for the rut.

This one’s yours, Caleb whispered. He handed me the gun. I needed to slow my breath. I raised the rifle, closed my left eye. My father’s voice told me to inhale, pull the trigger, exhale. Don’t blink. I had been lucky two seasons in a row. Clean shots both. Perhaps luck inspired a confidence I relied too heavily upon—maybe I was still stupid with rut as well. I inhaled, slid the safety up. Fired. Missed. Chambered another bullet. Fired. Hit the buck, though I couldn’t tell where, and he ran. We held there a moment. I shook my head, It wasn’t a good shot. When I squeezed the trigger, I had closed my eyes. I hadn’t watched the shot. Something I did not do when, years earlier, I shot the buck my late husband, Randy, and I had watched grow from a gangly spike. We had a pact; we wouldn’t kill anything that grazed in our field. We had 60 acres that were once planted in alfalfa and still gave us volunteer graze. Our horses spent spring mornings in it, fall afternoons, too. It fed them and a small herd of whitetail. Sometimes, antelope.

I can’t imagine an animal giving itself to me; I believe everything living, save for the deeply tormented, wants to continue to live. It’s what we know.

I mounted the head of the buck I promised not to kill and called it Boom. Boom and it was dead, I told my friend as we dressed it out and hung it in his bar. Later, along with his wife, we three would process the deer we each shot. Warm up the wood stove and make sausage, wrap steaks, stand on wood chips while saws and grinders worked. Dressed, processed, boom. The words we use to help distance the pain of killing. He drowned, I would tell people when they asked how Randy died. I no longer called it an accident, nor said I lost him when I was just 30, he had not simply passed away. He died doing what he loved, someone said to me at his funeral. He loved living, I replied. Boom. I can’t imagine an animal giving itself to me; I believe everything living, save for the deeply tormented, wants to continue to live. It’s what we know. The cow elk on the hillside sniffed the air, nosing a smell she wasn’t sure of. She wasn’t poised to run. None of them were. They were merely grazing in what was left of the late December sun. Will the elk be pregnant? I had asked Caleb. Yes, he said. When I asked how big the fetus would be, he said, You won’t be able to tell.

We had to put chains on the truck to make it up the grade. I had drawn a late cow elk hunt tag. The region was steep and mostly inaccessible, likely the reason the tags were available. We had hunted the gulch across the ravine the weekend before but went home empty. This was my last chance. Christmas was coming. We would soon leave to visit my mother in Colorado. We needed time to hang and process the animal. And weather was coming. Snow. NOAA issued a Winter Storm Warning. If I was going to shoot an elk, it had to be before sundown. The grade was a hill by Idaho standards, but like most places we hunted, it was precipitous. Even with the chains, we occasionally slid. I looked out my window and could see no road, no ledge. Just down. If we went off here, the truck would roll. Wheels, cab, wheels, cab. It wouldn’t stop until it reached the road. The dogs were in the backseat, sleeping. Their trust in us is so complete. The rifle lay in its hard black case beside them, as if it were a third dog, sleeping, trusting. I remember a story my father told me about his father and a small dog they had. “Take it hunting and don’t bring it back,” my grandfather said to his son. “What did you do?” I asked. I remember him saying he tried to pretend it was a rabbit. He was not one to dress up the truth. The morning Mark Cada killed himself, Dad took me downstairs and handed me a bullet. “Mark put this through his head.” The bullet was as long as one of my fingers. Heavy. I couldn’t picture what Mark’s father found when he found Mark on the hillside above their house, but 40 years later, when a poet, a classmate, sat on a bench in the university’s arboretum and pulled his trigger, I saw it perfectly. There is a hole where they dug up the blood, a friend whispered as we walked. I hoped some of his blood would find the roots of the tree he sat beneath. To keep some of him living with the poems he left behind.

I think of the last breath my husband released into the Clarks Fork River on the afternoon he drowned. I wonder if another being inhaled it. Maybe some of him went on. We poured his ashes into a different river in the hours after his memorial. I had picked the ashes up from the funeral home where I had last seen him, or rather, his body. The smear of white spit was still crusted on his lips where I had pressed my own and tasted nothing but river water. Someone had led me into a darkened room to be alone with his body a final time. I only remember the spit and the dark and the husband of one of Randy’s sisters taking me out with a firm hand on my arm. I had ridden to the funeral home with his family. Closed in the car his mother said, “You lied about being married.” It was two days before his funeral. “We were married,” I told her. Just as I had told her the night she and his father drove to the mortuary across the state line, to see for themselves, that he was dead. We were in a gas station. She said there had been a mistake, the coroner had listed me as his spouse. That she corrected it. “It was no mistake,” I told her. Reaching for a drink I wouldn’t finish, I told her we were married. “Joint taxes,” I muttered. The car was silent after I spoke. At Randy’s funeral, seconds after the colonel placed a flag in my hands and saluted me, she tore the flag from my arms, where I’d pressed it to my chest. “He was mine,” she said so loud she startled the priest.

The 30.06 in the backseat was Randy’s. I bought it at a pawn shop. A Christmas gift. I killed Boom with it after Randy died. I was packing up the house because I couldn’t make the mortgage payments—even if I could, the house was not in my name. Just a week before he died, Randy had removed the pay on death insurance. Nothing was in my name. He had no will. That’s when lawyers got involved. It was only two weeks after his funeral. His parents made demands, called a meeting between our lawyers. Everyone showed up but his mom and dad. Driving home, my best friend Melissa at the wheel, we watched as a hawk lifted from the ground, a black snake in its mouth. “You will win this,” she said. And as she did, the hawk dropped the snake which writhed in the air until it hit the ground in a place neither of us saw. I had found a dead hawk on our deck the week before Randy died. It’s a chicken, he tried to convince me, but I know hawks. Even then they meant something. Omens, harbingers. The knowing began with a young hawk I found in a blizzard and warmed back to health in my bathroom. Its enlivening cry filled every corner of my house. For months after it flew from my door, I would see it sitting in the pine near my house. I made Randy dig a hole and we buried the hawk outside the fence we’d strung for our four dogs.

Rusty was the newest of the four. He came from a family who asked us to take care of him while they traveled. They never came back for him. In a sympathy card the wife wrote, We are so sorry for your loss. If Rusty is too much, we will come get him. Boom. The words we use to distance us from pain. In a photo taken years later, Rusty sits beside my dad under the black walnut tree in the front yard of my childhood home. Dad, in his ridiculous gardening hat, balances a huge squash with one hand and has his other arm around the big red dog. He was just starting to forget things when he and Mom drove from Colorado to my house in Montana to help me move. Dad spent mornings spreading the gravel I’d had delivered as a Father’s Day gift to Randy from the dogs. Mom packed dishes in old newspapers. I sorted through Randy’s military records and photographs. We are a family who work as we grieve.

After my father praised my aim and the cherries saved for winter pies, I would find the bodies of the robins, stroke their smooth chests, and whisper, I’m sorry.

The buck I’d shot on the late October afternoon was gone. We were tracking it through drops of blood barely visible on the tips of brown grass. Every few yards, a spattering marked a place where the animal paused as the blood left his body. The buck had climbed out of the ravine, crossed the trail we sought, and was headed for a deeper drainage. We tied flagging in places where we found blood. It began to snow. I was angry at Caleb. I’d felt pressured. He’d whispered excitedly, this one is yours. You got this. Careful. Breathe. Aim for the heart. We had not known each other long. Only hunted together for two seasons. Caleb had given up hunting before we met; it was me who talked him back into it. Handed him the rifle my father gave me, the 30-30 with a stock in which he’d inlaid 12 unique types of wood to make a diamond pattern. It was the only gun my parents had for the first decade of their marriage. The means of survival in 1950s Montana when survival, for them, was hard to come by. Caleb and I moved slowly through the long grass, nearly invisible to one another in our camo and the darkening forest. Still quiet. Still hunting. When finally, we saw one another he whispered about the coming darkness, the snow beginning to fall. You should go get the dogs and bring them back here. I nodded. He would keep tracking, and as I turned, he added bring the meat pack. All the way back to the truck I replayed the shot. The crack of the rifle. The startled face of the buck. Rechambering. Again. And the buck running on three legs. Shame carried me down the darkening trail. I pulled the trigger in haste. I was in love. I wanted to impress Caleb. I wanted to make him proud the same way I wanted to make my father proud by shooting the robins out of our backyard cherry trees. After my father praised my aim and the cherries saved for winter pies, I would find the bodies of the robins, stroke their smooth chests, and whisper, I’m sorry. I could not camouflage my shame. I wore it into my adult life and again on that autumn trail. What kind of person will kill what they love to earn love? What exactly was I aiming at when I finally pulled the trigger?

Buster, the blue heeler Randy had when I met him, is buried in a grove of aspen in Colorado. He should be at my childhood home with Rusty, Maggie, all my childhood dogs, and every childhood pet, from fish to rat that I ever called mine. When I buried Buster, I was dating my horseshoer. He was the kind of man you date when your father is dying and you don’t want to face the fact that your father is dying. The kind that talks incessantly about his ex and how much he still loves her, the kind that answers a knock on his door, right after you’ve had sex, to take a Valentine’s gift from that same ex. I was visiting with Buster and Katie. Maggie and Rusty now lived with my mom and dad. I could find no rental that would take four dogs and two horses, my dowry for widowhood, after selling the house Randy and I finished together, the house and acreage I could no longer afford. Randy’s mother wanted me to give the horses to a woman in Tennessee. It would mean so much to her to have something of Randy’s, his mother said, his mother who, following Randy’s funeral, demanded back every Christmas gift his family ever gave us. The woman who hung her son’s uniform in her living room. Who I did not fight for the life insurance or the flag she had pulled from my hands after the officer placed it there saying, He made his country proud. The woman who demanded control of our finances and that Randy’s dad be our personal representative. But who I would not give control of our checking account, home, vehicles, or pets. It would mean so much to his dad to be in charge of Randy’s finances, she said on the phone. His dad, however, said little, except that I was nice to him. His mother told the lawyers that I was a certain type of woman, this she knew by my belly button piercing and the thong underwear I wore. How she knew about either, I do not know. My lawyer explained that our CPA would testify that Randy understood filing joint taxes meant legal marriage in the state of Montana. Not in God’s eyes, the former Sunday school teacher said. You can ask God and Randy when you see them, I said in a fit of anger. “There are things that happen in a couple’s bed that a man doesn’t tell his mother,” their family lawyer told her. The horseshoer eventually married his ex. It’s best if I don’t ever talk to you again, he said over the phone. I replaced him with a biologist who stopped to see two ex-girlfriends of his own on the way to see me in Taos, where I was trying to escape the pain of my father’s death that spring.

Chains rattling, we inched our way up the mountainside to the top where Caleb thought it best to park, knowing even chains might not get us out if we went further. Two men walked out of the trees carrying rifles, Caleb rolled his window down. They said they were hunting wolves and heading home empty-handed. Take that dog hunting and don’t bring it back. I looked away and listened to the window as it rolled up, snugging glass into weatherstripping. We left the dogs in the truck with a dish of water and a promise that we would be right back. Randy had blown me kisses from across that river that had drowned him. I was going to the little market near the bridge; I’d be right back, meet him and his friend at the takeout. I was handing money to the clerk when a woman rushed in and said someone had fallen into the river. I assured them both that my husband, the former medevac pilot, would find them. I called him my husband. I had been engaged before but never married. I was 32, still trying the word husband on, liking it, especially on the day when, Christmas shopping, my best friend said to the clerk, “We have to stop or our husbands are not going to let us go shopping together anymore.” I felt a belonging I hadn’t known. I felt wanted. Cisco, a dog Caleb and I adopted, worries when his collar is removed, puts his tail between his legs, lays his ears flat. “You’re our dog,” I said to him over and over the day we brought him home. “Ours,” as I put the collar on, shiny and silver. He never seems to mind waiting in the truck. His trust is the same as the trust we have that those we love will always return. Sometimes we tiptoe to the glass and look in at them innocently curled together, and then we unlock the door and scatter them with joy.

The dogs were at the door of the camper when I pulled up to it, in the coming dark on the South Fork. They were still wagging and greeting when I returned to the trail we would walk to find Caleb, and, I hoped, the wounded buck. Ten minutes in, I heard the report of the rifle and knew the hunt was over. The dogs stopped and looked at me, the sound too distant to frighten them entirely, but close enough for worry, then we three began to run toward it. I found Caleb on the trail, eyes and face not belying his deed. We stood silent, facing one another, not blinking back the tears or trying to explain them. The buck had laid down above a small creek and Caleb had taken a clean, fatal shot. Now the 30.06 was silent, the chamber open, rendering it impotent. Randy’s Christmas present from me a decade before. He had not lived to use it. On a late September afternoon, packing the house we’d shared, packing what was left of the us we had become, I took the gun from its rack on the wall, walked outside in my socks, inhaled, slid the safety down, exhaled, and shot Boom. I fired again, thinking he had not fallen, and the bullet puffed dirt where red chert arrowheads could still be found. I used to think that when I finally did find one of those arrowheads, it would mean I was home. Only two months earlier had I found one in the yard we’d made for our dogs. It was already in a moving box, packed away with an old ashtray and a dime from 1910. My neighbour and her husband had been watching the buck through their binoculars from a butte that belonged to neither of us. They walked out of the trees and knelt next to me. “We got the whole thing on video,” the wife said, exuberant. I recalled the people with their cameras standing on the bridge as I lay with Randy’s body on the shore of the river he’d just been pulled from. I yelled obscenities at those people with words and hand gestures. “Delete it. Now.” I told my neighbour.

After Caleb delivered the fatal shot, the buck’s body rolled from where it lay on the hillside down to the creek bank. We cleaned it there. Carefully washing the blood off the warm flesh. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I said, stroking his fur. “I’m sorry,” Caleb said later. “I should have stayed quiet, let you take the shot when you wanted to.” Words distance us from pain. Boom. I have not shot a deer since.

Randy’s mother blamed me for his death. She said I encouraged his kayaking. True, I had bought him the boat that he had died in. He had bought the 40-year-old scotch that I drank to chase down the Xanax a doctor prescribed me a month after he died. I thought it might kill me. I hoped it would. Our house was so far from everyone. My parents had gone home, though my mother called every night. “Pretend he is still alive,” said the mother of a son who killed himself in their backyard. I shot robins from trees as if I enjoyed it and then gave each a silent funeral as Dad sat at the table reading the afternoon paper and Mom cooked supper. Their solitary sacrifices were wrought in the name of love. I let the farrier convince me that Buster, at 20, needed to be put to sleep. Words distance us from pain. I convinced myself that the wildlife biologist with a history of anger would never get angry with me again. I shook my head at the man who was with Randy on the river when he died after he said, “You’ll meet someone you love more than you ever loved Randy.” I let Randy’s mother take the flag from my hands and said nothing that night when we poured his ashes into the river, and she told her friend’s daughter she had always hoped the two of them would get married. All of this, as if I was not standing right there, as if I was not trying to live. Ask him when you get there, I told her again, years after his death, her still questioning his love for me when she called each holiday to remind me that she missed him, making sure I still did, until finally I begged her to stop calling and pretending it was about Randy. Years later I came across a 50th anniversary announcement Randy’s parents placed in the local paper which only mentioned two daughters, never a son. The bullet my father handed me in our basement that morning in January was cold in my eight-year-old hand. My father offered no admonishment and gave no explanation; he just sat in his chair looking at me holding the bullet. I pretend to know what he is thinking. The snake falls from the hawk’s grip and lands out of sight.

The receipt for this read, Euthanasia. She didn’t want to leave you. Words distance us from pain.

The red dot goes away as I slide the lever up. I slide it back down. Caleb walks out from the trees. I balance the barrel on my knees and aim it at the cow elk. The crosshairs circle a smaller patch of body. The shoulder. Inhale. Exhale. I slide the safety up. My cheek is still pressed to the stock of the gun. My father’s 30-30 now in the safe with guns we may never shoot again. My friend’s father restored the inlaid stock after it had gotten wet and the glaze turned milky as cataracted eyes. “Your father was a craftsman,” he said, handing me the gun. A dozen unique pieces of wood made diamond shapes in the stock. My father, the craftsman, milky with Alzheimer’s, unholstered his finger, pointed it at me, “You. Get out.” The red dot disappears. The dot of blood on the breast of the last robin I shot. The BB gun in the safe. The cow elk on the ridge, the others moving away from her now. She was giving herself to you, my friend said. My dog Katie on the floor of our cabin. Caleb and I holding her as she struggled against the poison that was trying to stop her heart. “I’ve never seen a dog try so hard to keep living,” the vet said, “she didn’t want to leave you.” The receipt for this read, Euthanasia. She didn’t want to leave you. Words distance us from pain. Caleb carried her body, wrapped in a wool blanket, to a hole he had dug in our woods. “You’ll find someone you love even more,” said the man who last saw Randy alive. Katie’s collar hangs beside my bed. Carhartt lies beside her grave. The crosshairs draw a smaller pattern on the elk’s shoulder. The red dot reappears.

Eight years after Randy died, I fell in love. “You’ve unlocked every gate,” Caleb tells me on the phone. Words distance us, even from love. I drive from my childhood home where so many of my loves are buried, to a town in southeastern Idaho where we will meet for the first time since meeting online. The parking lot of a restaurant where we would not eat dinner, we would not eat at all that first night. Caleb holds a Mason jar full of wildflowers, “Just like the John Denver song,” he would tell his mom, who never, like Randy’s mother, tells me that I have arranged our kitchen wrong or that I am wasteful with dryer lint that should be placed outside for chickadees to use in their nests. “I know they are talking about me,” his mother says to Randy and me when we come for supper one Sunday. “Listen, they say my name over and over, chick a -dee-dee-dee.” I wonder if I would recognize my dead husband’s voice. My dad, however, sings to me from a cassette recorded in 1976 for my grandparents. I was four and had gotten a piano for Christmas. Caleb and I call the lodgepole nearest our house, Winston, after George Winston, the pianist whose music fills our home. Chickadees sit in Winston’s limbs waiting for the larger birds to leave the feeder. I can’t stop hearing Randy’s mother, so I learn to love robin song and the tapping of nuthatch as they seek bugs in the wood of our home. Sometimes we sit together on the couch, Caleb and me and two dogs, and stare into the trees. “I like sitting beside you,” Caleb says. And Katie lies in the earth beyond the house, and Carhartt suffers vestibular attacks and, for a short while, cannot walk without falling over, and we know that 16 years is a long time for a dog, but she makes lap after lap around the house as if guarding the love we keep inside.

The meat from Boom rots when the freezer that holds it quits. Boom’s head falls off the wall in a house I rent and one of the antlers comes off. I think I should bury it, but I don’t. What does one do with something they have paid to make lifelike but that nevertheless aims to prove its death? Both antler and head are in storage, along with many of my other belongings, stashed there when I said yes to Caleb when after three dates he asked if I wanted to move in with him. One day, I tell myself, I will clean out that storage unit, stop paying rent to store memories, donate Randy’s clothes and cowboy hats, bury Boom’s head in my mother’s backyard alongside all the other animals I loved. What else is one to do with the things we hold onto in a fierce effort to keep them alive? I believe the elk wanted to live. Randy once said he would die before he reached 35. “I thought he would climb up on the rock,” the last man to see Randy alive would say. Randy blew me kisses the last time I saw him alive. The elk is standing alone on the ridgeline.

I was alone in the big house on Blanchard Butte Road for two days after Randy died. My uterus emptied what Randy and I had made only a few weeks before. This was not the first time. I remember him crying months earlier, leaving for a work trip and leaving me with blood and a bag filled with aftercare. I would be ok, I told him as I was leaving the clinic. That night I passed out in a hotel room because I lacked the strength to make the 30-minute drive home. About how big, I asked Caleb, who I know I love because he has the answers to the same questions my father would have the answers to. Questions about wildlife and trails and mountains and weather. How to stay alive for weeks in the wild. Maybe the size of a pea. Caleb tells me and leaves me to decide if I still want to hunt. My father, thinking of his father, and the dog he shot, I pretended it was a rabbit. Caleb taking the meat pack off his back, guiding the barrel of my rifle through its crossbars, the crosshairs steadying. The elk stands alone on the ridgeline. The sky behind her is turning steel grey, gun-barrel grey. Behind me, the jagged teeth of the Seven Devils Range bite into the sky.

The first thing we saw as we started down the trail that early winter morning were fresh wolf tracks centred in the boot prints of the unsuccessful hunters. We were walking through a stand of bare aspen. The trail was unlike most Idaho trails we’d walked. It was flat and descending. When we cleared the trees, we could see over the river some 500 feet below to a ridge we had hunted the week before. That had been a nasty climb. Steep. Snowy. We had glassed elk in the trees above the knob, and as I belly crawled the final distance, I was louder than I could have been. I hoped they heard me. It was at least four miles back to the truck. It would take three trips to pack the animal out. I didn’t want to climb that hill again, not once, certainly not twice. Not to slide down the slope, slippery with the season. I hadn’t cried because I wounded the deer those years before on the South Fork; I cried because Caleb was crying. Our instinct is to survive. Wounded, I have run. The morning my father died, I was dress shopping. My sister texted me: He is gone. I was in the dressing room with the dress I would buy and wear to his funeral. I have forgotten now what that dress looked like. I cannot remember what else is in the storage unit, Randy’s voice, or if he said it was 35 he would not live beyond, or 40. This year I turned 50 and bled for two weeks straight. I thought I would be past this by now.

Caleb wonders when I will stop writing about my dad and Randy. He says, “I am not like Randy or your dad,” when I suggest we remodel the house. He has killed two deer with the rifle I bought for Randy, not including the buck I attempted to kill. I like sitting beside you. I tell him that I am ready to sell the armoire that was Randy’s, one of the few pieces of furniture I brought with me. The widow’s dowry. Pretend he is still alive. The mirror on the front of the armoire is old and distorts the way I see myself. The backing is coming off, and there are places where I can see through, to the inside, as if it were plain glass, which all mirrors, finally stripped of their silvering, are.

We had convinced ourselves we would see no elk that day. They’d be hunkered down in the trees, preparing for the coming storm. And there had been the wolf hunters, and there were the wolves, so Caleb slung the unloaded rifle over his shoulder, and we walked as if it were a summer trail. But there were elk. And we’d not have known if we had not stopped for lunch and started glassing the slope below us and seen the bulls. Carefree, their dangerous season over, one pair lying butt to butt, arrogant in their safety. More were scattered on the ridges and precipices below them. The snow had not yet started and the trail went farther and we are those people who always want to see what is around the next corner, so we walked on. And around the corner is where we found ourselves, unprepared for the cow elk. Caleb chambered a bullet, handing me the gun, saying nothing as I walked, then crawled down the trail. The elk still. Alone now, I take a shallow breath and press my cheek to the stock, moving my eye close to the scope, a scope I looked through years ago to kill a coyote who was caught in a trap and whose leg was shattered. I had a pistol, but I needed distance. That afternoon it was the hood of my pickup that balanced the rifle. I couldn’t bear the suffering. The cries. The way the animal leapt over and over again as if by some miracle it would finally be free. We try so hard to get away from pain. The report of the 30.06 is so loud. I wanted it to be louder. I screamed when Buster took his last breath, I screamed again when I felt Katie’s body go limp. The rifle's report would echo across the ridgeline and be gone. Mine would echo throughout time and memory. The sound is a result of a small combustion, a release. Boom. Ok, I said when the EMT said Randy was dead. Ok, I texted my sister.

When Caleb tells the story of the cow elk the following spring to our friends who have come to visit, he starts crying. I could tell she was scared, he said. She kept pushing the safety on and off. Her hands were shaking. We are sharing supper. Elk steaks. I have come to like telling the story of the meat we serve. The meat we have killed. I sometimes tell the story of Caleb standing at the sink with a three-toed salamander in his hands. An exterminator had been called to kill the ants that had burrowed into our home. The poison had found all the living things, including the salamander that lived beneath the plywood that protects our windows from shattering under the pressure of the snow when it gets deep. He was holding the creature so gently in his big hands, the same way he holds the story of the cow elk. The stream of water from the faucet was warm and he was running a fingertip up and down the length of its body, which he then returned to safety. I slide the safety off. The pack Caleb used to carry the quarters of the buck out of the South Fork was before me. I guide the barrel through the crossbars, and I feel a weight lifted. I press the stock against my shoulder. My cheekbone against the stock. My left eye closed, my right one seeks that place on the animal that will promise instant death. Above the shoulder, below the neck. I aim for the heart.

When I was young, I often spent summer nights sleeping beside my dog on the grass in our backyard. One of those nights, when I was eight or ten, I heard our screen door open and saw my dad step out. He walked through the night and then lay down beside me. I was never in trouble for sneaking outside to sleep. This of himself, my father saw in me. We lay side by side and stared at the stars. The planets. The Milky Way. I remember the sky as a brighter blue than it should have been and my father saying that if I wanted to see the stars clearly, I would have to stare at the darkness between them. The heart lies in the place between the neck and the shoulder. The crosshairs no longer wander. The safety is on. And then it is not.

It is the moments between that have changed me. Pulling the trigger never hurts as much as finding the animal lying dead on the slope, body pressed against one of only two Douglas firs on the ridgeline. Darkening the red dot when I feel Caleb sit behind me on the trail, his chest to my back, his heart pressed to my spine. He wrapped his arms around me and closed the space between his body and mine. I never know when the right time comes. I only know that something comes over me, perhaps an ancient need for survival, a space when the tightening of my finger pulls the trigger less than half an inch. I keep my right eye open; my right thumb slides the safety back on. It all happens in less than three seconds.

And the dogs will be waiting in the truck, and the storm will come, and it will take two trips of four miles, and I will watch as Caleb heaves the pack that carried three of the elk quarters onto his back, and I will try to relieve his weight by placing my trekking poles under his pack, my only weight being the meat from the ribs, the liver, the heart. This alone, is all that I can carry.

We will make the last trip to the truck just as the snow begins to fall and we will drive down the steep road following our headlights, putting our trust in that singular vision, knowing that to leave the road would mean safety or certain death. Our tracks will be covered by morning. On the hillside, now indelible in my memory, we have left the carriage of the cow elk. We have left some meat for the others who must survive a winter that will be as challenging as any we have known. Eventually, her bones, like the bones of everything I have or will ever love, will return to the earth. Though it will take time. Until then, I will return to broad land above the river, sit in the shade of the tall pine, stare out at the Seven Devils still cloaked in winter snow, and in memory, trace the long surface of a rib bone, searching again, for the heart.