OLD SAMSON COULDN'T FEEL his hands because of the coldness of the gun. Or maybe it was the snow that gathered on his jacket, looking like the ash in the dead fire pit back at camp. But the numbness steadied his aim. He was chilled beyond shivering. No longer did his body fight off the icy fangs in the wind plunging into his face, his ears, his back. He was part of the landscape now, battling the cold no more than the peeling birch log on which his gun rested. The only movement in him was glacial: just an inching of the arms to plant the rifle’s crosshairs on his target. A stag pawed a bald patch of snow some fifteen yards ahead. It wasn’t an ideal shot. The animal stood facing him, presenting only a fraction of its left flank. If it so much as scented him, it would turn living missile, rocketing through the undergrowth and into the white veil of snowfall. God only knew how many days it would take for another opportunity to come along. Samson had to send the bullet between the deer’s leg and its breastplate into the left lung, the heart, and out through the right lung. Then it wouldn’t be a deer anymore.
He moved the crosshairs away from its shoulder, where the bullet could lodge without killing. The deer bent its head, nuzzling a tuft of grass buried beneath the snow. There were six prongs on each antler — a good animal, Samson thought. Steam blasted from its nostrils. Its back smoked in the frigid air, melting the snowflakes that silvered its fur. A light rolled in its black eyes, a flash of mercury electrifying the dark onyx. Then the light landed on Samson. It found him. The head of many antlers jolted upright. The deer’s muscles tensed into steel coils. The white underside of its tail leaped up like a flame. One final cloud exploded from its nostrils with a furious, defiant snort. Then Samson pulled the trigger. The shot came alive for a hard instant before dying in the densely packed trees. The deer lurched forward but its hooves never found their footing. With a clumsy bound it was on its face, rear legs kicking, driving it blindly into a snowdrift. Then it lay on its side until its life ran into the snow and froze.
A good animal, Samson thought again. But only one. He gripped its antlers and raised its head. No more mercury swam in its eyes. Their light seemed remote now, like starlight in bleak February. Samson dropped the head back into the snow. A few flakes landed on the eyeball and remained. The minute the body stopped moving, the cold closed in to swallow it. Maybe death was a snowstorm blasting from every angle, and life was the act of sealing up the windows and doors with anything on hand. Samson noticed the snow clinging to his coat and brushed it off.
A dog stalked over from its hiding spot behind a holly bush. It was a black German shepherd that treaded softly and never barked — a lean thing made of exposed ribcages and saliva. It sniffed the kill, lips pulling back from its teeth. Old Samson shoved it away with the butt of his rifle. Then he tied a cord around the deer’s legs and dragged it onto a sled. He wrapped the carcass in a tarp and used more cord to bind it securely in place. Then he slung the cord over his shoulder and dragged the sled in the direction of camp.
This would be easier with Jacob, Samson thought. But Jacob had marched back to town last night after their argument. The boy didn’t believe in the hunt the way Samson did. With a huff Samson heaved the sled over a tree root. The deer must have weighed two hundred pounds. It was a lot of meat for one person but not enough for an entire hunting season. Maybe Jacob had been right. Maybe this trip was a waste. All this trekking through the woods and only a single buck to show for it.
Samson adjusted his grip on the cord. The dog followed a few yards back. It watched over its black muzzle, yellow eyes glowing in the fading light. Samson wondered if Jacob had made it back to town. It was a long walk. What if he lost his way? What would Samson tell his wife? He’d tell her the truth, he guessed. Their son tried to find his way back to town by himself, and the forest had taken him. He was buried in a snowdrift now, stiff and solid, until spring came and softened him with fungus and worms. Then a squirming, writhing life that was not Jacob would crawl into Jacob’s body and play puppeteer. But this was winter. In winter a man can’t even rot.
Still, Jacob had a chance. Samson had taken the boy hunting ever since he was old enough to shoulder a .22. While other boys played catch with their fathers in the park, Jacob learned how to follow the stars, mark trees, and build lean-tos. He might make it back all right.
Samson planted his frozen boots in the snow and tightened his back muscles into granite. The dog trotted behind, never letting Samson out of its sight. Jacob was the one who had found it, and yet it had refused to follow him back to town. That was bad, Samson thought. Dogs knew when something bad was about to happen. It might be wise to set out in the morning and look for Jacob’s trail. Hopefully the snow hadn’t buried his footprints.
The sled caught on something. Samson looked back. He slowed. He stopped. The cord slipped from his hands. Thirty seconds passed. Samson could only breathe a few unsteady clouds around his beard. He took a tentative step, paused, rubbed his numb chin. The dog tilted its head to one side. Samson approached the bundle and stared. The wind howled somewhere above the trees, stirring the edge of the tarp that cocooned the deer. And still Samson stared. The “deer,” he thought. But it wasn’t a deer.
A human arm dangled from the tarp, naked and flecked with snow.
Samson watched it until he became conscious of the darkening sky. Twilight was falling. At this latitude, in this season, it wouldn’t be long before night came on. Samson licked his chapped lips and crouched down. He undid one loop of the cord and pulled back the tarp. The deer’s black eye gazed emptily past him. Its tongue lolled out, swollen with frost and death. It was a deer after all. Only its left foreleg, near the entrance point of Samson’s bullet, had changed into a human arm. A man’s arm.
Old Samson put his hand over his mouth to think. The dog sat beside the carcass and waited. It waited a long time. The sun trickled its liquid gold out of the sky. The wind grew colder as a full moon made an appearance above the trees. The snow had stopped falling. Samson covered up the carcass with the tarp again and fastened it closed. With aching joints he stood, picked up the cord, and resumed dragging the sled back to camp. It was another half-mile of marching before he let his thoughts take on the bone and muscle of words.
It needs to be seen, he thought. That’s all that played through his mind, repeating like the murmur of a brook. Nothing like this has ever happened before. It needs to be seen.
Samson reached camp about ten minutes after sundown. He left the sled by the cold fire pit and sat down on a log, head in hands. The dog hunched in the darkness and made itself invisible, just eyes glinting in the moonlight. Samson didn’t want it around him anymore. He didn’t want anything except for morning to come and sweep the night and the deer carcass into well-lit reality, where Samson was sure the two would disappear. Then he could look for Jacob in sound mind, navigating a forest that made sense again.
He eventually forced himself to revive the fire pit. With a spark of magnesium, flames threw shuddering orange light across the snow. The tarp bundle looked different now — changed. Something else had happened to it during the trek into camp. Samson made sure his gun was loaded and hauled himself up on numb feet. He nudged the tarp open with the rifle’s barrel. The deer’s other foreleg had turned into a human arm as well. Right and left, clasped as if appealing to something. It was motionless, though — still dead. Samson dropped the tarp and thudded down in the snow.
Two arms, Samson thought. A changing deer — a morph deer. Could nature do that? It could turn a caterpillar into a butterfly, or a seed into a maple tree. But a deer? Impossible. The thing under the tarp was either a deer or a man. It couldn’t be both. Things were either something or something else, but they never blurred the lines. The orb in the sky was either the sun or the moon. A man was either alive or dead. There was no lunar sun, no living death.
Samson brushed more snow from his jacket and wondered why it never melted. He wanted to see his face. He’d heard old mountain men developed a lunatic stare when blizzards trapped them inside. Maybe isolation could make a man see things. But Samson didn’t have a mirror. All he had was a hunting knife. So he drew the blade from its sheath and squinted at his reflection in the polished steel. His eyes, waterlogged, dragged sacks of purple earth beneath their lids. His lips cracked like clay left too long in the sun. A frozen waterfall hung from his jaws in place of a beard. He took his finger and smoothed the crevasses on his forehead. So many wrinkles, he thought. When he first took out the knife, he half-expected to see Jacob’s face in the blade. But he hadn’t looked like Jacob in decades. The wilderness had worn the Jacob out of him, the way wind and rain obliterate the fine details of a statue. Old Samson couldn’t tell if he were going crazy. He could only tell he was wearing out.
He returned the knife to its sheath and stared into the fire. A ways off the dog’s eyes glowed with their own self-contained fire that shared no light with the world. But Samson couldn’t do anything about the dog. He had stopped feeding it, and not even that drove it away. It was unavoidable, just like the lines on his face and the gray in his hair. Samson knew all this exposure to the elements was aging him but he didn’t care. He enjoyed escaping to the wilderness, leaving the motorized, metal-and-plastic world behind, where everybody went through the motions that guaranteed food, shelter, and comfort. Like lab rats, Samson thought, trained to push buttons for food pellets. But there were no guarantees inside those buttons. The sooner everyone realized that, the sooner the experiment would break down. Then Samson could watch them scramble to learn what he had always known: how to live without guarantees, to survive on luck and skill, to melt into the land instead of resisting it. That’s why he had become a hunter, because he understood the worth of a man. A man’s life is to be burned up, not built up. Its value is measured in how much he sacrifices, how much energy he expends in the pursuit of the unexpendable. There would always be winters, full moons, and deer. But office jobs, carpools, and Little League games — those would come to an end; and when they did Samson could laugh new wrinkles into his face and keep pursuing the things that never ended.
Strange that Little League games came to mind. Jacob had always wanted to play, but Samson took him to the woods to teach him bush craft instead. He would thank him for it later. But later came and Jacob certainly hadn’t thanked him. He had called him a coward and stormed off by himself. Growing up, all the boy wanted were friends his own age and trips to the pizza parlor after a ball game, not freezing nights surrounded by owls snagging helpless things in the snow. Samson pictured him in a ball cap, knocking the dust from his cleats with his bat the way he had seen the pros do on TV. He would swallow the lump in his throat and scan the crowd for his father. Faces everywhere: hats, sunburned necks, perspiration on foreheads, mothers in sunglasses clapping and waving; and in the midst of it, the face Samson had seen reflected in his knife: that sunken, wild mask caked in snow. What would Jacob think if he had seen that? Would he finally realize he didn’t belong at the ballpark? Would he swap his bat for a rifle and follow Samson into the wilderness, to the place with heads of many antlers and eyes of lightless flame? Would he be better for it?
But Samson was mixing the past and present. Jacob was a man now — had been for some time. Samson wondered if he had any friends now that he was grown. It didn’t seem like it. But friends weren’t much use out here. Hunters needed partners. He and Jacob had been partners, and Jacob had betrayed that partnership. Still, Samson would look for him in the morning — follow his tracks into town, or as close to town as he made it. He wouldn’t come empty-handed either. He had something that needed to be seen.
Samson glanced at the body of the deer wrapped in the tarp. The dog would eat it if he left it out overnight, so Samson threw a cord around a tree branch and hauled the bundle off the ground. It looked like a lynching victim. The dog stood under it, nose pointed at it like a finger. It would wait there all night, Samson thought, and never move. Well, let it wait. Let it wait until Judgment Day, for all he cared. Samson was tired. He climbed into his tent and zipped up the flap. Then he thought about the dog and the bundle and locked it. It took him a long time to fall asleep.
#
The next day found the dog in the same spot. Samson shooed it away with his gun and looked up at the bundle. It had changed again. Naked human legs stuck out of the tarp, dangling in the wind like pale-blue copper. Samson’s stomach turned sour. He took a deep breath and cut the tarp down. The dog licked sticky foam from its lips and watched as old Samson stretched the body onto the sled and hesitated. After some deliberation he bent the stiff legs at the knees and forced them under the tarp. He exhaled. No breakfast today. He needed to move.
Jacob’s trail was half-buried in snow but still visible to a trained hunter. The sky hung low and dark over the treetops. More snow this afternoon, Samson thought. He had to move quickly. The sled complicated that process. He considered leaving it behind but… it needed to be seen. So he dragged it around rotten stumps and half-buried rocks, winding through pines as he pursued Jacob’s footprints. Sleep had evaded him for most of the night. His limbs sagged like boughs weighed down with snow. The deer sapped his energy. The dog, on the other hand, glided easily over the terrain. Samson glared back at it and shuddered when he realized it was watching him and not the bundle on the sled. His steps grew clumsy. Jacob’s footprints were becoming more erratic. They crossed one another and veered off in strange, wide arcs. Samson realized they were bouncing from one tree to another. Jacob had been holding onto the trunks for support. He must have been freezing. He should have made a shelter. Why had he kept walking? And why had he tired out so quickly?
Samson struggled to haul the sled uphill. The deer weighed as much as an engine block — if it were a deer at all anymore. Somewhere behind the clouds the sun rose higher into the sky. Flurries began falling through the bare canopy, whipping up a constant moan of wind. Old Samson stopped to rest his burning muscles. He dropped to his knees in the snow and coughed. Jacob’s trail wound through so many remote miles, places where foxes wandered abroad in daylight and human voices never cut the virgin air. Samson looked up and saw pines staring down at him, at his sled, at the unfamiliar things that had tramped into their country. Why had Jacob come here? All around lay rocky outcrops, toppled trees, and frostbitten brush — and Jacob’s footprints. So many footprints, twisting into nonsense, scribbles, ant trails — like following a million madmen through a maze Samson couldn’t see.
Out of nowhere the dog bolted over with a snarl. Samson barely grabbed his rifle and battered the animal across the mouth before its teeth closed around his throat. He clambered to his feet and stared at it, panting. The dog slipped back to its place behind the sled. It regarded him stonily, without so much as a blink. It had gone for him with intent to kill, Samson thought. He had shown one moment of weakness, and it had sprung at the opportunity. It was starving. Good. Maybe it would die. Maybe Samson should kill it right here and now. He brought the rifle to his shoulder and took aim. The dog’s yellow eyes burned through the scope, nearer than ever. Uncomfortably near. The animal made no attempt to run. Samson pointed his barrel between those eyes but couldn’t steady his hands. His heart was beating too violently. This wasn’t like the deer. With a sound of disgust, he lowered the gun, grabbed the sled cord, and went back to following Jacob’s trail.
He cursed Jacob. He cursed ever following him. He should have gone back to his wife with nothing but the deer. What son? He had no son. A son would never say the things Jacob had said. He would never suggest Samson give up hunting and find a normal job in the city. He’d never stand in the firelight as Jacob had, with shadows swooping across his face, and call his father a coward. He wouldn’t kick snow in Samson’s direction, or pitch a cooking pot into the stillness of the night, or accuse his father of running to the woods to hide. Hide from what? From failure? Did Jacob really think his father was afraid of failing? That’s why he hunted, so he could always blame the deer, or the weather, or plain bad luck if he came back empty-handed? Ridiculous. He had provided for his family. Not always, but he had provided. And he had given Jacob the lessons he needed, even if they weren’t the ones he wanted. There was no Jacob, Samson thought, stumbling and falling against tree trunks, dragging his sled into deranged wastelands of ice and snow. Jacob was playing in a Little League game on a May afternoon. Jacob wasn’t out here and he wasn’t in that reflection in the hunting knife. He was in town. He was at home with the black dog curled at his feet. He was back at camp, calling Samson a coward and a failure. He was… He was…
Under the tarp.
Samson halted at the edge of a strange impression in the snow. It was about the size of a man, with four grooves where limbs had lain and a circular shape for a head. It looked like someone had curled there and gone to sleep. Just sleep, Samson thought. He looked back at the bundle and saw the wind had blown the tarp slightly ajar. A crown of familiar hair fluttered out. Samson had watched that hair grow from a bald, newborn scalp. He had cleaned it with no-tears shampoo and taken it to the barbershop for its first cutting. He looked at it, then back at the impression in the snow. Jacob’s footprints stopped here. They plodded and faltered to this very spot, this bed in the snow where someone had gone to sleep and never woken up.
But it had been a deer, Samson thought. He was sure it had been a deer. His mouth mumbled and tears welled in his eyes. He was bringing a deer home to his family. He was a good father. He hadn’t failed. He had shown his son how to survive in a world without guarantees. Now Jacob was back in town, ready to shake his father’s hand and thank him for teaching him how to conquer the forest. And he wouldn’t sleep. He’d have no need to sleep. He’d be too busy playing Little League games and celebrating at the pizza parlor, and Samson’s wife would say he was a good man, a good man who had pursued the unexpendable. Then Samson would be the one to sleep, not Jacob.
The black dog stood near the impression in the snow and looked at Samson. Samson jumped at seeing it, as if truly noticing it for the first time. The dog glanced back at the tarp, then pointed its nose at the human-shaped indentation.
“No,” Samson said, shaking his head.
The dog faced the tarp. It waited.
“No,” Samson said. “Me.”
The dog latched onto the bundle to drag it into the indentation. Samson threw down the sled cord and knelt at the dog’s side. He clasped his hands in appeal.
“Me,” he said. “I’ll go.”
The dog kept dragging.
“No! Me!” Samson shouted. He dove into the snow impression himself, blocking the path of the sled with his own body. With some effort he fitted his arms, legs, and head into the proper indentations. There was no place for his gun, so he threw it aside and let the snow have it. All the while he repeated the same phrase to the dog until it degenerated into babbling.
“No, me,” Samson said. “No, me. No, me. Know me.”
He lay in Jacob’s place, feeling nothing but the warmth of the tears flowing out of him and becoming frozen. Above him the tarp rustled. Maybe the wind. Maybe not. The dog came to the impression, snowflakes melting on its fur. They didn’t melt on Samson’s jacket. He let the whiteness bury him while the tarp rustled and the dog pinned its iron legs to his chest. Its jaws opened, lips peeling back from its teeth. Samson heard its stomach growl. He hoped Jacob would tell his mother that the old man had saved his life. Dad had saved him from the snow.
Samson closed his eyes and wondered what he would become in springtime.
— RYAN HARBERT
Ryan Harbert graduated with a BA in English from Kent State University. The Saint Clairsville, Ohio, writer has made ends meet as a waiter, a fast-food cook, a veterinary receptionist, and a night janitor. His hobbies include running, obscure Asian films, video games, and petting every cat he sees.