A full grown moose – shot, gutted, skinned, and butchered – will take up at least seven game bags. One for each of the four quarters, streaked with shiny chunks of fat and tendon. One for the ribs, to take home and scrape off for sausages, burgers, and soups. And the last one for the skull and antlers, tied to the back of your pack, sticking out on either side of your shoulders like a pair of bony wings. In some game management units, you used to have to haul the salvageable meat out before you even thought of touching the head.
“To, uh, discourage poachers,” Nick murmurs next to me, as if reading my thoughts. “Trophy hunters. Wasteage, man. Troopers used to fuck you for that one, when they still came this far north. Fuck you sideways.”
A snippet of an Alice in Chains song comes to me, something we were listening to on the drive up through the dark, and I hum it, shoving my hands in my pockets to grab some residual warmth in the foggy September chill. “I feel so alone…”
This moose is torn apart, not neatly quartered and stowed away on the back of a Honda Fourtrax for transport back to camp. It looks like it was hit by a train, with viscera scattered across the tramped down grass like a Pollock painting. A gnawed hind leg dangles from a gnarled birch tree, twisting slowly in the breeze. The ribcage is a piece of modern art, cracked open and leaking half-digested willow shoots from a torn gut. The poor bastard’s head is somehow untouched, a set of budding spike antlers covered in drying gore and a growing cascade of black flies. The eyes, still open, seem to judge us. “Something did this to me,” the disemboweled yearling rumbles in the base of my skull, where nightmares live. “Something tore me apart and left me in pieces, tried to put me back together but couldn’t. You’re next.”
I want to be back at that shitty one room bar a million miles from here, drinking an expired six dollar Modelo, getting the stink eye from some trapper that’s been here since Hammond. Nick wants to spend our fee at Bush Co., stuffing dirty fives down the thong of some single mommy from Sutton, pouring warm Jager down her C-section scars and licking it off her chipped toenail polish, like Tarantino in that old vampire movie. He’s told me so, repeatedly. “Just bring ‘em back a black bear, Pauly,” he begged, ashing his American Spirit out the window of my Ranger. “We’ll tell them it was a bear, and then we can get the fuck out of here. This place doesn’t feel good to me, motherfucker. Feels like an abandoned house, and someone’s squatting in the basement, living off rats and dogs.”
Mom said we were both too imaginative as kids, and then she was gone. Dad didn’t say much of anything after the Prudhoe wellhead valve busted and sheared off his jaw. Glared and sucked vodka through a straw into his neck hole, dissolving into the couch like a primordial mushroom, putting out mycelium into the earth, probing for his wife at truck stops and casinos. We spent a lot of time in the woods after that. The birch and spruce and alder were home.
Nick is right. These woods feel like we’re deer walking over a nuclear waste site, too dumb to recognize the poison leaching into our bones until we’re spitting up blood.
But the moose means we’re close. The tracks we’ve been following since August are all over this spot. Big elongated pawprints, almost webbed in the toes, as if whatever left them was caught, pants down, in the middle of transforming into something else. Divots speak to claws, depth speaks to big. Huge.
“Gonna end up a big ol’ pile of them bones…” Nick finishes the Alice riff, toeing the ground like a racehorse. “Paul, why it keep leaving the carcass? No meat, no bones dragged away. Just blood.”
I’ve been wondering the same thing, but the answer dries the spit in my mouth and sucks my balls up into my core. A real butthole-puckerer, my dad used to say before he couldn’t anymore. Firepower doesn’t seem good enough. I’m afraid. I want to go home.
“It likes to kill, I think.” My voice comes out like a cartoon, and I half expect to see a speech bubble materialize behind me. “Likes to kill. Doesn’t need to eat. Just wants to hurt.”
We push on, deeper into the mountains, higher and higher towards the treeline. The wind howls down the slopes towards us, and at night, our tent rattles and thunders, a big olive drab sail. The tracks don’t fade, like I expect – still pressed into the earth and mountain scrub like a paved path. Nick starts to get sick, some kind of chill from weeks of hard tracking and the mountain frost. His cough is hacking, almost a bark, and he twitches in his sleeping bag like a dog chasing rabbits.
I don’t feel so good myself – something deep in my bones is twisted and gnarled, and the exertion doesn’t make it any better. I sleep shallowly and when I jolt awake at night, startled by Nick’s twitching or a noise outside the tent, I’m covered in a strange, slimy sweat. It clings to my fingers and soaks into my clothes, drying like mucus and stinking like bait.
Every few days we run into another crime scene – a deconstructed porcupine, a drying school of shredded salmon torn out of a nearby stream and graffitied across the side of a rock pile. I have to put down a dying wolf, dragging itself along the ground by its bloody front legs, and the crack of the gunfire echoing off the sides of the mountains twists something in the back of my head to breaking. Nick doesn’t talk much anymore, and when we make camp for the night, he stares skittishly through the fire, tongue panting out of his mouth, eyes unfocused. The hares and squirrels and ptarmigan we kill for dinner, he starts to eat rarer and rawer until he’s practically horsing down feathers and fur.
My back is fucked from hauling gear, and there’s a strange meaty hump developing between my shoulder blades from the weight of my pack. The slime still seeps out of my pores and the smell of spawning fish, pushing their way upstream to die, follows me like a cloud. My fingers and toes are stiff, and I know I’m probably not getting some obscure vitamin, the lack of which is going to send me into seizures, tongue wagging and eyes bugging. The first asshole to die of scurvy since pirate times.
The hunt changes you. The trail makes you different. The tracks zig and zag for miles with no apparent rhyme or reason, up ridges and back down valleys, sometimes straying into colossal boulder fields and across patches of fresh snow. I haven’t had a cup of coffee or a night with a woman in months. It might be years. The chase becomes what you leave behind.
On the last day, we crest the peak of a craggy rise and look out over the sun struggling to rise. Below us lies a truly frightening expanse of boulders and shrunken spruce trees struggling to grow out of the rock. It stretches for miles and miles, backing up to a glacial lake, glinting in the sullen glow of the morning sun’s first rays. Nick sighs, and I notice for the first time the sharpness of his teeth, the skinniness of his frame. His hands are covered with a coarse thick hair, almost furry, and his ears prick up. I haven’t paid attention and in the process, my brother’s become something out of a ghost story.
“Tracks lead that way.” He points with one stubby finger, sniffing the air. “End of the line. You think there’s a whore in old Spenard that’ll look at me twice now?”
I laugh, truly laugh, from deep within me. “Two for one special. The beast brothers.” He looks at me, covered in slime, fingers webbed, nose arched, gill slits emerging below my jaw. “Son of a salmon man. Brother of a coyote boy. Mean, green, fuckin’ machines. We been out here too long, Nicky.”
Nick pants, giggling and sobbing like a dry brook. “I don’t know, if, if, if, we can ever go home. I don’t remember why they sent us out here, in the, the, the first place.” He throws his head back and yelps, the sound echoing down the valley and burying itself in the lake’s cold depths.
I place my hand, such as it is, on his sloped furry shoulders. “We gotta kill it. Or it has to kill us. Either way….” I don’t know how to finish the sentence. Nick knows.
We pick our way down the face of the mountain, sliding down jagged slopes of scree and dodging boulders the size of my truck. Nick is light on his paws and leaps from rock to rock, panting and yipping, while I trail behind, burdened by pack and rifle and webbed fingers that won’t quite fit in the trigger guard. I’ve flipped the safety off and made sure my ammo is dry, because somewhere within me I know we’re close to the thing we’ve been tracking. Animal magnetism, I think, and I don’t even have the energy to chuckle.
The lake gets nearer and nearer, and overhead, black clouds begin to form. It starts raining, then sleeting, then hailing, a cold August or September burst that makes our path slippery with melting ice. Ahead of us, a figure looms, skeletal against the lake’s silvery horizon. Two elongated arms, two crouched legs, a shaggy head. It’s a man, or man-shaped, and as we near him, he lets out a guttural screech that seems to stop the rain for a moment.
He’s caught in a bear trap, a dulled, rusty piece of metal that seems to be growing out of the earth on an umbilical cord of a chain. Who put it there, eons ago, and how long it’s been sitting, lying in wait for this thing out of nightmares, neither of us can say. But Nick and I circle the beast-man and he lunges at us, growling in pained fury, the cords on his neck standing out like alder branches.
The remains of a pair of camouflage army pants are cinched around his waist, and his claws have torn through the front of his boots. His face, once human, is now almost totally unrecognizable as anything besides wolverine and ermine and mink and something from ancient cave paintings. But he smiles at me as I inch closer, finger twitching on the trigger.
“whyare, youhere,” he asks, hissing syllables through gritted teeth.
“To kill you.”
“whyami markedfor, death?”
“You killed a village. Left them torn apart. We got paid to hunt you down. They didn’t know what you were. Thought you were a bear.”
“ihave killedbearandmanandmooseand, otherthings.”
“I saw.”
“ibecamethis, way. youwill, too.”
“Fuck you.”
“itstoolate. toolate foryou. thehuntchanges you. itchanged me.”
“How did it change you…”
“madeabeast outof me, turned mesourandcruel. closed myeyes, openedthemagain, blood on the ground.”
He straights up, bloodshot eyes narrowing with pain, his sentences grinding into more and more recognizable forms. “You can hear the first hour of the world out here. The fartherandfarther you go, the moreandmore you, become.” The wolverine-man points to Nick. “Coyote.” He points to me. “Salmon.” He turned his claw on himself. “Wolverine.”
“I camehere, fromsomewhere…. I can’t remember…. youforget yourownname.”
He turns to me and I shoot him through the forehead and he falls to the ground and the earth shakes with the thunder and the hail comes down. We had a job to do and now it's done. Then Nick saws his head off and straps it to his pack, leering into the gunmetal sky, and we set off back through the boulders to the world. With any luck, we’ll make it to civilization before we turn.
-- Jacob Hersh has written rude works of political journalism and reviews of local musicians for the Alaska Landmine and other, smaller things for other, smaller publications. He attends law school, in the hopes of eventually making enough to finance his lifestyle. He can be found on Twitter at @youngjakeinc.