She came to get me from the trailer so I could help her. When we arrived in the woods, I looked down the hill and saw the head flopping. His neck was stretching up, but he couldn’t get up. His body was paralyzed. “Oh, my God,” I thought to myself, “he’s not dead.” The poor thing was shot in the shoulder. One bullet wouldn’t do it for this one. I waited on the hilltop for her to finish him off.
A cool wind blew dead leaves across the ground between the trees. I stopped my tears and stared at the earth. All my life I wanted to be like her. Yes, we were alike in many ways. But, we were also different in many ways. This was one of them. Bang! He was shot again and closer to death. “Is it dead yet?” I yelled.
“It will be in a minute,” she yelled back. I stood next to her treestand with her camera in my left hand and my cigarette in the other. At that moment I knew I would never take up this “sport.” She seemed to love it. The hunters have their reasons, but at this point of my discovery I didn’t know why.
After he died, I flung the camera around my shoulder and walked down the hill. The cold air made me sniffle. She grabbed her brand new, homemade knife and cut through the warm flesh of the innocent buck. I watched her cut off his maleness and toss it over her shoulder. She cut through the veins and arteries to remove the guts. The strong scent of his blood traveled right up my nose. Blood soaked into the prints of her hands and up her fingernails. She reached up the opened body to his neck. “I'm looking for the cord,” she said, then pulled. Organs that had worked ten minutes ago now slid out of his body. “When you cut, you have to be careful not to puncture the stomach or corn and shit will be all over.” I had never imagined this. The guts lay on the dirt and leaves, still connected.
She then dug through the stomach, the liver, and the intestines until she found the heart. With the heart in her hand, she reached her arm toward the sky and asked me if I wanted it. “No.”
My eyes told her of my amazement and she said, “Why not? You used to eat this.”
It was time to drag the dead buck up the hill. I had completely forgotten about the camera. When we reached the top, she went to her truck and pulled out an axe, then chopped away at his pelvic area. After that she went over to a tree to chop off some branches while I stared at him. I saw something. There was a small beating movement back and forth under the hair of his left thigh. I watched it for ten minutes and wondered how the muscle could continue after he’d been ripped open and chopped at.
We loaded him on the truck and drove to a tree. Here we hung him. Then I took the pictures, but I didn’t want my picture taken with him. I was already part of his death. However, I knew that later, I would probably eat it.
—Cori Lark
A Witness of Being © 1997 All rights reserved.
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