You Only Get Letters from Jail by Jodi Angel Page A

the dew. We wound around the thick brush, climbed overboulders, and slid over the backs of dead logs, and suddenly morning came like the flick of a switch so that what was impossible to see before was now in sharp relief, and the sky lightened from black to gray and we moved faster up the mountain. In the dark we had gone slow and stayed on the flat ground, moving between trees and turning sideways to slide through bushes. I could smell the green of broken branches and split leaves, but in the darkness I could not see them as we passed, and I was careful to look down a lot and watch my feet in the back splash of light.
    When the sky was bright enough to define distance, Uncle Nick came to a stop and we stood beside him and looked out at the forest in front of us. “Let’s divide up,” he said. He was breathing hard and it was difficult for him to whisper. “Shirley, you head out to the left, not too far, but so that you can cover some ground between us. Robbie, you go right. Remember—no rack, no shot. And try to be quiet. There’s a clearing about an hour and a half up from here, wide open for about two hundred yards, so just keep moving east and when you get to the clearing, we’ll come back together and take the north trail.”
    We each took a sip of water and then fanned out, left, center, and right. I found a thin break in the weeds and thought it might be a game trail, and I watched for signs that I was moving in the right direction. I wanted a deer. The feeling came on me all at once—ten minutes ago I didn’t give a shit if I shot a deer or got blisters on my feet or walked off the edge of a cliff. I had gone limp, and I was just dragging along at the end of their lead. They moved the flashlight, and I tookthe direction. But now I wanted one. I wanted to be the first one, beat Shirley, make Uncle Nick proud, be somebody different than I was. I liked it in the woods—I liked the smells and the sounds and the sharp ends of sticks poking into me whenever I tried to pass through. I tried to remember everything that I hadn’t paid attention to during hunter’s safety when we learned about game hunting. Deer, pheasants, ducks, dove, quail. I closed my eyes and tried to relax my eyelids so that my eyeballs wouldn’t jump around behind them.
    Bitterbrush, mountain mahogany, tall sagebrush. I didn’t know what any of it looked like, but I knew it grew dense and the deer would gather there and these were good places to wait and watch. I kept moving east, or what I guessed was east based on where the light was thickening. I walked quietly, tried to make my boots light and my steps weak so I didn’t step all the way through to the ground, break the pinecones, crush the things that might make noise. I imagined myself depending on the kill. My hands started to sweat against the gun and I thought I heard something and my heart stopped. I froze in place and waited. There was something to my right and I followed it and raised the rifle so that it was closer to my body and closer to my chin so that if I lifted my arms the barrel would be in a straight line with my sight. I tried to slow my breathing down, concentrated, and walked on slowly, waiting for the brush to part.
    In the mountains, sound echoes and travels at strange angles. I heard the gunshot but could not tell the direction—for a second I thought that it was in front of me, but then the reverberation bounced back and I knew it camefrom my left, somewhere ahead. It was a strange sound—a sharp crack and then a hushing sound afterward, like the sound running water makes when it moves fast, and then the sound trickled out and died. I waited for a second shot, but there was nothing. I waited for my deer in the brush, but there was no more movement, and I realized that whatever had been there had been small and close to the ground and for the past ten minutes I had probably been tracking a squirrel. Then I