Chapter 6

The autumn chill that had settled overnight was lifting in the early morning sun. The bush was still. I heard a raven caw in the distance. Halfway up the slope above my shack, where sapling trees clung to life in the dry, where the trunks of their older companions were charred from a back burn gone wrong a few years back—the firies were reducing the fuel after a wet season to protect the subdivision of hobby farms down by the river—there was a narrow track, not visible to the untrained eye. It was up there that, when the need arose, I set a trap. I didn’t like setting traps. The native wildlife too easily got caught, but after last night’s fiasco, I was in need of another kill. I was standing over a small hind. A teenager. The muscles quivered, eyes rolling in terror at the sight of me. Its back leg was caught. I set down the hessian sacks I brought with me on my rounds and took the boning knife from my belt. The incision was fast, deep, the little Hog hind relaxed in death. I was glad I’d trapped a Hog. The Rusa, Chital and Fallow around those parts all weighed in at about eighty or ninety kilos for a stag, and about fifty for a hind. Then there were the Sambar. They weighed in at over two hundred kilos. Even a hind was too much for one person to handle. I never shot a Sambar. I freed the leg and dragged the hind, positioning the head up hill. Then I wedged the shoulders and hips between some logs and rocks that were lying around. I kneeled down beside the carcass, grabbed the s*x organ, and, with a decisive swipe of the knife, liberated it, tossing it into the undergrowth for the goannas. Gripping the knife, I made a short cut at the pelvic bone, then a long, shallow incision from between the back legs, running the blade up the chest and the neck to the jawbone. It was a satisfying cut. I heard the beating of wings and looked up at the branches above me. A raven had come to watch. I peeled the skin back from my incision. Then, making sure I didn’t slit the intestines and the stomach, I made a second cut, into the muscle this time, turning the blade upwards, feeling the release. As the knife made its bloody journey up the belly, I pulled the muscle away from the organs with my free hand. It was a precision manoeuvre. I didn’t want the meat spoiled. I especially didn’t want to inhale the putrid stench of rotting grass and body fluids. As it was, the heat of the fresh kill rose, and with it I breathed in the sharp metallic odour of its blood. I set down the knife, took out my small hand saw and cut through the breast bone. With the rib cage open, I cut around the anus, tying it off quickly. I did the same with the windpipe and oesophagus, reaching in as far up the neck as I could, putting down the knife, grabbing and pulling down hard to set the windpipe free. The motions were automatic, habitual, and I dressed the hind fast. I’d been doing the same for so long, I felt nothing. I glanced up. The raven c****d its head. Next, I removed the props, turned the hind on its side and cut through the diaphragm, repeating the process on the other side. Then, with the hind on its back, I reached in, finding purchase in the warmth, tugging. The guts slithered out in one lump. I deposited the whole bloody mess in a sack, taking care to keep the bladder intact. One aroma masked another, and there was nothing as good as hind urine. A quick pick at the remaining bits of fascia and fat, a douse from the water bottle and the cavity was clean. There wasn’t much of a downhill slope, but it would do. I pulled the hind around to where the decline was steepest and cut off the head. I was sick of seeing it. Always, when I field dressed a deer, I was sick of seeing the head. It wasn’t the eye that stared or the lifeless way the head hung that bothered me. It was the inevitability of the decapitation itself. With the head freed from the torso I was faced with depositing it in a sack. In that moment, as I took the head by the ears and shook open the sack to drop it in, an image of my stepfather’s head lying in a bucket flashed into my mind, and it felt as though I was putting into that sack not a deer’s head, but Howard Potter’s. The job done, I rolled the hind onto its back, propped its rear on a rock and spread the back legs. I reached for the saw. When the blade found the pelvis seam, I pressed down firmly and felt the c***k. I grabbed a few rocks lying around to hold open the chest cavity and speed up the cooling. The carcass could lie there losing its blood while I had a rest. The raven sat, waiting. I ignored it. With me so close to my kill, the bird wouldn’t bother it. I closed my eyes, enjoying the warmth of the morning sun on my skin. About twenty minutes of blissful quiet passed. It was too early for flies. Then I heard a vehicle heading up the mountain. As it neared, I wondered if it was the same vehicle that had been driving around the night before. The engine idled, then cut out. Couldn’t have been more than a few hundred metres from away. I guessed he’d parked on the highway. There was a layby at the apex of a sweeping bend. In years gone by, it was used by logging trucks, and an old timber track led off and forked a few times. One of those forks led up to mine. Even so, I didn’t expect whoever it was to head up my way. I listened. Couldn’t hear a c***k. Minutes passed and not a sound. I decided if the driver was wandering about down there, I wouldn’t have heard him up where I was. But he was still out there. The vehicle hadn’t started up again. I let the minutes pass before I could wait no longer. The hind needed proper hanging and skinning and that needed to be done in the next hour. She would have been around thirty kilos. I bagged her up and took my kill and my tools with me, leaving the trap unset and a bloody patch for the raven to pick over. With the carcass slung over one shoulder and the other two sacks weighing down the other, I didn’t have a free hand. Fifty metres from my shack, I smelled him. He was upwind with his back to me, squatting on his haunches with his trousers round his ankles, releasing his bowels. His arse was pink and pretty and what came out of it was long and hard and rank. The man had a broad back. I took in the mullet, trailing down between his shoulders. I stood, watching. I felt the weight on my back shifting and took a step sideways for balance. My foot crunched on a patch of leaf litter. Mullet man stood up abruptly and pulled up his pants. He turned. The look of alarm in his face gave me the upper hand, but it was a look that faded into something else at the sight of me. Malice. A glint in the eye. He saw me as prey. I held his gaze. The feeling was mutual. ‘You’re shitting on my property, mate,’ I said, putting the growl in my voice. He didn’t move. He was young, no more than twenty, cocksure. He had a large face with mean features, most notable his dark, deep set eyes. I set down the meat sacks and stepped forward. ‘Get the f**k out of here.’ He took one look at my blood encrusted hand poised over my knife belt and said, ‘Take it easy, mate.’ But still, he didn’t move. My hand gripped the knife handle. ‘I said, clear off.’ ‘Jeez.’ He edged away. But I knew he’d be back. Something about the swagger in his walk, the way he turned around to face me when he’d put a decent distance between us, the way he stood and stared as if to give me the message. I held his gaze thinking of his soiled arse. I had no idea if he’d already found my shack, but if he’d got close, he’d have heard the generator. I waited a good five minutes beside his s**t watching the flies zoom in for a feed, before I loaded the sacks on my back and headed home to skin and butcher my kill. I hadn’t reached the shed when I heard that engine of his revving as he headed back down the mountain.