Hunters
“Do you mind me asking how old you are?” the Maine Guide asks me. It is the next-to-last day of the hunt and the men still need to get their second moose. When the Maine Guide’s truck turned into my driveway I fixed my hair in the bathroom mirror.
I tell him I am twenty-eight and he nods but doesn’t say anything. I don’t think about it, I just decide. I invite him inside for a cup of coffee, something I’ve never done, not with any of the winter men.
“You’re not from here,” he says. He holds the coffee, takes a sip. “What are you doing out here?”
“My husband studied trees,” I said. “So we moved to where the trees were.”
“I didn’t know you were married,” the Maine Guide says.
“He’s gone now,” I say, and even though it tells nothing at all, it’s enough of an explanation.
When the Maine Guide kisses me in my kitchen, my whole body starts to burn in a way that feels so good that I forget to keep breathing. It’s been such a long time since I was last touched, and now that I am getting touched, I remember what it feels like. And all that remembering along with feeling makes me so tired I just lean against the wall, and the Maine Guide must feel it because he holds me up. He touches my face and his hands are so rough I want to touch them with my hands. They feel like paws. And he smells like the woods, like cold and pine, like my husband after a day out looking at the bare trees in the dead of winter. I try to sort out all these things while realizing that this is the first time I’ve kissed anyone in so long, but the Maine Guide breaks away. He apologizes and shakes his head and even though I say it’s all right, he shakes his head again. He looks at me and it’s a look full of sadness, not because he’s sad about me or about the hunters from New Jersey or about the moose or the bobcats that they’ll get in December, but because of something else—probably because his wife died like my husband died, or maybe because he has a wife but doesn’t wear a ring, or maybe because he’s just sad. Even though he’s in my kitchen with my coffee and bits of my lips are on his lips and bits of his are on mine, he is a stranger. So I say again that it’s all right, but the Maine Guide drinks his coffee and doesn’t kiss me again.
The hunters come home early on the last day. Their truck rushes past my house and the Maine Guide’s truck follows. Instead of whoops I hear one of the wives asking, “What is it? What is it?” but I don’t hear the answer.
I hurry down the road wondering if one of the boys shot himself by accident or if they shot each other or if they shot someone else, though I know this can’t be true because they would have driven straight to the hospital, and not back to the lake house.
When I get to the lake house I see it is not a boy or man who is shot but a dog. It’s lying in the bed of the hunter’s truck and I can tell already that the dog is dead. One of the boys says to his mother, “I thought it was a deer,” and the father hunter snaps back, “Even if it had been, we weren’t hunting any goddamn deer.” The dog’s mouth has fallen open and its tongue is lolling out. It’s a shepherd dog, not one of mine.
The Maine Guide sees me standing at the end of the driveway and he looks at the dog and then walks up to me. “Do you know whose it is?” he asks, and I say the dog belongs to a family on the other side of the lake. The hunters put a wool blanket over the dog and the Maine Guide, the boy, and his father drive off, and I go home and cry over someone else’s dog. I cradle all of mine at once and swear to them that I’ll never let them outside again, that I’ll never let anyone hurt them, but a half hour later they have to pee, and I open the door and they all charge at once into the night.
The hunters from New Jersey don’t come back in December, but other groups come, from New York and from Massachusetts. The Maine Guide puts them up in the lake house and pays me rent, and I don’t ask if he’d like a cup of coffee and I don’t think he’d come inside even if I did. One night when he comes to pay rent there’s a woman in the truck with him. She peers at me as I’m standing on the steps in my socks, my sweater wrapped around me and the dogs behind me trying so hard to get out. The Maine Guide’s woman looks at me as though she’s wondering what a woman like me is doing living alone in the woods, taking money from hunters and waking up to bears on the deck and renting my old studio to men with coolers of moose meat. If she asked me why, I would tell her I didn’t know.
