Drive - A Menoir 5th Installment
the hit, saying
“This is where it went in and a perfect spot, if I do say so
myself. Let’s flip the antelope over.”
“Wow!” I
declared. “The exit hole is the size of a baseball, and I think
that’s part of the antelope’s heart hanging out of this huge
bloody bullet hole. You blew the antelope’s heart out!”
“Heh heh,” Russ
chuckled. “This is what the Remington ADL 270 caliber rifle does
best. It kills everything in front of it, and cripples
everything behind it! You got the knife? Cut its throat, we have to
bleed it out.”
“You cut its
throat, you slacker. You shot it! Besides, the antelope doesn't have
any blood left after you blasted its heart clear out of its body.”
Russ had a manner of making me do most of the dirty work, and I felt
this time I needed to rebel. He did cut the throat, deep, right to
the neck bone, but no blood drained from the cut throat. I was right
and told him so. We cut open the chest cavity through the softer
sternum and pulled the ribs apart.
“Ewww, here’s
the blood! Looks like a bomb went off in here. We won't have to pull
out the organs; we can just dump the antelope out.” I gagged. The
air inside of something that was alive a short time ago has a smell
akin to… well nothing I can compare it to. Russ cut on down
the belly and used a rock to pound the knife through the pelvis. We
dressed the antelope out, towed it over to the ditch, laid it butt
down on the bank and propped it open with a stick between the ribs to
cool. We found the place in the fence where the herd had crossed and
zigzagged in ever widening tacks, until I found some fresh blood,
then more in a red damp depression in the sand, and then some blood
smeared on nearby sagebrush. “Here, I got the blood trail,” I
called out, and Russ cut a diagonal across the sagebrush desert to
intercept me moving along the trail.
We were in the high
mountain desert behind our place, and our farm was the furthest farm
away from any civilization, on the edge of nowhere. The sage was
short and sparse with mostly cheat grass covering the sandy soil. The
cheat grass was dry and brittle, dying all the time, but always there
trying to cover the earth. The most annoying thing about the grass is
their seeds which have a horrible way of sticking in your socks,
worming their way deeper in the fabric and into your skin.
“It looks like
he’s dragging a hind leg,” Russ pointed out to me. Russ
considered himself a real sleuth of a tracker.
“Yeah, three
steps – drag, three steps – drag – a new dance step,” I
joked. He glared at me. It wasn't far until I was sure I spotted the
antelope. “There, see the ears?”
500 More Words Tomorrow
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