The Blue Moon Review - Fiction

Out Into a Quiet River

by Lynn Kozlowski

My uncle said, 'There's not always blood.' He said, 'You don't always see blood.'"

My uncle said, "Look at him." My uncle said, "Look at the way he puts his weight down." My uncle said, "See? See the foot in front?"

I said, "Which foot? Which one?"

"Look," my uncle said, "for God's sake, look. Can't you see?"

He poked two fingers in it. He said, "He's not got his weight down on that side. Look. He runs to here, then walks." My uncle stood up, watching the deer stepping away in the empty tracks.

We were gathered around the tracks in the loam, in the bare spots of the loam, where the leaves had blown away. My uncle reached around and slapped me up high on my backbone. My cousins came up behind me, giving me little pats.

My father was looking me over, walking right around me, looking me over. "Load up," he said.

My uncle said, "He's a big son of a bitch, alright. Big rack on him?"

"Yes," I said.

I had whacked off a shot in the dirt. Nothing had gone by me.

My father said, "This one's yours."

I had cut a second shot through the thicket. My uncle followed the line of that shot out to where we were standing.

My father and my uncle and my uncle's two sons spaced themselves out behind me. The path went up a hill and over it. The path curled and turned in an area of hills and basins and cluttered woods.

I watched the brush and ground for blood. I saw fresh black beads of deer scat. I looked down in the path, following the footfalls on the narrow path, looking for the reach of the step to fail, looking for the mark of a rack scratching on the ground.

My uncle said, "There's not always blood." He said, "You don't always see blood." I squatted and felt the ground. My uncle said, "He'll be staggering just up ahead. We'll be hearing him stumbling against the brush." My father pointed to get me more up ahead.

The tracks went along the shoulder of a narrow brook. The ground was soft and black along the trail. The brook went squarely into a high river, and the tracks walked into the river.

I stared out into the water. I looked along the far side of the river and along the sides downstream. This was a big, cold river that had forest up to its edge on each side. My uncle came up behind me. He said, "I don't like to see this." I said, "Dammit." Everybody was close in behind us, waiting to get a look at the tracks stepping into the water, waiting to see for themselves out into the quiet river.

Lynn Kozlowski has published poetry in The Transatlantic Review and The HMS Beagle, fiction in The Malahat Review and The Quarterly, verse commentary in Tobacco Control, and empirical research in Science, Nature, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and The New England Journal of Medicine.