I was too angry to move. Just frozen with it, in disbelief.

But the truck wasn’t coming back. It had vanished into another fold, and the temperature was falling fast, and I was wearing only a T-shirt and the buck was laid out on the road and it was miles back to camp.

I didn’t know what to do, but I walked back down the road to the buck. There was no other option. I would need to try to carry the buck to camp.

I found him in the road, a shadow against other shadows, this night without a moon, and I knelt in front of the cavity, careful to avoid the pile of entrails. I felt around in the dirt for my knife, having to crawl like a blind man, my fingers sifting dust until I found the blade. I wiped it on my jeans and then I reached for his hind legs. The Achilles tendon and sack of musk, bitter and maddening, and I sliced the gap between bone and tendon, a natural hollow covered by nothing more than thin hide. I cleared both legs in this way then reached for the forelegs. These I snapped at the elbow, broke until the bone jutted out, and I slipped each foreleg through a hindleg, making a backpack. Those jutting bones slipped through and caught on the Achilles tendons.

My knife sheathed and rifle in hand, I lay down beside the buck, my back against his belly, and slipped his hooked legs over my shoulders, pulled his neck and head and antlers over my chest, cradled in close. Then I pushed up off the ground to a sitting position and struggled to stand.

The buck weighed more than I did. Maybe a hundred and twenty pounds, even without the guts, and the weight was the same as stone. Hard and unyielding and real. I took a step forward up that hill, and another, and my legs were shaking, my back caving. There was no way I could do this for a couple miles.

I did try. I kept moving, hunched forward and pulling and placing one leg and then another. His head and antlers thumping against my chest, a new kind of beast fused with man, walking together and sharing the same breath and blood. Hollowed out, but hide and hooves and antlers shielding the bareness and weakness of man. And what would I become? If I made it all the miles to camp, would I gain hooves?

I believed this animal could become me. I felt that. I was a child still, and so none of the boundaries of this existence were set. All was possible. Metamorphosis. Desire and will and despair strong enough to change physical form and find a truer shape. My legs thinned at the calves and feet hardening, shrinking, and my thighs strengthening and rotating at the joint. A ridge across the top of my skull and bone growing, my neck thickening against the weight. Hair across my arms more coarse and dense and matting, skin toughening into hide. All sound magnified, coming closer, minute and exact, scent of every plant distinct, eyes finding light in shadow. All thought gone and replaced by the world. The immediacy and enormity of that world, and to become a part of it, finally, no longer removed. The curse of humanity is to lose the world, thought the loss of immersion.

No doubts, no indecision, only instinct. I was something entirely other than the buck. And the night was not immediate to me. I did not know every sound and movement, could not smell most of what was in the air. I had no hide to shield me.

If I could have transformed, I could have carried that weight. But I remained human and weak and faltered and fell sideways onto the ground, onto the buck, this backpack of flesh still warm.

I pushed his head and antlers away and slipped free of his legs and stood and didn’t know what to do. The night black, truly black, the stars bright above but somehow casting no light on the ground. A separation of impossible distances, this lower world lost to the light.

I grabbed those horns and pulled the buck, dragged him across the ground, uphill. Walking backward, stooped over, pulling with everything I had, wandering over this dark earth dragging a dead body limp and heavy.

Hell not what we think of, populated and busy, torments everywhere and flames, figures hopping this way and that to distract and entertain. Hell will be solitary. Each of us dragging across an endless dark expanse, featureless. Hell will be an endless task. Nearly impossible to drag this body even a few more feet, my back in agony, and yet this will go on for a night entire, and then a confusion of nights and time lost and years passing and lifetimes and finally geologic time, the surface shifting beneath my feet, mountains rising and forming and wearing away and still this dragging and each moment too much, each moment unbearable. Hell is time refusing to pass and the enormity of it waiting still to be passed.

The body we drag in hell is our own, all that we’ve been and the weight of that, pulling backward and not seeing where we’re going, same as when we lived. Directionless, blind, pointless. Our suffering not building to anything, refusing meaning. Only dragging on.

The body catching on root and scrub and rock, snagging. Having to heave and yank but with no back left and thighs burning, and when the weight drags again it has gained resistance, the ground a gatekeeper, refusing passage.

Our sight will be the first sense to go in hell, because it was most precious to us in life. We’ll have it only long enough to see the stars above and learn their distance. We’ll spend some endless number of nights believing they might come closer, believing we might reach them. We’ll come to rely upon them as a consolation, and without meaning to we’ll begin thinking of them as a goal. They’ll offer escape, another place, and then they’ll seem fainter, less distinct, and this will last long enough we won’t be able to remember whether the stars were ever more distinct but our desire for them won’t have lessened, and then they’ll suddenly be gone entirely, just gone and no light anywhere and we won’t know whether we’re still able to see or not. We’ll want to rub at our eyes, poke and prod and try to bring them to life, but our hands will not be free.

We’ll focus then on sound, the dragging of this body over rough earth. And because we’ll have nothing else, we’ll make a world of that sound. A scuff of hide over dirt all I could hear on this hillside, a heft and weight general and entire, but then sound separates and small stones shift beneath and roll and grind against outcrops of stone, small ridges like spine protruding, ripping at the hide, sound of tearing, and we can’t know what we’re dragging, an animal with stiff hairs or our own bodies because the sound of tearing is a sound of fear and can’t be known. Hooves over the ground, we should be able to hear those, some track they make, but the dirt in millions of grains and hundreds of small stones and momentary drag across tufts of grass and scrape against root and brush are so many sounds all at once we become lost. Sound itself a landscape of hell, no escape at all, and now we’re dragging in two worlds that grow further apart, world of touch and world of sound, the body we drag no longer indicated and perhaps not our own.

Touch. Physical weight and strain, and this endless night colder and colder, all warmth fading and the sun never to rise again. Muffled world, blind and soundless, but not detached. Pain and nowhere else to focus but on that pain. The failure of the body, grinding of bone against bone, splitting of muscle, and nerves light up our dark sky. We have some sense of seeing again, but this time inside us, bright spots of grinding and tearing that race in slim lines, impulse and pattern, red network of pain, and seeing this removes us from it, limits what we feel, and we think we can manage, but then all goes dark again and now we know every pattern, every raceway, but only feel its surge, don’t see a thing. Pain. The sensation of pain, always fresh. And there is no other sense. Taste and smell never mattered during our lives, and they don’t matter in hell. We’ve forgotten them. And though we continue to walk backward, dragging this weight, we no longer know because we’ve become lost inside ourselves, each hell private and contained.