I dug through that neck as quickly as I could until I heard metal on bone and wrapped the knife around, cutting everything that might still be hidden. I grabbed the antlers then and yanked backward hard. Cracking sound, and I yanked again and twisted and then I dug that blade between vertebrae and stabbed and finally severed.

A severed head. I couldn’t help but look at the buck’s eyes and see that they were still galaxies entire, made of some substance that wouldn’t fade, a luminescence beyond blood. The buck not diminished.

I was careful not to let his open neck touch ground. As long as I kept him aloft, he would not root again. I held his antlers with one hand at my shoulder and let his eyes look up into the sky. I knew not to look longer at them.

Heavier than I ever would have dreamed, that head and neck and antlers, and I had to stoop over to pull up that road, and the weight was too much for one hand. Dead weight of flesh, our bodies so much heavier than we imagine.

I wasn’t sure what to do, standing in place bent over and breathing hard, my shoulder burning, but I slipped the rifle barrel up until it lay across my shoulders and then I could grab the antlers with both hands.

If anyone could have seen me in that darkness, it would have looked as if I was trying to wear his head and horns, trying to pull them in place of my own, bent over and become any beast, hiding away from mankind.

18

JESUS IN THE DESERT, FORTY DAYS IN WILDERNESS, GOING BACK, refusing civilization. His feet hardening into hooves, ears tufting, a ridge grown across his head and sockets for horns, bone growing, and he leans over onto his forelegs and finds an easier stride. Able to pick his way among the rocks, dainty of foot, ready to leap and run at any threat. The hide thickening across his back and shielding him from the relentless sun. Galaxies forming at the backs of his widened eyes, luminescence, night vision, a second day.

Our stories of transformation have been taken, erased from the Bible we have now. Where is Pan, half goat, with a man’s torso and goat’s horns? Where are the mermaids, half fish? Where is Medusa with her head of snakes? These stories are a part of us and can’t be erased. The Bible isn’t finished until what was erased has been returned.

Jesus was hiding. And what do any of us have to hide except the beast? Hooves and antlers and the world returned, a landscape animate. Jesus as aurochs, the bull, thick dark horns, shaggy hanging head thundering across desert stone. Or gone down lower onto his belly, thick toes ending in points, tongue flicked outward to smell, platelets all along his back, eyes like beads.

Scent of the buck on me. Smell also of blood. Bent over to face the earth invisible below, stepping into that darkness.

The spine in us comes from fish, the first vertebrate fish. And our legs and arms are fins. This is truth. The lungfish is more closely related to us than he is to most fish. He breathes air, walks across dry land, burrows in to wait for rain, lives as long as we do. Jesus in the desert, going back to his origins, would have seen his arms and legs shrink back into lobed fins, felt his tail regrow and complete the ridge of his back. He would have burrowed down into the earth and dreamed of water.

Waiting and wandering and migration, all forgotten. I climbed that hill spine curled and strained and carrying my trophy, and I did not stop. We can return to that. One foot in front of the other even when we have no strength, even when we need to sleep and need food and need water. We can continue on anyway.

The earth could have been flat. If it was created, then why not any shape? So gravity and steep hillsides must be meant as torments, a test of us. That hill rose before me, and my steps were not entirely solid but slipped back a bit, and brush tore at my face until I veered away, and then scraped from the other side and I veered again. I couldn’t see. The buck staring into the heavens and all illumined for him. If the world evolved, then it is what it is. If it was created, then its shape is the inferno.

The sound of my footsteps and nothing more. Slow plodding, and after a while it seemed they could have been someone else’s footsteps, sound dislocated. I listened to this other figure hike along that road. Always near and out of reach. A phantom you could forget and then remember again. Each step isolated, pushing, carrying something. No momentum. A sound made of will alone.

Hell an echo chamber, all without source. Our preview in this life is our sense of self, never constant, no solidity, nowhere to be found. A kind of shadow projected out over this brush and changing constantly in size, and the light that makes that shadow something beyond the range of what we can see. We know the shadow is there but can never find it.

A scraping sound, this was all I heard at first. But then a low thud beneath it, my weight against the earth, proof. Cast just to my side, walking in tandem. And then slipping farther away and behind. My skin, also, a separate thing, overgrown by the oak and hung beyond the outlines of me.

The gun a rack across my neck, cold steel, and the buck’s antlers bloodless. His upper vertebrae against mine, two-headed creature looking opposite directions, earth and sky, our eyes mounted to the sides. A guardian impossible to approach. A single set of lungs, single breath.

At times my heartbeat felt doubled, a reverberation as it hung and shook in my chest. Wave pattern rippling outward, some relation to the thud of each footstep, no low sound ever contained, always reaching beyond.

The road rising more steeply at the top of the glades. My toes digging in like hooves. Strange calves, too thick. No calves on a buck, only slim bone and tendon, all muscle up high. Our proportions are wrong, feet too large and swiveling.

I hit brush in front of me, a wall of it, closed and blind, fully grown, and so I knew I was at the fork. I could see nothing at all, not even when I blinked and looked for outlines, but I turned to the right and felt the hump in the center of the road beneath me, covered in short brush, and stepped to the side into a wheel rut.

I followed this trough, lugging that head. My elbows up, shoulders burning, tiny compared with the shoulders of a buck. Huge sweeps of muscle, able to leap, but they lay now in the road behind, disconnected. A pair of forelegs and shoulders and rib cage and section of spine wandering on their own, resting for a moment, lying down in the road. And farther down that road, another pair of legs unable to pull or drag, only pushing flesh into ground, going nowhere.

I couldn’t risk being overtaken, had to keep moving. My footing uncertain beneath me, deep channeled rut carved by water. Large stones uncovered and gathered at the seam, and my feet slipping along the walls. In darkness, I wouldn’t know how deep. I could be following a channel that cut until the hill on either side was over my head or even higher and I wouldn’t know. Submerged and believing I was still on the surface.

But the slope became less steep, walls lay down and rut filled. Shallow curve of ground, smell of sugar pines and sound of air moving through their tops, the road no longer a channel, and the toe of my boot kicked an enormous cone and I stepped on another, crunching down through it, and I was where my grandfather had gathered his cones.

I had to rest a moment. Went down on my knees in soft needles and grass and tilted to the side to let the rifle butt hit ground and head fall. I pushed cones out of the way and curled into a fetal position, first and final form. Breathing hard. The ground already cold, all warmth of the day gone.

Here is where they had decided to leave me, knowing I might not make it back, knowing the buck would be wasted on the road. I wondered what had been said. They might have said nothing. They might have just climbed into the truck and left.