Mounts

The walls at camp are covered in mounts. An elk, a coyote skin, two lacquered rattlesnakes, at least fifteen buck. When I was twelve years old, they started dipping the skulls in paint before mounting them, dyeing the bone beneath the antlers. One of my pap’s is a tie-dye orange and green. One of my brother’s is blueish chrome. It’s strange to see the deep round eye-hollows staring through anything but the color of bone. I think, “At least let it be dead.”

It’s even caught on beyond our family. Todd Fisher’s wife got a small buck last fall. Pap said you shouldn’t shoot four-points but it’s fine if a woman does. My Uncle Blake dipped the skull pink and Gram showed me before they gave it to her. She said, “Isn’t it pretty?”

My Uncle John also shot a four-point, thinking it was a six in the snow-glare. He was red embarrassed dragging it down to camp – I wondered if he considered leaving it. Perhaps if gunshots were silent, but everyone knew the shot came from his part of the hill. Blake dipped John’s buck pink too. Pap did the mount and they gave it to him on Christmas in front of everyone, laughing. I thought he’d snap, flat hard mouth under his graying moustache, but he forced a laugh as well. White knuckles blending against the antlers, the bright pink skull sharp and hanging. I wondered about “Respecting the animal.”

Dad made me go during hunting season but I never wanted to. It wasn’t because I thought it was so wrong to shoot a wild animal. I knew it wasn’t as bad as what happened to the ones I ate anyway. It was because I didn’t like the way they all seemed out there. Sitting in chairs under their respective mounted antlers, back when all the eye-hollows were still sunken in bone white, three generations of men – brothers, fathers, grandfathers, uncles and sons – trading harsh stories and sipping beer, insulting their wives in front of their children. I never felt so alone as in that room surrounded by dead things and bravado. I remember hating the way they talked. I remember feeling so soft and pink and sensitive. They wouldn’t even leave pink in their steaks. I remember thinking I liked my dad better when my mom was around.

They didn’t want to let my little sister go when she got old enough and asked if she could hunt. Pap said it was a weekend for the boys and the men to bond. My dad brought her anyway, and he yelled at some of the boys who talked blue like they’d always talked when they talked like that in front of her. He stopped making me go the same year he brought her. I think raising a daughter changed him.

It was later on we started throwing parties out at camp. The frenetic energy of young men posturing around girls, trading insults, laughing extra loud. My brother and cousins pointing out their mounts on the wall, brazenly reciting the lead-up to the kill. Liquor pressured with friendly pleas. The bunk room at the back of the cabin behind only a slate-gray curtain, which waves each time the front door opens. There comes a point of staying over or leaving, the long drive back to town, especially in the winter, dark icy dirt roads.

The lights start going out then. The fire smolders. Antlers and skulls – some of them tie-dyed or blueish-chrome – cast eerily in television light. Gentle tugs – with words and with hands – towards the curtain. It’s all dark in there. Bodies itch like trigger fingers. “Let’s just be real,” Richie said once, “if they’re here after midnight, they want dick.”

And one night he was with a girl behind the curtain and she came out crying and slept off the liquor in her van with the doors locked. And one night he was back there with an exchange student from India and yelled out, “It’s true: they’re all pink on the inside, boys!” And one night my cousin Cody mixed Everclear in the punch and told the girls it was just vodka. And one night Derek told my brother he had an ugly girlfriend and he broke up with her the next day.

Sometimes I imagine women mounted on the wall out there, dipped blueish chrome, shining in the television light. Sometimes I imagine white knuckles over a lifeless body pink and hanging. Sometimes I don't know who's the mount.

I never minded the hunting itself. Awaking in the blue-black of half-dawn, trudging as softly as possible out into the hills to a stand and setting still in the endless trees. The sun rising, the woods aflame with the bloom of death. The stiff straight trunks blending unimaginable depth into the illusion of wallpaper flatness.

It was that last year I went, the year before my sister got to go, two years after they started dipping the skulls in paint, that I could’ve taken a buck of my own. It snowed early that season, and the buck stepped lightly through the fresh powder. A ten-point. A rare and glorious thing, a mount like that.

The ten-point turned broadside in a clearing not twenty yards from me. I thought, This will show them all. This will redeem my crying to go home when I was ten. This will redeem my not wanting to play football or wrestle. This will be a mount as good as Blake’s best, as good as Pap’s best. I imagined it dipped in paint. I thought, “It was just a mount from the moment it walked into sight.”

I knew without shooting that it was the same color as me on the inside.