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In retrospect, it stands out to me that he asked if I had killed. Not if I had killed an animal.
“No,” I said. “How did you know about my plan?”
He gave me another look that said why would you ever think I didn’t know about your plan?
Hades only asked one more time if I was ready, and then he didn’t ask again.
A large part of hunting is stillness. You can’t tromp around through the woods and expect the animals not to run from you, so eventually we chose a spot and set up a small temporary blind and a pair of seats, and we waited.
“Hunting hours are from sunrise to sunset,” he mentioned, his voice fitting in with the soft forest sounds. “You get a little extra time for birds.”
“I know,” I whispered back.
“So don’t hunt at night somewhere you might get caught,” he said.
“I won’t.”
“And don’t hunt by yourself. It’s a ridiculous way to die. Just text me.”
“Okay.”
The deer came along about half an hour later.
Its antlers were at least the length of my hand. It was legal. For the briefest moment, I wondered what Uncle Hades’s plan was. Just to sit there and watch?
I decided not to ask.
Instead, I drew back my bowstring, aimed, and let it go.
I knew the second that the arrow left the string that it wouldn’t be a clean kill. The truth was that my hands were shaking. My heart was in my throat when the arrow hit, and I’ll admit this: I did want to freak out.
For one second.
That was as long as I had before Hades put his left arm out in front of me, like you’d throw your arm in front of a kid in the passenger seat, and threw something with his right hand.
In the near-dark, the knife was a blur. My arrow had hit the deer too far forward and caught in muscle. Hades’s knife went in with a solid thunk, precisely between the point of its shoulder and its belly.
The deer dropped like a rock and landed on the ground, unmoving.
I lowered my bow as smoothly as I could. It was so quiet in the woods. Just wind whooshing in the trees and the smell of fallen leaves and the two of us.
There was just the deer.
When I turned to my uncle, he was watching me with mild curiosity and no judgment, waiting to see how I would react. Maybe he thought I’d be sick, or cry, or freak out.
But I was flooded with a sense of balance—real balance—for the first time in my life. It had been kind of scary to shoot an arrow at something and know that my intention was to kill it. Cleanly and quickly, even if I hadn’t quite pulled it off.
And I knew, somehow, that I was meant to do it. I was meant to hunt, and to track, and, yes, to kill. I was part of that balance, so I could either resist it or respect it.
I knew then that I’d always choose the latter.
I gave him a shaky smile, and he smiled back.
I see that moment differently now that I’m an adult. At the time, I thought that Hades was managing his expression so carefully because he wasn’t sure if I was ready for the reality of the hunt.
When I got older, I realized that he believed me when I told him I was ready. Unlike other adults I’d encountered, Uncle Hades didn’t use those questions to try to convince us to change our minds. He was genuinely asking, and accepted the answer as true.
The way he watched me afterward wasn’t because he hadn’t believed me, or because he thought I’d change course and have a big emotional reaction, or because he had any problem with big emotional reactions. I’d already had plenty of those in front of him growing up. We all had.
