Page 43 of Mazywood

“I’m fine,” she said, finally answering Sharise. “I tripped.”

“What are you even doing—” Sharise started to say, but her eyes took the same journey Imani’s had: first to the bloody tree trunk, then the blood trail. And the head. “What the fuck?”

“It’s a deer,” Imani said.

Sharise nervously tracked the shadows between the trees near the boulder. Her breathing quickened. “What the fuck, Imani!” She turned over her shoulder. “Dad!” she called.

Imani grabbed Sharise’s arm, pulling her so hard that Sharise almost fell on top of her. Their faces were close. “Don’t!” Imani said. “He’s not there. Don’t call them.”

“Let me go!” Sharise said. “Why are you just sitting next to it? What’s wrong with you?”

Sharise yanked herself free, then she extended a gloved hand to Imani to help her stand. Imani hopped, pulling her snowboard with her. They both moved ten yards away from the frozen deer’s head, but Imani still imagined the carcass’s stuffed eye socket and its white stare. Her stomach squirmed as if she might be sick, but she swallowed it back.

“I bet it was hunters,” Imani said. “Poachers. Hunting season for deer is over.”

“Why do you even know that?”

“I just do.” Imani hadn’t told Sharise that she wanted to learn how to hunt and had researched it online. Hunters could hunt small game until January on Mount Shasta, but not deer.

Now Imani couldn’t remember why she’d wanted to hunt so much. The deer didn’t have antlers, so it was a girl, she realized. Maybe it was a mama deer. When she’d fantasized about hunting, she’d thought more about tracking animals and perfecting her aim. She hadn’t thought about a snowy eye socket. Or a deer leaving a family behind. Now she never wanted to go hunting. Up close, the deer didn’t look like food at all—it just looked dead.

Imani realized she was shivering. She quickly zipped up her jacket, although it didn’t help. Her shaking wasn’t from the cold.

“Why did they leave the head?” Sharise asked.

“Maybe… they got the meat they needed and they didn’t want it,” Imani said.

Imani was so nervous that she could hardly catch her breath. Discovering the deer’s head had startled her, yes, but now she was more worried about what Sharise would do. She was frantically trying to tell a story Sharise would believe so she wouldn’t panic. Imani used to lie a lot more when she was younger, and the secret to a good lie was to be specific. Details.

“They probably cut it up right out here. That’s why there’s so much blood,” Imani said, and Sharise made a horrified face.

“Eww. Fucking assholes,” Sharise said.

She had bought into the story Imani was weaving! Imani imagined the hunters—at least two of them—stringing up the deer for field dressing, pulling out the internal organs in the solitude of the ski hill days before her family arrived. She’d seen it a million times on YouTube. It was plausible and almost ordinary, except that deer season was over.

But no matter what story she told, Daddy might want to leave if he knew. Mom too. At the least, they would not allow them on the ski hill anymore. And without the ski hill, this was just a creaky old house without internet or a phone.

“Sharise?” Imani said, her voice soft.

Sharise sighed as if she already knew what Imani planned to say.

Imani looked into Sharise’s eyes with her best puppy dog face. “Please, please, please don’t tell Daddy and Mom. I’ll wash the dishes on your day for a month. Two months.”

“We don’t even know if it was hunters, Imani,” Sharise said in her big-sister voice that could be as firm as arguing with Mom. “What if it was bears?”

“Bears hibernate,” Imani said. Bears usually hibernated. The blood on the tree had felt random, more like something bloody had been thrown against it. Angry. It didn’t seem like hunters; Imani knew that even if Sharise didn’t. But she also knew that contestants on Naked and Afraid survived in handmade shelters in the wilderness surrounded by wild animals and none of them had gotten hurt by any creatures except insects. A bear or mountain lion probably had killed this deer, which meant it had been close.

Yes, they could have passed whatever had killed the deer on their snowboards, brushing within yards of it while it lurked in the trees. Imani knew that, and the idea made her lips quiver. But she also knew that the deer probably had not been killed that day—and whatever had killed it could be long gone by now.

“You think they’ll want to leave if we tell them?” Sharise asked.

“You know they will.”

“That deer is pretty big. If it wasn’t hunters…”

“We’re in a house. Hunters are scarier than bears.”

“Yes! What if they know we saw what they did? What if they come after us?”