Tender

My family name starts with Hunt and ends with a disassembled doe hanging from the barn roof, rust-red iron hooks slotted between each fibula and tibia. We’ve slit her stomach, spilled her guts, and carved her muscle. My brothers gift bloody handfuls of meat to my mother through the back door.

At my request, my father shows me how to skin the hide—tug, slice through the tough white connective tissue, tug, slice, tug, slice. I will tan it later to prove that I can. I’ll use my brother’s pocketknife and my own half-frozen, thirteen-year-old fingers to painstakingly remove the excess fat and muscle, careful not to cut through the skin itself or to smear her blood on my long braid. I’ll salt her hide, stir it in a fifty-gallon drum with chemicals my mother and I buy from Kroger, and work it over rough tree branches. The finished product will be stiff and balding. It’ll leave the white porch rails stained gray for years.

For now, I stand in the barn entrance and watch the doe’s mouth string blood into her own pile of intestines. My father’s hunting buddy picks a piece of meat off her carcass, pops it in his mouth, and remarks on the quality. Tender, he says. I pretend this is something I could do, too—behold her dirt-frosted insides, her filmy nocturnal eyes, her blood-drenched lips, her naked muscle and bone—and be so unable to relate to her that I could hold a piece of her raw flesh in my mouth and never taste her.