Chapter Text
Life is like a roller coaster, Ashley thought. She had cheered so enthusiastically when her mother won the lottery and qualified them for their long-anticipated hunting permit. She had really looked forward to spending several days in the field alone with Granny, Auntie Kim and her mother. She would be the very first of her cousins to join their elders on a jack hunt. Four years before, her mother, Aunt, and Granny had last won a permit, but she had been just twelve years old and too young to hunt. This time, she was finally old enough but so was her bratty cousin, Cassie. Auntie Kim’s older daughter had herself just turned 14. However, Cassie couldn’t go this year because the party was limited to four and Ashley was older.
Then Ashley learned to her disappointment that Granny had unexpected business obligations in the city and could not hunt this year after all. Cousin Cassie quickly volunteered to take her place and no one objected. No one asked Ashley’s opinion. Her mom and Auntie Kim her sister so wanted Ashley and Cassie to be friends. However, they had not gotten along very well from the time when Ashley was six and Cassie were 4 years old. Cassie had played with Ashley’s livestock truck and bitten the pricks off of all of her plastic jacks. Cassie may have forgotten all about it but Ashley never had.
Despite Cassie, Ashley’s excitement grew. Auntie Kim had rented a cottage right in the preserve, so that they might get an early start and waste no time traveling back and forth from a motel. The cottage even had indoor toilets and hot running water. Ashley waxed the string on her crossbow and adjusted its sites. She began to devote several hours a week to practice her archery.
Then, two nights before the hunt, Ashley felt a cold coming on. She drank two glasses of orange juice and took vitamin C and zinc oxide tablets in hopes that she hasten her recovery. However, in the morning, she was clearly worse. Aching bones and stuffy head aside, Ashley was determined to hunt and even more determined that Cassie – ever smiling, always bubbling Cassie - would not hunt while she stayed home and nursed a damned virus.
Auntie Kim and Cassie picked up Ashley and her mother, Jill, on the day before the Hunt for the long ride out to Red Lake Reservoir. Red Lake, named for the fiery reflection of the autumn oak leaves on its placid water, served as the regional 5-county site for the annual Hunt.
Ashley felt terrible and the car ride made it worse. She popped decongestants and ibuprofens, while Cassie asked again and again why Ashley had insisted on coming if she was so sick. Cassie slid across the back seat and pressed herself against the door to maximize the distance between them. She hoped to decrease her risks of infection. Every time Ashley coughed or sneezed, Cassie looked at her with disgust and warned aloud that Ashley would make them all deathly sick, over and over again. Alternatively, she voiced her fear that Ashley would cough at the wrong moment and scare away any quarry.
Again and again, Ashley protested that she only had a cold. She really didn’t have bubonic plague – although she admitted to herself that she felt like it. She prayed that she would be better in the morning.
Ashley’s mother, Jill, Cassie, and Auntie Kim unpacked all of their gear and laid it out on the kitchen table, ready for an early start in the morning. Auntie Kim showed Ashley the permit with her name on it. Desperate to improve by the next morning, Ashley drank hot tea and honey, loaded up on decongestants and on the last of her bottle of ibuprofen, and turned in early.
However, Ashley felt even worse in the morning, if such might be imagined. She awoke so congested that she could hardly breath. Her clammy nightshirt clung to her perspiring body. Her damp hair hung limply, plastered to the sides of her face.
Cassie taunted that Ashley looked so hideous; her appearance alone would frighten away any jack who saw her. Even Auntie Kim worried aloud that Ashley’s cough or even her noisy breathing might give them away to their quarry. Finally, Ashley herself admitted that grit and determination were simply not enough. She simply would not be able to hunt. Four full years might pass before their names came up in the lottery and she got another chance.
Cassie, of course, then asked why Ashley had insisted on coming at all. Any one of her friends would have very much enjoyed hunting in her place. “An utter waste, a selfish waste,” Cassie said, quite unabashed and as sure as always of herself. Ashley’s mother and Auntie Kim were a bit more understanding. Her mother had even volunteered to stay at the cottage with her.
Ashley insisted bravely that she wasn’t all that sick and urged the three to get the early start they wanted. Her mother offered to stay with her once again, but finally surrendered to Ashley’s repeated assurances. She and Ashley had cellular phones and could easily keep in touch. Auntie Kim told Ashley that she had another bottle of ibuprofens in the glove compartment and left her the car keys.
“Be careful,” Ashley admonished. Every year, accidents happened during hunting season. Women traipsed through the wood carrying deadly weapons. Hunters fell from elevated blinds or mistook each other for game. Jacks could be dangerous too. In keeping with the well known male enthusiasm for violence, some tried even to assault the hunters using found weapons like tree branches, lost arrows, and stones. Hunting in groups was much safer and preferred. Once, the story went, the jacks at Tall Pines Reserve had banded together to attack the hunters en mass. The hunters made a stand and the Rangers suspended bag limits and extended the hours of the Hunt through the night. Every single jack released was taken on that very first day. Many were taken within minutes and those able to flee were tracked down relentlessly through the night and all were dead by the next morning.
“You be careful, too,” her mother responded.
Auntie Kim looked and looked. She just couldn’t find her good-luck knife –an old, beaten up, pitted by corrosion, and blackened blade that somehow held the keenest edge of all her knives. She knew that she had brought it from Granny’s house. Granny and her Granny before her had always brought it with them and used it to gut and skin all of their jacks. She never once had come home empty handed - except the one time she had forgotten to bring it along. Kim knew she had brought it, but she just couldn’t find the elusive thing. They had unpacked the car in a rush and no one was quite sure who had put what where. Jill, Cassie, and even Ashley looked but no one could find it. Finally, Auntie Kim just gave up. They quickly readied their crossbows, strapped on their quivers, and set out before the first horn. Kim settled for the brand-new Janie knife that her sister, Jill, had given her for Christmas.
Ashley looked longingly at her gear, now sitting all alone on the table. She caressed the dark wood of the richly finished wooden stock of her crossbow lovingly and nocked a bolt, almost out of reflex. Then she checked and rechecked the safety and regretfully, just laid it back on the table, loaded. Its mere presence taunted her with her long anticipated, missed opportunity to hunt. Finally, she just threw her old sweatshirt over it so that she would not have to look at the damned thing any more. She looked to have a quiet day to herself at least – with no Cassie. She went out to the car to get more ibuprofen and went back to sleep.