Free Vision Quest by Terry Davis Page B

she looked down and saw her shirt torn and her arm bleeding. Deer hooves are very sharp and not all that clean. I sat Carla down on the running board and looked at her arm. I had to get a flashlight to see. The cut was shallow, but about an inch wide. The skin was ripped down the inside of her arm from her elbow to the middle of her forearm. A four-inch flap of it hung in her shirtsleeve.
    â€œI just wanted to pet it,” Carla said.
    â€œI know,” I said. “Me, too. But she can’t know.”
    â€œIsn’t there some way we can help her?” Carla asked. “She’s crying.”
    I cut Carla’s sleeve off with my hunting knife and pulled the skin flap back over the cut and wrapped her arm in gauze. “I’d like to wash this,” I said, not answering her question. “But all we have is Gatorade.”
    â€œAnd you’re saving it to drink,” she replied.
    â€œDamn right,” I said.
    â€œCan’t we keep her from suffering?” Carla asked.
    â€œI’m gonna shoot her.”
    â€œBut she only has broken legs. And she’s a deer, not a racehorse.”
    â€œI know,” I said. “But she’ll starve. Somebody’ll come along and shoot her anyway.”
    â€œYou don’t have a gun,” Carla said.
    â€œIt’s in my bag.”
    â€œPlease do it now, then,” she said. “It’s awful to hurt alone.”
    So I got the Luger and walked behind the deer and shot her once through the back of the head. She shook with the impact of the bullet, but then she went still and didn’t twitch at all. The shot rang and rang in my ears, that gun is so loud.
    I let down the tailgate and shoved the dead deer in with her head hanging out so she wouldn’t drip blood on our stuff when we went downhill. At the campground we gave her to the ranger and I washed Carla’s arm and found out the nearest doctor was back in Kettle. The ranger couldn’t do any more for the cut than I could, but he did promise to hold a camp spot for us if we wanted to come back. Carla said we did and we took off, barreling down the gravel road to the highway. I wanted to get there fast so maybe the doctor could stich the skin back on.
    It turned out the cut wasn’t very bad after all. The lady doctor just called it a “scrape” and snipped off the flap of skin, cleaned the grit out, and gave Carla a tetanus shot. We talkeda little and she gave us Rocky Mountain spotted fever shots for free. We just had to pay for the tetanus toxoid, and it was only $3.50.
    The ride back to Trout Lake was beautiful. The night was warm and clear. We drove real slow and there were lots of falling stars. When we crossed over to the west side of the river we saw lots of deer and a couple porcupines. When we got to the campground the ranger had the doe dressed out and hanging from a hook at the side of his house. Carla couldn’t use her arm much, so I set up the tent alone. She went right to sleep after we ate the stew, but I talked to some of the folks camping around us, and to the ranger to see if he’d seen anything of my grandpa.
    I crawled into the tent then and lay for a few minutes on top of my sleeping bag looking at the dark silhouette of Carla lying on her side in her sleeping bag. I reached up and traced along her hip lightly with my finger; then I pulled off my T-shirt and jeans and crawled into the bag, where I fought the desire to beat off until the birds began to sing.
    Carla got up early and watched some Canadians fish off the bank for a while, she said, before she woke me. I took down the tent, stowed it, fired up the Ford, and headed us for the highway. We were silent for a while, just looking out through the big Ponderosa pines at Trout Lake sparkling in the clear morning. Then I asked, “Carla, did you smell that beautiful smell this morning? I’ve never smelled anything like that in the woods before.”
    She turned from the