Free Season of Death by Christopher Lane

butchered en masse. Virtually every part of every animal was utilized: the meat dried and stored for winter, the skins tanned and fashioned into parkas, mukluks, gloves … There was no waste, no spoilage, no killing for sport.
    Which was precisely what they were doing at the moment, Ray reminded himself as he used the paddle to deflect a glossy, amber rock. Ray wasn’t exactly proud of that. He accepted and understood the need to kill for subsistence, but was uncomfortable with the idea of ending life for
fun.
What, exactly, was the thrill of robbing a living thing of its breath and spirit, of its
kilal
Maybe Margaret was right. Maybe in the absence of necessity, hunting was an act of barbarism.
    Ray had participated in the hunt for nearly three decades and, despite his wife’s objections, planned to continue. Hunting caribou was part of who he was. He would honor that, dutifully and reverently taking an animal per season, selling the skin and putting up the meat. And he would pass the practice on to his own son one day.
    One day?
What had been a vague hope in the vastness of an undefined future just hours earlier was now a specific date on the calendar. Ray shivered at the thought. The son, or daughter, he had imagined having
one day,
was on the way. He or she would arrive … soon … in less than nine months! Ray let the oar rest against the gut gasket as he made the mental calculations. This was September. October, November, December …
    “Look out!” Billy Bob warned.
    Dazed, Ray blinked away the daydream and realized that they were slipping into a turbulent trough of angry river rocks. Cursing, he paddled hard and managed to catch an eddy. The craft spun full circle and rocked radically before narrowly missing the trough.
    “Lewis!” Ray called impatiently. “What’s the story with this river?”
    “Uh?” He glanced over his shoulder. “Story? You mean, how it come to be?”
    “No. Like are we gonna be dumped off a twenty-foot falls around the bend?”
    “Uh? Naw!”
    “You said you’d floated it before, right?”
    “Yah.”
    “And there wasn’t any serious water?”
    “No.”
    “What did the Park Service say about the junction with the Anaktuvuk?”
    “Uh? Park Service?”
    “Didn’t you call them to check on water level …? To find out if there’s been a flood warning issued? This baby is really high right now.”
    Lewis shrugged at this. “I do river once. Early summer. No problem.”
    “Early summer? That’s before most of the thaw.”
    “Eh … Worry too much,” Lewis replied. “It be fine. Everything smooth.”
    Somehow, Ray wasn’t convinced. He still had the nagging suspicion that at any moment they might reach a cascading drop-off that had slipped Lewis’s memory.
    The next section offered submerged sandbars, a few malevolent-looking slabs of moss-covered granite peering up from the depths, and an occasional whitecap. Ray was sweating beneath his parka, arms beginning to ache as he pulled at the water on one side, then the other. He had just ruddered them around a gravel peninsula when the current swept them into an arching right turn. Both boats were sideways again. Suddenly, Billy Bob yelled, “Duck!”
    Ray did, and a cottonwood branch peeled a layer of skin from the top of his head. It hurt, but was infinitely preferable to getting clotheslined. He rubbed at the scrape and grimaced as he found blood on his fingers. At that instant he decided that he would visit revenge on Lewis Fletcher. Somehow, some way, he would get him back for this.
    “Looky thar,” Billy Bob said. He was gesturing to the right bank where a boat had been docked on a mudflat, its leash tied to a tree: a gray, rubber Zodiac with an eighty-horse Evinrude outboard motor. Ten yards farther up on the shore, another, identical raft sat like a beached whale. A half dozen wooden crates were stacked next to it. A stencil marked them as property of the U.W.
    “‘Spose they’re huntin’ too?” Billy Bob