We had three birds each, seared and shrunken over the fire, their black and white feathers strewn on the ground and stubborn down stuck to the back of our hands. The hearts, God, even the hearts my father had made us eat, though he spared us the messy insides; the guts we threw on the fire hung like earthworms, dripped and hissed over the embers. I remember it clearly, the feeling of gristle tight between my teeth, the small pockets of muscle laced through with tendon. William and I could hardly look at each other, but only glanced at how far along the other was with the little bodies in our hands.

I sensed my father and William’s father as they moved behind us in camp, quietly talking as they hung the moose kill, sipped their beers. Only after William and I were finally finished, the little carcasses naked at our feet, did my father come to see we had eaten everything off those birds. Good—then he added—now you know.

After we finished, William went to join his father under the tarps and with the kill we were there for—a bull moose. In the moment William left the fire, left behind the thin bird bones reduced to carbon, he was returned to that sacred unit of father and son. I heard the crack of tab on a can of Old Style, a celebratory drink for the hunt. Although William’s father had stood by as my father forced us to de-breast and eat the birds we had shot around camp—there were boundaries men didn’t cross in front of one another—Williams’s transgressions were forgiven. I sat at the fire a little longer and felt my father’s reluctance, his silence, hover in a kind of ring and settle around the stones of the firepit. Words that never came hung in the air above us, twisted in the smoke and carried off. My father, though never unnecessarily cruel or authoritarian, was a man of principle and quiet grit—to cross certain thresholds he defended was grounds for dismissal—a radiance we’d once shared in childhood could be extinguished. 

Of course, I wasn’t thinking about any of this back then; I wasn’t much aware of anything but a nausea I must have thought was from the bird meat in my stomach. Yet, I realized in that camp, and I think he knew it too, that he could have a greater love for something other than me, his son. That I could be an outsider even to him. I was thirteen then and felt waves of embarrassed shame. Red, wet ribcages lay like some pried-open seashells at my feet. Bird hips hinged wildly; their legs flapped like fresh-bent willow as I threw them on the coals of the fire. The wings themselves curled and singed in the heat. I walked past my father, who faced away from the fire, back toward the tarps strung up in the thinned-out stand of birch trees we had made for moose camp days ago. William’s father brought out ice cream gone soft from inside the beer cooler, an unexpected sweetness stashed by William’s mother, must have been the morning we left. William sipped his beer between scoops of Neapolitan, while I skimmed at the melted edges of vanilla and chocolate, avoiding the bright pink of strawberry with its mocking childhood taste.

We had boated out on William’s father’s Lund. Painted army green with wisps of shadowy cattails and bulrushes, the paint job an attempt to blend in right angles to terrain that offered none of that geometry. The Flats everyone called it— an expansive span of wetlands that spilled from the edge of the boreal that surrounded town, then mingled to the foot of low-lying distant mountains. Golden tamarack and stunted black spruce weaved through marshes and hillocks. Moose camp could be about two weeks, William’s father had said, and no girls allowed. He laughed lightly, smiled as he looked at me; figured he saw something in me no one else did, though I wasn’t sure what. I walked to the big truck that waited, full of all things camo, wool, and army surplus, and William, a sort-of friend from school, in the back. I had an old down coat on; three block colors spanned the top, bottom, and arms: navy blue, forest green, and dirty mustard, blotched with oil stains. I remember my mother scrubbing furiously in the bathtub, sighing heavily as the stains remained. But it hardly smelled, was warm, and my father had found it at the dump, an ever-moving trove of possibility—one man’s treasure—like a mantra from his lips. It was Alaska after all, life was different, and we were all getting used to not living in the Lower 48. Nothing I owned would camouflage me anyway, while William resembled his own special kind of forest.

Though William and I were in the same class, I was still a good head shorter than he was, skinny enough to run track, but not quite the size for hockey, which he played near-continuously in a league of combined schools, military and town kids alike. We had just moved to the Interior; a year and a half back had driven up from Minnesota, while he had come as a baby, from somewhere in northern Wisconsin. Both our fathers worked the pipeline, mine, a welder, his, an engineer. We got along enough anyway, any possible kid snobbery reduced by the isolation of the subarctic, and our solid Midwestern rearing.

The moose hunt was William’s father’s annual trip to get meat for the winter, divided among several families. Then, come winter breakup, near emptied freezers could be filled once again with spring black bear or early summer caribou from farther north. My father had loved duck hunting the Dakotas and handled his own guns with ease. We kept silent between us how I had hated those early dew-heavy mornings when he dragged me to dank blinds, fields shrouded in endless shades of tan and brown. I shivered and shifted, hesitant like wary geese, trigger-flinched as I made errant shots in the pink light of the prairies. I didn’t mind when he finally stopped his pre-dawn shake of my shoulders as I slept, felt only a distant kind of unease when he slammed loose-necked birds on the counter.

A few evenings before the moose hunt, as my father piled gear in the garage, I surprised even myself when I said I would join them for the hunt. I glanced at his face for a flicker of disbelief, but none came.  My mother’s eyebrows lifted, slightly, and later that night she brought out the stained down jacket and added it to the growing stack. I remember the morning we left, as she pulled me close in the driveway and whispered—I’m proud of you—and I pretended not to hear. I twisted out of her arms and moved towards the truck. Guilt like a heavy quilt wrapped itself around my shoulders. I turned, waved, and smiled for her, the coming light just under the horizon catching in her eyes.

While our fathers stalked the woods and glassed the edge-lands from knolls that rose from the marsh, William and I stayed behind at camp. We tended fire, chopped wood if we wanted, dangled our rods beside the Lund for pike that swam the tea-colored waters. This camp had been used by William’s father for some years, an informal stake in a small clearing twenty-five yards or so from where the Lund rested, on the soft shoulder of a small tributary’s banks. We had traveled the river corridor for hours in a twisted maze of wetlands where the grasses, tall from summer, waved as we flew by. The sedges and cotton grass blurred green, brown, and a faded white, soundless over the indulgent roar of the outboard. Mallards, canvasbacks, shovelers, and wispy green-winged teals flushed as we rounded corners, the first panicked flaps off the water jarring me, when I was almost certain we might overcome them with the boat, though we never did. Football-shaped bodies catapulted in earthly rainbows, flashes of iridescent heads, throats, and secondaries, as they shuttled to other ponds or hidden sloughs as the Lund cleared the way.

We watched dark-eyed juncos, their hooded heads bod and peck in the dust of camp. Chickadees flitted in the low thickets; their near-constant fee-bee-bee pitched through the forest. My father cracked the pilot bread he couldn’t stomach into quarters and sent the pieces sailing to the clearing’s edge. Then, out of that interior forest, magpies appeared, and with their long purposeful tails, swung high to the spruce nestled among birch. As they glided down, they cawed and gurgled, scattering the other smaller birds, taking what they wanted, as my father laughed at their boldness. Look to that, he would say, you could learn something from them.

William’s .22 would ping ping ping at cans horizontal on a plank, and when he handed me the gun, I hollered when I managed to knock them over. He re-stacked the row with fresh targets, the muscles in his face still and serious. I felt like a younger brother: naïve, wide-eyed, fumbling.

I remember it was the fourth day of camp when the shots were heard. Far off in a distance I could not place, though William was certain—southeast, over near the old Fish and Wildlife cabin—and my father appeared some time later, harried and breathless—get up, let’s go boys—and we grabbed our packs and ran, following him. The alders and willows William dodged caught me by surprise, their sharp thin arms lashing at my face, the sting and recoil, and my own jagged lunges. When we finally made it to the kill site, my father was standing over the massive bulk of the bull moose. The animal was so big, so brown and dead and still, its huge soft nose pressed unceremoniously into a muddy patch of ground. A rigid line of concentration set my father’s mouth, as we stared at the animal. He circled the body and displayed a look marked by focus, a singular vision of purpose. It was the same face I knew, when we’d drive to the fields by the school and spend the better part of an afternoon, back and forth, a football arcing in the sky between us. I couldn’t help crying out when each throw smashed into the bones of my fingers; I stood in a kind of dulled rapture, the shape of the ball hurrying towards me. My father would eventually call out, incensed, demanding attention, action. Now, with my hands limp at my sides, I moved edgewise of the small clearing.

A pungent smell filled the air, the tannin-rich release of plant life mixed with the animal’s own oils, sweat and grease and heat emanating skyward. William and his father spoke in hushed tones, and there was something between them that reminded me of small flock, moving in tandem. William gestured to me, and we began to adjust the moose’s head, the weight of it nearly obscene as we struggled to get the nose out of mud. I slid my hands down the main palm of the bull’s antlers, striations like a map in relief leading to small peaks of the tines. We hardly budged the giant’s head. Our fathers came; mine grasped the base of the antlers as William’s father plunged his hands under the chin. The palms of my father’s hand opened, and I could see the lifeline pulse as it followed the tension of his thumb. The bull’s head gave, and we drew the neck forward, the full length stretched on a tussock of bundled grasses. My father retrieved his Canon and each of us traded places behind the animal. I remember William’s father squeezed my shoulder, said it was my father who had shot the moose—his first Alaskan kill—and I realized my father had not yet said a word to me. The camera’s shutter pointed towards the bull’s long nose; it seemed more a landscape fixture than something that had lived and breathed just a short time ago. William and his father grinned in every photo; I observed them lean into each other, his father’s hand as it came across William’s shoulders. The dull gray of that mid-morning gave way to distant color as the horizon opened where the hills filled the edge of sky. The light slowly came over our faces. William’s father propped the camera against one of the packs and all of us squatted behind the moose. As the pulsing red light blinked and I crouched in front of my father, I glanced down at the enormous head below us. The flutter of the timer counted the seconds down in its hasty final approach. Afterwards, one last photo of my father was taken, alone with the animal. In my peripheral, I felt his attention on me, as William’s father spoke softly about the big boy going down.

I watched my father’s eyes follow the hands of William’s father, as they began to move along and through the animal with a surgeon’s steady lines. He began at the rear hock, the first cut a separation of hide in a swift circular motion, then down the inner part of the leg. Just before the genitals, he sliced up the belly, towards the chin. Short and even slices, his other hand guided the knife under the skin as he cut. Yet when my father tried those same arrangements—his hands, the knife, the flesh—the cuts looked clumsy and ragged. The firm line of my father’s mouth twitched at the edges, pinched slightly forward, the same mouth he made when correcting my mistakes. He managed to chuckle at times, embarrassed; his stubborn hands, the failure of the knife’s angle, the lack in applying enough pressure. William’s father’s gentle laugh eased any tension—You’ll get it, it just takes practice—he assured my father. I did not envy the new topography my father attempted to decipher; the body of the animal overwhelmed me. Yet somewhere it was mapped in the mind of William’s father. Soon half the hide was loosened from the body and stretched on the ground. This clean surface, free of dirt and hair, is where we placed meat before we filled game bags William had prepared. The bull, half-intact, monochrome in red and brown symmetry, offered a strange abstract sight as muscle groups bound together directed the curve of the blade.

Our fathers traded the Buck back and forth, slowly released muscle from silvery sheaths that enveloped the entire inside of the moose. My hands bloodied as I was given meat or asked to hold a leg or joint. I brushed my hands over the silkiness of membranes, and I thought of my own insides—how they too were just a knife-draw from spilling out on the ground. As I witnessed this goliath be butchered, I felt vulnerable, exposed, emptied like the moose’s body cavity had become. He was tremendous, but it hadn’t helped him, and I was just a fraction of his size.

William and I loaded our packs and my father would first head back to camp with us; then both men would continue for the rest of the meat. Our packs were lifted on our backs by our fathers; my feet suddenly heavy like anvils in the thick spongy moss and tangle of brush. We ached to keep our footing in the mangled roots of cottonwood and alder. Back at camp my father hung the blood-seeped bags over poles we had made days earlier. Stay here boys, he said, and left.

We coaxed the fire from embers that shimmered deep in the charcoal, lit green switches and waved them high and swirling in the air. Birds gathered as we ate food no longer needed; the Lund would be heavy with meat. The magpies fluttered down, the white-tipped cross of their shape erupting back and forth into the trees. I remember William took his .22 and aimed at the birds, and something illicit sparked the air between us.

It was me who decided to bait the birds; the pilot bread enough. We knew that the larger the piece, the more likely they were to fly—to pick off manageable portions in the safety of a tree. I broke off smaller pieces, lured the birds to stay grounded. We followed their marble eyes as they flashed through the glass world of the scope. William’s body leaned into the rifle, a natural appendage. I remembered those mornings in freezing blinds, and my father as he called out skeins of Canada geese as they flew overhead, rained down as we sprayed the skies with lead. But this was the first time we aimed at something on our own terms: unguided, undeterred, footloose.

When William let the first ping go, we hollered. I threw the bait as William took the shot. I remember the sight of their black and white feathers strewn, the checkered mess of their bodies. The way one would cock his head at another, unmoving on the ground. And when we heard the voice of my father, it sounded otherworldly, like he was calling across the shore of a distant lake. The two men stood, legs splayed out under the weight of their packs, knuckles gripped hip belts strained taut. I don’t remember William’s father’s face—instead my field of vision was fixed on my own father—his eyes widened, disorientated. William unloaded the .22 and pocketed the shells. My father, thighs arched with a determined chaos, walked toward us, heaved the weight of the pack to one hip, and sent it pounding to the ground. The  heaviness of what he had carried from the kill site vibrated through the soft muskeg and reached my feet. He came to me, circled my arm with an almost absentminded gentleness, and hit me, straight across my temple and the upper part of my cheek bone. He dropped my arm and turned to William—if you kill it, you eat it. He walked away, and both men began to unpack the meat, ignoring us. William and I picked up those camp robbers, their white breasts stained with red, black wings loose and dangling like soggy rags, and piled them by the fire. My father came, told us to strip them completely, not just breast them out like we did ducks and geese. Pluck them clean, that’s your dinner tonight—his voice was sharp, jagged. A knife across my thin chest.

Months later—it took days to cure the quarters, then cut, grind, freeze, and package the moose—and the return to school, I had forgotten about the photos from the hunt. Had left the memory somewhere out there in the Flats. Coming home from school one day, the photo envelope’s serrated edge caught my eye. There was the Lund, up on a bank of rough grass and horsetail, the greens and browns of its aluminum hull no match for the colors of the marshes. There was William as he built the fire ring. A pike I had caught, held high, my fingers looped through the gills. The moose flayed out in various stages of disarray; eventually just down to the antlers, the snout severed and left behind. The long necks of a pair of sandhill cranes, their red crowns reaching above the grasses; my father hadn’t mentioned seeing their tawny bodies, though we had all heard their rattled call. Then my father with the moose. The long Alaskan light of autumn streamed golden behind him and spilled over his shoulders into the tussocks. One side of his face was obscured in shadow, and though he was not smiling, I could still make out his brilliant eyes. They shone in the way they did, lifted in light. It was then I realized that until that late September, I always thought I would be like him. Yet I ended up nowhere near; all of a sudden he seemed larger than any life I knew with him. Looking at his face in the photographs he struck me as out of reach, something I had never considered possible, until that moment. I thought about how he must have seen William and I, with the spread of dead birds around us.