To kill and not to have killed not quite a squirrel

On a day engulfed by one sodden white fog after the next, Ignace Hamilton Braxator went up into the mountains armed with a shotgun. He marched in his snowshoes, straight up the trailless slope. At first the going was cumbrous. The snow was heavy, gray and as wet as water. The gun seemed an unaccountable burden that had to be shifted left and right, end over end. And the forest was oppressively silent, as if the winter had frozen its denizens and banished the wind. To say nothing of the constant cares that haunted his waking hours, and which refused to give him peace in his attempt to encounter the forest sconced in its alabaster blanket. After some minutes he stopped, turning to see the way he'd come.

Already the plume of woodsmoke from his cabin had receded into something like an illusion alloyed with the driving fog. The scene had no dimension, only mute colors, horizontality, verticality. He was often plagued by this thought, to the point where it had become a commonplace: What if this vista were a screen, a foil--and if he could part the fog, what horrors might lie beyond?

And yet he had just come that way, through the reality of it. Stooping to adjust the bindings on his aluminum snowshoes, Ignace Hamilton cursed his mind for being so hopelessly and romantically inclined to illusion. This was nature, wilderness, one had to be careful, and observant, fully rooted to what was real. If he lost his way in an idle daydream there would be little to prevent him from breaking his leg and being harvested into the granary of an indifferent fate. He faced about, squared against the towering obstacle of the mountain, and walked, soon falling into a rhythm of slow steps, steady breathing and paced progress. It did not take long before his thinking settled and was tethered to the circumstances of the day right there. Ignace's mind shrugged off the cares of the receding world below and abandoned itself to something like the moment. The butt of the gun rested in the flat of his hand and the forestock now weighed a reassuring groove into his shoulder. He began hearing things between footfalls: A chirp here, a creaking trunk there, snow dropping from boughs everywhere.

He had purchased the shotgun as a precaution against wolves and other possibly malevolent critters. But on this walk he had envisioned using the gun for something else. Having enjoyed the best of what a metropolitan upbringing and bachelorhood had to offer--and only that--our Ignace Hamilton Braxator had never killed anything larger than a millipede, which had once slithered out repulsively from under a dusty philological volume while young Ignace secretly rifled through the drawers of Uncle Camillus's desk. He had crushed it with the book unthinkingly, discoloring the cover forever. But that is neither here nor--suffice it to say that it is irrelevant, and we shan't linger for a moment longer over this episode. Now, then, Ignace had put himself in the position to reenact what his primitive ancestors had done out of necessity, and his more immediate ancestors had pursued as their hereditary right. He aimed to kill something, to field dress it, and to return to his rustic hideaway to eat it. Foremost on his list of targets was a bunny, but he would settle for what creature he chanced on or could flush into view. Ignace, he he decided, was henceforth to be a direct participant in the circle of life.

Instinct will overtake us if we allow it to, we all should know. Ignace realized that he would give himself the best chance of training his sight on a real animal by selecting an area, sitting down, and being still. At first there was no place, really, to select. He was ascending a vast wooded slope where each thicket or clearing was like the next. By and by he came to a shelf in the land where the slope of the mountain seemed to hiccup before resuming maybe a hundred paces ahead. As if, he thought, some obscene creator had furnished this lonely mountain with the perfect bed for a multiline highway. Ignace Hamilton found a little hollow in the snow where a tree had been uprooted in the wind, and it was here that he made his ambuscade, if you'd like to call it that.

Soon after being seated the fog coagulated around him into a soup to beggar the senses, seeming to close from above and below without sign or suggestion. Would he be able to find his way back down in such thick fog? He tried to quell the panic, but his mind raced with auguries of imminent dark and a boreal cold that would come creeping into his veins and freeze him from the heart out. It was while indulging this death-fantasy that Ignace heard the chattering. A kind of glottal hammering oversampled with a squeal, a to him uncanny hybrid between woodpecker and mouse. It sounded small, defenseless, and close. Ignace Hamilton knew also that it could not see him. With a slowness bordering on trepidation, he stood up out of his hollow and began advancing gingerly toward the source of that helpless and alien yibbering. He timed his steps to coincide with gusts of headwind and the rhythm of the chattering itself, relishing the conviction that he was doing it right. At length he thought he could hear the sound immediately overhead and stopped.

Yes, it had to be there. He undid the safety on the piece and swung the muzzle up toward the enfogged canopy, waiting for the curtain to open on his prey. There Ignace stood, a model of hunstmanlike composure, for the better part of an hour when, finally, at last, the fog parted--quickly, as if obeying the touch of a button on some screen--and Ignace could see that it was a squirrel. No sooner had he seen the obsidian glint in its rodent eye than BLAM! Ignace's aim was true. For one second, the squirrel scrabbled against gravity and doom. Then it arced out of the tree and whoomped its own grave into the snow, trailed in its descent by two tufts of disaggregated and gently dishing hide.

Thrilled by the success of it all, Ignace Hamilton Braxator reached for his knife and fell to. Again he felt that his actions were guided by instinct. He had never flayed an animal before, but here he was, sectioning it down the middle, authoring the closure of the circle of life like a consummate outdoorsman. His knife was sharp, the cut clean. Very soon he had revealed the abdominal cavity and begun to empty the guts. First the entrails, the blood blooming off them into the snow. Intestines, stomach, kidneys...there came the liver. With the lower work done, he used his knife to puncture the diaphragm and get into the chest cavity. Into this he reached two fingers. They closed around an object and pulled. It wouldn't dislodge easily, and he pulled with a bit more conviction. There was something about it, he felt. Something odd. It was too hard and unyielding. He pulled harder still but it wouldn't budge. Soon he was pulling with all his might, swearing and sweating. When last it gave and the heart clattered out onto the snow, Ignace fell back and looked at it in disbelief feeling the hairs on his head and legs prickle and stand on end. The squirrel's heart was as hard as a stone. More than that, it was covered in verdigris and rust. There were plates, terminals, wires, tubes. The last thing he did before bolting headlong down the mountain was to crouch over the cooling corpse and register the suture marks on the ribcage. He did not even bother to pick up his gun.

Ignace Hamilton left that cabin in the mountains for good the next day. No one in the area remembers having met him, and of what he had seen that day he spoke to no one at all.