“Run the blade along here, then stab it -- push it in,” his father’d guided, pressed his hand as he cut through the pelt and deep into the animal’s flesh. “Ya smell it? Can you smell the blood, Jack?” Jonathan sniffed, nodded as his father’s face smiled into his. “It’s the raw guts and the blood you’re smellin’, son. That’s the life in it; the life of every living creature is in its blood from the first moment of conception. Now the life’s slippin’ out of it, goin’ back to the ground where it belongs; it’s like a sacrificial offering to the earth, for the life she’s given us – or maybe for the washin’ away of sin, for murderin’ this lovely beast of er’ creation?” His father’s eyes stilled in the silence between them, then his old man laughed, his big hand slapped down upon Jonathan’s shoulder. “Despite all that blather, I’m impressed with ya, son; that’s your first kill and quite a shot for a twelve year old boy – be’d quite a shot for a man . . . but then again ya are a man now, bein’ bar mitzvah’ed and all,” he said as Jonathan glanced away at the barley colored and sun mottled mountainsides of late November; snow flurries lofted down through the valley far off, yet the skies above them shown deep blue as waters of the Cote d’ azur. “A quarter mile is my guesstimate,” his father said . . . with open sights; that stag was runnin’ full tilt, a hundred yards below and away from ya. One shot, through the heart – damn, Jack!” His father laughed gregariously, yet hesitant, a chill in his words. “You’re one hell of a hunter, boy; hope to G-d you never get mad enough to come lookin’ for me; c’mon son, let’s get her done.”

The cold carbon-steel of the blade gradually warmed in his hands, billows of bloody steam welled into his nostrils from the carcass as he breathed the animal’s life into his lungs; the warm sticky redness of it, adhered the bone-handled knife to his palm and fingers. He thought again of Barbara Carey. Barbara had been Ella’s first attempted murder for him – for them, as Ella’d said, but what he’d done to Barbara had wounded that girl deeper than any knife . . . Barbara’s image faded, but he saw the blood, running down the inside of her thigh from below the bed sheet wrapped around her as she’d stood before him on that evening. A trickle of life cut a path to her ankle; a dark black, bead at the bottom of it, waiting to drop like a corpse to the floor. At an early age, Jonathan’d been introduced, acquainted with death; he’d come to know the old boys, presence like the back of his hand.