Who: Wash and Gale What: Hunting is good for the soul When: Sometime this weekend Where: Somewhere in the Santa Ana Mountains Warnings/Ratings: Lowish - killing and gutting of a deer Status:Complete
The Santa Ana Mountains couldn’t exactly be called one of the eight wonders of the world or anything - they weren’t very rugged, for all intents and purposes, not so craggy. But the deep canyons and the scent of crisp air - to Gale, a combination of grass freshly cut, the earth itself, and ice - was enough to make it worthwhile for him. To rejuvenate him. In those dreams which had unfortunately (or fortunately?) come to an unsatisfying conclusion, the outdoors - the forest - was the only place he could recall ever feeling alive in. Sort of similar now, and he much preferred hiking on the brink of autumn over a stint in the unforgiving, dry desert. It would be good for him, good for Wash too.
Terrain was interesting. Oak trees, sage brush, and weeds (not to mention poison oak - ‘tis the season for that too, and no one wanted itchy rashes from the shit) interlocked to form seemingly unbreakable walls at nearly every turn, but there were animals too - and it was the very beginning of deer season. With him, Gale had his bow and arrows, and a few knives for easy cleaning, along with his game bag stuffed with supplies. This was the first time Wash had been hunting, and his friend wanted to make it good for him.
“Venison is sounding really fucking delicious, I have to admit,” he said, quietly, as they traversed the trail, one with nature. No interruptions, no cell phones, no honking car horns, no OC disasters. Or so he hoped. Gale swiped a few acorns, studying them - first you had to, above all else, hunt where the deer lived. Where they ate. “Corn poured straight onto the ground, that’s the trick. We just have to find a good spot to bait them.” And then wait a little while - it was all a fun waiting game, the art of hunting. But if there was anyone who knew his trap tricks? Oh, that’d be him for sure.
Wash hadn’t been out in the woods in...well ever, really. Spokane wasn’t exactly a thriving metropolis on par with the likes of Chicago, or New York or even Orange County (to a varying degree). It was more like a very large sprawling town. Woods and forest surrounded it, although sparsely, and there were some amazing looking mountains in the distance. There weren’t as though there ample opportunities to go out and commune with nature if one chose too, however, camping fell in the realm of Family Activities and therefore was not something Wash had done growing up.
He had slept outside before, but sleeping in a park or trekking across the Afghan desert hardly constituted as real camping. At least not in the sense that Gale had, so hiking up through the mountains was a new experience for Wash. As he walked alongside Gale with nothing but a backpack stuffed with what TV and books had told him he’d need on his back, he couldn’t help but be amazed. It was so quiet out here. It was hard to remember that just a few miles behind them laid a sprawling expanse of urban life. The two of them may as well have stepped into another world.
Wash had been looking upwards at those oak trees and letting his eyes pass over that thick sage brush that seemed more like a barrier than plants when Gale started talking about venison and how good it’d be. That’s right. They were out here to hunt. Or, well, Gale would probably do the majority of the hunting. Wash was skilled with firearms, but he’d never handled a bow a day in his life. There was something intriguing about hunting with a bow, though. Seemed more of a challenge really. Any idiot could pull a trigger. Took a little more cunning to hit a target with an arrow. Or at least that’s what Wash thought.
However, Wash wasn’t without weapon himself. He had his newly returned pistol at his hip, because hiking through the woods unarmed seemed like a terribly bad idea. And his military grade knife. It wasn’t a hunting knife, but it had a sharp enough blade if needed.
Wash turned his attention away from Nature and back towards Gale as he started talking about pouring corn into the ground to bait the deer. He may as well have been speaking a different language for the look Wash was giving him.
The look was returned with a crooked smile, his pale, wintry eyes flickering with telltale amusement. Wild boar was common to hunt during the spring and summer months (you kind of had to follow the schedule of the seasons - Gale was used to hunting illegally in the ash-and-coal Seam of District 12, out of nothing but sheer desperation to feed his family but that wasn’t a factor these days), whereas hunting deer was commonplace as the seasons tipped over to fall. Beginning of September, that was where they were now. He was excited. Though to be honest, Leliana would probably give him a similar look - she’d want to save the animals, not shoot them.
But venison. You really couldn’t beat that, prepared and spiced correctly.
“Okay, just trust me,” he said, and opened his game bag to find the correct bait - deer traps themselves were elaborate, footholds, something that grabbed the deer and made the kill simpler because you just used a knife but Gale would go for luring them into the area and then shooting from a distance. For the bait, you had to set it up so that other critters wouldn’t get to it - everything tended to love corn, and keep a vigilant watch (it could also mold if you left it for too long).
Then he, in his camo gear, moved to conceal himself in the brush. The smooth and velvety tread of his, ever the hunter. “How’re you holding up, soldier?” he asked Wash. Hopefully he wouldn’t get too squeamish because this? This could get messy.
This was Gale’s element. The guy was (and pardon the cliche) a duck in water out here. Wash could easily see him running through the woods, bow in hand, tracking deer in this reality and any other. He looked happy, excited. It was a little infectious and Wash returned the crooked smile with a faint one of his own and a shrug. Gale had taken him into his world. It was exciting.
“Yeah, alright. I have no idea what you’re doing but…” He didn’t really have any choice but to trust Gale. He was a cityboy out here in the Great Outdoors. Excited, curious and ready to learn, he watched Gale set the bait. No traps. Just bait. Then he watched Gale scurry over to the underbrush and settle in.
Wash followed suit. Monkey see monkey do. He owned camo gear, not the kind hunters used to make themselves appear as though they were just a part of the growth, but green was green, right? It was better than a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, which had been Wash’s only other option.
He hunkered down by Gale, realizing quite quickly that he was going to have to assume a comfortable position because they were going to be there for a while. Not a problem. He’d spent time in a sniper’s nest a couple of times. His knees were good, he could kneel for hours if necassary.
He glanced at Gale and grinned at him. Yup, infectious excitement. “So far, so good,” he reported.
They had that in common, playing sniper - for hours, in the middle of cold and lonely desert nights, Gale had waited up with a rifle, in less than comfortable positions. You became cramped, and tired, and sometimes you thought about dark things you’d rather not consider but you never lost focus - lives, literally, depended on that very aspect. “Good,” he chuckled softly, impressed with Wash’s willingness to dig in and try something new. “After this, I think you owe me a skateboarding lesson or whatever else. You know, I teach you something, you teach me something.” Nice trade-off, right?
And they would be here awhile. The waiting game. Sometimes, he remembered his dreams with actual fondness, him and Katniss camped out with the sun warming their faces, chewing on mint leaves, waiting for game to come by - he’d set his traps, and they’d go check them hours later to discover bountiful meat. They spent rare precious free time this way. When he was actually happy.
It took some time, but sure enough, a small deer came ambling along - venison walking, with its white tail and its big ol’ doe eyes. Sorry, Bambi. You were about to get shot. “I don’t want it to suffer,” Gale spoke in a rumble, retrieving an arrow from the quiver on his back and loading the bow. “The arrow takes it down, but then we usually slit its throat before it realizes what’s happening.”
Wash felt the color heat up his face, just a little bit at Gale’s suggestion of a skating lesson. Jesus Christ, he really was never going to live down trying to take Gale’s head off with the skate deck. Not that he should. He’ll take all the ribbing in the world until the end of time as punishment for his actions. He gave Gale a kind of lopsided grin. “If you’re really interested in learning, I can teach you a few things,” he said quietly, as though he’d frighten away the deer with his very voice. “I haven’t been on a skateboard in a few years.” Not since bootcamp. He had literally gone into the military with the clothes on his back. Whatever of his belongings left behind that his stepfather and mother hadn’t sold was likely buried deep in a landfill by now. But skating was like riding a bike, one never truly forgot. Just carrying the deck had brought back a feeling Wash hadn’t felt since he had been a teenager.
“I gotta get wheels for the deck first, though,” he went on, his voice dipping even quieter, “and find a park or something with rails and a ramp. Though, first you gotta be able to get on the board and stay there.”
Just talking about skating made Wash yern for halfpipes and emptied pools he could roll across, build enough speed to go up the side, spin and come back down. Flip his body and the board into contortions that seemed to defy gravity.
His voice hushed when the sounds of hooves sounded on the ground, snapping Wash’s attention towards the spot where Gale had laid the bait. Something in Wash coiled tightly. As Gale readied his bow, Wash quietly, nearly soundlessly, brought his legs under him. He nodded his understanding and never took his eyes from the deer. Knife ready in his hands. Take it down and put it down before it felt a thing. Got it.
“Ready,” he murmured back.
Hey now, Gale was completely serious about those skateboarding lessons! Not that he’d give Wash a ribbing during, no - he just could tell that his friend was into it, and the sport was important to him in a sense. So he wanted to learn too - similar to how Wash went hunting with him today, to be exposed to something that was essentially a part of the other. It was...sharing and caring. You know. In a manly way.
He also knew that his friend would have his back, so he didn’t hesitate. As the deer was munching, Gale aimed, a sniper target practically forming in front of his line of vision - the trick was to know where to place the shot. ‘Boiler room’ was considered the heart and lungs, the shot every hunter learned as a preliminary (unless you were Katniss and could use an arrow to pierce squirrels in the eye, with astounding precision) but aim too high or too low and the kill would stumble off, leaving a blood trail in its wake - one you’d have to chase to find a wounded animal. He went for the back of the skull instead, right there - at the top of the spine.
A squint of one gunmetal grey eye, he released the bowstring, target locked in - and the arrow whizzed through the air, striking the deer. The animal dropped immediately, and heart and lung functions began to shut down. It’d be a few more seconds before it actually died, however, and Gale didn’t want it to spend much time writhing there on the ground in pure agony.
“Ready,” he echoed, adjusting the quiver on his shoulder. Now for the bloody part, if Wash wanted the honors.
The air in Wash’s throat was slow as Gale aimed the arrow at the deer. There was something eerily familiar about laying in wait to ambush a target. And there was something comforting about the familiarity of it. Wash’s breath stilled to nothing, his eyes never leaving their target.
Gale’s bowstring twanged softly, but with finality. A moment later the arrow found its target and burrowed itself into the back of the deer’s head where its skull met its spine. Time seemed to freeze for just an instant before the deer toppled to the ground with a soft thump. A body falling to the ground sounded the same no matter if the body was human or animal. We’re all as one at the end of the day.
And it was the end of days for this particular deer. Gale had said they needed to move quickly to end the deer’s suffering before it started and Wash was perfectly fine with that. He wasn’t out to make anything suffer. Gale had felled the deer, so Wash took it upon himself to finish the job. He pushed out of their hiding spot and crossed the distance to the deer in short order, knife in hand. He had never killed anything like a deer before, but a throat was a throat and a jugular was a jugular. He drew the blade across the deer’s throat and sliced it with one fluid and well practiced motion.
And like that it was over. No fuss, no muss.
As familiar as laying in wait and ultimately killing the deer had been, it was different than striking and killing an enemy target. That carried a sense of urgency and the consequence of capture or worse. Hunting didn’t seem to carry any of that dire sort of foreboding. Wash wasn’t sure how to describe it, but he could see why Gale found hunting to be good for the soul. Something about being a part of the food chain seemed to bring you back to where you had come from a long long time ago.
Wash got to his feet and looked back towards his friend. His voice broke the silence that had been hanging over their little patch of woods. “How was that?”
Wash totally got it, Gale could tell - the feel in the air around them, everything that seemed to buzz with familiarity and, oddly enough, a sense of being soothed by the motions and by the comfort that the practice and sport of it elicited, washing over you. It almost seemed to be second nature, what Gale felt like he was meant to do, where he best fit - a puzzle piece sliding right at home into its perfect notch, and there was no feeling quite like that, in his opinion.
“Perfect,” he flashed his friend a smile of camaraderie and, actually, he was pretty impressed too. They’d taken out this deer, which wasn’t easy, it was a whole process - and nothing would go to waste either; they’d be eating some good venison later. “Now comes the ‘fun’ part. We hoist the deer up and take the organs out, leave ‘em for the rest of the critters in the forest.” Birds of prey, ravens and crows and such, would appreciate the feast. But it was good to dress the deer out in the field as soon as possible, so the meat didn’t spoil.
Rummaging through his game bag, he procured a rope and two pairs of gloves, holding one out to Wash. “Safety first.”
Wash cleaned the blood of his knife quickly as Gale rummaged through his pack. Fun part, huh? Wash wasn’t sure Gale had the right definition of the word fun, but they were committed now. There was something to the whole thing though. It was one thing to go to the store and pick up a pound of meat. It was something else all together to take down the beast yourself. It was a sense of accomplishment that came with learning a new skill. He just hoped Gale didn’t expect Wash to actually try and cook anything. He could kill a deer, sure, but cooking was a skill Wash had never managed to master.
“Hoist up the deer,” he repeated as he took the gloves from Gale. He glanced up at the trees surrounding them, “how?”
Naaaaah, Gale would do the cooking, Wash didn’t have to worry. He’d grill them up some delicious venison steaks, maybe make a stew or something. Hell, he was practically salivating just thinking of it, but first they had to focus on the task at hand. “Rope around its neck like this,” he instructed, looping as he spoke. “Now go on and toss the other end over that stout branch right there - “ He nodded toward the one he meant, while he got situated with the somewhat small deer (it looked like a roe, kind of, even if it wasn’t that - but deer came in all shapes and sizes).
Once the rope was secure, they’d give it the ol’ heave-ho. “Pull,” he said, putting some muscle into it - but they didn’t need to be the Hulk to lift this thing. It was definitely on the daintier side, nor did Gale plan to proudly mount the head on the wall later or anything. That just seemed weird.
“You ever have venison before? It’s fucking amazing. This one will taste gamey, I bet - it probably ate a lot of acorns.” And the taste of course depended on the diet of the animal.
Wash did as Gale instructed, tossing his end of the rope over the branch Gale had indicated. Wash’s aim was good - spot on really - and the end of the rope lazily went over the branch and back down to his waiting hands. Once it was secure he helped Gale hoist up the deer.
Ok, so this was the part of hunting no one really ever seems to talk about and Wash understood a little better why some hunters strap their trophies to their cars or trucks and drove with them back to civilization to have them stuffed or butchered professionally. The deer hanging by its neck from the tree was a little uncanny. Actually it was a lot uncanny. Kind of swinging a bit off the ground, dead eyes staring upwards, tongue protruding from open mouth.
As Gale went on about venison, Wash was staring at the deer and making a bit of a face at it. Yup, he wasn’t ever going to take for granted where his meat came from next time he was at the store or sitting to eat in a restaurant. He might now better understand the vegetarian movement. Not that he was about to go down that road. Nope. He liked bacon way too much to give it up. But he had a better appreciation for people who did this kind of thing for a living.
It was a moment after Gale had finished speaking when Wash realized he’d been asked a question. He tore his eyes from the hanging deer towards his friend. “Venision? No. My mother...she wasn’t much of a cook, really. Unless it came pre-prepared or through a drive-through she didn’t know what to do with it.” He had to laugh a little bit, picturing his mother, in her high heels and short skirt trying to hoist a deer up by its neck to cut its insides out. The more he thought about it the more ridiculous it sounded and the harder he laughed.
“Sorry,” he managed through chuckles once he got control again. “My folks weren’t exactly what you’d use to define domestic bliss. The thought of my mother doing any of this shit is fucking hilarious.” He cleared his throat. “Acorns, huh?” He said. “Right. Yeah. That makes sense.”
No it didn’t.
Gale snickered a little too, fondly. “You’re from Spokane,” he noted, taking the correct knife from where he had the blades tucked away and secure. “It’s that, you know...suburbia thing. I always wondered what that was like. I grew up in West Virginia, I mean, my dad was a coal miner and he died young because of it. It’s just very...rural out there.”
Really wouldn’t be much of a stretch to be hunting like this, in the deep forest, wooden cabins, unreliable electricity and modern conveniences - rustic, would be how he’d describe his overall childhood. Nothing wrong with that, even if sometimes he felt really cut off from society.
He kept talking through the not so pretty part, slicing into the deer, removing the correct organs - it was bloody, much of it spilled, but that was to be expected. Hoisting an animal up was a lot cleaner than a ground attempt, obviously - otherwise you had to deal with dirt and debris, and Gale wanted it all to be as clean as possible. He didn’t linger either, working efficiently, using the knife and also water to flush out excess blood from the open cavity. “This cools down the body temperature,” he explained. “Less chance for the meat to spoil. Then we’ll carry it to the car and bring it back.”
Ta-da! There went the magic. And he’d leave the organs for creatures of the woods as indicated. “So, what’d you think of your first hunting experience?” he asked Wash, now that the gory part was done. But the guy had a strong stomach, he could handle it.
Wash had a strong stomach indeed. Part of that he could attribute to video games having become more gory and violent over the last twenty years. Especially the horror genre. Though there was a huge difference between pre-rendered gore and seeing it up close and personal. So he supposed having seen combat probably helped in that department way more than excessive sessions playing Doom.
“Spokane is technically a city,” he pointed out as he watched as Gale carefully and precisely took out the organs that apparently weren’t good for eating, most of which made sense. Who wanted to eat kidney or lung?
“Its the state capital and the second largest city in the state,” which Wash was willing to acknowledge wasn’t too much of an accomplishment. When people thought of Washington they thought of Seattle.
“Its just kind of, you know, sprawled out,” he went on content to let Gale be elbow deep in a deer’s gut this time around. “Its not too different than here. Just, you know, minus the sun, surf and over all weird-ass shit.” He shrugged with a bit of indifference. His name sake may have been the state in which he was born, but it had long ago ceased to be his home. He glanced at the collection of organs on the ground, “winters can be pretty killer though.”
Learning Gale was from rural West Virginia wasn’t too much of a surprise and actually made a lot of sense. Gale was very at home out here in the wilderness. Wash found that he was almost envious of that.
“I never knew my father,” he went on, his eyes still on that collection of organs, “but my stepfather worked in one of the manufacturing plants. Mean sonovabitch, my stepfather.”
He looked up from the pile of organs to the deer and Gale and studied them a moment before answering. “I see why you like it so much,” he said with a lopsided kind of grin. “Its quiet out here. Peaceful. A good way to reset yourself. I wasn’t so sure at first, but it really is. Although that” he pointed with his knife towards the hanging deer and then the pile of lung, kidney and other innards at Gale’s feet, “kind of makes me think of some kind of ritual gone horribly wrong.”
He was looking forward to the venison though. The way Gale had been talking about it, Wash hoped it was half as good as it sounded.
“You turned out pretty decent though, and I’m sure karma will come around and bite your stepfather in the ass,” Gale said, cleaning his hands, gloves off and discarded in the trash bag - he hadn’t known that Wash grew up with crappy parental figures, but this right now was kind of a whole new start. He had friends here, and a girlfriend - there were good things. For the both of them, he just had to remember that.
And he was glad to hear that the hunting hadn’t been too fucked up - in a way, Gale felt rejuvenated, refreshed, and words couldn’t exactly explain why, but with good friends sometimes you didn’t even have to. He was also pleased to have shared the whole experience with someone who could appreciate it too, and see the appeal - not everyone would, but at the very least, that a friend was willing to try said a lot. There was a bond there.
“Alright, let’s head back. You can tell me more about what I’ll need for my first skateboarding lesson,” he grinned, already looking forward to that too.