My name is Callista Eleanor Thorne. Everyone calls me Callie.
I was going to say that it all started when I was seventeen, but it really started many years before I was even born and I hope that writing it down will help me remember. Having intellectual knowledge of something is not the same as remembering. But I think having intellectual knowledge of something is better than pure ignorance. Or at least I hope that’s the case.
I guess it began with my father’s death when I was twelve. It’s one of my worst memories, but I’m afraid to lose it. It makes me who I am. Losing it would, I guess, ease the pain of loss, but then, I wouldn’t know who he was, who he had ever been, and losing that might just kill me.
My dad was a park ranger in the Allagash. I know what that is, of course, because I spent many summers there with my dad, but if I’m writing to a future self with no memory of it, then I guess I should say that it’s a preserved wilderness in the northwest of Maine. It’s called the Allagash Wilderness Waterway, a 92-mile run through interconnected rivers and lakes, and it is the most spectacular place on earth, at least in my estimation.
From the south, it technically begins at the southern end of Chamberlain Lake, but I kind of think of it as starting at Churchill Dam, which his where dad and I always put in when we headed north. Speaking of north, most people don’t know that this waterway is like the Nile River in that it flows north rather than south. I think that was worth remembering.
Dad was killed by a bear when I was twelve. Kind of. He was chased by a bear. Dad climbed a tree to get away from it and yes, he knew that black bears are great climbers too, but he figured that having the higher ground would help. He might have been right, if the branch he’d climbed on hadn’t broken, sending him twenty feet to the ground. I hope he died that way and not from being partially consumed while alive. Also, he might have lived had park rangers been allowed to carry firearms on duty. Thankfully, the state changed this policy shortly after my dad’s death. Unfortunately, it was too late for my father.
His death colored the rest of my life. We were poor and mom went into a funk from which she never recovered. I hope she doesn’t read this and think that I hated her for it. I didn’t. I understood. But I wish she’d have stayed away from the boxed wine. My sister, Amanda, and I, were forced to fend for ourselves from early on. I was twelve. She was ten. We became adults in function overnight.
Aside from my father’s death, the biggest event that changed my life was a late November afternoon when I was seventeen, hunting for deer near our house.
I shivered as the biting wind from the southwest tried to penetrate my wool coat, gnawing at me from the outside while my empty stomach gnawed at me from within. I’d been in the woods since an hour before dawn and had only seen a yearling doe at fifty yards, twenty minutes after sunrise. It was now afternoon, and my hunger pangs had only worsened.
“I should have taken the shot,” I muttered under my breath. My sharp eyes swept the forest, my head remaining still. Fifty yards was a long distance for a bow in these woods, with too many branches in the way. Too much risk of merely wounding the animal.
Hunting wasn’t like in the movies. Deer rarely paused in the open, offering an easy target. More often, I caught just a flicker of movement—a foreleg shifting, an ear twitching, or a tail’s brown tip flicking to reveal white underneath. I adjusted my stance, blending with the shadows cast by the trees, every sense alert to the forest’s whispers.
I glanced down at my weapon, a compound bow, adjusted to forty-five pounds of draw weight. I could raise or lower it by an additional seven pounds, but forty-five was where I felt most comfortable for safe draw, accuracy, and sufficient power to take a deer. It was nowhere near the seventy-pound draw weight of my father’s bow, but he had been a full-grown man before his death, well stronger than I could ever hope to be at any age.
I could have been hunting with my dad’s rifle or shotgun, but I had never found it fulfilling to hunt that way. There was nothing wrong with it, of course. Harvesting your own meat rather than outsourcing that role to butchers was preferable all the way around, as far as I was concerned, so I wouldn’t fault people who used firearms, but it just wasn’t my preference. I felt it took more skill to close within forty yards with a bow than to shoot an unsuspecting deer from three hundred yards away. Still, there comes a point when you can’t be too picky about the sport of fair chase, and I was just about there after three days of trail mix as my only source of food.
I had another advantage: my color blindness. I was diagnosed with mild deuteranomaly at age five. While others marveled at vibrant sunsets, I often mistook green with brown. But in the woods, this disadvantage became an asset. Camouflage did not easily fool my eyes, allowing me to spot shapes that others missed. This unique vision had fed me more times than I could count.
Hunting today wasn’t strictly legal. Maine law barred hunting on Sundays, and I had already exceeded my bag limit back in September. But with Christmas approaching and the last of that meat long gone, I faced my annual moral dilemma: to obey the law and starve, or hunt and survive.
I knew I could get more permits along the coast, but that was a world away from the vast, silent woods of my home. That was for rich people—people from New York who had holed up in their congested city, made more money than I could even conceive, and then came to Maine in their forties or fifties, already retired, buying up all the land along the coast where the best deer hunting was and then putting up “no hunting” signs everywhere. They weren’t even natives to my state. Just people from away—transplants.
None of them hunted, of course, which meant that the deer population exploded along the coast to where deer starvation had become a real (and largely ignored) problem. Coyotes had appeared on the streets of coastal towns before I was born, and no domestic cat was safe to roam now.
But those concerns were a long way off for me, who lived two hundred miles north of the ocean in a township that had a number rather than a name, northeast of Mount Katahdin and west of Route 11 in an area just east of the “big woods.” Woods that stretched on for hundreds of miles into Quebec, Canada. It made me think of my dad and I wished for one more time to start with a canoe at Churchill Dam and make the trip to Umsaskis Lake with him. Someday, I’d have to do it on my own.
I caught a motion in the corner of my eye. Very slowly, I turned my head and then stopped when I saw it again. I waited, watching intently. A pair of ruffed grouse were making their way towards me, meandering over roots and under a fallen log. They disappeared behind some short firs, which gave me time to swap out arrows from a broadhead to a blunt. I quietly nocked the blunt arrow and waited.
At some point, I would draw the bow, pulling forty-five pounds to get the cams to rotate, at which point the mechanical advantage of the compound bow would come into play. This bow had about an eighty percent let-off, meaning that I could hold the bow at full draw with only nine pounds of force and hold it for a long time; something I could not do with a more traditional bow.
I waited for the birds to pass behind a downed tree and then drew the bow full, anchoring my thumb in the corner of my lip. I exhaled slowly, calming my breathing and my heart rate. Food was nearby, and I needed it.
When the grouse came into view, I smoothly released and watched, almost in slow motion, as the arrow flexed and sped toward my target, hitting it in the head and killing it immediately. The second grouse took off, the sound of its beating wings almost like a percussive drum as it fled the scene.
I looked up into the sky and whispered, “Thank you.”
I placed a broadhead arrow on the string, nocking it in place, and leaned back against a fir tree, taking some pressure off the soles of my feet.
A half hour later, I was rewarded for my patience when the second grouse returned. Again, I watched it, waiting for an opportunity to swap arrows. It hopped along the snow, three or four hops at a time before stopping to look around. It repeated the pattern every minute or so before hopping up into a gnarly old leafless crabapple tree that still had a handful of tiny green apples clinging to branches.
The grouse was looking for food, but so was I.
I stopped mid-draw as another motion caught my eye. Sixty yards further on, behind the crabapple, I spotted a deer. I could see the V of its white chest and wondered how it could have appeared standing straight on without my noticing its arrival. I must have been distracted by the grouse.
I waited. There was no clear shot, it was too far away, and a head-on shot was a bad choice anyway. I dared not move, for the deer was looking right at me. It lowered its head just enough to expose seven points. Three symmetrical points existed on each antler, plus the right antler bore an extra brow drop tine.
The deer lifted one leg and stamped it on the ground, as if testing me for a reaction. The animal wasn’t sure what it was seeing, but something was unusual, making the deer skittish. I watched as the deer licked its nose, wetting the tip and distributing invisible scent particles to improve its sense of smell.
For a half hour, we watched each other, the deer moving its head from side to side, up and down, taking an occasional short step, and I moved so slowly as to be imperceptible. I was still holding my bow with the wrong arrow nocked but was just now reaching into my quiver for a broadhead.
When the buck turned to look over its shoulder finally, I swapped arrows, causing the deer to snap its head back to look at me.
I stopped moving, the arrow nocked, but not placed against the bow.
Just then, the grouse took off from the crabapple tree, a lost meal, but probably worth passing on, assuming the deer just came a bit closer.
The buck made a blowing sound in response to the drumbeat of grouse wings and then began moving to my right.
It’s going to circle around me to get upwind of me, I thought. The deer was about at an eleven o’clock position from me; once it moved to about two o’clock, it would be directly upwind and have the best chance of smelling and identifying me.
But in order to reach that point, the deer would have to pass the one o’clock position, which would open it up for a broadside shot if things worked out.
I picked an opening between trees and very slowly turned my body to afford a bow shot into the opening. It was no more than three feet wide between a low white pine and a tall, leafless ash.
When the deer stepped behind the pine, I drew my bow, anchoring in the corner of my lip again. The shot would be about forty-two yards, just at the outside edge of what I could shoot accurately.
It seemed like ten minutes went by, and my fingers were aching as I held at full draw. I couldn’t see the buck anymore. It was fully hidden behind the pine, and it was even possible that it had turned and run away, shielded from my vision.
I was ready to release the draw and lower the bow when the buck stepped out, broadside to me, but looking directly at me.
Another step, I thought, willing the buck to move.
It did, and I released the shot.
Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible. The first seven chapters are available on this website for free.