Something Stinks

By Rod Moody-Corbett.

 

Our cabin was all of one room. Or should I say that a curtain of rank muslin divided our sleeping commons from a linoleumed kitchenette across whose seamy, air-bubbled tiles an assortment of knives had been laid out on a worn gingham dish towel? The stoutest of these was a tall rosewood cleaver with three fine silver rivets arranged in its grip. Behind them, pushed up against the wall, was a small fridge, a Dutch oven, and two battered skillets, stacked one inside the other, and a can of no-name bean medley with a faded orange price tag smeared to its lid. A squat iron stove stood in the other corner, grate open and ash pan hoary with coals.

It felt far later than 9:54. I was despondent and starving. I chided myself for not re-upping on the tenders and taters, braving a venison dumpling, or bolting Eric’s islanded eggroll. Or maybe this was the weed gnawing. I unwrapped one of my PowerBars and waved the stiff wiry snack under my nose. It smelled like a roomful of cardboard soused in grainy ganache. I took a bite, and a game of tug-of-war, in which metaphor, you might say, my teeth served as rope, ensued.

“Get that door shut. You’ll let in the cold air.” Judith crossed the room and tore down a sheet pinned up behind the stove. Wooded sunlight filtered in from a thin four-paned window serried in bird shit and dust. I’d managed to pull my first bite loose but now the real cud-work had begun.

“Is this it?” Willis asked. His eyebrows retreated as his nose quested across the rafters like a rat’s.

“You were expecting what?” Judith asked. She dropped her pack. “Flat screens?”

We crowded into the foyer, stomping our boots on a worn mat, and proceeded into the main sitting area, the cabin cool, dusky, pungent with mothballs, a rank, old-tobacco-like musk. You wouldn’t need a builder’s level to know that the entire foundation was grossly off-kilter. The roof leaned, the steps leaned, the laths. The door’s bottom rail sat askew of its jamb. I felt wickedly off-kilter myself. Low nylon cots spanned the wall opposite the kitchen, which was of unpainted drywall. I called dibs on the cot nearest the door (for ease of egress), and stowed my pack and rifle under the bed frame. The mattress was sturdier than I expected, though short and bowed near the head. At the centre of the room sat an old Ping-Pong table, absent net, a stack of black folding chairs, two bar stools, and an embroidered loveseat with an occult scroll of ducks and frothy streams repeating across its cushions and arms. I stretched out on my cot and gazed up at the rafters where tiny white mushrooms bloomed in between bands of old rotten weatherboard which were themselves eruptive with moss. Was this normal? Dangerous?

There was a thump at the door, and Isaac shouldered his way inside, carrying our last cooler of food. “Can someone help me with this?”

“Over there,” Willis said. “There’s room in the fridge.”

My father came past my cot and sauntered into the kitchen. “Well, this is interesting,” he said. He picked up one of the knives and began brushing and scraping the edge of the knife along the dry bony joint of his thumb. “This is actually pretty sharp.”

“Please don’t touch those,” Judith said.

Adjacent the loveseat was a complicated shelving unit whose forked trestles and sills housed many paperbacks. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, José Ortega y Gasset’s Meditations on Hunting, Trees and Shrubs of Newfoundland and Labrador: Field Guide, Actual Air by David Berman. I hopped up from my cot and pocketed the guide.

Judith and Willis intended to camp outdoors, leaving my father, Isaac, and I the cabin. I unrolled my duffel and loaded my pillow sleeve with excess sweaters and pants. Then I changed out of my jeans and pulled on my good socks and thermal underwear and turtleneck. I felt blocky and volatile in my hunting garb. I didn’t feel young. The polyester rain pants I’d rented from the Castle clung to my thighs and made a weird chafing sound like a straw grabbing at a near-empty glass as I shambled around the cabin.

As I bent down to grab my Weatherby, Judith came forward with a pair of binoculars. She put a hand on my shoulder. “Why don’t we stick with these for now?” she said.

“I’m not bad,” I said. “Really.”

Judith shook her head. “Rules are rules,” she said.

We retained our earlier teams. Judith would lead Isaac and my father west of the cabin across a low river valley, while myself and Willis would head back down to the beach and canvass the shoreline.

Judith crept a finger over her map. Along her nail were horizontal white slits. “Now look, if you want, if you two start looping back around this way, say, around one-ish,” she said, indicating an amoebic green splotch on the map, “we could probably link back up in here somewhere, by this little bend in the river, for lunch.”

“Unless we’re on the trail of something, you mean?” Willis said. He made a note on our map with his carpenter pencil, which was a short flat yellow pencil with a squared lead.

“Of course,” said Judith. She refolded her map and stuffed it back in her coat pocket. “We’ll just play it by ear.”

“Not that I expect we’ll be seeing much of anything this late in the day,” Willis said.

“Tomorrow, we’ll start bright and early,” Judith said.

I couldn’t decide how best to carry my binoculars, dangling uncapped from my neck or bundled away in my bag. They were bulkier than I might’ve liked and painted a splintery tan. As we scooped along the trail, I knelt where Willis knelt, surveying trees, miscellaneous networks of branches I kept misconstruing for antlers. Willis endured these errors and the eagerness with which I summoned them with placid frustration.

“That’s just a big rock,” he’d say. Or, “Those are birches,” and so on.

We swerved off the main trail and spent an hour or so crouching around a slippery, stump-addled path adjacent the shoreline, descending sleek rocky crevices, passing much lichen and moss and tidy nubbles of excrement, the freshest of which Willis dutifully studied and massaged.

“Moose?”

“Naw. That’s caribou shit. Moose poop’s bigger and oval. A caribou’s shit’s smaller, pelleted, more like a Raisinet. But see how shiny this is? I don’t even need to touch it,” he said, touching it. “Like this is really fresh. And a big dump, too.”

I studied the shit, unsure if I accepted the analogy.

We continued to the water in silence. I ate another PowerBar and drank most of a lemon Gatorade I’d found in the fridge. I could hear the lake stirring to one side of us and a joyous brook bending coolly through the trees. A few of the trees were scarred blonde and bands of bloodied antler velvet swung in the broken bushes like a pitcher plant’s drifted slipper. By now my spotting was proving so ineffectual that I hoped to resist the urge to name those things that Willis might shoot, for fear of reprimand. In any case, it was hard enough just keeping my footing. My fingers were tacky with sap-muck and blisters welled on my heels. As the sound of running water grew nearer, we slowed to a stop. Willis pointed first at the ground, which was imprinted with round, crescent-shaped tracks, and then to his forehead, before squatting behind a rock and raising his binoculars. I squatted also. Below us, through a mass of leaning firs, snuffling at a ghostly spray of lichen, stood a large brown shape with hard shiny antlers and a white rump—a caribou, I guessed. The antlers were short, reddish, and remarkably symmetrical; coved, four tines to a brow.

“Is that a bull?” I asked.

“Do you see a penis sheath?”

“You mean like a foreskin?” I adjusted the finder on my binoculars, and queried the blurry brown mass.

“Foreskins hood glans. An ungulate’s dick’s passive, gets burrowed, retracted all the way up. So what you’re left with is a preputial sheath. Are you registering any preputial sheath?”

“No,” I said. “And please stop saying preputial.”

“So what does that tell you?”

“But I thought only bulls have antlers,” I said, and felt very dumb indeed.

“Tell me where you’re seeing this penis sheath?”

“So it’s a woman?”

“A cow,” said Willis, raising himself up from behind our rock. “Meaning we can’t kill it?”

“That’s right.”

We waited for the cow to move on before breaking clear of the treeline and stumbled toward the beach. I’d always prided myself on my sense of direction, my ability to compass the obscurest circuits and cityscapes, but it occurred to me that I had no idea where we stood in relation to our cabin, or where—gazing down the beach, admiring its spiny issuings and swirls—we’d docked. This minor disorientation asserted a strange terror over me. It was akin to the episodes of sleep paralysis I experienced with disturbing frequency as a boy—immobile, encradled in the thick paralysis of REM sleep, my mind utterly awake to its imprisonment. In the darkness of those nights faces formed in my room. I would see a tall laughing man with a skinny black moustache who would look at me and, the instant our eyes locked, suddenly stop laughing; or else a dark shape that somewhat resembled my grandmother: the stern bulk of her skull feeling its way over my blanket, across my chest, the weight of its breath, or my own, hissing. I would try to speak, to ward these apparitions away from my unshifting limbs, but my lips wouldn’t summon a word. Time, it seemed, was my only salve. But there would be no apparitions here, no delusive visitors. Now, on the beach, as I faced away from the wind and regarded the water, across which a few lusterless, slag-bellied clouds stood reflected, I tried to resign myself to this disorientation, this spell. I rubbed my hands and listened to the sound of Willis wading through the water. It was a good sound, and the sturdy break of waves chucking upon the rocks soothed me. I sat down and nestled myself up against a stack of brown rugged stones. I hadn’t looked at my phone in nearly twenty-four hours, and I wondered, again, if they’d called the election. My thumbs, so accustomed to clicking, scrolling, dragging, grabbing, liking, unliking, enjoyed an odd flexibility, full of clumsy potential, even if I didn’t really know what to do with them. Tracing the adjustable eyecups of the binoculars, twiddling the finely grooved wheel, I remembered the weight of my phone, its chipped case and soiled inner slip, which I missed like a dead mechanism, a phantom limb.

“What, we napping now?” Willis asked.

“No,” I said. “Just resting.”

I accepted the hand Willis offered me and sprung up onto my feet with stunning facility. Willis brushed the silt from my shoulders, and suffered me what felt like a fatherly glare. “Take some water,” he said.

Around noon, we started back up the streambed and into the woods. Willis had given up on spotting through the trees and we tottered swiftly along the banks locating our party in a small grove, a metropolis of nodding alders and aspen.

I’m not sure what Willis expected, but for ten grand a pop he seemed pretty chagrined by the offerings. Perhaps he envisioned too-English scenes awash in wool foulards and hounds—a parliament of green gabardines. I could see it now. With our bowlers and brogues and buckskin gloves, we’d reassemble, mid-hunt, for champagne cocktails abreast one of those lavish Rolls-Royces with the boxy wooden gun troughs and leathered cases snuggled over the mudguards. Hardened footmen and their idiot understudies would top up our cocktails and serve us flat silver trays of cucumber sandwiches, fish-finger toasties—whatever else these imperial sportsmen of old imbibed.

As it was, our prepackaged fried bologna sandwiches and veggie wraps were about on par with your prevailing airplane catering. The falafels were scanty and stale, the hummus runny. Willis hadn’t touched his and I couldn’t tell what he intended to communicate by way of this hunger strike.

Isaac had brought along a tiny stove he’d constructed out of pop can bottoms looted from the blue bins behind the Castle’s dining hall. Who knew where (or by what means) he’d acquired the black film canister of white gas which he decanted into the base of his stove and lit with a strike and ferro rod. It took him less than ten minutes to boil a pot of water which he poured over a biodegradable satchel of ramen. When he was finished he made everyone pour-over coffee.

“Anyone for milk?” Isaac asked. He held up a bag of white powder.

“Thanks, no,” my father said. “The nighted colour denotes me truly.”

“What’d you use to make these perforations?” Judith asked.

“Scratch awl. Guess you could probably get away with a screw or even a screwdriver if you wanted.”

After lunch, we traipsed back down to the stream, following a dark, sluggish current, banked in torn sallow foam. We picked our way along its edges in stealthy subterfuge. Pond striders skated across the water’s slow glassy surface, their long middle legs whipping back and forth like oars. As we continued along the stream, I noted that the water now seemed to be rising steadily over the banks.

“Are we splitting up?” Willis asked. “The day’s not young, but—”

“Something stinks,” my father said.

He wasn’t wrong. The air had taken on a definite fecal spice—of sweltering sewers bricked in urinous crotch rot, of marshy, long-festering stool. I hiked my shirt over my nose and availed myself of a sharp sour dose of my own design. A hump of stone sprawled in the stream’s middle and along its edges the water forked fast and spumy.

“Fuck,” Willis said. “Not again.”

“What is that?” I asked.

We neared the obstruction. Swatches of bloat shone on the broad clay-coloured frame. Judith set her rifle on a banked gravel bar and started into the stream. She did not seem in the least bothered by the cold as the water treaded up past the knees of her waders.

“Caribou?” my father asked.

“Moose,” Judith said.

I stalked upstream to get a sense of the front. It hadn’t a head.

“Looks like poachers made off with the antlers,” Willis said. He pointed to a ragged, slantwise laceration starting back from the spine. Maggots rutted in the unwanted chuck. “How long you think it’s been here?” he asked.

“Hard to say,” Judith said, scooching around the carcass. She unzipped her jacket and fished out a digital camera and snapped some pictures. “You can tell there’ve been ravens at it, but the hide’s too tough and cold for them to break all the way through.”

“Man,” Willis said, leaning in. “What’d they use on the head? Imagine lemon zesters make cleaner cuts than this. Christ. There’s bones and chips and shit all over the goddamn place.”

“I’m not seeing any bullet holes,” Judith said.

“The ribs are all poked up on the side here,” Willis said.

“Crazy how preserved things can get just in water,” my father observed.

Isaac edged past me, his gait stiff, soldiery. “When it comes to freezing,” he said, “what we want to concern ourselves with are gross melts.” He slipped a hand into his coat pocket and hauled out a thin spiral notebook and pen. “I’m talking anthrax in permafrost in the Siberian tundra. Microbial breakdown. Adaptable pathogens.”

“Siberian anthrax,” my father said. “I’m listening.”

“Because if you want to look at vectors of contagion, revived bacterium, then—”

Willis shushed him. Judith steadied herself in the water and shimmied along the back half of the corpse. “Pass me a stick, would you?”

I rummaged around in the brambles for a decent stick. The best I could drum up was a blistered log with a bulbed, faintly sceptred end.

“Come on,” she said. “Toss it over.”

I entered the stream and flung the stick toward her, upwind of the current. Judith caught the stick and flipped it around, prodding at the underside of the moose with the cudgelled end, tilting her head away from the smell. “Looks like it’s latched on there pretty good,” she said.

She splashed ashore and handed me the stick. The whole thing was mucked over in slime.

“Thanks,” I said.

Judith squatted on the gravel bar and unbuckled her pack. She withdrew a coil of coated manila rope and a yellow strap with two metal biners lashed to either end. Water riffled from the backs of her waders onto the gritty stones. On the side of her pack was a small hatchet and a short cabled tool with a red crank—a sort of winch or pulley or what Willis kept calling a “come-along.” Judith unhooked this device and gathered the rope and strap and clumped up the bank. She stopped at the base of a broad birch, and rocked her shoulders against its trunk.

It didn’t budge.

“Can I ask what difference it makes hauling him out of the water or is that a dumb question?” my father wanted to know.

“It’s not a major problem,” Judith said, belting the yellow strap around the base of the trunk and tugging in the slack. “But I’d sooner have him sunning above ground for the coyotes and ravens than freezing his ass off underneath.” She released a catch on the winch and paid out a line of cable, which she dragged back down to the water.

“You want me to work the lever?” Willis asked.

“Sure,” Judith said. “Just make sure the line is tight.” She looked at me, Isaac, my father. “Okay. Now you two,” she said, meaning, I assumed, my father and I, “it’s time to get wet.”

My father thrashed into the water with galling enthusiasm. Judith tossed him an end of rope. Together they squirmed the rope under the lodged carcass, drawing the line up over the forelegs and shredded neck.

“I’m not much for knots,” my father said, considering the two ends of rope.

“Please just do it for him,” I said, waving my stick. I stood partway in the stream. Water lapped at the tops of my boots. It wasn’t clear to me what my role was, but, as self-appointed overseer or project manager, I felt it a duty incumbent on me to shore up efficiencies.

“I can figure it out,” my father said, a little injured.

Judith snatched the rope from my father and, applying a few mysterious twists and loops, knotted the ends together and fastened the spiralled noose to the cable’s hook. “Easy-peasy,” she said; and then, turning up the bank to Willis, “Okay. Grab in that slack.”

Willis, kicked out at the base of the birch, one-armed the lever and the moose jerked forward. I plotted my stick underneath the back legs and jimmied away the rocks. Helping or hindering—who could say? As the moose snaked onto dry berm I thought I heard something crack.

“Hang on,” I said. “I think it’s hooked on something back here.” I stepped my left foot forward. The stream was much deeper than I’d thought. Now I could feel the water rushing coolly through my boots.

“You okay?” Judith asked.

“It’s slippery,” I said.

“Careful,” she said. “Just be careful.”

Willis cranked the winch and the stick broke apart in my hands. I burst forward, teetering suspensefully on my back foot, and fell face-first into the stream.

A bad feeling followed.

My mind blanked, as great gulps of raw muddy water greeted my nose and throat and lungs. I swam and spat. My head surged briefly above water, but my boots, my beautiful new boots, had gotten snared on a rock or subaqueous root system. I couldn’t stand up, and I soon found myself fully submerged. Had I lodged myself in a pocket of squelchy quicksand? Was quicksand even endemic to the island? I held a leg. There were bumps on the leg. And I thought: Why are there bumps? All along the bone of its shin ran a label of these little, like, spherical corms or boils. And I thought: Why am I touching them? Firm as frigid gummy bears.

I opened my eyes, tried dragging myself up the tumorous leg and onto a more significant aspect of moose. This too was not a happy feeling. I felt like I was searching through a loaf of curdled tofu. There really wasn’t much there. Above me a disturbed world faltered and swung. So this is how it ends, I thought, just as hands—Willis’s—swooped down and grabbed me, fetching me up onto shore, a heaving, spitting thing.

How much of this does one describe? How much am I better off suppressing? Rivulets of sludge issued from my chin. A milky gruel passed from my lips like battery acid. The smell was no longer an external entity but an internal one, and I, its reeking locus.

“I thought I felt something biting on my line,” Willis said, hysterical with laughter.

All but Isaac attended me. Judith handed me water, Willis—with much effort—worked off my boots and wrung out my socks, while my father helped me out of my sweater and draped his own coat over my shoulders. As an undergrad, I’d once witnessed, mid-class, a prof break down before us in the throes of an epileptic event. One minute he pondered the board, dawdling, chalk in hand, and the next thing I knew he was down on the floor stricken with alien convulsions. I hadn’t known what to do then and so remained in my seat. I watched as others, braver and bolder than I, rushed to the fallen man, loosening his shirt and tie, gliding a soft spongy binder under his head.

So, as I sat there, drinking water, shivering, I knew, or like to think I knew, where Isaac was coming from, keeping his distance, sitting apart, with his notebook and pen, grimly, or so it seemed to me, recording all.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rod Moody-Corbett is an award-winning writer from Newfoundland. His writing has appeared in Socrates on the Beach, The Drift, The Paris Review Daily, and Fiddlehead, among other publications. He is the recipient of the 2022 Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Story, a Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Letters Award for Short Fiction, the University of Calgary’s Kaleidoscope Prize, and the CBC Canada Writes Short Story Prize (People’s Choice Award). He serves as a contributing editor for Canadian Notes and Queries. His début novel, Hides, was published earlier this year by Breakwater Books.