Evergreen by Rebecca Rasmussen

Author:Rebecca Rasmussen [Rasmussen, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-385-35100-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

Sometimes Hux couldn’t believe how alike Lulu Gunther turned out to be. He was feisty and loud and downright obnoxious sometimes, most of the time, but he was also more generous than anyone in the Northwoods. He had more heart.

Before he got to the buck, Hux stepped around it and went inside to heat a can of chicken soup and drink a glass of milk while the refrigerator still worked. During the winter, when the storms cut off the electricity, he’d have to put whatever was perishable in the snow, and unless he tied a rope to it he wouldn’t find it until the spring. Probably he should have stocked up on powdered milk, but it seemed unnatural to him when for years all he’d drunk was milk from Gunther’s goat Willa Girl and then Willa Girl II. It was bad enough drinking gallons of the store-bought stuff while they waited on a Willa Girl III.

After Hux ate, he boiled a pot of water on the woodstove for coffee and sterilized his tools. Before he began to separate the buck’s head from his body on the porch floor, he gave thanks like his father taught him. In his father’s view, respect was the most important part of preserving an animal. When Hux was first learning how to mount, his father would take away his tools for a week if he forgot to say a few kind words. Hux didn’t love the work the way his father did, or the hunters he mostly did it for, but he was good at it, and more often than not that made the difference between failing and prospering in Evergreen.

Once Hux freed the buck’s head from its body, he decided to spread plastic garbage bags over the kitchen table instead of going out to the work shed. The light was better for skinning here, and Leah wasn’t around to protest anymore. He went out to the shed for the shortwave and set it up on the counter.

While he worked, Hux liked to listen to the Canadian program A Day in the Life Of. Recently, they’d done a story on polar bears in Churchill. Hux liked the part about the bears knocking over a tundra buggy and scaring tourists into going home. His father said there were two kinds of men in the world: the kind that respected animals and the kind that got killed by them. Hux had witnessed the rise of a third category: the kind that sprayed themselves with Rusty’s Doe-in-Heat, waited with whiskey in a tree stand, and took a kind of grace that didn’t belong to them.

Hux knew he ought to bring the buck inside, but what he really wanted to do was drink a cup of coffee and reread his favorite childhood book, which his father used to read to him first as a boy and then again as a young man. After Hux’s mother got sick and couldn’t easily join them in conversation anymore, and Hux and his

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