The Fox Hunter

Abstract

The Fox Hunter Jane Downing (bio) Ez tied four dead foxes along the front fence to the left of the gate, hanging each head down, back legs crossed like chopsticks. The tails, worth a bob or two, she would hack off later, once she'd exchanged her gun for a knife. She carried the two rabbits from the traps into the kitchen and dumped them beside the sink. Their noses touching reminded her of something out of an old storybook. She searched her memory. Babes in the Woods. Poor dead things about to be covered in leaves by robins. Or, in this case, turned into stew. Ez had been born Esmeralda between the wars, coming into being at the tail end of the Great Depression, though the poverty was never truly over for either of her parents. On the back step her dog, Poppet, whined as he waited. Ez propped her gun by the kitchen fireplace, but not with the care a bolt-action rifle demanded. The gun tottered and fell, cracking two of the turquoise glazed tiles that surrounded the hearth. ________ "She's had a fall," the nurse said in a stage whisper as she showed Nerida into the room. "She's the cat's mother," Ez muttered, and winked at her great-niece across the divide of the nursing home blanket—a familiar gesture, even though the hand on the blanket was hardly recognizable as belonging to Nerida's favorite relative. Ez had been a sturdy woman all her life; muscle had gone first, and it now looked like flesh was held there only by the bag of her skin. "I didn't have A Fall," Ez insisted over the top of the nurse. "I am not Eve. Neither is this the beginning of the end in your namby-pamby nursing home speak." "So what did happen, Auntie Ezzy?" Nerida sat down and took the old woman's hand. "A misstep on the way into lunch. I fell over. It's not the same thing. Nothing broken." ________ Ez never liked the turquoise tiles anyway. Their attempt at prettiness stuck out like tits on a bull against the rest of the house—Ted had said as much when they'd bought the place twelve years back, on a mid-'80s high of army retirement payments, hers [End Page 85] and her now-dead husband's (late, not lamented). When she went out to the shed to get her bowie knife (fox tails), she also picked up the short-handled sledgehammer. The tool had a good heft to it. Back inside the house, Ez swung down one, two, three, four times, shattering the shitty faux-turquoise, dirty-grouted tiles. She felt better. Not having known she'd needed to. The renewed energy got her through the evening chores, and Ez only remembered her earlier act of destruction when she was settling into her horsehair armchair by the hearth with a cup of milky tea. She'd have to clear up the chunks and smaller shards of tile if she wanted to light a fire. The High Country delivered cold nights. Ez rested the tea cup on the arm of the chair and went down onto her hands and knees again, picking and gathering. Better do the job properly. The last phase was with the broom, sweeping away the smallest, sandy fragments. The bristles found words on the stone, exposed by her hammering. Ez fetched the desk lamp from the study. Plugged in by the toaster, the chord just stretched. She got down on her knees again. Leaned into the pool of light. Peered close. "Well, blow me down," Ez muttered. "Never could read Chinese." ________ Esmeralda was born in the High Country. There'd been no Chinese people in the surrounds then, no faces in the school yard that weren't Anglo-white. There had been echoes, though. When counting out "it" in a game of tag, the elimination rhyme went, Eeny meeny mink monk, chink chonk chow,Ooza vooza vacadooza, vee vie vow,Big shippy coming, blowy up killMake poor Chinaman feel very ill Ez remembered her inordinate pride at learning this complicated set of sounds...