Read Online Before You Know Kindness by Chris Bohjalian - Free Book Online Page B

that—unlike so many others—didn’t become a mere fossil to study in the Ice Age but actually flourished in the midst of cataclysmic environmental transformation. Spencer understood that deer could eat virtually anything that grows up from the dirt—and, when pressed, had been known to stomp fish in shallow water to eat them—and were capable of living almost anywhere. Deep woods. Cleared farmland. The suburbs. Cities. The whitetail existed in the coldest reaches of northern Alberta, in the scorching heat of New Mexico, along the Pacific coastline of Peru. Its cousins, the blacktail and the mule deer, filled in those western corners of North America where the whitetail was absent—the Nevada desert, the California seaboard—with the result that there were few crevices on the continent where there weren’t deer of one kind or another.
    Nevertheless, Spencer had convinced himself that New Hampshire would be different. In all the times that he had been to his mother-in-law’s—the summers when he’d been a college student, weeks at a time ever since—never once had he seen a deer on her property. Two decades ago he’d seen them occasionally from the highway when he was returning home from Echo Lake, but he guessed those sightings were ten miles from Sugar Hill, and he knew from his work that deer tended to live most of their life in a world no bigger than a couple square miles. If there was enough food, some whitetails would spend a whole season in a few hundred acres.
    Moreover, he presumed he saw deer off the interstate near Echo Lake because there was no hunting allowed in the state park. And hunting was the key. Neither wolves nor foxes nor drought nor mountains of snow could diminish a region’s deer population for long. Only man could do that. All that hunting in the fall beyond the borders of the state park, Spencer guessed, kept the deer herd small and would prevent the creatures from sidling up to a Sugar Hill garden and eating the spinach. They knew the signs of a
real
predator when they saw one.
    An irony, of course, was that Spencer himself would never kill a deer. Nor would he ever eat one. He hadn’t touched meat since he was nineteen years old. He’d never hunted (and he knew he never would), and he positively did not approve of someone else taking a Savage 99 or a Browning A-Bolt or whatever it was that they used, and firing a bullet into a deer: Like the lobsters he’d slaughtered—like the hogs and the chickens in their minuscule cages in those deplorable factory farms, the air itself an unbreathable miasma of excrement, like the mink who were electrocuted or clubbed for a coat—they felt pain. They felt pleasure. They had parents.
    But if two centuries of deer hunting in New Hampshire had diminished the herd to the point where he could plant the vegetable garden of his dreams—and have the satisfaction of knowing that his daughter, his mother-in-law, and his niece were savoring its bounty—so be it.
    His family had never had vegetable gardens when he’d been growing up, not on any small (or large) square of land beside any of the houses in which they’d lived in a variety of suburban neighborhoods north of Manhattan. Not in Hastings or Rye, not in Stamford or Scarsdale. Not in either of the smaller houses in Hartsdale or the large Tudor one his mother had loved in New Canaan. They moved a lot, it seemed, for a family in which Dad never once relocated cities for work or even changed corporations. Bill McCullough worked, in fact, between the eleventh and the eighteenth floor of the same building on Madison and Twenty-third Street for forty years—working every single day for the very same insurance company—until his wife was diagnosed with lung cancer at sixty-two and he retired at sixty-three to help care for her. She died after a gloomy, febrile, excruciating seven-month battle—more with the chemotherapy and the radiation than with the disease itself—and he, well aware of the life