Tracker by Gary Paulsen

often. Her bursts of running, open mouthed and hard, stretched only two hundred yards and he saw her moving ahead in the willows and across the clearings, looking back in fright, spit dripping from her tongue out the side of her mouth.
    The deer.
    And when full light came he hated himself as much as he loved the deer. She was running untilher front legs collapsed, running until she caved in, and she plowed down into the snow and then up, staggering, to run again and he hated himself for driving her that way but he couldn’t stop, couldn’t make himself stop now.
    He must touch her.
    He must own her.
    He must own-love-touch the doe and when that happened his grandfather would not die.

ELEVEN

    He had tracked her all that first day and all of that night, following in the moonlight and the new clean snow and through the next morning, and when the sun was highest his brain did not work right anymore.
    He was tired beyond bearing, tired beyond the doe, weaving and staggering and falling and stillnot stopping. By midday there was nothing for him but the doe and the touching of the doe and it was no longer possible to distinguish between what was real and what was not.
    Once in the morning light he watched the doe ahead of him and saw her turn and swore there was a light around her head. The light moved with her neck movements, was not a halo so much as a glow that came from within the doe and it was still there even when he wiped his eyes. The light stayed for five or six minutes and did not disappear until the doe staggered into some willows and was lost from sight.
    Again, later, he was looking at the doe and it seemed that everything he saw in front of him was a mirror. Seemed that the doe was actually in back of him and that everything that was going to happen had already happened in back of him. It made his mind whirl and then his vision fogged and he fell down and would have stayed down again but for the doe.
    She moved and he followed.
    By noon she could not run but seemed to fall forward, fall away from him and just keep falling, with her legs catching up only to fall again for miles and miles.
    And he came the same way. John was falling and making his legs catch up—he did not feel tired anymore, didn’t feel anything.
    At one in the afternoon he began seeing the doe all the time. She was blown out completely and could not even make the pretense of running. Instead she worked just to stay ahead of him, just ahead, always in sight—never more than a hundred yards, often less then fifty.
    He saw her.
    At one point she vomited from stress and there was some blood in it, blood mixed with bits of bark fiber from the last time she’d eaten, over a day before, and when he came on it he was sickened and felt the bile rise and he, too, vomited.
    The air was warm and he hung his jacket over a bush, stuck his cap in his back pocket and poured sweat still. The sun was full on his back now as he worked north and he made sounds that weren’t human, yet weren’t animal—sounds from his throat as he watched her stagger and fall away from him, first to the left and then to the right.
    At last when she went down she didn’t get up as fast and then each time she fell she was slower to get up and he kept coming.
    Coming—until there came a time when he was nearly on her before she got up, only to fall again, and then she didn’t get up.
    She was blown. Her ribs heaved for air as his did, her eyes showed edges of red, her mouth was open and her tongue stuck out to the side and he thought he’d never seen anything so awful and ugly and beautiful at the same time.
    The doe was his and he didn’t have to kill her, give her death, and he moved forward to her, on his hands and knees now, crawling, lunging, and she jerked to get away once and fell and he saw it as a picture, the doe on her side, heaving air, the yellow in the snow where she urinated in fear, the fear and the madness around her,