His headlights bleached a tunnel of light beyond Sleeping Child. She could see a thin glow over the haze of the hill, an edge of her heart turning silver. Stars settled closer. She rubbed a dull pain beneath her rib cage. Walking the barefoot miles to escape Thompson Falls had made her legs restless. She could feel the slow crawl of blood in her calves. She leaned forward to loosen her shoelaces. She kept her head down for a moment. She could smell the leather of his seats, his wood-sweet cologne.

The man shouted, “Look,” and she lifted her head eyelevel to the bottom of the windshield. She held the deer in her vision like light. For one moment suspended in its leap. She could see its white throat, the hair bristled on its back. She heard first the thick hide buckling the smooth chrome, then the slow slide of the well-grazed deer over the wind-ridden hood. She pictured the break of the shiny hood ornament, a knife now slitting a straight edge of the deer’s belly, the hood purple with blood.

The deer came through the windshield, and time moved slowly for Louise. She heard the wheeze of the stranger as the deer hooves cracked the windshield. She could hear the dull flesh blows to the man’s chest, and she thought of jumping down to sawdust in moccasins, of fruit ripe and falling to hard ground. His voice was cushioned by the neck of the deer, little puffs of breath, then a whistling, a rattling bone caught in his windpipe, pressing. She covered her face with her forearms, felt the razor cuff of hooves at the back of her hands, blood rush to her elbows. She heard herself moan as the car bounced hard on rough ground. She saw the headlights shoot up toward sky then down again to sage and white grass. She counted these things in the pulse of her fingers. A hiss of steam rose white like a warm winter river above the hood. She closed her eyes as her forehead hit the windshield frame.