Dead Fish and Dying Elk

“Dead Fish and Dying Elk” is the title of a chapter that sets Mo Duvall-Wenstein’s attempt to begin a life in Grundy against the sudden presence of death in the surrounding woods. Its paired images arrive in sequence: first the dead fish left in her cabin, then an injured elk and the enormous black wolf standing over it. The movement from an unpleasant household chore to an encounter with a predator makes the wilderness more than scenery; it presses directly against Mo’s new domestic life.

A New Home Among the Dead Fish

Mo’s first hours as a Grundy resident begin with a small but grisly inheritance. After Nate Gogan leaves, she finds dead fish in the refrigerator, bathroom sink, and hanging from a string in the utility room. Her new isolation sharpens the strangeness of the scene: the cabin lies fourteen miles outside town limits, reached by a winding gravel drive set half a mile back from the highway. Where her former home in Leland, Mississippi, had carried the muffled sounds of neighbors and traffic, the cabin seems almost unnaturally silent.

The fish turn settling in into a practical problem with a distinctly local danger. Mo wants to throw the remains outside, but worries that doing so would advertise an easy meal to bears. Instead, she double-bags them in heavy-duty trash bags and leaves them in the utility room, intending to take them to the locking garbage bin at the end of the driveway in daylight. Nate’s housewarming gift of cleaner and paper towels helps with the mess, while his welcome makes the gesture of settling in feel neighborly rather than merely remote. The chapter thus introduces Mo’s new home through two opposing signals: she is welcomed into the community, but must learn to manage its physical risks on her own.

The Dying Elk at the Door

The title’s second image arrives in a night scene that turns the cabin’s stillness into sudden alarm. Mo is jolted awake by frantic bleating and bodies crashing through brush. Dazed in the dark, she reaches for her glasses and heads toward where she expects her bedroom door to be, only to collide with a wall in the unfamiliar cabin. She stumbles to the front door expecting an injured sheep, a half-asleep mistake that briefly makes the noise seem ordinary before the moonlight reveals what is actually outside.

Less than twenty feet from the cabin, just beyond the tree line, an injured elk lies panting, blood flowing from its neck into a dark patch on the grass. A huge black wolf is hunched over the dying animal, intent on its prey and apparently unaware of Mo. She steps back into the shadows but cannot bring herself to close the door; the wolf snarls, its jaws poised above the elk’s throat, and Mo screams for it to stop. The scene answers the chapter’s opening domestic grotesquerie with a more immediate encounter with death: the fish are remains she can bag and contain, but the elk is still alive, and the predator is close enough to stand almost at her doorstep.

Later Echoes of Animal Violence

The chapter’s pairing of dead fish and a dying elk finds a harsher echo in Mo’s encounter with John Teague. After a wolf intervenes, Mo cannot keep the attack separate from its aftermath in her mind: she recalls Teague’s blood on his shirt and the way he scrambled from the wolf, then imagines his truck tumbling into a ravine and him dying in a fire. Her attention keeps returning to the black wolf that saved her, even as the violence leaves her shaken. The memory makes the boundary between predator, rescuer, and threat unstable rather than reassuringly clear.

Cooper’s account of his father’s death gives that instability a family history. His father remained in wolf form to free Cooper’s uncle, Samson’s father, from a cage trap set by researchers tracking wolves. When the researchers returned, the trapped wolf’s rescuer became the target of their rifle fire; badly wounded in the head, he reached the woods so his uncle could bring him home. Cooper says he eventually understood that the humans had been confronted by a huge, angry wolf, even though he had once been angry with them. In this account, human attempts to study and contain animals collide with the danger of a transformed body, and rescue itself carries a fatal cost.

The uncertainty returns when Mo and Cooper find Abner in the woods. His rifle is loaded but unused, and deep claw wounds cross his chest, dangerously close to his neck. Later, Cooper admits that he cannot remember the night of the attack and considers whether he might have left their sleeping bag and changed into wolf form without waking Mo. He points to the campsite’s proximity and Abner’s apparent terror of him as reasons the possibility cannot be dismissed. The episode turns the earlier image of a wolf over dying prey into a question about responsibility: the animal violence is visible, but the identity and memory of the attacker remain uncertain.

Trauma and the Return of the Scene

The violence surrounding the wolf is not confined to the first encounter or to Mo’s later speculation about Teague’s fate. During the attack, Teague twists her arm behind her and shoves her face against rough brick while speaking in a voice that remains soft and almost friendly. The mismatch between manner and action sharpens the threat: he presents the assault as a choice for her to make even as he holds her in place and threatens to hurt her. Afterward, Mo tells Buzz she wants to pretend it never happened, asking only to be told if Teague is identified. Her effort to close the subject is not the same as being free of it.

The memory returns through images she cannot control. After leaving Buzz’s office, Mo hides in the kitchen, recalling Teague standing over her, his smirk as she screamed, and the unnatural way he scrambled from the wolf. She also imagines what she did not witness: Teague’s truck tumbling into a ravine and his death in the burning cab. Evie notices Mo’s pallor and feverish brightness and sends her home. Later, returning to the alley does not restore ordinary time: pavement scraping beneath her shoes and the sour smell of the Dumpster bring back the pressure of Teague’s breath at her neck and the warmth of his blood on her shoulder. Mo tries to steady herself by summoning the scent of honeysuckle and the familiar image of cotton trucks leaving white scraps in their wake, but an approaching voice startles her into swinging and clipping someone’s jaw.

These recurrences make the title’s animal deaths part of a broader pattern of violence that resists neat containment. The fish can be sealed in bags, and the elk’s injury can be seen at the cabin door; the human assault persists instead as sensory fragments, imagined endings, and abrupt bodily reactions. The wolf’s intervention may have stopped Teague, but it does not erase what happened or settle Mo’s fear about the creature that intervened. The chapter’s juxtaposition therefore holds rescue and danger together, while showing how an event can continue to intrude after its immediate scene has passed.