Evelyn and Jan Killed by Hunters is the family tragedy Andrew Milling recounts to Carag: during hunting season, hunters killed Milling’s wife, Evelyn, and their daughter, June, while they were out in the snow. The account moves from a remembered family happiness to the grotesque public display of their bodies and the failure to recover both skins. It reveals the personal loss beneath Milling’s anger toward humans, while showing how the hunting season turns a familiar landscape into a lethal one for woodwalkers.

Family Life Before the Hunt

Milling places the deaths against the life he and Evelyn had built together. He met her through a work project, where she was a young production manager and, like him, a mountain-lion woodwalker. Evelyn came from Vancouver Island; Milling describes her as beautiful and rather stern, and recalls falling in love with her within days. She was already engaged, and he took longer to win her over. His account nevertheless presents their eventual relationship as deeply happy, not as a romance marked from the outset by tragedy.

The birth of their daughter, June, made that happiness greater. The family moved from Los Angeles to Jackson Hole because Evelyn wanted to live in the mountains and had grown tired of the city. She loved snow, and she and June delighted in running through it, often in their animal forms. That detail makes the setting more than a backdrop: the mountains and snow are part of the life Evelyn wanted and the freedom she shared with her daughter, but they also place the pair outdoors during the very season when hunters pose a threat.

The November Disappearance

The killings occurred on a sunny day in November, eight years before Milling tells Carag the story. Milling had a work appointment; Evelyn and June wanted to go out into the snow. He warned them to remain inside the national park because hunting season had begun. They were excited by the fine weather and, as Milling reflects, may have become imprudent. His warning establishes that the danger was known, but his account does not suggest that he could prevent their choice to go out.

When Evelyn and June failed to return, Milling panicked and went looking for them. The search brought no immediate result. He eventually discovered what had happened not through a face-to-face encounter with the hunters, but on a hunters’ website. This sequence gives the loss a particularly brutal form: after the uncertainty of their disappearance, he encountered the evidence at a distance, on a public webpage, where their deaths had been turned into a display.

The Hunters’ Display and the Skins

On the website, one hunter held Evelyn’s body beneath the arms and raised it to show the size of his trophy. Milling saw something brown in the background and recognized it as June’s body. The image joined the two deaths in a single discovery, and the hunter’s presentation made the family’s loss inseparable from the boastful display of a kill. Milling wished he could wipe the hunter’s arrogant smile from his face; instead, he smashed his computer. The destruction expressed his immediate fury, but it could not undo what the image showed.

Milling tried to recover the bodies and learned that the hunter had kept only their skins. He managed to buy Evelyn’s skin back. He could not afford June’s, and the hunter refused to give it to him. That unequal outcome leaves the recovery incomplete: Milling regained one remnant of his wife, but the evidence of his daughter’s death remained beyond his reach. He recalls the hunter’s taunt that Milling should kill an animal like that himself. In the story, the remark makes the hunter’s refusal more than a transaction; it denies a grieving father even the possibility of reclaiming what was left of his child.

The Story’s Afterlife

Milling tells this history during a meal with Carag, but he does not attend to the food as he speaks. His voice lowers as he begins, and his eyes become wet when the family’s happy life gives way to the ending he anticipates. As he describes the website and the lost skin, he clenches his fists; his claws score the table, and he partly transforms. Only after recounting the hunter’s refusal does he turn to the food, eating with the mouth and teeth of an animal. The physical changes make his grief and anger visible without diminishing the restraint with which he first relates the family’s past.

For Carag, hearing the account reveals the loss behind Milling’s hostility toward humans. The story does not make the killings an abstract danger: it specifies a season, a warning, a failed search, a website, and the skin that a father could not afford to recover. Later, Carag learns that the puma hunting season runs from October through March and that obtaining a license to kill one is easy. That knowledge gives Milling’s recollection a continuing context: the danger that took Evelyn and June belongs to an established hunting season, not merely to a single terrible day. The episode therefore connects private bereavement to the broader vulnerability of woodwalkers when human hunters mistake or treat them as trophies.