The Deep and Dark Woods Behind Us
Three Stories
by
Bernard Fancher
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 by Bernard Fancher
All rights reserved
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Table of Contents
*****
I take a step and ease weight onto my foot very slowly.
Rain-soaked ground and damp grass have so softened our steps, neither one has previously detected the other. At first sight he may have possibly thought me a ghost, emerging as if from a silver steel tank of water to appear all at once in the slightly less dense, fog-silvered air. I try again to imagine, from his perspective, a form not of the world only a moment before come now suddenly out of the mist, as though air and water molecules have spontaneously arranged according to some previously unknown law to coalesce unexpectedly into the shape of a man.
He can’t be sure what confronts him, and so stands still, as I barely breathe. The tined tips of his rack merge seamlessly with the spiked branches that half conceal him. So composed, revealed imperfectly in a thicket of thorn apples, he waits, calmly attempting to outlast my patience.
Averting my eyes a few dozen degrees, I scan through the scrub, glancing up the bank into oak trees where the soft morning sun illumines dead clinging leaves. Perhaps the buck lifts the tip of his nose and thus ever so subtly averts his own gaze, attempting to detect danger from some subtly changed scent in the air. But I can only imagine that gesture, not having actually seen it, just as I imagine the previous course of his approach from the deep woods, advancing towards me up a narrow path ascending from the fog-filled ravine, coming forward at a slant to the top, crossing in clear air on a leaf-strewn avenue, before descending again through thorn-laden limbs, until stopped. Now stopped as well, I slide my eyes back to where he remains motionless still. Perhaps it is only the water tank that holds him—a random thought, which I immediately discount. The water tower predates us both; it is as much a part of the landscape as the land itself, and would hardly have bothered him, even assuming he noticed it at all.
Since I am bird hunting I close my eyes and begin a silent count, numbering each breath: one… two… three… At the count of ten I look again to find the large buck gone, having departed as quietly and irretrievably as the air from my lungs.
Just so, deer appear and disappear in these parts.
A boy once stumbled, almost falling, transiting a nearby ridge. In the bottom of the ravine where the gas line passed directly below him, a startled doe stood up from a pile of brush. The amazed boy watched a large rack rise from the pile before gathering his wits, raising his gun, and felling the buck with a single well-placed shot.
So klutziness and noise may assist the hunter occasionally more than smooth grace and stealth.
In years gone by, when opening day meant cars lined up and parked on both sides of certain backcountry dirt roads, gangs of men would—sometimes literally—beat the bushes, yelling and stomping their way through the woods as they attempted to push deer to their fellow hunters. This descriptively named technique of putting on a push or a drive could be equally disconcerting for any human being caught in the middle.
On one such occasion, finding myself so haplessly positioned, I stood on the leeward side of a large boundary oak until the surge passed, only to later perpetrate the tactic on another poor fellow.
Sitting perched on a stump where two ravines converged, this much older man, having endured my onslaught of hying and hollering, quietly asked as I came close enough to hear his hoarse whisper: “What exactly are you trying to accomplish, boy?”
“We’re driving deer,” I informed him importantly as I shifted the angle of the gun at my shoulder. “You see any?”
“Well,” he drawled, pausing to light a corncob pipe, making me wait an additional few seconds as he drew on the amber mouthpiece, “I had hoped to before you came along.”
Another year, another technique: my brother and I crept with our muzzleloaders through a wooded slice of land while a friend and his brother and father waited with their black powder rifles at the outskirts of this long, slender copse. Halfway through, we heard the distinctive booming discharge of a .58 caliber Zoave and cautiously continued, hopeful and expectant, only to hear at the other end the discouraging news. Though our tactic remained brilliant in conception, it nonetheless failed due to but a single slight flaw in execution. The brother of my friend had, according to his own estimation, “led” the driven deer just a wee bit too much, and so missed bagging ‘a nice ten point’ as it walked cautiously from the woods to the cut cornfield.
I walk now from the water tank until the manmade terrace upon which it rests narrows to a point overlooking a small brook in the ravine bottom where, as a child, I had played paleontologist, exploring and digging along the clayey bank in the transitional wilderness between some now-dead neighbor’s back yard and woods. Discovering the charcoal-like remnants of ferns in the muck established the illusion of connection with the prehistoric, just as remembering the event all these years later imparts a sense of discontinuity with the less distant epoch of my childhood. In my mind I go down and unobtrusively as a ghost proceed to cross the stream and ascend the spruce-covered ridge on the other side, following the stream on a high parallel course back towards the wellspring of origin.
Closing my eyes, I hear the sound of my own breathing. The blood pumping in my ears sounds in the surrounding immense silence like ten thousand hobnail-clad boots marching incessantly down a cobblestone boulevard. I imagine, seeing it again in my mind, the buck bedded but alert at the base of a pine tree, scanning with a slow sweeping gaze back towards the swamp from which distant salvos intermittently boom out. As I raise and steady the long rifle, an intense and primordial awareness threatens to overwhelm my own sense of wellbeing. Or rather, it amplifies awareness nearly to the limit of endurance. I wonder how it is the deer does not detect the disturbance of my breathing, which seems so obvious as to reveal and betray me. I pull the trigger and the hammer falls, after which—after what seems a near full second of delay—the smoke pole ignites and discharges. So slowly as if to convey perturbed reluctance, the buck raises its seemingly overlarge rack and large body, initially moving rump first and rearwards, still attempting to process what has just happened. Compounding the initial confusion, apprehension attends the buck’s sense of all that may happen next. It has still to determine the source and manner of danger encroaching unseen upon it. Unsure and unknowing, the aware and wary animal slinks away, head down, stepping cautiously, suspecting yet never confirming my presence.
Nor, does it seem, can I confirm his. All these years later I remain half-convinced the patched round ball has gone through. Once again, a mental search of needles and bark at the base of the pine where the deer made its bed reveals no evidence of blood or displaced hair to support such supposition.
Ah, I hear myself sigh, resurrecting the old joke, you led it too much.
Yet the most likely explanation seems too mundane a truth to account for the miss. So at last I concoct a psychically more satisfactory explanation: The deer, as it slunk back towards the swamp, revealed itself for an apparition when it dissolved into and became again one with the mist.
Perhaps, then, I’d encountered the ghost of Roosevelt Luckey’s buck taken in 1939 hardly more than a mile from this place. At 198 3/8 typical Boone and Crockett, it rates still as the largest, most nearly perfect, such trophy taken in the State. Perhaps the latter deer evolved from the same gene pool as the former, representing both a physical emanation and spirit likeness of that granddaddy deer of them all.
I round back on the ridge to follow the path of the deer I’ve just spooked off the hill, composing the beginning of a tale to go with all the well-worn stories recounted autumn upon autumn round a fire as wet Woolrich pants and cold bones alike warm in the glow après-hunt. In my memory of those late days and nascent evenings, steam swirls from cups we hold with both hands, taking the heat into still reddened fingers as we wait for the coffee to cool.
The Roosevelt Luckey buck had already entered the realm of local legend by the time I first heard tell of it. Now recently, I have become made aware of another, even more immense, trophy—measuring 244 2/8 non-typical, taken by Homer Boyle the very same year, not all that much farther from here.
The progeny of those monsters presumably still roam the fields, woods, hills and ravines around us. By implication, one may still encounter and take such a prize, a hope and desire that informs all our stories and tugs at our hearts from foyer walls and backrooms about these parts where one finds incontrovertible proof of large and impressive bucks nonchalantly and commonly displayed—though no buck since ’39 has matched the proportions, either in reality or myth, of the grand progenitors.
But not fifteen minutes earlier I had seen what could have been a direct descendent of either one. I track above and parallel to the level terrace on which the water tank sits. Ascending above the rounded top of the tank, staying low under spiked thornapple limbs, I move quietly, unhurriedly, intent on capturing at least one last glimpse of the buck. The trail of twinned crescent prints allows me at least to know I am following not a phantom ghost but a real, tangible, thing.
And yet no sooner do I make that determination than the prints disappear. A fresh fallen mix of red-tinged maple and yellow ash leaves confound every effort to confirm the true path of the deer. It is as though he has ascended off the earth, weightless as ether.
The mist encloses again where the near edge and the far side of the ravine converges, becoming a shallow bowl-like entry to a high field where I continue following a track formed only by my perception of where a pursued deer might go.
But the field is too vast, the still hidden introits to the surrounding woods too diverse. The real world at last defeats the phantasm of my imagining. A crow caws, the sound distant and echoing as it disappears into a hollow wood. I stand at the center of an ever-widening openness revealed as the sun burns through, dissolving the milky mist around me.
Then again at last I see the buck, a hundred yards distant. He stands aloof and unperturbed, looking regally back at me from a thin gap between small pine trees. I imagine his turning, anticipate the very second he will bolt and disappear, yet still somehow manage to miss the precise moment of decision.
For awhile longer I stand alone and rooted, deliberating how and even whether to follow. And yet I know that no matter which way I choose, whether ultimately successful or not, part of me will continue to pursue him all the days left to come.
*****
The Old Orchard
A ruffed grouse thrummed and reflexively I raised an imaginary gun, briefly tracking the bird’s gliding trajectory until it tilted and dropped into cover farther down the ravine. Beau looked towards the source of the commotion, then back at me, as Chance turned and converged towards him. “Where’s the bird?” I asked and then again, “Where’s the bird?” while together, tails swishing, the dogs nosed over flat sodden leaves, tracking the scent to its start.
But soon they were off the bird’s scent and onto another, chasing a flushed rabbit. I backed against a tangle of canes, pushed through, and followed down a narrow corridor passing through thick brambles at the back edge of the old orchard.
In a small clearing, last fall’s yellow apples rested like a pool of warm sunlight on a bed of dark curled leaves. Over-ripe, approaching putrescence, the decaying fruit exuded nonetheless a pleasant spicy odor, vaguely suggestive of cinnamon. A few otherwise untouched specimens exhibited evidence of temptation—where some small thing had nibbled, leaving fluted incisions.
Any second I expected a second flush, and missed the heft and countering weight of a gun. Consequently my hands yearned to hold the old L.C. Smith double I’d named “Elsie” now gathering cobwebs and dust, consigned for all foreseeable seasons to lean against an exposed corner timber post upstairs in the house. Though I hadn’t touched that old gun in years, my right thumb slid searchingly across the opposing forefinger, as if to smooth the jagged chink where the tang split the stock. More directly I longed to perform an act imbued with memory and lost grace, to push forward the safety and discharge the old girl one last time on a hunt.
I remembered as well an old Brittany and the last time we went out on a day not too much unlike the present. His main character flaw had been an incurable penchant for chasing after bounding deer and rabbits. Yet for the longest time he’d behaved. And then one beginning fall day he complied with an impulse and took off, never to return. Subsequently I’ve come to resolve the mystery the best I can, imagining him dropping mid-chase in the deep woods, ever intent on pursuit.
I stood in a beam of strong sunlight feeling its warmth penetrating my back. The dogs circled and waited, sniffing the base of a black cherry. My mind still lingered in the past and I remembered the day I traded a Shaker wall clock for the gun, calculating even with all its defects I’d managed to negotiate a half decent deal. Over the following weeks I patched and oiled the stock, re-blued the barrels, fabricated a new leaf spring for the safety. Finally putting it all back together and lighting out for the woods, I swung the barrels upon an over-flying hawk and brought a pestering crow trailing only a few feet behind plummeting headlong with the very first shot.
For a moment the intervening years disappeared and I remembered standing alone in the woods thinking nothing would ever again come as instinctive and easy as shooting that unwary crow. There were, of course, other small triumphs—the trailing shot that found a distant grouse just as it entered a snow-laden pine, the pulling snap at a woodcock doing a quick switchback to the left, the reaching too-far-away try at a zigzagging rabbit that nonetheless caused it to tumble and fold. But perhaps the best memory involved no kill at all, only the satisfaction of walking out of the fall woods with a boyhood friend one summery afternoon, sitting to rest on a stump while holding the gun across my knees, and casually mentioning the pretty blonde who waved enthusiastically the day before from across the street. Still, that one moment shooting the crow stood alone as a kind of perfection.
From the next village three miles distant the Catholic carillon played, ringing the hour: eleven bells. And in the nearby hamlet below the tentative, hoarse wail of the firehouse siren rose briefly and faded, marking the old time.
The dogs glanced back, sniffing a fecund damp-dry clump of half rotted leaves, until a chipmunk squeaked and they dashed in tandem across the near corner of an adjacent field, pursuing new adventure.
“It doesn’t look like Lyle’s going to make it.”
Mom said the words to prepare us, but the news—gathered that morning at church—changed the tenor of our Palm Sunday dinner.
“That’s too bad,” I said finally, and recalled Glad’s guarded reply a few weeks before when I offered to make up a plate to send with her at the end of our annual game dinner.
“Oh, that’s all right,” she smiled weakly, politely refusing the suggestion. “I doubt Lyle would enjoy it.”
We completed our Sunday meal quietly, listening to the last of the winter’s wood crackling like kindling as it quickly burned in the fireplace. I couldn’t be sure what my brother’s thoughts were, but mine briefly returned to the day a quarter century earlier when Lyle gave us a lesson in fishing. Stopping the truck alongside a stream on a dusty dirt road, he set a whisk broom on the lowered tailgate—with the head facing away against the imaginary current—to demonstrate the correct way of approaching our quarry.
David and I later smiled at Lyle’s scanting assessment of our knowledge and ability, for by then, even then, we had fly-fished for years. But here was a chance to learn something new. Lyle had on his own developed a unique but simple system incorporating a fly rod and reel strung entirely with monofilament, and just enough curl of lead lathe shaving to present a loosely hooked angle worm quite effectively. The arrangement worked so well Lyle seldom went home before catching his limit.
And although I never used that exact method, it did give me the idea to later buy a small Zebco reel with a long release arm in the front, which I spooled with four pound test. Attached to my fly rod, triggered by my pinky finger, it effortlessly cast everything from small lures to large nymphs and helped me catch innumerable smallmouths and stocked rainbow trout.
In a good year Lyle might catch a couple hundred trout using his system. Half went in the freezer, contributing to the winter larder. The rest were eaten fresh for dinner, or left gutted and cleaned, hanging at various neighbors’ front doors. Occasional grumbling among the more adamant catch-and-release adherents attested to Lyle’s local fame and prowess. But as Jim, my hunting and fishing partner and friend almost since I can remember, once said: the man came from a different time, a different world, and there’s no changing the fact now.
And yet, I’m not sure full understanding is ever quite as simple as that. I find complication in the subtle fact that Lyle would as soon help stock the East Koy as fish, an observation come by firsthand the one early Spring morning I agreed to assist in the endeavor. Another time I watched him reel in a perfect cast and wade cross-stream to remove a wad of old monofilament left to dangle in a bush, detecting stoic reserve despite the provocative affront to his outdoor aesthetic when, curling the bunched line into a large open hand, he grumbled: “Birds get snared in this stuff trying to use it for nests.” Only later did he allow himself to pass a final judgment, adding the single word Idiots to encompass any and all persons who would show so little regard for the world as to engage in such sacrilege.
Now Lyle faced his own deadly entanglement. While sharing a bottle of wine a couple evenings before, Jim quietly suggested we should stop by to visit again, “While we still have the chance.”
At the time I’d been touched by this show of thoughtfulness, but as we headed from downtown Wiscoy (‘downtown’ being Lyle’s joking designation for the hub of that small community, barely even a hamlet anymore) and headed up the hill to the old schoolhouse, Jim started in again on the guns, estimating their worth and what they could fetch—not, he was careful to add, as he always did, that he’d ever sell either one of them.
They were a prized pair of Ithaca’s—what Jim liked to refer to as a ‘brace’—yet so different from one another as to belie their shared pedigree. The one, built early last century in the classically delicate English style, he’d inherited from his grandfather. The other, more modern and robustly American, came from Lyle by way of me. I’d sold it the previous winter for a couple different reasons, the most obvious—if stupid—being money. But I’d also weighed the incontestable fact that tipped the scales in Jim’s favor even now, despite his grating tendency towards bellicosity: He treasured Lyle’s gun no less than the one he’d received from his grandfather, and would care for it accordingly.
Already he’d improved on it more than I could have. Though I had cold-blued the barrels and refinished the stock with a homemade recipe of varnish and drying oil, there was only so much my own hands and poor talents could do. Jim could afford professional restoration. The results, impressive enough to the senses, imparted a further salve of psychic reassurance. Even so, I retroactively regretted the sale, and couldn’t help feeling a little annoyed at myself—and resentful of Jim—each time he resurrected the subject.
“Yep,” I said, looking out the passenger window at a field topped with new melting snow. “Maybe I should have held onto that piece. I’ve been thinking I might start hunting again.”
“You should.” Jim offered the opinion emphatically, looking directly my way. Then, his voice softening, he added: “I miss those days.”
We pulled in between the ancient maples that hugged the drive leading up to the small red schoolhouse. Above the front door the date 1847 stood incised in black on a white oval plaque. But that entry was mainly for show. No-one who really knew Lyle and Glad ever went in the front, and so we walked along the garage-side path on narrow rectangular stones to the back door off the deck. Along the way, Jim passed me the gun and restated his well-meaning intention—made in a conspiratorial half whisper—that we should just pretend I still owned it. For some reason he felt Lyle needed shielding from the cold fact that I had sold it. But when the time came for me to play my part, I said simply it was Jim’s gun now.
It fazed Lyle not a bit. He took the gun and briefly appraised the shiny, professionally re-blued barrels, then ran a hand that seemed almost too large for such gentleness across the freshly oiled and buffed walnut stock, caressing the dark wood with bent, work roughened fingers. Breaking open the breach, he peered down through the chambers before snapping the gun closed and immediately pulling it in one well-practiced, fluid motion to his right shoulder; sighting down the flat ribbing on top past the little brass ball perched at the muzzle, he tracked one last time through the picture window the flight of an imaginary flushing ruffed grouse. When he handed the gun back, a slight nod signaled his wordless approval. But then immediately banishing any attendant memories, he asked if we boys wanted to taste some really smooth cider, and without awaiting an answer, started off to get it. We watched helplessly as, holding onto the handrail, he climbed slowly the two tiled steps leading to the original, elevated part of the house.
As soon as he’d gone out of earshot I asked how Lyle was doing. Shrugging her shoulders, Glad cheerfully replied, “Oh, he has his good days and bad.” She paused, smiling bravely, before adding more quietly: “Today is good.”
When she resumed tracing a new leaf stencil duplicating an old serving tray pattern, I looked up at the two large buck mounts fixed on the opposite wall, the one staring our way, the other gazing out the large picture window across the yard and into the open field beyond. Then I saw the display case on the wall under the bucks containing some of the arrow and spearheads collected over the years. It occurred to me I would probably never shoot and kill a buck such as either of those staring down from the wall, nor find even a single Indian point either. I remembered the story Lyle once told on himself about his first real job, plowing for a farmer who threatened to fire him unless he stayed put and quit hopping off the tractor to retrieve every artifact he unearthed. And then I thought about the buck he didn’t get, and the quiet revelation he made after I missed a twelve point of my own, shooting with a muzzleloader nearly straight down from the edge of a ravine as the deer lay bedded against the base of a pine tree not thirty yards below. Lyle said most likely I’d missed due to the steep angle, citing ‘parallax error’—something previously unknown to me, but which complicated even more what had once seemed so simple.
Then, because he liked to relate them, and I liked to hear them, he sat in the chair by the shop stove and told me a story.
It took place in the old orchard at the back of the old family homestead, a place I imagined very much like the one I now often frequented while walking my dogs. On this particular day he too watched a big buck—possibly the biggest he’d ever seen—come partially into view, drawn by the fruit lying beneath a gnarled apple tree. While he waited for a clear shot, he kept the gun in his lap. But no better opportunity arrived and he watched, helpless and yet calm, as the big buck eventually turned and just walked away.
I wasn’t sure what to make of the tale or why he told it but it made my own predicament seem better, exactly describing how as my own trophy buck slowly got up and walked into the woods I’d felt that day I missed—helpless, yet somehow still calm. And maybe that was the sole point of the story, to acknowledge a connection. Finally he stood, placed a large hand on my shoulder, and quietly informed me, almost whispering into my ear: “You don’t have to kill them all.”
Years later I would recall those words. Late one afternoon, sitting in the old orchard a quarter mile behind the house, I listened to something softly ticking, hidden in the enclosing brush. When on towards dark I got up to leave, a wily old buck ran off, hooves pounding away into silence. My heart pounded too as I stood futilely pointing my gun, feeling the hot rush of adrenaline, frustration, and foolishness, until I remembered: You don’t have to kill them all.
When Lyle shuffled back from the kitchen he held a glass of light amber liquid and a sandwich bag containing a cube of cheese snagged in each hand. I wondered, helplessly watching, if he might fall going down the steps. But he managed without incident and walked stiff-legged yet determinedly across the floor to serve us.
“How do you like that?” he asked as I took a sip. Backing up, he grasped the arms of his favorite chair with both hands and sat down.
“Pretty fine,” I said, setting the glass of mild cider on my thigh. Then I sampled the tongue-stinging cheese.
“Bites, doesn’t it?”
Lyle smiled, looked down the front of his shirt, and pulled a small green pad from a chest pocket. “Here’s something might interest you. My father in law kept a record of the pelts he trapped as a boy, and what they sold for.” He opened the worn green tablet and searched down a column of notes with a bent finger. “January of ought six he lists eight muskrats at nineteen cents apiece, for a total of one dollar fifty-two cents. And here he recorded a single ermine for a dollar eighty-five.” He looked up triumphantly and beamed. “For the month that makes a grand total of three dollars and thirty-seven cents.”
“Grand total,’ I chuckled, and Glad paused in cutting her stencil to look up, gently upbraiding. “For a boy, back then, that was real money.”
“Oh, I know,” I nodded, suddenly more circumspect. “I was just thinking how things have changed.”
“That’s right,” Lyle affirmed loudly. “Nobody traps anymore. Kids just want to sit around all day in front of a television and do nothing.”
“Or a computer,” Jim added.
“Those damn computers.” Lyle almost spit out the words.
I reached to take the small notepad from his hand and felt the fabric texture of its worn green cover. It might as well have been an artifact from a lost civilization.
“I’m glad we came,” Jim said, once we were back at the car. “Even though he seems fine, you never can tell.”
“No you can’t,” I agreed. And that seemed to conclude the conversation.
As we started back down the road the way we had come, I thought of the rows of colored hunting tags tacked to the interior wall of the small shed that stood down by the garden at the far corner of the old schoolyard. Bold numbered rectangles—in varying hues of purple, yellow, orange, green, and blue—represented the sum of thirty years’ experience now lost, but for the memory of the man who had worn them. I’d gotten to see those tags this day only because Glad had asked me at one point to fetch kindling from the windblown yard debris stacked on the floor between Lyle’s workbench and the opposite wall. So I went, thinking nothing of it until realizing I’d entered a kind of time warp as I let the door shut back against the jamb. For a long moment I stood in the close silence and looked at those fading colored, numbered pieces of card paper—knowing it would likely be the last time I’d see them—until, rousing myself to again enter the present, I backed clear of the shop, pulling the door to with a tight sealing squeak.
When I returned to the house Lyle told us again the story about the German short hair he’d trained as a boy. As he related the tale I looked over the collection of paired antlers he’d retrieved from the garage in my absence. I ran a finger across a repaired slug-nicked gap at the base of one ‘horn’ disguised so well you wouldn’t know where to look unless shown. My thumb slid against the rough ribbed shank of the disembodied trophy as I listened—for what I knew would be the last time—to how that dog would hunt, telegraphing pheasant or grouse, according to the motion of its bobbed tail. Moved evenly side to side—Lyle wagged a forefinger back and forth in approximate reenactment—meant a near grouse. But looped in a slow, and then fast, jerking circle indicated the dog had gotten onto a pheasant. His father didn’t believe him, Lyle said, until one day he accompanied them out on a hunt. But the pointer ruined a ‘til then perfect demonstration of this uncanny talent when it took off after a rabbit, eliciting the admonition since passed unaltered down through two generations: “Dammit boy,” Lyle growled, effortlessly resurrecting his father’s indignant tone and flared temper, “if you want a dog for running rabbits, get yourself a damn beagle.” Still smiling at the memory, Lyle closed his eyes as he settled back in the chair, the tale all but finished.
“I’m glad we went.”
“I’m glad we went too.” I resisted saying more and pulled up the handle on the passenger side door. Further words seemed redundant, since we’d all but said goodbye.
“We should go fishing this spring,” Jim said, prolonging the moment nonetheless. He held the brake with his foot while I opened the door to get out.
“We should,” I agreed, resting my foot on the ground. “It’s been a long time.”
“We could go back to that place up beyond Lyle and Glad’s where we fished that one time. You know, there’s that little bridge. We were always going to explore the downstream side.”
“You mean on Overholt Road?” That had always been one of Lyle’s favorite stretches, a fact we both knew.
It seemed we were trying, awkwardly, to reestablish something between us. As I held the door open, projecting one foot aslant to the ground, I could see in my mind’s eye the wood bridge that crossed the creek at the bottom of a steep dip in the narrow dirt road.
“Yes,” I agreed, “we should do that.”
I got out and pushed the door closed. Dropping my hand as the car started off, I turned to see Beau’s golden face framed in the center low pane of the backdoor window. Before I could enter the house, the dogs rushed past my legs and began whirling about in the grass-covered drive. Despite my command to return, they would be neither deterred nor recalled, so I relented and walked with them up the grade of the back yard until the ground leveled, where I picked up a stick and threw it wheeling end over end against the depthless blue sky. I stood in the soft warmth of the sun watching the dogs race one another. And then I followed as they passed from lawn to field, heading towards the old orchard and deep woods beyond.
*****
A Quiet Hunt, Late in the Day
Halfway up the now defunct nature trail we’d stopped to prepare our guns, pouring powder into the barrels while tipping them a little sideways in hopes of coaxing some bit of the charge down into the bolsters. During this first interlude I’d started watching my brother out the corner of one eye, becoming aware of a rough simultaneity to our actions as we engaged in a loosely choreographed variation of the same ritual. Now that we’d followed the ravine to its conclusion and stopped, I obliquely watched him again, all the while pretending to focus upon the muzzle end of my long rifle.
I remembered and could still feel the tightening resistance as the circle of lard-coated cloth puckered up like a closing flower against the centered round ball, until the blockage suddenly gave way as the ramrod forced the patched ball past the muzzle sliding it easily down inside the barrel.
With our rifles loaded, each hammer poised at half-cock above a crimped percussion cap, the atmosphere changed at that moment from a casual walk in the woods to the more focused pursuit of a hunt. Still, I felt in myself a vestigial reluctance to proceed, wishing somehow, before climbing from that first plateau, to delay our ascent and chuck a stone hard against the adjacent silver water tank’s rounding welded steel panels, in order to elicit once more a sound I had not heard in years—the sharp initial ping and reverberating echo converging forever into a deep hidden center of water.
In those earlier days when such impetuousness remained still permissible, a wood sign marked the start of the nature trail, which turned sharply left at the reservoir before leading on to the top of the hill. Every year—every season, in turn—some small particular along the way would inevitably change. The jack-in-the-pulpit expired, or the pendulant oriole’s nest disintegrated, and eventually fell, from the stately rock maple branching upwards and outwards against the open blue sky. On all the innumerable walking excursions of the trail our grade school Principal Mr. Kleinspehn never failed to teach the one inviolable rule of nature, tirelessly observing life plays out in a state of constant flux and nothing stays the same for ever.
I knew some further change had begun the day I discovered a large hornet’s nest bulging like a gray paper pineapple from the open backside of the painted trail sign. One early summer evening my brothers, my best friend from college, and I took turns throwing rocks at the alien nest, running away each time we missed to the Catholic Church annex. We threw wildly the first few times, imagining behind us an angry funneling swarm in pursuit. But eventually, growing bolder, I drew near enough before throwing to score a direct hit, causing the hive to implode with an airy, hushed whoosh.
In a few years all that remained of the nest were concentric gray circles converging upon the inside corner of a compartment that once held mimeographed trail maps. Already at that time the exterior paint had started peeling like sheets of birch bark and not long after that the exposed wood softened and swelled and soon enough rotted away until no evidence remained to indicate a sign ever existed.
I sometimes wondered what Mr. Kleinspehn thought of that particular manifestation of flux. He had built the nature trail, inserting numbered markers along the way amongst perennial glossy patches of Vinca minor and unfolding stalks of cinnamon ferns or adjacent to wood chips beneath a woodpecker hole, each location of which he would then sketch and reproduce on the purple-tinged mimeographed maps. Being convenient to him, Mr. K walked the trail often, seeing to its maintenance even into the first years of his retirement. But his interest in nature, like ours, extended to hunting which may account for the unnatural sight of squirrel shelters constructed of old tires cut in half, folded, and affixed at the back end of the trail to the sides of certain large oaks.
As far back as I can remember, Kleinspehn’s have lived in the narrow fronted, dark green Victorian situated roughly equidistant between Mr. K’s office and the start of the trail a hundred yards up the right-of-way lane leading between his garage and the dark stone Catholic Church, rising on a long doubling curve to the old water tower perched on the hillside overlooking the village. During all the years of our growing up my brothers and I had assumed as well an alternate right of way passing along the rear edge of his back yard, turning the far front corner of the barn quickly, as on a pivot, and veering directly for the woods. Though never challenged, I’d always experienced in those days a moment of unease passing the sliding barn door, which seemed always left partway open—enough to allow a body to pass through while keeping the interior immersed in near darkness. I half expected Mr. K would one day emerge and confront us, though such an action seems nearly inconceivable now.
All this I recalled with muted nostalgia, still obliquely observing my brother while pretending to focus on the octagonal muzzle end of my rifle’s barrel. Neither one of us seemed in a hurry to move and so I extended the daydream to the Sunday morning before, when I stood in my parents’ side yard and watched as from two houses away a figure I recognized as one of the Kleinspehn girls pulled a triangular green lawn cart down the same invisible path her father had taken nearly until the day he died. She traversed a slope of seamless back yards, descending below a gnarled apple tree to the now fallow plot of her father’s garden. I watched as she tipped the triangular cart forward, emptying its contents onto a pre-existing pile of compost, before reversing her course and ascending past a rusting burn barrel and the old apple tree back to her childhood home. Suddenly I felt an impulse to follow, and allowed myself to indulge it. Crossing the street and strolling the long way up the sidewalk, I found her kneeling head down at the side of the house tending a raised bed of her father’s prized roses. Unaware of my presence, she continued digging at the already disturbed earth—working a spade shovel in one gloved hand, smoothing the tilled ground with the flat palm of the other, until I said her name. And then she reared on her knees and said my name in return, her voice soft, yet inflected with mixed wonder and surprise.
As we caught up, I learned she had married and lived now in Minneapolis; I told her I lived alone, not counting two dogs and a cat, on the remnants of an old farm outside of Wiscoy. We then proceeded to discuss what she and her sister might do with the house, and as she talked, I noticed how gently she’d aged, retaining the happy essence on display the day she emerged from the band room with her younger sibling singing Hey Jude. Though indisputably the less striking of the two girls growing up, she radiated a mature beauty and grace that made me wish I’d pursued her instead.
“You want me to go ahead?” Paul continued to look out across the field as though he hadn’t spoken a word, and my head barely turned as I refocused on the moment, trying to compose and articulate a response. For some reason we always stopped to wait at this break in the old fence line, and it seemed to me suddenly we did so out of a shared understanding that what lay before us deserved a moment of silent transition.
“What do you think?”
My brother’s prompt required an answer. I shifted my weight off my haunches and leaned forward onto one knee.
“If you want,” I whispered. Reestablishing focus, I discovered myself undergoing a process of reorientation, preparing for the transition from the woods to our backs and the mown field strewn with round bails after the summer’s last haying. As well, despite the pause, I was still slightly winded from the climb up the hill.
“I’ll stay here,” I said, “and wait until you emerge from the next gate.”
“Okay. Maybe we’ll get lucky and I’ll kick something out.”
And yet, despite having formulated this plan, neither of us moved. Perhaps approaching as it seemed a moment of psychic oneness with the world, we anticipated the doe that just then crossed from the distant hedgerow separating this first field from the other farther on. Walking deftly out away from a single tall hickory into the open field, she approached a rolled bale resting on a slight crest in the grass, lowered her head and began nonchalantly to feed. If it hadn’t been at least a hundred and fifty yard shot, one of us might have dared take it. Instead, we merely watched in sustained and nearly devout silence.
“Okay, then,” Paul finally sighed, rising off his knees to a half crouch. “I’ll go and leave you to see if anything else shows up.”
“Say five or ten minutes?”
“I’d imagine—at least.”
He backed away and disappeared into the dense greenery behind me to take the mowed and winding path through a long narrow patch of pine, thorn-apple and regular apple trees bordering the fenced edge of the field to my left. I sat and settled back against a large square oak post to wait. The ravine we had followed to this place opened directly to my right not a dozen yards away, forming a shallow V that sharpened and descended quickly. Many years before I had witnessed the fleeing ascent of a half dozen deer, emerge from this place as if out of the earth itself and run on a diagonal to the far point of the triangle woods a quarter mile away. Opening day a few seasons later, standing exactly in the same place I sat now, I’d watched two yearlings closing along the fence line to my left, fleeing an initiation of gun shot. As they passed barely beyond arm’s length I resisted the urge to reach out, as if in so doing I might assuage their fear and grief, and quiet their muted cries for the mother I imagined, that morning, only a minute earlier, they’d lost.
Maybe, I thought, I was getting soft, remembering and thinking such things. And then I remembered towards the end of his life Faulkner declined an invitation to participate in a hunt, explaining he hadn’t the heart for it anymore. I smiled, believing I now understood.
Suddenly, as if it sensed I was there, or had somehow divined my thoughts, the doe in the field straightened and looked inquisitively my way. For a long moment she stood flicking her ears before deliberately high-stepping to the cover of a nearby ravine, descending behind the rusting hulls of two postwar-era cars permanently parked in the weeds. Already the pale sun touched the fringed treetops in the triangle wood across the way. A cloud eclipsed the sun and the deer, as well, merged with its surroundings and disappeared.
I waited, remembering the day as a young boy I discovered this place. A succession of clouds repeatedly eclipsed the overhead sun, creating gliding waves of shadow and light across this same high open field of grass. Entering the field, jumping shadows, I reveled innocently in the happy nature of things.
Only, now I knew it couldn’t be the same field—not exactly.
The ancient philosopher Heraclitus informs us: You cannot enter the same stream twice. I think that means our field of worldly reference, subject as it is to time and alteration, places us in an existential stream of constantly fluctuating consciousness. Just so, the field before me had changed, as had I, since that long-ago day I first waded in.
Years after that first encounter, perhaps as many years before now, a herd of Black Angus cows occupied this field, and a Sheltie tried to herd them. I loved that dog; and still do, I suppose. Every morning he would greet me at the bottom of the stairs and patiently wait while I sat on the next to last step tying my boots. Finally I would ask, “How goes the world today, my good Macduff?” and he would eagerly follow wherever I led to find out.
Before Macduff there was Heidi, a miniature dachshund, who loved this field too and who one November evening I’d buried on a soft rounding rise midway between the square fencepost at my back and the big hickory standing alone in the far hedgerow. Even after a quarter century I knew I could find the exact spot. But what now could it possibly matter?
Gazing across the grave of the one, I recalled my favorite picture of the other, standing broadside, looking back towards that same solitary hickory while I waited, pausing as one does after the final clay pigeon to hear the shot rain down on the far woods. In the picture it is time to go. Already the grass is dark and slightly foreboding, the horizon mixed purple and gray. Yet Duff stands looking back, reluctant to leave, and I wonder now if I shouldn’t have brought him here as well in the end.
A hundred yards along down the old fence line, my brother disrupts my reverie by walking into the field and I rouse to start towards him. He scans the distance as I approach, glancing my way only when I come near enough for him to whisper: “Anything?”
“Nope,” I replied, my voice slightly too loud and disquieting, “not a thing.” And there too I stopped, taking up my own scanning survey beside him. “That doe crossed down into the far point of this next ravine, behind the junk cars.” Lifting a long arm, I pointed, as if he didn’t know where to look. “Maybe we could push her?”
Paul silently considered the suggestion before offering a ruminative “maybe,” conveying an impression he seemed less than convinced my impromptu tactic would work. Or perhaps he merely felt little enthusiasm for what we both knew would be a rough walk.
“I’ll take the ravine if you want.” I offered to take the harder way, still thinking he preferred not to, but sliding his eyes sideways to meet mine he let me know that’s not what he meant.
“I’m thinking we’re losing daylight and I want us to get to the triangle before it gets too dark. Why don’t I go down over the hill and let you set up on the other end. Maybe I can send something your way.”
I knew then his intention probably better than he. Earlier in the year I had nonchalantly mentioned having to occasionally push my fingertips between two particular ribs in order to alleviate a pain located just underneath. Sometimes, though rarely, the sensation migrated from there down my left arm. It was nothing, I said, sure that neither of us entirely believed it.
“All right,” I said, acquiescing to his judgment. “I just hope I can make it across the field without keeling over.”
My brother turned, looked me square in the eye.
“You’re not funny,” he said, and abruptly turned to leave.
So I wasn’t funny. I smiled, crossing the field, thinking Paul probably smiled as well, in spite of himself, once he’d gotten far enough away. I walked along the side of the ravine past the two ancient junk cars to my left and crossed a dry ditch, ascending the last part of the field to the long edge of the triangle woods. Here I sat with my back to a wide ancient maple and waited for my brother to reappear to the right. As we parted I had watched him go past the end of the old fence line into the ravine farther down, apparently thinking to push the doe back towards me after all. But when he came out the other end and waved, I waved back across the middling distance, a signal meaning neither of us had seen a thing.
It was time to redeploy. I got up and skirted the edge of the woods walking away as he skirted the last of the high ground, retreating behind me. I imagined him starting down the long gentle cow-path to the base of the plateau as I passed through the open gate in the hedgerow. Again I settled back against the small woods, facing the sunset this time, overlooking a bowl in the terrain. Narrowing as it rose into the field, the depression extended toward the bigger woods across the way. The deer knew well this passage, as did we, and I remembered, like a premonition belatedly understood, discovering one certain fall day the punky remains of a tree scratched to pieces by antlers or claws just inside the western point of The Triangle. And so inevitably I recalled as well the big buck shot mid-field while crossing over from that point in the early hours of opening day a week later.
It wasn’t my deer, even though I’d earlier found the shredded tree and later imagined he’d done it. But I found him at mid-day lying on the crest of a ravine in the far woods and, raising my gun, waited expectantly for the moment he would leap up and run for his life, before making the somewhat confounding discovery that he was already dead.
Yet the even more confounding thing was the blood trail; tracking it backwards, it couldn’t have been more obvious. Big lobed blobs, like red paint dribbled carelessly on brown leaves, led unmistakably out of the woods back to the field. But there the retrograde trail stopped. Absorbing a single well-placed shot, issued from the lone hickory in the hedgerow nearly a hundred yards distant, that morning the buck had jumped and twirled perfectly once at the center of the field before running off; a cursory search revealed no sign in the stubble grass, and so the boy whose buck it rightly was decided, prematurely, he’d missed.
“Always follow your shot,” his dad admonished him later. “That goes as well for hunting as basketball.”
But the boy hadn’t followed that day, and so it happened, as a consequence, I found the deer. By then it was past noon, and the fields and the woods had become quiet. After a futile search for help, I tagged and gutted the deer, extracting the slug from under the hide opposite the point of entry. And then I returned home to find the story of the boy’s missed opportunity already going around the neighborhood. It took the combined efforts of that same boy and me and Paul and my other brother, David—all of us hoisting a pole passed beneath the inverted buck’s hooves—to carry it out.
I started feeling suddenly tired recalling these now far distant events and determined for the rest of the hunt to instead concentrate on the near present. Consequently I lost sight of the wider world beyond while I focused intimately on a lithe stalk of timothy somehow spared the summer’s last cutting. A vertical line of green supporting a long furry head, it stood alone in a small untouched space between my feet and the wider shorn field. As I looked, it seemed I was seeing something for the first time. But when, after closing my eyes, I looked again, it had reverted to being just another stalk of grass amongst the world’s innumerable others. So I closed my eyes again and waited.
In the mature deciduous woods to my back I could hear a pair of squirrels running through dry fallen leaves, each of them making the same shuffling sound, inseparable and yet distinct. One moved, then the other, and then for some unknown reason they were both simultaneously, entirely, still. I kept my eyes closed waiting for them to move again, and in the silence heard only another iteration of the silence—that too, for what seemed the first time.
It was so quiet. Nothing moved, and still the world remained still. I kept my eyes shut and envisioned my brother’s passage from the apple orchard at the wide bottom of the hill as, crouching in perpetual anticipation, he followed an old fence-line up through the progressively narrowing ravine towards its—and the woods’—conclusion at the shallow bowl in the field, close to my left. I watched him climb in a sort of dream vision, hunting his way forward in that familiar, slow alert crouch. Somewhere, between him and me, I imagined another large buck and knew if my brother went slow enough to merely push and not spook it, one of us might yet get a shot. I opened my eyes in premature anticipation, but there was nothing more to see than to hear, so I closed them yet again, and waited.
How long I sat napping I don’t know. It may have been two minutes or ten. Sometime in that unknown interval the sun moved down behind the trees at the far end of the field. The sky turned gray, and the air where I waited in what seemed sudden shadow felt chill.
I lifted my head, having heard what in the next second I saw: a doe coming out of the woods. She stepped into the field as if stepping into a broad shallow pool, one foot testing the water. I watched her, tensing my fingers around the long combined stock and barrel of my rifle, raising my arm so gradually even I could hardly detect if it moved. Flicking her tail nervously the whole time, the doe descended and waded cautiously to the middle of the pool, edging toward the deep woods beyond. I raised the rifle into place and steadied—resting lifted elbow, arm, and the entire forward weight of the barrel on my left knee. She turned to look behind her; I held my breath until she turned back away. Pulling the hammer with my thumb, I felt and heard it softly click into place. I closed one eye, sighting her. She was all I saw of the world.
Yet, presented with this perfect shot, I didn’t take it. A further rustling of leaves suggested another deer followed. Exhaling pent breath, I let the doe go. When the sound stopped I imagined the other deer standing cautiously behind my left shoulder at the woods’ edge. I waited, but still no buck appeared. Eventually a small flock of feeding hen turkeys emerged, appearing from my privileged vantage more like a levitating armada of black turtles floating almost desultorily across the now dark pool of grass.
When my brother came out a few minutes later he looked up and shrugged his shoulders as if to ask if I’d seen it. I prepared myself mentally for the inevitable conversation to come:
—Did you see it?
—Yes.
—Why didn’t you shoot?
—I was thinking how difficult it would be tracking a wounded deer at this hour. What if the blood trail seeped into the grass and disappeared?
—We would pick it up in the woods on the other side.
—Even supposing we found it, we’d soon be searching in darkness.
—So?
—Just so.
—Sometimes I think you think too much.
Though in my mind the conversation went something like that, I knew in reality it would inevitably be different. Life is flux and change, after all, and never quite entirely predictable. The only constant would come at the very start as my brother posed the question latent in the inquiring look and quick shrug of his shoulders, with all the far more explicit and changeable words to follow.
Coming closer, he began posing a few latent questions outright.
“Did you see her? Why didn’t you take the shot?”
“Because,” I patiently replied, so far ahead of him I’d already begun to smile, revising my script. “I was waiting for the buck.”
It was a good, if subtle, line—but Paul wasn’t getting the joke. He just looked at me again and frowned and then shook his head slowly, confounded at having such a fool brother. I felt sorry for him then and guilty too for having made him work so hard to no end, and so as I stood and stretched and tried to shake out the cold ache that had lodged deep in my legs, I already knew the rest of what I would say.
I finally pointed and told him, indicating with an outstretched arm the place I had buried Heidi “on a low ridge midway between that hickory tree in the near hedgerow and the oak gatepost at the far end of the first field” where earlier we’d paused together, as now, before moving on. I told him because he’d never before known the location; waiting a further quiet interval, I asked if he wanted to go.
So we went before looming dark to the small rise of an unmarked grave situated halfway between a scraggly old tree on one side and a creosoted square post on the other.
Crossing the high field where long ago we had practiced shooting clay pigeons—where as a boy I had jumped simultaneously above and below a succession of cloud shadows—I knew, as if perfectly perceiving an inevitable conversation to come, that sometime before leaving we would discharge our long rifles, employing as targets the rusting hulls of junked cars parked in the tall fringe of dry weeds edging the ravine just beyond. An acrid billow of smoke would hang in the air as we reloaded to shoot again, until finally, with night revealing and then eclipsing the brief sudden flare of our muzzles, we would stand motionless, listening, as the last echo of our day fell silent in the deep and dark woods behind us.
*****
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