by Roy Kesey
They hit Hull Mountain Road, slide along the back of a steep ridge, past a campground, and it’s all dirt roads from there in. The truck bangs them around and there’s no point in talking. Half an hour later Garrett finds the same place he and Blaine parked two years before, alongside a flat that was logged to death at some point and now is nothing but brush.
They start pulling out their gear. He hands Aaron a box of shells and the 32-20, shows him how to load and unload it, has him run the bolt a couple of times and tells him not to put a round in the chamber unless he’s looking at something he wants to shoot. Aaron nods but it’s hard to tell if he gets it. The sun’s almost up.
–Okay, says Garrett. You got any reach-back?
–Any what?
–Toilet paper.
–I guess I forgot.
Garrett tosses him a roll.
–Here’s the rule as far as that goes: no shitting on the path. Have a look for snakes before you squat, and after you’ve done your business, be careful standing back up. You’ve got that ten-pound shark-sticker on your belt, plus the shell case, and it’ll all come sliding off and land you know where if you’re not paying attention.
Aaron laughs.
–The Shitting Rules.
–That’s about right. Now come on. And stay close.
They spend the morning side by side running shallow brushy draws, and don’t see anything with horns. There’s better country in all directions, and Garrett thinks of a dozen good hunts, but they aren’t going to work with someone who doesn’t know the country and has no idea what to do if he gets lost.
The heat’s coming on in spite of the breeze, and by now the deer will mostly be bedded down. The kid sounds like an army all by himself, keeps his eyes on his boots and still manages to step on every dry branch in his path. That and his questions—their elevation, the biggest deer Garrett ever shot, the names of all the bird species he sees. Garrett has a good mind to take him by the shoulders and tell him that hunting’s mainly about quiet, about watching and listening, and that he really needs to shut the fuck up if he wants to see anything worth—
–Bear!
–What?
Aaron raises his rifle and Garrett catches the barrel, swings it down and away, turns to look where it was pointing and sure enough, maybe a hundred and twenty yards, almost full grown, hunched down and staring at them. Garrett freezes, drops his voice to a whisper.
–Couple of things, Aaron. A, we don’t have bear tags. B, it’s not like it’s a grizzly—black bears will always run if you give them a chance. C, I’ve never seen one around here before, so this is a pretty special thing. Now do like me and watch what happens.
Very slowly, Garrett lowers into a crouch and guides Aaron down with him.
–I can’t see it, says Aaron.
–I know. Just watch.
A second later the animal rises up into sight, swivels its head back and forth.
–There you go. They’re curious, but they don’t see very well, and we’ve got the wind so it can’t much smell us or hear us. Real slow, let’s stand back up.
They do, and the bear hunches back down; they crouch and the bear rises back up. They play like this for a couple of minutes. Then the wind changes and just like that the bear is gone.
After one more dry run they walk back to the truck. Garrett tosses Aaron a beer from the cooler, gets a little lunch put together. They sit down in the shade to eat. Garrett says they ought to try higher up, and Aaron says that sounds good to him.
Garrett stops the truck in a pullout above a long ridge, sees a grassy saddle and there’s something moving at the edge of it. He pulls out his binoculars and gets barely a glimpse but there was a flash of horn and it didn’t look bad. He turns the engine off.
–I just saw something maybe worth sweating for. You see that saddle? The buck took off to the right. Here’s what we’re going to do—you’re going to walk straight down this ridge, not right on top but off a little to the left, and when you get to the saddle, cross over real quiet and take a stand somewhere where you’ve got a good look across the draw. Put a round in the chamber, and don’t make a sound. Don’t shoot at anything unless you can see all of it and you’re sure it’s got horns. If you shoot at the first noise you hear, it will probably be me, and I will haunt your ass forever, you understand?
–Got it.
–Good. I’m going to go all the way to the bottom of the draw to the left, circle clear around, and hopefully kick that buck out where you can see it. The important thing is, stay right there in the saddle until I come for you. I don’t care if it gets dark and still I’m not back. All that means is I saw something better somewhere else and had a go at it. Seriously, if you start moving around—
–I understand.
–Give me ten minutes’ head start, then straight down, quiet as you can.
–I will.
–Good luck.
–You too.
The draw is awful work, head-high buck brush and mesquite, and Garrett hopes the kid knows the saddle when he sees it and doesn’t walk all the way to Covelo. He finds a little opening but twenty yards along it closes in, and he scratches his arms to shit fighting his way through. An hour or so of this before he makes the end of the ridge, and there’s a couple of buzzards overhead. If this wasn’t opening weekend he’d knock one down just to make himself feel better.
The back side of the ridge is even worse, thicker brush and more thorn and mostly uphill. He stops to catch his breath, takes a shot from his canteen, picks a few stickers out of his shirt. Then he hears a slight shirring, something moving and not too far off. He slides left, half a step at a time. He gets a short ways up the far side of the draw and now he’s got a better look at things: a thin glade maybe fifty yards uphill, and another one up high that’s probably the bottom of the saddle.
He kneels, waits and watches, listens, and nothing moves. He stands, and still nothing. He looks up at the ridge, sees a big rock bluff shaped just like the island in that damn book. He blinks away the sweat, takes a step and a buck shoots into the near clearing. The rifle flies up and he gets one quick shot, sees dust off to the right and knows he missed, throws another shell in and waits. The buck pops into the upper clearing and the rifle rises again, the buck breaks left, there’s a shot from the top of the ridge and the buck folds and rolls.
Garrett whoops, waits for Blaine to whoop back, and remembers who he’s here with. Unbelievable. He works his way up, finds the three-point lying half into the brush. The shot was perfect, base of the neck, tough enough on a standing shot, half impossible on a snap shot like that one. The buck will field-dress a hundred and ten easy, and the rack is terrific, twenty inches wide and eighteen high, nice and clean, not too heavy, but still—hell of a buck.
He drags it around so the head’s uphill and waits for Aaron to make his way down, but the boy doesn’t come. He pushes up through the clearing, wondering if the buck is maybe somebody else’s, but there’s his nephew, stupid hat, stupider knife, gun at the ready like this is the last of the Alamo.
–I saw a big one, Aaron says. A really big one. I heard someone else shoot and then I saw it, only for a second but I could see the whole deer so—
–It’s down there waiting for you.
–What?
–You broke its neck.
Aaron’s smile slows.
–Is that bad?
–It’s the best there is.
Garrett smiles, pulls off Aaron’s cowboy hat, smacks him on the shoulder, puts the hat back in place. He turns and looks downhill, gets a sense of the shot, shakes his head.
–Fucking amazing. How far did you lead him once he broke?
–How far what?
Garrett laughs, asks Aaron if he’s ever gutted a deer, laughs again when Aaron says no but he once cleaned a fish. They walk down, and Garrett gives the boy his time to look from a ways off, to look from closer up, to take the antlers in his hands and turn them back and forth.
–It
’s a terrific buck, son, and that was a terrific shot.
–Thanks.
–You’re welcome. And now the work starts. Go get your pocketknife.
The kid’s useless, but Garrett goes slow and talks through things, talks more than he ought to probably but his nephew doesn’t seem to mind. The slit down from the sternum, the wet loops of intestine and the big bluish ball of a stomach spilling out. Careful around the bladder, the colon emptied and tied off, the diaphragm cut open and the lungs pulled out. He works the knife around a bit more, asks Aaron for his hat, smiles as he takes it, fills it with the kidneys and the liver and the fist-sized heart.
–That wasn’t necessary, says Aaron. I don’t even like liver.
–You think that was bad, you’re going to love this next part.
Aaron looks up and Garrett grabs him by the back of the neck, rams his head down into the open belly, lets him out and laughs. There’s bile in the boy’s hair and blood dripping down his face. The kid is choking and coughing and pounding his chest.
–Holy shit, says Aaron when he can breathe again. I think I swallowed a deer turd.
–That, Aaron, was a proper blooding. You have killed your first buck, and you have been blooded: you are now a man.
–That was the grossest thing in my entire life.
–Old tradition. Goes back years and years.
–Really?
–No, but I read about it in a book this one time. Aaron laughs, wipes off his face, sits back to watch as Garrett starts sewing things up.
At the truck Garrett asks if Aaron wants to mount the whole head, and Aaron says maybe just the horns. They skin the deer out and leave the hide for the coyotes. Garrett saws off the rack, tags it, saws the head off as well and gets the carcass into a deer bag in the shade. It’s all work he’d usually do at home, but there’s pleasure in doing it here, now. He slides the water jug out to the tailgate and they wash up, then head still higher on the mountain for one last hunt. They take late stands into dusk but don’t see anything except a red-tailed hawk a million miles up in the sky.
On the way home Garrett asks Aaron if he’s got a girlfriend, and he says yes, Miluska from Prague, together for three years, and she’s almost done with a Ph.D. in semiotics. Garrett nods, shakes his head, and Aaron laughs, says he has no idea either.
–Whatever happened to you and Aunt Dina? Mom used to talk about her all the time.
–Uf. Bad business. Still takes a chunk out of my paycheck every month, so I know she’s eating well, wherever she is.
Which reminds them of how hungry they are, so Garrett pulls over at a burger stand on the rancheria. While they wait he tells the story of his dad’s first deer—how he’d emptied his gun at the buck as it quartered away uphill, and hit it solid with his last shot. The deer running out of steam, heading back downhill mostly stumbling; his dad in its path with the 32-20 back over his shoulder like a baseball bat. The buck saw him, tried to cut but lost its footing, fell in a pile and died at his dad’s feet.
Aaron shakes his head at the end but doesn’t smile, and Garrett thinks maybe he didn’t tell it very well. They finish their burgers and get back on the road, and now his mind drifts, wondering when Blaine will get his act together, wondering if his mother’s doing as well as she seems. He looks over at Aaron and clears his throat.
–We never talked much about your mom, did we.
–Never talked about her at all.
–You want to?
–I’ll listen if you’ve got something to say.
Garrett nods. Truth is, he doesn’t remember a whole lot about Lana except as a kid—running through sprinklers at four or five years old, missing teeth at six, sweet as hell and collecting oak leaves at nine or ten. By twelve or so she starts to blur. A few years later he joined the Corps, and by the time he got back for good she was married, gone to Ukiah, not much for coming back to visit or inviting anyone over.
He tells all this as well as he can, smoothening the edges just a bit. Aaron watches him close, nods a lot, tenses up when Garrett can’t think of anything else to say.
It’s almost ten by the time they get back to Fallash. Garrett heads to his mother’s all the same so they can get a little bragging in. She’s watching something on television, comes out to the truck in her slippers to have a look. She congratulates Aaron when she hears that it’s his buck, but her heart’s not much in it. Garrett figures she must be tired.
Garrett gives Aaron a wink, switches tags on the rack and punches the dates, sets the horns up on the hood where everyone passing by can get a gander. They sit on the porch and take off their boots, and Aaron’s socks are bright with blood. He pulls them off, and his feet are covered with messy wet blisters. Good for him, thinks Garrett, keeping his mouth shut like that. His mom goes for gauze and tape, and the men sit in the quiet, swatting at mosquitoes.
Then Blaine shows up. He’s halfway between drunk and hungover, in too bad a shape to celebrate Aaron’s buck much past a handshake and a nod, but at least he’s on his way back down. They get Aaron’s feet cleaned up and head in to the living room. His mom leaves to make coffee, and Blaine asks for the story. Garrett lets Aaron tell it all, doesn’t even correct him on the little stuff he gets wrong.
Everybody’s got a mug and they’re all sitting there staring at their coffee, nobody telling jokes or stories, not at all the way a good hunt should end. Garrett asks his brother if he’s bought a new bugle yet, and Blaine doesn’t even get it. Their mom looks over at Aaron, her expression something between angry and exhausted.
Garrett feels the day’s ache in his legs, wonders if he got into any poison oak, not that he saw any, but that doesn’t mean—
–Is it true that you’re going to sell Lana’s house? his mom asks Aaron.
Garrett sits up straight, watches Aaron square around in his seat.
–You mean my house, says Aaron.
–I’m only asking because I ran into Michael from Fellings Realty at the supermarket, and that’s what he’d heard, that you went to the Ukiah office a few days ago, that you’re planning to sell the house.
–That’s one of the reasons I came back. The market’s starting to come around, and grad school’s expensive—even with the stipend I had to take out a couple loans. And it’s not like I plan on coming back here to live.
Garrett’s mom gives her boys an I-told-you-so look though she’d said nothing to Garrett. He sits there feeling a little betrayed, a little pissed off, but on the other hand Aaron’s right about whose house it is.
–You might have told us, says his mother.
–I was going to, says Aaron.
–Well. You didn’t.
–Leave him alone, Mom, says Garrett. It’s not like we were using the house for anything. Nobody’s even been up there since—
–Is that right? So I guess the house just cleaned itself all these years. I guess those new perennials out front got planted by magic. I guess all that blood in the bathroom—
–Whoa, whoa.
–I won’t have it, Garrett. I won’t.
–But if you never told anybody—
–Do you have any idea what it was like for me, finding her like that? Or you, Aaron? Okay, you were off at college, but you barely came home long enough for the funeral, and out of the blue you decided there wasn’t even going to be one. Never once did you ask what anyone else wanted.
Aaron shakes his head, opens his mouth, but she doesn’t give him the chance.
–For six years I’ve been over there twice a month keeping everything just like Lana liked it. Not to mention the fact that your grandfather and I put up half the down payment on that house, and of course she never paid us back, but you—
–Is it true that Grandpa molested my mother?
Nobody moves. Nobody says anything. Garrett looks at his mom, at Blaine, then turns to his nephew.
–What the fuck are you talking about?
–She sent me a letter about a week before she killed herself. It
was kind of cryptic, which is why I never—
Garrett’s out of his seat but Blaine catches him halfway across the room. Garrett swings him aside and Blaine catches hold of his shirt, hangs there beneath him, tears running out of his eyes and still Garrett punches him, as hard as he can, drives him down to the floor.
Aaron’s crying now too, and Garrett’s mom is up and gone, the back of the house, somewhere. Garrett looks down at his brother, at the blood coming out of his nose. Looks at Aaron. Looks out the window at his truck.
Blaine sits up and wipes at the blood, says, Don’t you dare pretend you didn’t know.
–You fuck. You stupid drunk motherfuck. How could you—
–Lana leaves town the first chance she gets and hardly ever comes back, we have to drag her over here even for fucking Christmas, and you’re saying you never figured it out? You’re not that stupid, Garrett. Nobody’s that stupid.
Garrett stares at the wall, hears his mom crying in the back bedroom, lowers his head. Aaron stands, walks like he’s headed for the bathroom, stops and turns and opens the front door. Garrett watches him sit down on the porch and pull his bloody socks back on. Watches him lace his boots up. Watches him take the set of antlers off the hood, and walk away.
–Stop him, says Blaine. None of this was his fault.
But Garrett waits a moment more, and by the time he gets to the door the kid is gone.
Nipparpoq
IT IS NEARLY DARK. Stand very still. There is nothing that can be done about the cold. It has been nearly dark for the past twelve hours, and soon it will be completely dark. Stand very still and do not think about the cold.
The natseq will come. It always comes. Do not move or the natseq might hear, might use another hole. Watch the strip of baleen: it will tremble as the natseq approaches. In a moment or an hour or tomorrow it will tremble, and you will hear the roil of water, the sudden rasp of drawn breath, and at that moment you must be prepared to hit what you cannot see.