by Larry Brown
Jimmy’s daddy had been sitting here since before daylight, and there was a hard white frost on, and he could see it everywhere on the grass in front of him. The temperature had gone way down last night, close to twenty, and he was shaking inside his clothes. His breath was fogging in front of his face. His nose was running. He wished he had better hunting clothes. He wished he had some Gore-Tex long underwear, and maybe some heated hunting socks with batteries that strapped around your ankle to keep your feet warm. They used two AA batteries. He’d seen some in a Cabela’s catalog. About fifty bucks. Same price as a nice spear point. He hadn’t smoked a cigarette yet, but he was sure wanting one. He knew he wasn’t supposed to smoke while he was hunting, because the deer could smell the cigarette smoke, but he didn’t know if he could wait much longer or not.
He tried to be still, but it was hard when it was this cold. His ass had already gone to sleep and his rifle was cold in his hands because he’d forgotten to get some gloves. That was another thing he needed: gloves. Maybe he could drop a hint to Johnette and get some for Christmas. Which was right around the corner. No telling how much Christmas was going to cost. He didn’t have any idea what to get anybody. He’d probably have to go shopping with Johnette and he hated having to do that almost worse than anything else. And he wished he had a sleeping bag. That’s what Rusty hunted from, a sleeping bag. Rusty hauled his rolled-up sleeping bag up into the tree stand with him, and unrolled it, and he took off his boots, and slipped down inside the sleeping bag and pushed the top down so that he could see over it, and then he sat down in his chair that he had bolted up there and picked up his rifle. He said his feet never got cold in the sleeping bag. He said you could be out there on the coldest morning there was, and if you had that sleeping bag pulled up around you, you didn’t even have to wear a coat. But Jimmy’s daddy wasn’t sitting inside a sleeping bag, and he was cold. He thought he was colder than he’d ever been in his life, and that included a coon-hunting trip with his daddy a long time ago when he was just a boy. They’d been down in a river bottom somewhere, with a bunch of blue-ticks and redbones and treeing walkers, with ice crackling underfoot everywhere, and they’d gotten lost and had been forced to wade a couple of sloughs to find their way back to the truck, breaking ice as they went, and the water had gone up past his thighs, and then he’d had to keep walking in his slowly freezing wet pants for almost an hour. And it had been unbearable. When he’d started to cry from the cold and the pain, his daddy had called him a sissy and told him he’d never take him hunting again. And he had kept his word. Old hardass son of a bitch. Sit your ass over there in the damn woods by yourself if you want to. See if I care.
[…]
Jimmy’s daddy began to wish that he’d brought a Thermos of hot coffee with him. He knew he had a Thermos somewhere because Johnette had given him one for Christmas a few years ago. How good would that be right now? A steaming cup, the vapors drifting up to his nose, in the middle of all this cold. Why didn’t he ever plan for stuff like that? Why didn’t he start looking for a good place to hunt about six months before hunting season instead of depending on Rusty to find him a place and then being disappointed? It was always like this. He was always sitting in the wrong place, whether it was a dove field or a deer stand.
He heard a rifle fire somewhere far off, a faint pow, he couldn’t even tell in which direction. Just one shot. It wasn’t close enough to be Rusty because Rusty was only a few ridges over, out of sight of Jimmy’s daddy.
Jimmy’s daddy sat there, thinking about lighting a cigarette. He hadn’t had one now in over thirty minutes, because he hadn’t wanted to smoke walking in to the stand. Right now he thought maybe a cigarette might make him warmer somehow. But he held off. You never knew. There might be a big buck out there just about to step from behind one of those pine trees. You had to remain alert. You had to be still. You didn’t need to smoke. Scratch your ass. Sneeze. Cough. He’d never seen anybody smoking in any of his hunting videos. That didn’t mean that they didn’t do it off-camera. Jimmy’s daddy knew they could edit stuff out. The videos didn’t show them eating meals or going to the bathroom or blowing their noses either, but he knew they did.
He kept sitting there and thinking about it. What was one cigarette going to hurt? Hell, he was almost twenty feet off the ground. That smoke was going to drift off. And if a deer never had smelled cigarette smoke, how did it know to be scared of it? He didn’t think it would hurt anything to smoke just one. Since he wasn’t going to see anything anyway. But he held off a while longer. It was important to remain strong as long as you could.
He took one hand off his rifle and stuck it just inside the zipper of his coat to try and warm it up a little because it was so stiff from the cold. That was the hand that held his trigger finger. Hell, he had to keep it warm. That big monster buck might be right out there in front of him, only hidden.
He kept sitting there. Sitting there and sitting there and sitting there. Nothing was moving. Not even a bird. Then he saw one bird. A cardinal. The sun still wasn’t up. It was kind of cloudy, so maybe it wasn’t going to come up. When his hand warmed up a little, he took it out of his coat and stuck the other one in. If a big buck jumped up he’d have to switch hands. But no big buck jumped up. He kept sitting there. He tried to wriggle his toes but they were so dead to him that he couldn’t feel them wriggling. And then he saw a deer. Two deer. A doe and her baby. Just stepping from the edge of the pines. Not over a hundred feet away.
Jimmy’s daddy immediately started shaking from excitement. It was just a doe and her baby, true, but they were deer. If there were two deer here, there might be more. There might be a big buck following them, wanting to breed the doe. The rut might have already started. The baby had already lost its spots, but it wasn’t very big. It might have weighed thirty pounds. Jimmy’s daddy knew that it wasn’t a legal deer. But the doe was. You could take a doe. Rusty might cut his shirttail off if he shot a doe, but hey, it was still fresh deer meat. But what about this? If he shot the doe, what would happen to the baby? Would it starve? Nah. It wouldn’t starve. Hell. It lived in the woods. It could find something to eat. All it had to do was walk over there into the edge of those hard-woods and start picking up some acorns. So Jimmy’s daddy started positioning himself for a shot. Very slowly. Moving in little increments of movement. He had to get his trigger-finger hand around the grip and start raising the rifle, which he’d already sighted in about three months ago. He had bumped the scope getting out of the truck with Rusty this morning, in the dark, but Rusty had said that it probably hadn’t hurt anything. And Jimmy’s daddy sure hoped that it hadn’t.
The doe lowered her head and nibbled at something on the ground. The fawn flicked its tail and walked forward and stuck its head between its mother’s back legs and started nursing. Aw shit. It wasn’t even weaned yet. Jimmy’s daddy had been in the process of raising the rifle, but now he stopped. Maybe it wasn’t big enough to eat acorns. Maybe it would starve. And then, as he sometimes did, like when he first kissed Lacey, he had a revelation. Maybe he ought to shoot both of them and gut them and then come back tonight and sneak them out of the woods. If you got caught with two and one of them was illegal, no telling what the fine would be. Much more than for having wet beer in a dry county probably.
He kept watching them and watching them caused him to forget about the cold. What if he went home and got the ’55 and drove it over here and parked off the road somewhere and dragged them out and put them both in the trunk? The only way he’d get caught would be if a game warden personally stopped him and searched his car. But what if he went home and got rid of all his hunting clothes, got rid of his orange vest, got rid of his hunting boots, got rid of his rifle, got rid of his orange hat, […] and put on some more clothes, maybe some blue jeans, and maybe his Tony Lama ostrich-skin boots, the ones Lacey liked so much, and came back over here and parked the ’55 out on the road, and then got Rusty to listen for traffic for him, and loaded them into the trunk an
d took them home and unloaded them behind the trailer and hung them up in the shed to skin them by flashlight? He wouldn’t get caught that way, would he? Look how much meat he’d have. Two whole deer. But where was he going to put it? They didn’t have a deep freeze. Hell, Carol had one. He could get them dressed and cut them up and slice them up and wrap up all the meat in some freezer paper and tape it up good and mark it with a Magic Marker, put steaks or roast or whatever it was on it and haul it down to Carol’s house at Bruce and leave it down there in her deep freeze. He could tell her she could have some of it if she wanted it. He didn’t know if she liked deer meat or not. He wondered if she was fucking anybody. She still looked pretty good for an old chick.
He kept sitting there trying to decide what to do. The doe and the fawn were slowly working their way past him. And at any moment they might step back into the sheltering pine saplings and be hidden again. He needed to shoot was what he needed to do. Shoot something. While it was standing right in front of him. So he raised the rifle on up, very slowly. They didn’t know he was there. They hadn’t seen him. It was a real good thing he hadn’t lit that cigarette. It was good to be strong. It paid off.
He slowly fitted the scope to his eye and swung the 30.30 to cover the doe. He was still shaking a little from the excitement, but he tried to hold the gun steady. He wished he had a rest. Rusty had gun rests on all his stands that he used. This one was just an extra one that had been lying in Rusty’s backyard gathering rust. It didn’t have a gun rest.
The doe was nibbling at something on the ground and Jimmy’s daddy had the crosshairs of the scope centered on her chest. The fawn walked forward and suddenly blocked the doe’s chest with its hindquarters. Jimmy’s daddy waited. He was surprised that they couldn’t see the breath fogging from his mouth. And he didn’t care if Rusty did cut his shirttail off. He was going home today with some fresh deer meat. That he’d killed all by himself. For the first time. He couldn’t wait to show the deer to Jimmy whenever he got it or them home.
He swung the rifle left suddenly, onto the fawn. Why not just shoot that little son of a bitch? Kind of leave the doe for seed? Naw, shit, it was too small. Look how tender it would be, though. You could probably cut that meat with a fork. Once you got it cooked.
The deer kept working their way past him while he sat there trying to decide what to do. He couldn’t shoot both of them. No way. As soon as he shot the first one, the other one was going to run. There was more meat on the doe. That was what tipped the scales. The little one would just have to make it on its own. It would just have to learn that it was a cold cruel world out there. So Jimmy’s daddy swung the crosshairs back onto the doe’s chest, pulled the hammer all the way back to full cock, and fired. The rifle slammed him a sharp jolt in the shoulder and the deep boom from the muzzle rolled out across the frosted stillness. The fawn dropped and the doe froze for a moment, tail clamped tight against her hindquarters, and Jimmy’s daddy said out loud, “Fuck!” The doe looked up, saw him, ran, two hops and she was gone. The fawn was kicking on the ground and Jimmy’s daddy levered another shell into the chamber, the spent one flipping out of the way in a brass blur. He was shaking worse now. Did he need to shoot it again? And how the hell did he shoot four feet to the left of where he was aiming? The fawn was still kicking and Jimmy’s daddy was afraid it was going to run off, so he shot at it again. And nothing happened except the jolt to his shoulder and the echo of the second report rolling out across the pine trees. Rusty was going to hear him. He thought he’d missed it completely that time. Should he shoot again? Was he shooting four feet to the left? Should he hold four feet to the right and shoot again? Jesus. It was still kicking, and now it started making this throat-clogged blatting noise, like a strangling goat. Oh my God. He had to put the little son of a bitch out of its misery. Shoot again? Or get down and cut its throat? None of the hunting videos had ever showed any of this shit. He levered the spent shell out and a fresh one in and held four feet to the right of the fawn and fired. He saw a puff of hair from a hindquarter. But it still wasn’t dead. Of course it wasn’t dead. No way it was dead. You weren’t going to kill anything shooting it in the damn ass. He levered another shell in and sat there. He was going to have to get down and cut its throat. That’s all there was to it. So he stood up and turned around and started down the ladder that Rusty had welded to the deer stand. He made it fine about three steps and then he accidentally bumped the rifle pretty hard against the ladder and it went off almost beside his ear, boom!, which scared him so badly that he dropped it, and grabbed the ladder with both hands just in time to keep from falling off. Oh my God! He’d damn near shot himself! He heard his beloved Marlin Glenfield hit the ground, and that hurt him, and he had to stop for a moment, seventeen feet off the ground, and compose himself. His heart was racing incredibly fast. Son of a bitch hit the ground! From twenty feet up! Holy shit! The little deer was still blatting, and it was an awful sound. But he knew his hunting knife was right there on his belt. What was he going to do, stab it or cut its throat?
He hung there, swaying on the ladder, his breath still fogging out in front of his face. His legs were shaking and he didn’t trust his feet to lower him safely yet. So he had to stand there and listen to the little deer and the noises it was making. He wished it would shut up, and he wondered if Rusty could hear it. He was definitely going to cut his shirt-tail off now. He guessed that bump in the dark this morning must have been harder than he’d thought.
Finally he started lowering himself. He took it slow and made sure he didn’t miss a rung. His hands were cold against the cold metal, and he wished he’d eaten some breakfast. And now it felt like he might be going to have a little diarrhea on top of everything else. But he had put part of a roll of toilet paper in his coat pocket, just in case he needed to go to the bathroom while he was out hunting. So he had thought of one thing to bring.
At last he was on the ground, but he couldn’t see the little deer now. He bent over and picked up his rifle. Oo. Oo-oo. The end of the barrel was full of dirt, must have landed muzzle down. He couldn’t shoot it without getting that shit out of there. It would blow up in his face. And one of the mounting brackets on the back of the scope was bent. It must have fallen over against the tree after it hit the ground. So he just set it back down, sick as a damn dog. Then he started to draw his hunting knife from its scabbard on his belt, but instead he lit a cigarette. It didn’t make any difference now. His quarry was down. And lying somewhere just on the other side of that clump of honeysuckle that had been killed by the frost. He took a few puffs, and then he drew his knife. […]
The little deer wasn’t hard to find, blatting like that. Jimmy’s daddy went forward, cigarette in one hand, knife in the other. He parted the pine saplings with his body and there it was, lying on its side and trying to raise its head, front legs trembling. There was some blood but not much. Jimmy’s daddy eased up to it and stood there looking at it. He’d never been this close to a live one before. He could see the bloody hole in its hind leg, but that wasn’t the shot that knocked it down, he didn’t think. Unless he’d hit it in the same spot twice. He tried not to listen to it, but it was hard not to. It was so loud that he thought anybody around could hear it. And there were other people around. They’d driven past some parked pickups this morning in the dark, a couple of them sitting not too far from where they’d turned off and opened a gate that Rusty had a key to. So he needed to go ahead and shut it up.
But he walked around to the other side, still trying to see where the first shot had hit. And then he saw it. There was a short groove cut right across its back. He’d shot it through the backbone, and he guessed that was why its back legs weren’t moving. What the hell was he going to do, stab it or cut its throat? Somehow he couldn’t stand the idea of cutting its throat, and he knew he had to do something quick, so he stuck the cigarette in his mouth and bent over and pulled its head up by one ear, and stabbed it in the throat. The knife didn’t go in very deep, so he had t
o stab it harder, again. And again. And again and again and again! The little deer blatted and blood dripped from its tongue and spattered on the frozen ground and Jimmy’s daddy thought he might be going to throw up. But it didn’t last long. The little deer relaxed and Jimmy’s daddy turned loose of its ear and watched its head slump to the ground, and while he watched, the dark eye fixed and glazed over like paint healing over in a bucket, only lots faster.
Jimmy’s daddy took the cigarette from his mouth and stood there, panting a little, looking down on it. It didn’t look like much. It looked about like a thirty-pound deer. It looked illegal as hell. Son of a bitch. What the hell? Four feet to the damn left? He wondered if Rusty had any coffee in the pickup. He looked at his knife. It had some blood on it, so he bent and wiped each side of the blade in the frosted grass, then put the knife back into the scabbard on his belt. Then he looked around, still smoking. He was cold again now that all the excitement was over. Maybe he ought to drag it toward Rusty’s pickup and hide it somewhere, and then if he wanted to he could go ahead and get in the pickup. Rusty had put the key on top of the right front tire. There was a cooler in the back and knowing Rusty it had some beer in it. He’d probably warm up dragging the deer. But what if he ran into somebody? What if he ran into some law-abiding son of a bitch who’d run right out to his truck and get on his CB radio and call a game warden? Maybe he needed to hide it here, get his rifle, get the dirt out of the barrel with a little stick if he could find one, go back to the truck, get the key, crank it up, get the heater going and get warm, look in the cooler and get a good cold beer, and then just sit in the truck and drink beer and wait on Rusty to come out of his stand. Take his boots off and rub his cold feet. Let his toes warm up. So that’s what he did.
That night Jimmy’s daddy placed thick-sliced steaks of a pale color over an almost perfect bed of coals, red showing within the gray-ashed briquets, small yellow flames lapping among them, Jimmy sitting quietly on the trailer steps watching him as he sprinkled the steaks with salt and pepper and Worcestershire sauce, and then poked them gently with a fork. He knew not to cook them too long, to keep them naturally tender. He’d read a few deer-cooking recipes here and there. He sipped his beer, glad now that Jimmy hadn’t seen the dead baby deer, just the parts of it that he’d brought home, one hindquarter and one shoulder, since the bullet had ruined the other hindquarter and Rusty had reluctantly accepted the other shoulder as a gift from Jimmy’s daddy, sort of a hunter-sharing-the-spoils thing, saying that it was barely big enough to make a sandwich. They’d skinned it in the woods and chopped it apart with a little sharp hatchet Rusty kept in the truck, Rusty cussing the whole time, and walked out with the three pieces under their coats. Took all the ice and beer out of the cooler and put the meat in the bottom and the ice and beer back on top of it, all the way to the top. Didn’t see a game warden. Didn’t even see a green truck. Didn’t see a soul. Drove right on out with it.