Hunters

by Chet Williamson

  "Like?..."

  "Like any more shootings?"

  "No. At least we have that to be thankful for. I can authoritatively say that as of 2:25 today in Elk County, no hunters have been shot." Ned waited for the punch line, and it came. "At least we haven't heard about it yet."

  Camp Kessler had been founded in 1937, and had been named after a popular blended whisky of the day. Jim Lincoln's father Russell had come up with the name, and the other three men with whom Russell Lincoln had leased the land and built the cabin on it were equally amused by the choice. Though none of the men were heavy drinkers, they thought the name made the camp sound hale and hearty, and on the first day of the 1937 hunting season, they had drunk a toast with a fifth of Kessler.

  That year three of the four men got deer, and one of them shot a second for the less fortunate hunter to take home. With four deer in the first season, the name was considered lucky, and was retained. A plaque was carved for the front door with the first names or nicknames of the camp members, and was updated through the years. Names were never removed, only added, so that by today there were a total of thirty-two names on the weather-worn maple plaque. Six men made up the present membership of Camp Kessler, three of whom were sons of the original four members, and two of whom were their sons.

  Jim Lincoln, one of the second generation, sat inside the one-room cabin, looking through the camp log. He had been lucky enough to get his deer the day before, so far the only member so blessed that season. He had thought about going out and trying to bag one for the one of the others, probably his son Ben, but had decided that it was too damn cold, and stayed at the camp. The fire in the cook stove kept the cabin warm and toasty, and he used the time to fill in the past few days in the log.

  He idly wondered what was happening in the world outside, then dismissed the thought. They had no radio up here, and had never had one. It was a long standing rule of the camp that during the week of deer season, the outside world was barred. The sole electronic device was a small weather radio that would alert them to storms.

  When Jim was done with the log, he read the entries from the old days, and felt waves of nostalgia, both for his own past hunts and for a time he had never known, sweep over him. This was the all too rare time, alone in this cabin, when he most missed and most strongly felt the presence of his father.

  His dad, dead for ten years now, was here all right. He had loved this place better than anywhere else on earth, just as Jim loved it today and, he hoped, Ben did as well. Here, and in the woods outside, was where Jim and his dad had bridged the gap that years had put between them, and first talked as friends and comrades. It was where Jim had first learned that his father was not just a father, but was also a man with his own thoughts and dreams and disappointments.

  Now Jim closed his eyes and sat, listening for the soft, strong voice of his dad, who could checker a gunstock as easily as he could sight in a rifle, and who could tell you exactly where the big buck were going to pass by. Jim heard him, but only in his mind. Still, that was enough, and he spoke aloud in the cabin, talking to his father, telling him about his worries and his joys, saying that he hoped he was as proud of his grandson as Jim was, saying all the things that he would have said if his father could have come back in the flesh.

  When Jim opened his eyes, he could almost see his words drifting upward to the plank roof, seeping into the cracks to stay there always, a part of him merging with the wood of the cabin, to be there when he was long gone, so that Ben could always come, sit quietly, and find a part of his father.

  Then he chuckled at himself, at a middle-aged man's fantasy of seeing ghosts when he knew better. Still, a part of him believed, and, he knew, always would believe. It was harmless, and made him feel better to think some remnant of his dad was still around. He had been too strong a presence in his life to ever think that he was really gone for good.

  The strange thing was the way in which Jim seemed to be becoming his father. His older relatives were the ones who noticed that he now looked a bit like Russell, and his vocal inflections were occasionally so close to his father's that it sometimes gave him a shiver, not of fear, but of delight to know that his dad was still alive in him. Maybe that was our immortality, he thought, to live on in our children. If so, it was enough.

  Jim Lincoln got up and went to the icebox. The big block of ice they had brought in was almost melted, and they had replaced it with chunks chipped from the slow running parts of the stream that passed by the cabin on its winding way to the Sinnemahoning Creek. The misshapen chunks were enough to keep the contents cold, and Jim passed by the cans of Schmidt's to grab a Diet 7Up. The camp rule was no beer until the day's hunting was done, and Jim wasn't much of a beer drinker anyway, having inherited his father's distaste for alcohol, in spite of his having christened Camp Kessler.

  He had just popped the tab when he heard a voice outside. He couldn't make out the words, and thought that one of his campmates was returning, triumphantly, he hoped. But when he opened the door, he saw a stranger.

  The man was big. His red face was clean shaven, and he was immaculately geared. He was cradling a .30-06 that looked either new or very well cared for. "How are you?" Jim said, thinking that it had grown colder since he had last been out. His words made huge puffs of steam in the cold air.

  "Doin' good," the man said. "Better if I bagged myself somethin'. You wouldn't be Jim now, would ya?"

  "Yeah, I'm Jim. Do I know you?"

  "Ran into Ben yesterday—that's your boy, right?. We got talkin' and he told me about your camp here. Mighty pretty."

  Jim smiled with pride. "Well, it keeps us warm anyway."

  "God knows that's important." The stranger looked at Jim's buck hanging head down from a long iron pipe. "See somebody got one."

  "Yep," Jim said. "Got him yesterday."

  "Lucky you. Everybody else still lookin' for one?"

  Jim nodded. "Still hunting. I was pretty lucky, I guess. Got him just a quarter mile from here. About a fifty yard shot. Ten-point. Going to have him caped and mounted. Never did it before, but this is the biggest one I've ever gotten."

  The stranger nodded. "Gonna stick his head up, huh? Well, you're right, that's a pretty big deer. I get a trophy like that, it'd be fun to stick its head up, that's for sure." The man laughed then, and Jim wondered what was so funny. When the man looked at him again, his stare seemed as though he were appraising Jim in some way. The sudden silence bothered Jim, and he felt that he had to say something to break it.

  "So did you get a shot at any so far?" he asked the man.

  "Oh yeah, I got a shot all right. In fact, I brought one down yesterday."

  "...But I thought you were still hunting."

  "I am." He grinned.

  "But if you got one already..."

  "I don't pay much attention to limits," the stranger said. "Way I look at it is, the more I get, the better I am."

  A surge of anger shivered through Jim. "That's a...pretty selfish way to look at it, isn't it? When there are hunters out here who haven't gotten any yet?"

  The man stuck out his lower lip in a mockery of contemplation. "No, not really. See, me and them, we're huntin' different things. In fact, my only competition is my campmates. And by cracky, as if right on cue, here they come now." The man looked behind Jim.

  Jim turned and saw three more people coming up through the open area by the stream. It surprised him that two were women, and that fact made him feel even more uncomfortable. The conversation had been cryptic so far, and Jim felt that there was something underlying it that he might not want to know about. Hunting different things? What the hell was that supposed to mean?

  "Ahoy, campmates!" the big man shouted. "I was just talkin' to Jim here. He's the only one who killed a deer so far. Everybody else is out huntin'." He turned back to Jim and said, more softly, "It's just Jim and us."

  Jim Lincoln knew something was very wrong then. He was standing right by the open door. If he managed to get
through it and slam and lock it, he could maybe get the handgun that he had brought up for plinking soda cans. But then what? Load it before they smashed through the door? And where the hell was it? And where were the bullets?

  It seemed he couldn't remember anything, and while he was making his plans, the big man stepped right up next to him and put a gloved hand on his shoulder, and Jim knew it was too late for any plans. "Why don't you invite us all inside?" the big man said.

  Jim eyed the three newcomers. They looked scary to him. The taller of the two women would have been beautiful if not for the grim expression on her face. Her glance kept flicking back and forth between the hanging buck and Jim, and he didn't like what he saw in her narrowed eyes. Her thick-lipped mouth was clamped so tightly that the skin around it was white, and she held her rifle as though she couldn't wait to use it.

  The face of the man standing next to her was vacant. Jim could read no emotion in it at all. The shorter of the women, however, wore a broad, close-mouthed smile that nearly sliced her rosy face in half. When he looked at her, she giggled, and though he wanted to read her laughter as friendly, he couldn't. There was something about her eyes and her smile that made him think she might be crazy.

  His gaze held on her in spite of himself, and she said, "It's really cold out here, man. We'd appreciate getting warm," and giggled again.

  Jim backed through the door, afraid to turn his back on any of them. He set his hand on the door and thought about taking a chance and slamming it shut, but the big man shook his head. "Man, don't even think about it. It would really be dumb, and it would kind of annoy us." Jim dropped his hand and kept walking backwards into the cabin.

  The four followed, the big man first, then the two women and the other man, who closed the door behind them. The big man went to the table, pulled out a chair, sat down, and looked at the tall woman. "So what's the agenda, Jeannie?...sorry, Jean?"

  The woman didn't look at the big man. She kept her gaze fixed on Jim, and didn't speak. "Look," Jim said, trying to sound calm and reasonable, "who are you folks?"

  "Yeah," the shorter woman said, "we oughta introduce ourselves. I'm Samantha, but my friends call me Sam. You can call me Sam."

  He tried to smile. His throat felt dry as dust. "Hi, Sam."

  "Hi, Jimbo. And this is Jean, and this is Michael, and this crazy guy is Chuck." She went to the table, put her arms around the big man's neck from behind and chanted, "Chuck Chuck bo-buck banana fanna fo-fuck...Chuck!" She giggled again.

  "Why do you hunt?"

  The question, asked in a dull, flat tone, jerked Jim around to face the woman called Jean. He thought he had heard her correctly, but he didn't know what to say, didn't know what she wanted to hear.

  "I asked you why you hunt," she said. "You killed that deer outside, didn't you?"

  He cleared his throat. "Yes."

  "Why?"

  "I...I've hunted for years. With my father. Ever since I was a boy."

  She sneered at him. "I didn't ask for your life history, I asked you why! Why you do it."

  What the hell was this? Why were they all out here, and what did they all have guns for if they weren't hunters themselves? He strove desperately to answer a question that he had never asked himself. It was like asking why you got up every morning and went to work, or why you ate, or why you breathed. It was just something he did. "Well...for the, the food, um, for the friends, uh, the sport—"

  "The sport?" The word shook him. He felt as though he had just been caught by the teacher doing something he should be ashamed of. "You call that a sport? Just standing around until a beautiful creature like the one outside comes walking by and then you just shoot it? And then you rip it open and pull out its guts and put its head on your wall to show what a brave hunter you are? That's sport?"

  Jim knew he shouldn't allow himself to get angry, but he couldn't help it. Who the hell was she—who were any of them—to tell him what to do? "It's not that easy," he said. "There's a lot more to hunting than that. You don't just walk into the woods and get a buck."

  "You want meat," the man called Michael said, "go to the supermarket. You want friends, join a club. You want sport, go play racquetball."

  "Yay, all right!" Sam said, clapping her hands.

  "You all...the four of you," Jim said, "You're not hunters, are you?"

  "'Take up your guns and follow me,'" Chuck misquoted, "'and I will make you hunters of men.'"

  "What gave us away?" said Jean dryly.

  Words were not in Jim's purview, so he searched for them in a near panic. If these people were really hunters of men, his life might depend on what he said. "Because you don't understand. You don't know what hunters...do for wildlife management."

  Chuck leaned his chair back on two legs. "Uh-oh. I feel a sermon comin' on."

  "It's not a sermon, it's the truth. Hunters got to thin the herd. If they don't, more deer would starve to death during the winter than already do."

  "That's bullshit," said Jean. "I've heard all that crap before. 'Harvesting the herds,' they call it. Like wildlife is one more crop like wheat or corn. Well, it isn't. No one grew deer. They were here long before the Europeans ever got to this continent."

  "And if those early Americans hadn't hunted deer, young lady," Jim said, "none of us would be here today."

  "Don't you patronize me," Jean said. Her anger seemed to have suddenly increased so much that Jim was afraid she would bring the gun up. "Don't you call me young lady or miss or anything, you understand?"

  "Okay. Okay, I'm sorry."

  "I'm through talking to you. You don't have any idea of why you do what you do, I'll tell you. You hunt because it makes you feel like a big man."

  "Yeah, Jimbo," Sam added, "and your gun's your dick because you probably can't get it up." She giggled again, and the sound made Jim's already flushed face even redder.

  "Shut up, Sam," Jean said, and Sam giggled again, louder, as if to challenge the other woman, but Jean ignored it. "But what she said is true. Your rifle's an extension of your penis. Now you'd deny that, but that's just because you've never looked at it that way, and if you did, you could never admit it to yourself."

  "Look," said Jim, "I like to hunt, that's all. There's no big mystery about it. I use the meat—"

  "You hunt because you ain't got the meat, Jimbo," Sam said, and buried her face in her hands and laughed.

  "I got another theory," said Chuck. Jim saw the commanding look that Jean shot at him, but Chuck ignored it. "I think that you got a lot of anger in you, Jim, that you're pissed off at your wife, at your job, at a lot of things, but you can't do a damn thing about it. So you come on out here and you shoot a deer, and you go, 'Hey, Mister Deer, take that...hey boss, bite on that bullet, hey wife, suck on this,' see what I mean? You don't have the stones to do it in your everyday shitfull life, so you take it out on the poor dumb deer. And I think that's what all you hunters do. And that ain't right, Jim. You think that's right?"

  "That's not the way it is. You don't know what you're talking about."

  "No." Jean shook her head. "You don't know what you're talking about. And I don't want to hear any more. Now take your clothes off...Jim."

  "Take my...what?"

  "Get undressed."

  "Yeah," said Sam. "Buck naked!" Her giggle was supplanted by a laugh that Jim thought sounded mean.

  "No," Jim folded his arms. He had had enough. If they wanted to hurt him, well, let them do it.

  "Do it!" Jean's rifle came up so that the round black eye of its barrel stared at Jim.

  "What the hell do you people want?" Jim said, dropping his arms and forming his hands into fists.

  Jean advanced upon him and jabbed the rifle barrel into the small of his throat so that he gagged. "We just want to convince people that it's not such a good idea to hunt deer in northern Pennsylvania. Now strip."

  He pulled away from the gun and felt his back bump against the wall. "The hell with you. If you're gonna shoot me, go ahead and do it
. I'm not taking my clothes off." He was willing to die rather than do what she said. He thought that they would kill him anyway, and he would not give this woman the perverse pleasure of humiliating him as well.

  "All right, Jim," Jean said, dropping the barrel slightly. He could see in her furious eyes that her will was as great as his. "Make you a deal. Your son Ben's going to be back here sometime. Now if you don't cooperate with us, we can do some things to Ben that no father should see happen to his son, you see what I mean? Samantha here can make Lorena Bobbitt look like a surgeon."

  The shorter girl nodded vigorously. "I can, Jimbo. The messier the better, far as I'm concerned."

  "You bitch...don't you touch him. Keep your goddam hands off my boy..." He moved toward her, but Jean raised her rifle again, and Sam reached into her coat and came out with a long-bladed hunting knife.

  "Relax, daddy," Sam said. "And drop them duds."

  Jean nodded. "I mean it, Jim. You don't do what I say, we'll not only kill your son, but we'll hurt him bad before we're through."

  Jim stood there for a full minute, trembling with fury and embarrassment. Then he reached up and slowly began to unbutton his red wool hunting shirt. His fingers felt huge and leaden, and the buttons seemed a foot wide and the buttonholes only an inch long. He wondered if Ben or one of the others would return soon. With luck, several might come in together. He hoped for it even as he feared it, and wished there were some way to tell them to just stay away, stay in the woods until he was beaten or dead and these maniacs were gone and it was all over.

  "All right," Sam said. "I dig a man who wears those cool long underwear tops."

  "Be quiet, Sam," Jean said, and Sam snickered in response. "Keep going."

  Jim unlaced his shoes and kicked them off, then unbuckled his belt and opened his trousers. At the table, Chuck gave a whistle through his teeth, which set Sam giggling again. Jim could feel his cheeks suffuse with blood. He thought of Ben, and dropped his pants. The socks and long johns followed, and now he stood there shivering in his boxer shorts.

  "Ooo, I see goose pimples," Chuck said.