Tracker

by Gary Paulsen

  In panic, in a clearing, she voided all her fluids and solid waste in a small pile that lay steaming in the snow, sinking, and she ran on.

  John came upon the pile and it was still hot, still giving off airs and he knelt to smell it. He could taste the smell, acid on the sides of his tongue, and he looked up and he knew her from the smell and the taste, knew that no other deer would have that smell or taste and even if he lost the trail now he could go by smell and that wasn’t the same. That made him different. He couldn’t smell that way before and that made him part of the doe. He would stay on her, keep after her until he owned her. No, more than that, more than owning.

  He would touch her and touch himself and touch his grandfather’s spirit and touch death and he would win.

  It was all with the doe, all of it—and he loved her.

  He would touch her, and he loved her. Loved her deeply—what she was and the way she looked and what she meant. She had brought him out, danced before him in the winter, danced and pulled him into the swamp. Part of him said that it couldn’t be, but another part of him knew that the doe had come for him at the barn—come for him and danced him away.

  In the night he was crazy, a little, and some of it came from being tired and some of it from thinking about his grandfather. The craziness came in short flashes and mixed with being not crazy so he couldn’t tell the difference. And he didn’t care.

  The gray of false dawn showed him closer to the doe. He could see her now, see her often. Her bursts of running, open mouthed and hard, stretched only two hundred yards and he saw her moving ahead in the willows and across the clearings, looking back in fright, spit dripping from her tongue out the side of her mouth.

  The deer.

  And when full light came he hated himself as much as he loved the deer. She was running until her front legs collapsed, running until she caved in, and she plowed down into the snow and then up, staggering, to run again and he hated himself for driving her that way but he couldn’t stop, couldn’t make himself stop now.

  He must touch her.

  He must own her.

  He must own-love-touch the doe and when that happened his grandfather would not die.

  ELEVEN

  He had tracked her all that first day and all of that night, following in the moonlight and the new clean snow and through the next morning, and when the sun was highest his brain did not work right anymore.

  He was tired beyond bearing, tired beyond the doe, weaving and staggering and falling and still not stopping. By midday there was nothing for him but the doe and the touching of the doe and it was no longer possible to distinguish between what was real and what was not.

  Once in the morning light he watched the doe ahead of him and saw her turn and swore there was a light around her head. The light moved with her neck movements, was not a halo so much as a glow that came from within the doe and it was still there even when he wiped his eyes. The light stayed for five or six minutes and did not disappear until the doe staggered into some willows and was lost from sight.

  Again, later, he was looking at the doe and it seemed that everything he saw in front of him was a mirror. Seemed that the doe was actually in back of him and that everything that was going to happen had already happened in back of him. It made his mind whirl and then his vision fogged and he fell down and would have stayed down again but for the doe.

  She moved and he followed.

  By noon she could not run but seemed to fall forward, fall away from him and just keep falling, with her legs catching up only to fall again for miles and miles.

  And he came the same way. John was falling and making his legs catch up—he did not feel tired anymore, didn’t feel anything.

  At one in the afternoon he began seeing the doe all the time. She was blown out completely and could not even make the pretense of running. Instead she worked just to stay ahead of him, just ahead, always in sight—never more than a hundred yards, often less then fifty.

  He saw her.

  At one point she vomited from stress and there was some blood in it, blood mixed with bits of bark fiber from the last time she’d eaten, over a day before, and when he came on it he was sickened and felt the bile rise and he, too, vomited.

  The air was warm and he hung his jacket over a bush, stuck his cap in his back pocket and poured sweat still. The sun was full on his back now as he worked north and he made sounds that weren’t human, yet weren’t animal—sounds from his throat as he watched her stagger and fall away from him, first to the left and then to the right.

  At last when she went down she didn’t get up as fast and then each time she fell she was slower to get up and he kept coming.

  Coming—until there came a time when he was nearly on her before she got up, only to fall again, and then she didn’t get up.

  She was blown. Her ribs heaved for air as his did, her eyes showed edges of red, her mouth was open and her tongue stuck out to the side and he thought he’d never seen anything so awful and ugly and beautiful at the same time.

  The doe was his and he didn’t have to kill her, give her death, and he moved forward to her, on his hands and knees now, crawling, lunging, and she jerked to get away once and fell and he saw it as a picture, the doe on her side, heaving air, the yellow in the snow where she urinated in fear, the fear and the madness around her, the wild eyes, and he reached out and he touched her.

  He was there and his hand went out and he touched her and then he fell, down and down in the snow and when he opened his eyes in a minute, an hour, a lifetime, she was gone.

  He got up and stood, weaving, looking back on his trail. The sun was afternoon hot and he had touched her and she was gone, gone, but he had done it.

  He knew because the yellow was still on the snow and there were flecks of blood from her nostrils and the imprint of her muzzle in the white.

  He had touched her.

  And now he had to get home and tell his grandfather that he had done it, he had won and there would be life now—life taken from death. Life taken back.

  TWELVE

  It was dark again when John reached the farm, dark and cold. He stopped in the woods on a small rise and looked at the house.

  He couldn’t tell his grandfather what had happened—at least not all of it. He had been chewing on it since he’d left the doe, walking all day in a thought haze. She had run in great loops and circles of fear but not a terrible distance from the farm. When he’d regained some of his thoughts he knew where he was and took a straight line back to the rifle and from there home—a seven-hour walk.

  Seven hours of wondering what he would say to his grandfather and now the time had come. He would have to say something but he couldn’t tell him of cheating death—that wouldn’t work either.

  The doe had taught him much, not about death but about life. And yet it was not something he could share with anybody—it was not something he was sure he really understood himself. It was just a thing that was—a way for something to be. She made him see a new way, but he could not make others do the same. They had to have their own deer.

  His legs were on fire and the pain seemed worse now that he was close to home. He staggered down to the porch and leaned the rifle in the corner and stomped clear of snow and went in.

  They were sitting at the kitchen table, just as they always sat. Relief flooded his grandfather’s face, a clearing away of wrinkles, but he said nothing.

  His grandmother coughed and cleared her throat, and he could see mist in the corners of her eyes, small tears.

  “We were worried,” she said, controlling her voice. “It came on to being long—longer than you’ve ever been at hunting.”

  John shook his coat off and hung it up and sat at the table, still silent.

  “For all that you didn’t make meat?” His grandfather lit his pipe, making clouds of smoke. He only smoked when he wanted to think before talking, he’d once told John. “Two days and some and no meat?”

  John studied him. “It�
�s not like it was before …” He trailed off, said nothing more for a long minute.

  “What isn’t? What’s changed?”

  And that’s it, John thought, the idea searing across the front of his mind—what has changed? Had touching the deer altered anything? Was there not still death—still death coming to his grandfather?

  “I … I found a doe and I followed her,” he started, but it wasn’t coming out right.

  “For two days you followed a doe? And you didn’t get a shot?”

  John looked out the window yet could see nothing but the reflected room. The tablecloth with the pattern, the glow of the lamp—it was like another world facing the world he was in. A world that was the same and yet the opposite and he wished he were in the mirror world.

  “A thing changed,” John said. “A thing changed in hunting, in everything, and I walked after her but didn’t shoot her.”

  His grandparents said nothing, waited.

  “And I walked for two days and then I touched her. Actually two days, and a night. And when I touched her everything changed—everything about the way we are and what’s happening.”

  He finished lamely, letting it simply end. His grandmother took a plate of meat and potatoes from the oven and put it in front of him. She had known somehow that he was coming because it wasn’t stale food, still fresh. Or maybe she’d just kept a different plate warm each night. No, he thought, she’d known somehow—just as she always knows.

  His grandfather put his pipe down. He never smoked when anybody was eating. He looked at John, then out the window. “You touched her? You really touched a live deer?”

  John nodded. “I walked and walked and touched her. She couldn’t get up.”

  Another long pause.

  “Ain’t that something, Aggie?” his grandfather said. “He walked one down. Ain’t that something?”

  And there was a thing in his voice that John had never heard before. A touch of pride, perhaps; a building of something.

  “I’ll take that with me,” his grandfather went on. “That’s something I’ll just take with me.”

  John had a forkful of meat halfway to his mouth and he stopped, put the fork down. He was surprised to see that his grandfather was crying, crying as he looked at his reflection in the window—or just looked out the window—and two thoughts cut through the tiredness in his mind, burned into his brain.

  The first was that his grandfather was going to die. He would die and there was nothing John could do about it—nothing touching the doe could do about it. Death would come.

  And the second thing was that death was a part of it all, a part of living. It was awful, a taking of life, but it happened to all things, as his grandfather said, would happen to John someday. Dying was just as much a part of Clay Borne as living.

  “Tomorrow, I do the chores,” John said. “You take it easy.”

  After that there was just the food and keeping his eyes open until he went up the stairs to bed where he dreamt of the doe and his grandfather and awakened in sweat when the dream became too real.

  But he made no sound and went back to sleep evenly, even thoughts of the doe washed from his mind.

  Keep reading for a sneak peek of This Side of Wild!

  • CHAPTER ONE •

  A Confusion of Horses, a Border Collie named Josh, a Grizzly Bear Who Liked Holes, and a Poodle with Three Teeth

  First, a hugely diversionary trail:

  Very few paths are completely direct, and this one seemed at first to be almost insanely devious.

  The doctor diagnosed various problems, some lethal, all apparently debilitating, and left me taking various medications and endless rituals of check-ins and checkouts and tests and retests. . . .

  Which drove me almost directly away from the whole process. I moved first to Wyoming, a small town called Story, near Sheridan, where I kept staring at the beauty of the Bighorn Mountains, accessed by a trail out of Story, and at last succumbed to the idea of two horses, one for riding and one for packing.

  The reasoning was this: I simply could not stand what I had become—stale, perhaps, or stalemated by what appeared to be my faltering body. Clearly I could not hike the Bighorns, or at least I thought I could not (hiking, in any case, was something I had come to dislike—hate—courtesy of the army), and so to horses.

  My experience with riding horses was most decidedly limited. As a child on farms in northern Minnesota, I had worked with workhorse teams—mowing and raking hay, cleaning barns with crude sleds and manure forks—and in the summer we would sometimes ride these workhorses.

  They were great, massive (weighing more than a ton), gentle animals and so huge that to get on their backs we either had to climb their legs—like shinnying up a living, hair-covered tree—or get them to stand near a board fence or the side of a hayrack (a wagon with tall wheels and a flatbed used for hauling hay from the field to the barn) so we could jump up and over onto their backs.

  Once we were on their backs, with a frantic kicking of bare heels and amateur screaming of what we thought were correct-sounding obscenities—mimicked from our elders—and goading, they could sometimes be persuaded to plod slowly across the pasture while we sat and pretended to be Gene Autry or Roy Rogers—childhood cowboy heroes who never shot to kill but always neatly shot the guns from the bad guys’ hands and never kissed the damsels but rode off into the sunset at the end of the story. We would ride down villains who robbed stagecoaches or in other ways threatened damsels in distress, whom we could save and, of course, never kiss, but ride off at the end of our imagination.

  The horses were—always—gentle and well behaved, and while they looked nothing like Champion or Trigger—Gene’s and Roy’s wonderful, pampered, combed, and shampooed lightning steeds (Champ was a bay, a golden brown, as I remember it, and Trigger was a palomino, with a blond, flowing mane and tail)—we were transformed into cowboys. With our crude, wood-carved six-guns and battered straw garden hats held on with pieces of twine, imagined with defined clarity that the pasture easily became the far Western range and every bush hid a marauding stage robber or a crafty rustler bent on stealing the poor rancher (my uncle, the farmer) blind.

  Oh, it was not always so smooth. While they were wonderfully gentle and easy-minded, they had rules, and when those rules were broken, sometimes their retaliation was complete and devastating. On Saturday nights we went to the nearby town—a series of wood-framed small buildings, all without running water or electricity—wherein lived seventy or eighty people. There was a church there and a saloon, and in back of the saloon an added-on frame shack building with a tattered movie screen and a battery-operated small film projector. They showed the same Gene Autry film all the time, and in this film, Gene jumped out of the second story of a building onto the back of a waiting horse.

  We, of course, had to try it, and I held the horse—or tried to—while my friend jumped from the hayloft opening in the barn onto the horse’s waiting back.

  He bounced once—his groin virtually destroyed—made a sound like a broken water pump, slid down the horse’s leg, and was kicked in a flat trajectory straight to the rear through the slatted-board wall of the barn. He lived, though I still don’t quite know how; his flying body literally knocked the boards from the wall.

  I personally went the way of the Native Americans and made a bow of dried willow, with arrows of river cane sharpened to needlepoints and fletched crudely with tied-on chicken feathers plucked from the much-offended egg layers in the coop, which I used to hunt “buffalo” off the back of Old Jim.

  Just exactly where it went wrong we weren’t sure, but I’m fairly certain that nobody had ever shot an arrow from Old Jim’s back before. And I’m absolutely positive that no one had shot said arrow so that the feathers brushed his ears on the way past.

  The “buffalo” was a hummock of black dirt directly in front of Jim, and while I couldn’t get him into a run, or even a trot, no matter what I tried, I’m sure he was moving at a relatively fas
t walk when I drew my mighty willow bow and sent the cane shaft at the pile of dirt.

  Just for the record, and no matter what my relatives might say, I did not hit the horse in the back of his head.

  Instead the arrow went directly between Jim’s ears, so low the chicken feathers brushed the top of his head as they whistled past.

  The effect was immediate and catastrophic. Old Jim somehow gave a mighty one-ton shrug so that all his enormous strength seemed to be focused on squirting me straight into the air like a pumpkin seed, and I fell, somersaulting in a shower of cane arrows and the bow, with a shattering scream on my part and hysterical laughter on the part of the boy with me.

  “You looked like a flying porcupine!” he yelled. “Stickers going everywhere . . . You was lucky you wasn’t umpaled.”

  Which was largely true and seemed to establish the modus operandi for the rest of my horse-riding life. I do know that I couldn’t get close to Old Jim if I had anything that even remotely resembled a stick for the rest of that summer.

  Horses are unique in many ways, though—and I know there will be wild disagreement here—not as smart as dogs, certainly when it comes to math.

  I knew nothing of them then and perhaps little more now. But one of those summers I experimented with rodeo.

  I was not good at it, to say the very least, and for me it was a particularly stupid thing to do because I was indeed so incredibly bad at it, and I did not do it for any length of time.

  I tried bareback bronc riding for a few weeks. I learned some things: I learned intimately how the dirt in Montana tasted and learned that next to old combat veteran infantry sergeants, rodeo riders are the toughest (and kindest and most helpful) people on earth.

  But I learned absolutely nothing about horses. I rarely made a good ride, a full ride, but even if I had, you cannot learn much in eight seconds on an animal’s back. . . .