A Thousand Deer

by Rick Bass

  When the men went north in the fall, I’d stand there on the porch with my mother and watch them drive off. It would often be raining, and I’d step out into the rain to feel it on my face—and I’d know that they were going to a place of wildness, a place where they came from. I did not seriously believe that I would ever be old enough to go in the fall myself.

  Instead, I sought out the woods I could reach. We lived out near the west edge of Houston, near what is now the Beltway. We lived a few hundred yards from the slow curls of Buffalo Bayou. While the men in my family went up into the Hill Country (and at all other times of the year), I would spend my time in the tiny de facto wilderness between outlying subdivisions. Back in those still-undeveloped woods was a stagnating swamp, an old oxbow cut off from the rest of the bayou. You had to almost get lost to find it. I called it “Hidden Lake,” and I would wade out into the swamp and seine for minnows, crawdads, mudpuppies, and tadpoles with a soup strainer. In those woods, not a mile from the Houston city limits, I saw turtles, bats, skunks, snakes, raccoons, deer, flying squirrels, rabbits, and armadillos. There were bamboo thickets, too, and the bayou itself, with giant alligator gars floating in patches of sunlit chocolate water, and hanging Spanish moss back in the old forest, and wild violets growing along the bayou’s banks. A lot of wildness can exist in a small place, if it is the right kind of country.

  This country was too rich to last. The thick oaks fell to the saw, as did the dense giant hickories, and the sun-towering, wind-silent pines. It’s all concrete now; even the banks of the bayou have been channeled with cement. I remember my shock at finding the first survey stakes, out in the grasslands (where once there were buffalo) leading into those big woods along the bayou’s rich edge. I remember asking my mother if the survey stakes meant someone was going to build a house out there—a cabin, perhaps. When told that a road was coming, I pulled the stakes up, but the road came anyway, and then the office buildings and the highway and the subdivisions.

  The men would come back from the woods after a week or so. They would have bounty with them—a deer strapped to the hood of the car, heavy with antlers (in those days people in the city did not have trucks), or a wild turkey. A pocket of blackjack acorns; a piece of granite. An old rusting wolf trap found while out walking; an arrowhead. A piece of iron ore, red as jewels. And always, they brought back stories: more stories, it seemed, than you could ever tell.

  Sometimes my father or uncle would have something new about him—something that I had not seen when he’d left. A cut in the webbing of his hand, from where he’d been cleaning the deer. Or a light in his eyes, a kind of easiness. A smell of woodsmoke. These were men who had moved to the city and taken city jobs, who drove to work every morning wearing a suit, but when they came back from the Hill Country, there were the beginnings of beards. There was always something different about them.

  At the Museum of Natural History every Saturday, I breathed window-fog against the aquarium panes, my face pressed against the glass as I watched the giant softshell turtles paddle slowly through their eerie green light. I bought a little rock sample of magnetite from the gift shop. The little placard that came with the magnetite said it was from Llano County, Texas. The deer pasture’s thousand acres straddles Llano and Gillespie counties. This only fueled the fire of my love for a country I had not even seen—a country I could feel in my heart, however, and in my hands, to the tips of my fingers—and a country whose energy resonated all the way out into the plains, down into the flatlands.

  All that sweet water, just beneath our feet. But only so much of it: not inexhaustible. We weren’t supposed to take more than was given to us. That was one of the rules of the system. My father, and the other men who hunted it, understood about this system; for them, the land—like our family itself—was a continuum. Each year, each step hiked across those steep slickrock hills, gave them more stories, more knowledge.

  I’d grip that rough glittering magnetite like a talisman, would put my fingers to it and try to feel how it was different from other rocks—would try to feel the pull, the affinity it had for things made of iron. I’d hold it up to my arms and try to feel if it stirred my blood, and I believed that I could feel it.

  I’d fall asleep listening to the murmur of the baseball game on the radio, with the rock stuck magically to the iron frame of my bed. In the morning I would sometimes take the rock and place it up against my father’s compass. I’d watch as the needle always followed the magnetite, and I felt my heart, and everything else inside me, swing with that needle.

  When we run out of country, we will run out of stories. When we run out of stories, we will run out of sanity. We will not be able to depend on each other for anything—not for friendship or mercy, nor love or understanding. There are those who believe we should protect a wild core such as the Texas Hill Country because it is a system still intact, rife with the logic and sanity that these days eludes all too often our lives in the cities. I would agree, but think the Hill Country’s core is worthy of protection too simply for its own sake, to show that we are still capable of understanding (and practicing) the concept of honor: loving a thing the way it is, and trying, for once, to not change it.

  I like to think that in all the years we’ve been hunting and camping on that rough, hidden thousand acres—through which Willow Creek cuts, flows, forks, and twists, with murmuring waterfalls over one- and two-foot ledges, the water sparkling—I like to think that we have not changed it a bit.

  I know that it has changed us. My grandfather hunted that country, as have his sons, and now we, my brothers and cousins hunt it with them, and already in the spring, we bring our young children into the country to show them the part, the huge part, that is not hunting (and yet which for us is all inseparable from the hunting): the fields of bluebonnets and crimson paintbrushes, the baby raccoons, the quail, the Zonetail hawks, and vultures circling over Hudson Mountain, the pink capital domes of granite rising all through the land, as if there once here lived a civilization even more ancient than their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents . . .

  A continuous thing is so rare, these days, when fragmentation seems, more than ever, to be the rule of the universe. I remember the first time I walked with my older daughter at the deer pasture. The granite chat crunched under her tiny tennis shoes and she gripped my finger tight to keep from falling. The sound of that gravel underfoot (the pink mountains being worn away, along with our bodies) was a sound I’d heard all my life at the deer pasture, but this time, this first time, with my daughter gripping my finger and looking down at the loose pink gravel that was making that sound, it affected me so strongly that I felt faint, felt so light that I thought I might take flight.

  A country, a landscape, can be sacred in an infinite number of ways. The quartz boulders in my mother’s garden—my father brought her one each year.

  Other families had store-bought Doug fir or blue spruce trees for Christmas; we had the spindly strange mountain juniper from the deer pasture. Even though we lived to the south, we were still connected to the center of the state, and these rituals and traditions were important to us, so fiercely felt and believed in that one might even call them a form of worship. We were raised Protestants, but were cutting a very fine line, tightroping along the mystical edge of pantheism. When Granddaddy was dying, just this side of ninety, and we went to see him in the hospital room in Fort Worth, I took a handful of arrowhead chips from the deer pasture and put them under his bed. It seemed inconceivable to me that he not die as he had lived—always in some kind of contact with that wildness, the specificity of that thousand acres.

  When my mother was sick—a small, young, and beautiful woman, all of her life—the strongest and best patient they’d ever seen, the doctors all said—she was ill for a long time, living for two years solely on the fire and passion within, long after the marrow had left her bones and the doctors could not bring it back, and still she never had anything other than a smile for each day she saw.
When she was sick my father and brothers and I would take turns bringing her flowers from the deer pasture in the dead sullen heat of summer, the shimmering brightness. We’d ride around in the jeep, wearing straw hats. We’d get out and walk down the creek, down to the rock slide: stream-polished granite with a sheet of water trickling over it, a twenty-foot half-dome slide down into the plunger pool waiting below, cool clear water six feet deep, with a mud turtle (his face striped yellow, as if with war paint) and two big Midland softshell turtles (an endangered species) living in that pond. An osprey nest, huge branches and sticks, in the dead cottonwood at the pool’s edge.

  My brothers and I would slide down that half-dome, down into the pool, again and again. A hundred degrees, in the summer. We’d go up and down the algae-slicked rock slide like otters. We’d chase the turtles, would hold our breath and swim after them, paddling underwater in that lucid cold pool, while our parents sat up in the rocks above and watched. What a gift it is to see one’s children happy and engaged in the world, and loving it.

  We’d walk farther down the creek, then: a family. Changed. Fuller. My mother would finish her tea, would rattle the ice cubes in her plastic cup. She always drank her tea with a sprig of mint in it. At some point on one of our walks she must have tossed her ice cubes and mint sprig out because now there are two little mint fields along the creek: one by the camp house and one down at the water gap. I don’t hunt there much any more: some, but not as much. I like to sit in the rocks above those mint patches for hours, and look, and listen, and smell, and think. I feel the sun dappling on my arms, and I watch the small birds flying around in the old oaks and cedars along the creek. Goshawks courting, in April. Turkeys gobbling. I like to sit there above the mint fields and feel my soul cutting down through that bedrock. It’s happening fast.

  Seen from below as it drifts high in the hot blue sky, a Zonetail hawk looks just like the vultures it floats with, save for its yellow legs. (Vultures’ legs are gray.) The Zonetail’s prey will glance up, study the vultures for a moment, and then resume nibbling grass. The Zonetail will drop from that flock of vultures like a bowling ball.

  Afterward, if there is any left, perhaps the vultures can share in the kill.

  Golden-cheeked warblers come up into this country from Mexico, endangered, exotic blazes of color who have chosen to grace the Hill Country with their nests in the spring, to place their hopes for the future deep in the cool shade of the old-growth cedars, the kind whose bark peels off in tatters and wisps, like feathers, and which the warblers must have to build their nests with.

  As the old-growth cedar is cut to make way for more and more range land, the brown cowbird, a drab bully that follows the heavy ways of cattle, lays its eggs in the warblers’ delicate nests, then flees, leaving the warbler mother with extra eggs to take care of. The cowbird nestlings are larger when they’re born, and they out-clamor the beautiful gold-cheeked warbler babies for food and push them out of the nest. Why must the ways of man, and the things associated with man, be so clumsy? Can’t we re-learn grace (and all the other things that follow from that) by studying the integrity of a system, one of the last systems, that’s still intact? Why must we bring our cowbirds with us, everywhere we go? Must we break everything that is special to us or sacred—unknown, and holy—into halves, and then fourths, and then eighths, and then . . .

  What happens to us when all the whole is gone—when there is no more whole? There will be only fragments of stories, fragments of culture. Even a child standing on the porch in Houston with the rain in his face can look north and know that it is all tied together, that we are the warblers, we are the Zonetails, we are the underground river: that some of it should not be allowed to disappear, as has so much, and so many of us, already.

  Sycamores grow by running water; cottonwoods grow by still water. If we know the simple mysteries, then think of all the complex mysteries that lie just beneath us, buried in the bedrock: the bedrock we have been entrusted with protecting. How could we dare do anything other than protect and honor this last core, the land from which we came, the land that has marked us, and whose essence, whose mystery, contains our own essence and mystery? How can we conceive of severing that last connection? Surely all internal fire, all passion, would vanish from us in a second.

  Stories. On my Uncle Jimmy’s left calf, there is a scar from where the wild pigs caught him one night. He and my father were coming back to camp after dark when he got in between a sow and boar and their piglets. The piglets squealed in fright, which ignited the rage of the sow and boar. My father went up one tree, and Uncle Jimmy up another, but the boar caught Jimmy with his tusk, cut the muscle clean to the bone. Back in camp, Granddaddy and his friend John Dallas and Howard and old Mr. Brooks (there for dominoes that night) heard all the yelling, as did their dogs. They came running with hounds and lanterns, globes of light swinging crazily through the woods. They stumbled into the middle of the pigs themselves. My father and Uncle Jimmy were up in the tops of small trees like raccoons. There were pigs everywhere, pigs and dogs fighting, men dropping lanterns and climbing trees . . . . That one boar could have held an entire town at bay. It ran all the dogs off and kept all the men treed there in the darkness for more than an hour, Uncle Jimmy’s pant leg wet with blood, and fireflies blinking down on the creek below, and the boar’s angry grunts, the sow’s furious snuffling, and the frightened murmurs of the little pigs . . . . The logic of that system was inescapable: don’t get between a sow and boar and their young.

  The land, and our stories, have marked us.

  My father and I are geologists. Uncle Jimmy and his two youngest sons manufacture steel pipe and sell it for use in drilling down through bedrock in search of oil, gas, and water. Our hunting cabin is made of stone. We have a penchant for building stone walls. Our very lives are a metaphor for embracing the earth: for gripping boulders and lifting them to our chest and stacking them and building a life in and around the country’s heart. I’ve sat in the boulders on the east side and watched a mother bobcat and her two kittens come down to the creek to drink. There used to be an occasional jaguar in this part of the world, traveling up from Mexico, but that was almost a hundred years ago. Granddaddy would be ninety this October. He and the old man we leased from, Howard, were born in the same year, 1903, which was the number we used for the lock combination on the last gate leading into the property. It’s one of the last few places in the world whose system still makes sense to me. It is the place of my family, but it is more: it is a place that still has its own integrity, that still abides by its own rules. The creeks have not yet been channeled with concrete. There is still a wildness beating beneath the rocks.

  Each year, we grow closer to the land, rather than farther away. Each year, it marks us deeper and deeper. The lightning strike that burned up the top of what is now called the Burned-Off Hill: we saw firsthand how for twenty years the wildlife preferred that area, but finally the protein content has been lowered again, and it is time for another fire.

  The land and its stories, and our own, have marked us. The time Randy and I were picking up one of what would be the new cabin’s four cornerstones to load into the truck. August; ninety-five degrees. Randy dropped his end of the behemoth sandstone slab (about the size of a coffin), but didn’t get his hand free in time. It might have been my fault. The quarter-ton of rock smashed off the end of his left pinky finger. No more tea-sipping for Cousin Randy. He sat down, stunned in the heat, and stared at the crushed pulpy end of that little finger. Some small part of it was already ground and mashed in between the atoms of the rock, and a little blood already dripping into the iron-rich soil.

  He tried to shake off the pain, tried to stand and resume work, but the second he did his eyes rolled heavenward and he turned ghost-white in the awful heat and fell to the ground, began rolling down the steep hill. All the little birds and other animals back in the cool shade of the oaks and cedars were resting, waiting for night to cool things off. What an odd creatur
e man is. But we couldn’t wait for night. We were aflame with a love for that wild land, and our long, rock-sure history on it. Our loving place on it.

  Granddaddy knew the old Texan’s trick of luring an armadillo in close by tossing pebbles in the dry leaves. The armadillo, with its radar-dish ears, believes the sound is that of jumping insects and will follow the sound of your tossed pebbles right up to your feet before it understands the nearsighted image of your boot or tennis shoe and leaps straight up, sneezes, then flees in wild alarm.

  There is a startling assemblage of what I think of as a “tender” life up there, for such a harsh, rocky, hot country. Cattails along the creeks, tucked in between those folds of granite, those narrow canyons with names like Fat Man’s Misery and boulder-strewn cataclysms such as Hell’s Half Acre. Bullfrogs, leopard frogs, mud turtles, pipits and wagtails, luna moths and viceroys, ferns and mosses . . .

  The old rock, the beautiful outcrops, are the power of the Hill Country, but the secret, the mystery, is the water; that’s what brings the rock to life.

  It’s so hard to write about such nearly undefinable abstractions as yearning or mystery, or to convince someone who’s not yet convinced about the necessity and holiness of wildness. It’s hard in this day and age to convince people of just how tiny and short-lived we are. I remember one winter night, camped down at the deer pasture, when a rimy ice-fog had moved in, blanketing all of the Hill Country. I was just a teenager. I had stepped outside for a moment, for the fresh cold air; everyone else was still in the cabin, playing dominoes. I couldn’t see a thing in all that cold fog. There was just the sound of the creek running past camp, as it always has, and as I hope it always will.