A Thousand Deer

by Rick Bass

A clamant wildness, irrepressible, running beneath the surfaces, and across the surface, and just above the surface. A wildness in the heart of the farthest roadless area; a wildness in the sight of a single butterfly in a suburban backyard. A wildness in a single story, told or dreamed or remembered.

  We need it all. We do not have to go looking for any farther or further wildness, but we need to know, or at least be able to imagine, that it exists. We need to be able to at least hear the echo of where we came from, even if a long time ago, and barely or dimly remembered now.

  We need the dream of such a past, and the promise of such a future.

  The green pastoral meadows sculpt us, the city parks and gardens sculpt us, and even now, the last few blank spots on the map sculpt us. It is all but one continuum, and we need it all, and our children deserve the possibility of it all.

  And for those such as myself who have had the privilege of experiencing it all—high nature, low nature, city-garden nature, as well as the deepest wildernesses—it is this richness, this bounty, that inspires me to work for the protection of the rarest and most imperiled type of nature—the unprotected wildernesses, such as those that remain in the Yaak and other places—so that hopefully such a choice might still be available, in all the years to come beyond this one. All the generations not yet born, but coming, almost as surely as time itself.

  COLTER’S CREEK BUCK

  One year, having returned to Texas for the Christmas season, I went back up to the deer pasture for what had once been a more common event in our family, which we called “the second hunt.” In the old days, my grandfather and his sons had spent many New Year’s Eves at the deer pasture, making a second hunt and welcoming the new year in that manner; though perhaps understandably, subsequent generations of us, somehow seeming to possess less leisure time have found ourselves hard-pressed to accommodate such an indulgence.

  Beyond the icing-on-the-cake nature of going back a second time, the second hunt carried with it as well a cachet of wildness, in that New Year’s in the Hill Country was often when the fiercest, most inclement weather passed through, yielding occasional freak snowfalls—one of the rarest of rarities, and offering us the seldom-experienced opportunity to try to track our quarry in the slushy snow for those few hours before it melted. (More frequent were the violent and beautiful ice storms, which dragged down phone and power lines and shellacked the entire Hill Country with single-digit temperatures and cast a sparkling diamond glaze over every rock, tree, and road, and gave the juniper-tinged air an even sweeter taste than usual: ice-scrubbed air so fresh and clean, at those temperatures, that it seemed to reach farther into the lungs, providing more oxygen, more sustenance.)

  It was the same year that I had brought my amazing bird dog down to Texas with me—Colter, a liver-colored German shorthair pointer, a great ground-covering big-headed sweet long-legged bomber of a hound with nitroglycerine running through his veins—so that I could travel the state south to north with him, hunting bobwhite quail in the brush country down near Corpus Christi and in the highlands up along the Colorado River. It was such a good year for quail that there were even large coveys of them in the Hill Country, and in my young man’s way, it was my intention to hunt them at the deer pasture, during my second hunt, before continuing up into the country on the upper Colorado.

  In my mind, it was wonderfully rich and simple, if not excessive. I would hunt deer in the late afternoons and foggy, icy early mornings, then come back to camp midday for a warming meal and a fire, and take Colter out into the russet tallgrass to look for quail. It was dove season, too, and if I was lucky, I might have a chance to gather a few doves for dinner. Then I would return Colter to his kennel, put my shotgun up, and head back into the hills with my rifle, to sit on a rock ledge in the waning of the day to watch for deer. It was the year that my mother had died young after a long illness, and I have no doubt that in addition to my youthfulness, it was my relationship to the natural world, which was to say at that time chiefly as a hunter, that I turned to in part at least for grounding and support in this newer, lonelier, turned-upside down world.

  It was painful, hiking those beautiful red granite canyons and sitting on those whale-gray ancient ledges of Cambrian sandstone, looking out at the same sights she had known and loved, though it was tonic, too, knowing that in the witnessing and the experiencing, these things were still shared between us, and always would be.

  The first day, New Year’s Eve, hadn’t quite gone the way I’d intended. The evening before, my middle cousin, Randy, had driven up too, bringing his then-young son, Nathan, along with all kinds of items for our version of a New Year’s Eve revel: no fireworks, nor cases of whiskey, but big fat free-range steaks, ears of roasting corn, fresh butter, green olives, giant baking potatoes, eggs, cream, sugar, coffee—enough food to stay a week, instead of just a couple of evenings. We didn’t get to hunt much that first day, however, because we spent the day digging Randy’s big pickup out of the mud. It wasn’t really even mud at first, just soft soil beneath the litter of dark slick rained-upon oak leaves. Randy had left the gravel roadbed, was turning around to head back to camp for something, and had tried, inexplicably, to take a shortcut through the woods, where he quickly became stuck not just up to the axles—the usual barometer for such mishaps—but to the frame itself, so that he and Nathan had had to roll the windows down and climb out, unable to shove the doors open against the force and mass of so much mud, which had been rained upon almost ceaselessly for the last week.

  Even from a distance, I could see the big blue truck—or the top half of it—when I came walking through the cold gloomy woods later that afternoon, with the steady rain still falling. As I drew closer, I could see the dark silhouette of Randy, barely visible in his rain-drenched camouflage amidst the dark trunks of the oaks, wielding a shovel, up to his ankles in soupy red mud, working as a farmer might labor in the stalls with his pitchfork.

  He looked haunted, hopeless, mindless. He had been working for hours to no avail, for each shovel of slurry he pitched away was replaced within seconds by the porridge-like flow of new material from the freshly opened perimeters of his excavation, and perhaps most dispiriting of all, he could see none of his “progress,” for the entire operation lay beneath the mask of the slowly broadening milky-red lake of his making. He could hear the gravel and mud scraping against his shovel, could feel the leaden weight of it each time he lifted a dripping load of it, but could ascertain no progress; when he saw me come slogging in from out of the rain and gloom, his mud-streaked face brightened, he actually smiled a half-grin, and wordlessly, he handed me a second shovel.

  The sides of the big truck were smeared with mud, as if it were a wild animal that had been chased there before finally being brought to bay—a short distance behind the truck, there were twin tracks of deep-standing water that reinforced this notion—and from inside the mud-splashed fuselage, and through the rain-streaked windows, as if in a French fine arts film, Nathan peered uncertainly, his face brightening too when he saw I had come to join them. In the fading light, he was bathed with the blue glow of the little portable VCR with which he and Randy sometimes traveled, the machine plugged into the cigarette lighter. (I was to find out later that Nathan had been forced by circumstance to endure seven consecutive showings of Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles, a fact that would ultimately sour him on that which had once been his passionate favorite.) Nathan smiled, waved wanly, and from the dry captivity of the interior, continued to watch, with the sight of us shivering and steaming in muck that was now knee-deep evidently more interesting than an eighth showing.

  Trying to use my little sled of a rent-car to pull the truck out was completely out of the question, as was calling in a tow truck from Johnson City, seventy icy miles away on a fast-gathering New Year’s Eve; indeed, the nearest pay phone was nearly twenty miles away. It was root hog or die, and strangely, or not so strangely, I was nonplussed by the size of the task. As much as anything—more than anything,
perhaps—it grounded me in the moment, was both emblematic of and yet an escape for the grief and absence I’d been feeling all autumn and winter, in that first year of my mother’s death, and would feel for a long time after.

  Even the act of walking around searching intently for a deer in this beloved landscape, intimately familiar to me since childhood, had at times left me unable to hold back or adequately process that enormity of loss; similarly, despite the tonic of nature, the reality and permanence of my loss—the alteration in the relationship—kept coming upon me as I sat quietly in the woods, focusing on the hunt, or focusing on not focusing, which is sometimes the best way to hunt.

  This, however, was not a moment of sadness, nor cause for complaint. So what if we were wet and cold? I was relaxing at one of my favorite places in the world, I was young and strong and healthy, I was with some of my family, I was uncompromisingly in the midst of raw nature, and in this particular moment my life had a focused and immediate purpose. It was all nothing but good, and I worked with pleasure, and slowly, Randy’s attitude recovered, until, by the time darkness fell, we were working in concert.

  We were not making any progress: beneath us, we could continue to feel the walls of our mudpit oozing to fill back in with the quicksand-slurry whatever we managed, with our aching backs, to export. Inside the darkened truck, the blue light of the VCR came on again—though still Nathan turned away and peered back down at us from time to time, as if to reassure himself that the truck would sink no deeper.

  Somewhere down in the mire, there was a jack—in addition to trying to dig out a new lane, like the exit ramp from a subterranean parking garage, up and out of which we might one day—perhaps tomorrow?—be able to drive, we were attempting to hoist each wheel free of the muck’s embrace, just high enough to place a flat stone, or a laddersticking of branches, beneath each tire, to help give traction at that point far into the unknown future when we might deem our endeavor sufficiently advanced to hazard a try at driving out.

  So deep-sunk were the wheels, however, that we were having to kneel on all fours to reach beneath them, and even then we found ourselves working in water and slurry up to our necks, and then our chins, and then our noses, tilting our heads sideways, straining to shove a flat stone into the breath of space between tire and temporary bottom-muck; and again, hearing us thumping around beneath the truck, Nathan peered down anxiously and studied without comment the assemblage of various-sized sticks and branches that kept popping to the surface and floating all around us like so many circling alligators.

  It was getting colder, and with nightfall, Randy pulled out his ever-trusty Coleman lantern and with shaking, frigid fingers, pumped up the pressure and then grubbed a match crookedly against the matchbox, Jack London-style. The match caught, and, shivering, he shoved it up through the baffling and into the glass globe, where the tiny tapered flame found the serpent-hiss of compressed gas and blossomed into a magnificent burst of light that captured and encompassed immediately the cast of all of our work, the scene of ruination that surrounded us: the swamp, where before there had been no swamp. And although it cheered us to have light in which to work, there was an awkward period of transition in which we had to accustom ourselves to the psychology of the new reality, and in this, despite our efforts at sunny optimism, we were not initially successful, erring at first on the side of despair.

  The lantern’s throw of bright light possessed a peculiar trajectory, fading quickly from an incandescent whiteness that was almost spiritual in quality to a softer and more mellow tone of yellow and then gold before finally, at its farthest reaches, dissolving into fairy dust–like pixels of barely illuminated drizzle. And because it was at these farthest reaches—not so far away, really—that our work extended, it gave us the perception that the entire world was a swamp—that for all our eyes told us, it might as well stretch to the horizon—and we were disoriented, even dispirited, but in the end, there was nothing to do anyway but dig, and so we recovered our hope or faith, if not optimism, and resumed the sledge.

  The rain appeared to be lessening, or becoming finer, as the temperature dropped—sleet now, with our hair plastered to our skulls and water running down the backs of our necks, there was nowhere on us that was not soaked, so that we paused from time to time to stand briefly before the lantern, steaming as if burning, to milk a moment of warmth—and our fear now was that the mud might freeze to sludge, and then harden further overnight, like concrete, if we did not get the truck out; though how we were going to do that, with our shovels and sticks and twigs and stones puny compared to the Herculean task before us, we did not know.

  I noticed a few stars appearing beyond the outer edges of the lantern’s light, felt a stirring of breeze, and in that subtle shifting a sound came to us now, the long baleful mourning of Colter-left-alone, Colter hungry and lonely: a sound so eerily and beautifully like the howl of a wolf that it could not help but ring and resonate, there in the darkness, around our campfire-like focus of the one lantern, within all the mind’s chambers of the not-so-distant past. Though our bogged-down truck was not a fallen mastodon in need of rendering, it was still a significant task before us, as our progenitors had always had tasks before them, and as Colter continued to bay and howl, it seemed very much to me that we had gone back in time or that time had moved forward and seized us, for whatever reasons, and carried us backward.

  We labored on, wallowing in the frigid trough of our own making, splashing back and forth with stones and branches. I thought briefly of the elegant parties that were probably beginning around this time, down in Houston, and in Austin and Dallas, in Fort Worth and San Antonio. The women in their long glittering dresses, and the men in crisp dark suits, and all the partygoers so clean-scrubbed and tailored.

  I wondered how the night’s scene must appear to Nathan and was reminded of Van Gogh’s painting, The Road Menders, one of the first paintings he made after an incarceration at a mental hospital in Arles, in the south of France—indeed, he painted it while still in his upstairs hospital room. The painting exudes the casual grace of the laborers’ physical industry and radiates a health that surely the recovering Van Gogh himself was experiencing there in the return of spring. Even the trees seem animated in the painting, and throughout there are the cool pale emerald colors of new spring, of recovery, and of vibrant hope and health and beauty, personified as well in the schematic, rectilinear step-by-step laying-down of stones into the roadbed, so that from the vantage of that upstairs window, with the warm shaded light falling over the village, it must have seemed to Van Gogh like nothing less than an avenue, a path, to salvation.

  In my own labors, I glanced up to see if Nathan might have returned to the window to stare down at our work, but saw instead—with some relief—that there was only the continued blue flicker of the Ninja turtles and that the continued evidence of our futility lay for the time being obscured from his consideration.

  I wondered what he would make of the evening, after it was over—I knew this logically, if not emotionally; it would someday be over—and I daydreamed, as I worked, of my own childhood, embedded in this same landscape. I recovered memories of the five of us—my father, mother, two brothers, and myself—driving up here in the spring to look at the bluebonnets; of riding around in the open-topped jeep on a weekend, smelling this wilder, more fragrant, living country, after a week, or a life, in the city; and of my brothers and I harassing the natives—leaping from the jeep to pursue fruitlessly a roadrunner or jackrabbit, or even one of the newer immigrants, an armadillo. How curious is the nature of the blood that exists in a boy, with regard to these things—and while I am sure that boys are wonderful, rare is the week even now, many years later, in which I do not think and imagine, with the weight of bittersweetness, how much my mother would have loved, as I do, knowing my daughters: watching them grow up, attending their functions, and being a grandmother to them.

  We shoveled on, laboring in the freezing mixture. We knew better than to attemp
t our escape, our exit, prematurely—to make a few short yards, but to then slide off our underwater road and back into the muck, deeper into the muck, would be to fail spectacularly, wasting all of our previous work, and consigning our stones and branches irretrievably deeper into the muck—and so, like the road menders, we continued on, getting everything just right: plotting and planning and scheming.

  It stopped raining altogether and grew colder still: wretchedly cold, though deeply beautiful, with the stars seeming to leap into the new blackness, blazing gold. It kept getting colder and colder, until I could not remember being so cold, not even in Montana. The light from the lantern began to dim, and the blue light from within the truck’s cab clicked off as Nathan curled up in the back, beneath a mound of sleeping bags, to go to sleep. Colter had stopped howling, so that it was very quiet. The only sounds were those of us sloshing around in the trenches, thigh-deep in places.

  Our little underwater road was finally beginning to feel substantial, to feel possible. Lost now more in the process than in any dreamed-of or hoped-for outcome, we continued to scrounge flat stones and cedar-slats. We could walk on our little road, could feel it finally firm beneath our feet, even in the deepest of water, and dikes of slurry rose just as high above us on either side of our proposed trail home. And gradually, constructed at about a ten-degree incline, our little road—a plaza of stone and juniper—emerged from the swamp, and continued then across the surface and through the woods, like the charming boulevard in some charming country other than our own.

  The stone path, the mended road, continued on in this manner a good distance out toward the sodden but firm gravel road. It was too far to lay stones and branches all the way there, but our hope was that if we could ever get the truck up out of the wallow-pit, we might be able to gather enough speed to skitter across that last distance, making it all the way to the road, where the firmness, the durability, of the road beneath us would be as great and joyous a success, as tangible a victory as we might ever hope to know. It seemed outlandish to dare to even imagine, much less wish, for such deliverance, and yet viewing our day’s work, it seemed possible, and closer than we realized.