A Thousand Deer

by Rick Bass

  I climbed—slithered was more like it—into the truck. Randy would push from behind, then would stand on the bumper and try to rock the springs up and down, to help the tires find traction.

  From his nest in the back, Nathan roused sleepily when I started the truck and dropped it into gear. I could feel faintly Randy hopping around on the back like a monkey, or like a frail jockey urging some thunderous warhorse home—his weight made somehow even punier and lonelier by the vastness of discrepancy between ability and desire, though still he continued to hop up and down, as if trying to kick-start the world’s largest motorcycle.

  I gripped the steering wheel and mashed on the gas, expecting only the heartsick whine and grease-slick spin of nothingness, but right from the very start, it was as if the truck seemed determined to climb up from out of the mud’s and the land’s grip. From the very beginning, I could feel the tires engaging with stone and wood, could hear and feel the cascade of rocks and branches thudding and clattering beneath us as the spinning wheels sorted and scrabbled through them—the tiny monkey in the back hopping wilder and faster now—and unbelievably, then, with the accelerator still shoved flat, we were slogging up and out of the pit, grinding our howling way forward, born back into the glory of movement, surging and slithering cattywampus along the general direction of the new road beneath us, threading our way perfectly between the twin landscapes of hope and despair, joy and terror.

  The fear that we would slide off our narrow path, or that our progress might slow, causing us to bog down once more, was counterbalanced exactly by the flames of hope that, yes, this was reality, that despite our fears, we were still moving forward, and the world was scrolling past: oak trees, prickly pear cactus, agarita, juniper, hackberry, hickory.

  And then like the evolution of joy, or like the conception, gestation, and delivery of something, the truck was out of danger, was driving as a truck should, skittering over the logs and branches just the way we’d hoped, just the way we’d planned and designed.

  It was obvious to us now that as long as we stayed straight and true, we would make it—the branches were snapping and thwapping against the sides of the hurtling truck, like the beatings and croppings of some sturdier jockey spurring us on—and now so certain was our success that Randy had leapt off the back bumper and was running alongside us with a wild whooping cry, leaping for joy with outstretched pliés and tour j’etés that looked all the more ridiculous for his mud-caked boots and camouflage clothing. He reached the road at the same time that we did, and for me it was the strangest feeling to cruise to a stop on the safety of that hard-packed gravel, secure in the knowledge, no longer taken for granted, that the truck, once it stopped moving, would not begin sinking once more.

  The ground was firm beneath us, and it seemed a miracle. It was almost as if we had to start over with the belief, the understanding, of such things.

  Never was the luxury of a hot shower so well received. The hot water melted the ice-slab I had become, returned the fragile heat of life to my body, and perhaps most miraculously of all—in the way that moving water can do—seemed to distance us in time, disproportionately so, from the not-so-long-ago rigor of the excavation, which already seemed a thing of the past, epic and mythic.

  We fired up the grill and poured stiff vodka-and-tonics and squeezed a lime into them. We sloshed gas on the pile of campfire wood and somehow got a bonfire going and sat on the porch as the steaks grilled and the potatoes baked. We looked out at the frozen stars and relived the adventure. There was still every bit as huge a vacancy in me as that which the truck had left behind—a bottomlessness, is what it felt like, and a fragility, but it felt good to have the truck safely in the barn garage, rather than still half-sunk out in the frozen wilderness, and good also to be with Randy and Nathan, and watching the fire: watching the sparks pop and float up toward the stars.

  The wind had shifted again, turning even harder out of the north, and was dryer. Colter lay beside me, the fire reflecting in his dark eyes, groaning and almost purring as I petted him from time to time, with the world ahead of us, and the territory of the unknown, seeming strangely larger than it had ever been: seeming almost precisely as large as the sky and space visible in the night beyond us and in the eternity of days that would follow, were sure to follow, from this point forward, not just in our own short mortal days, but in all the days of the turning of the world-to-come.

  It was impossible, I think, to feel any more insignificant against such a backdrop, and yet what a paradox that was, for how could such insignificance and tininess be the vessel, the reservoir, for such immensity of heartache, and for such fierce wonder?

  That night an ice shield fell over the world, so that when I awakened on the first of January the curve of the hills and the fields and woods were all encased in starlit ice, the land’s dark reflection burning as if from some interior fire.

  Nathan and Randy were sleeping in. I dressed and fixed a cup of coffee, acutely conscious of the almost mechanical advancement of time—or rather, my perception of it as thus, on this one day—and certainly, if I could have hesitated, or even gone back in time—if I could do anything to keep from going into the new year without my mother, I would have turned back, would have lingered, would have sought whatever quiet eddy there might have been, where things could continue being as they had been.

  There was just enough trace of stiffness from the labors of the day before to feel good: not a true soreness, but a reminder that I had done something. The frozen gravel crunched underfoot, and the frosty air penetrated so deep when I inhaled that it seemed somehow that I might be breathing starlight: that such a thing might be possible, there in that brief and fast-dying blink of time between darkness and dawn.

  The place I was going was a place I had never hunted before. During the November hunt, in a shady tangle of oak and juniper growing on a sandy flat at the juncture of a steep tributary, a narrow slot canyon down which immense granite boulders had tumbled, I had spied a torn-up sapling, so freshly scraped that the sap was still oozing from it, and the slivers and tendrils of bark that had fallen to the ground were still so bright and unoxidized as to seem still living; as if, were one to place them back upon the abraded bark of the sapling, they might yet graft and grow.

  My plan was to nestle into the boulders of that crevice and to watch the sandy trail that wound through those trees along the creek, and to see if the buck that had rubbed that tree with his antlers in November, marking his territory, might wander by. I had brought a set of antlers with which to rattle, to simulate the sound of two other bucks sparring in his territory, and a grunt tube, with which to make the deep low calls of another deer.

  Although I had walked every inch of these thousand acres in the darkness any number of times, both with and without a flashlight, I had never navigated my way across this landscape, nor any other that I could remember, with the world so perfectly encased in ice.

  Every branch, every limb, every blade of winter-dead grass was encased in a thick chrysalis of ice, which slid heavy and away from me as I passed through the brush, and which bobbed, clacking, in my wake. The world underfoot was likewise coated with a shell of illuminated ice, and even if I had not known that it would not last, even if I had believed that this was the newer and more frightening world-to-come—that from here on out, all would be ice—I think that I still would have found it beautiful.

  I crossed over the creek, which I had been able to hear roaring even from a distance: an exciting sound, so different from the usual quiet trickle, the riffling gurgle of memory. The usually clear creek was now the color of chocolate milk, and frothy with foam and roiling waves, spread wide beyond its usual perimeters. The severed branches and limbs of oaks and willows cascaded down its center, and smaller branches bobbed and wheeled crazily into the choppy eddies as if seeking an escape, and I had to pick my crossing carefully, working from memory as to where the pitch was widest, and where the little creek, once able to be jumped across and would
be one day—soon—again, was narrowest.

  Darkness, ice, flood: I had never seen such a world before, yet it made perfect sense to me. I inhabited it gracefully, like a guest arriving right on time. The high wind above continued to scrub the stars bright and burnished, and I made my way over the slippery ice hills to the secret cleft from which I would hunt that morning and settled in out of the wind, pulled on another coat for warmth, and then was motionless, as if having been claimed by the landscape, absorbed like nothing more than so much of the night-before’s rain.

  I could hear the creek below me, still roaring and charging: the perfect shadow, perfect systolic pulse from the steady torrents of the day before, which had spent all night charging down every other hill and every other creek in order to arrive at this creek, this one place, at this one point in time, and then carrying on past.

  Yesterday’s flood, arriving today—late, and yet on time—from other places I knew, a weaving of names that would mean nothing, or next-to-nothing, to those who did not know those places or names, but that meant the world to me: White Oak Creek, Buffalo Creek, Willow Creek, Coal Creek.

  By afternoon, these same charging waters—the ones I could hear but not see—would be nearer to San Antonio; by the next evening, or the following morning, to the estuaries of the Gulf, and then amongst the silt- and sand-colored waves of ocean surf.

  In the pre-dawn darkness I found a hiding place beneath an older, larger juniper that was growing between the symmetrical halves of a frost-split granite boulder, each boulder-half the size of an upright refrigerator, and I settled in to wait for daylight and to watch the canyon and the sandy little grove of oak and juniper below. I thought about nothing, merely waited.

  An hour, two hours, melted as if but a second, though not the ice. I didn’t move. It felt good to remain so still, so motionless, lulled by the cold blue wind from the north and by the sound of the water, the quick flood.

  There were no clouds. The rising sun touched the tips of the bright winter-green junipers on the rim of the other side of the canyon first and then began painting slowly but steadily with its yellow winterlight the vegetation and boulders beneath that rim, the light descending into the canyon, brush stroke by brush stroke, and onto my camouflaged hiding spot: though still the ice-shell held, so that the ice-casts of all things burned now not with starlight but with the fractal radiance of diamonds and rainbows.

  I sat entranced, almost as if not daring, or as if forgetting, to breathe, until finally I felt a faint stirring of warmth on my face, the winter sun finally beginning to catch, and the dazzle began to loosen from the hills, the prismatic colors sliding and slipping away from all that was cloaked with the once-shining ice. The sparkle vanished, yet in its place, the vibrant colors of the native landscape and native vegetation were revealed as if born again, fresh-scrubbed and bright.

  Still I waited, almost perfectly motionless, and was content to do so: listening, watching, waiting. Every half hour, I would blow quietly on the grunt tube or click the drybone antlers together lightly, rattling their tines against one another. Those sounds would be lost beneath the blue sky, but I did not despair, I had all day, and I rested there between the cleaved rocks and watched the canyon before me and continued to rest or reside in that space where hours were confused with moments.

  When the buck came in to his grove, he was moving quickly, almost at a trot. His body, light brown, was pale and clean, as if washed by the rain. He was a large deer with large antlers that were surprisingly pale—almost sun-bleached—and as he hurried down the canyon, passing me on my right side, only twenty yards away, I saw that his black hooves were shiny, as if newly polished, and the late morning sun caught his eyes so that they gleamed.

  I lifted the rifle quickly but carefully—he paused, detecting that movement between him and the sun—and finding the seam behind his shoulder at the top of the heart, I fired.

  He leapt hump-backed, stumbled, and then galloped down the trail he’d been on, as if merely in more of a hurry now to reach that grove of trees, and though I felt confident he was mortally wounded, that he would run but a few more bounds and then collapse, heartshot, I knew better than to jump up and follow, which might cause him to draft one final surge of adrenaline, giving him the strength to carry him far beyond my ken or reach.

  I continued waiting, and only now began to daydream, and to think about the conscious world, the real world of the present: of the fact that it was New Year’s Day and that I had just hunted and shot, and was about to gather, a fine deer. I wondered if Randy and Nathan were back in camp, or if they were out hunting in the bright cool sun. I listened to the rush of the briefly wide creek below, admired the sun-painted cliffs and rocks on the other side of the canyon a little longer, and then rose, stretching my legs, and walked over to where the deer had been standing when I’d shot, where I found, as I’d known I would, a scatter of hair and some drops of bright red blood, still shining wet upon the granite and in the pinkened gravel of the game trail.

  For how many tens of thousands of years have hunters known such a mix of feelings—the satisfaction of success mixed with the fuller evidence of the responsibility inherent in the taking of any food from the earth, whether planted crop or harvested wild? The weight of our own existence, made so startlingly manifest; the going-on.

  I followed the drops of blood straight down the trail, walking carefully, and I remained confident that the body of the deer would be just a little farther on, around the next bend—in the cool of that little grove, perhaps, pitched down into the sand.

  In the grove, there was less blood, but the trail was still evident. The deer was taking longer leaps, the leaves were stirred up from each track, and now and again I found another loosened hair, another Rorschach of bright red blood cradled in the brown grasp of an upturned leaf.

  I followed the trail out of the trees and across the sand and back onto the puddled stone of slickrock that pitched down toward the wide-rushing rain-swollen creek. There was a little ledge spanning the creek just a few yards upstream, a ledge across which I could usually walk, but that was covered now with the wide rush of the flood, and over which cascaded the sheet of a little waterfall.

  I bent and studied the blood sign. The drops led straight to the creek. I looked across the creek to the other side—too far for me to leap, but not for a deer—and saw the stippling of tracks from where deer regularly leapt this crossing. I did not see the brown body of the deer lying down, pitched over onto its side. I did not see the great nest of antlers cradled in the grass just a short distance ahead, visible above even the winter-dead remains of grass and brush, the sight that usually greets the successful hunter.

  Walking carefully, and starting to feel the first inklings of concern and doubt, I went upstream to the crossing place and made my way carefully across the flatrock ledge, the broad roiling sheet of water shuddering against my ankles, not quite over the tops of my boots, the water so silt-clouded from the flood that I could not see the stone beneath me.

  I reached the other side and hurried over to the spot where the deer’s leap would have carried him—the spot where all those other tracks were stippled, like the prints of long-jumpers in a sand pit—and being careful not to disturb any, I set my rifle against a tree and got down on my hands and knees in the storm-wet grass and began parsing among the tracks, hoping for the surest indicator, the brilliance of blood, and, failing that, another piece of hair—possibly this deer’s, possibly not—and, failing that, a divot of earth so freshly torn that the individual sand grains were still glistening: a line, then, a cast of direction to set off into, in my blindness.

  I didn’t see how the shot could be anything other than precise at that distance, but if my aim had somehow floated a few inches, penetrating the lungs but not touching the heart, then the deer—particularly a big muscular deer like this one—could in theory run for hours, on-again and off-again, before bedding down somewhere miles away beneath a tree, or in a nest of brush, re
maining vigilant, even if incapacitated, for days.

  That is not the nature of what deer do when they are hurt badly, however. Their nature when mortally wounded is to return immediately and directly to the core of their home, stop and hunker down, and wait to heal.

  I did not think this deer was hit in the lungs, though, nor in any other lesser place. I felt certain this deer had been struck in the heart, and even as I continued searching on my hands and knees for the most microscopic of clues, I kept glancing up into the meadow, believing that I was simply overlooking the body, as often happens: the hundred and fifty pounds of deer somehow suddenly vanishing, lying down instead of standing, and lifeless rather than alive. Everything disappearing almost immediately back into the protective coloration of the deer’s native home, back into the time-crafted perfect camouflage of native vegetation: everything except the crown of antlers, which, when upright, blend perfectly with the branches of the forest, but which, when pitched sideways in the middle of a field, appear as incongruous as the detached harrow for a farmer’s tractor. What was once hidden gracefully, meshed into the safety of the natural world, the human eye is drawn to, and quickly. As if all can find death immediately, while the task of finding life remains so much more challenging.

  I spent the rest of the day tracking, often on my hands and knees, or in a bent stoop, moving slowly: following one unraveling radial of tracks after another, as far into the forest as I could, before that skein vanished, or became entangled with another. I panicked that I would lose this deer—that I had lost it—and then I despaired. To lose any deer, or any animal, but especially a great one, is one of the sourest feelings a hunter can know, rearranging and nearly invalidating what is already a complex and highly evolved moral negotiation in the short realm between life and death. Often the hunter feels like weeping, or is paralyzed with grief when such a misfortune occurs, and may quit hunting for a year, or other times altogether.