A Thousand Deer

by Rick Bass

  I’m so pleased with the return of desire that I announce it to my cousins, father, uncle, brothers. “I’d love to find an animal,” I say, being cautious, in my backwoods way, not to say the animal’s name, deer—much less the specificity of “a nice buck”—in order to keep from presuming arrogance. Understanding, eventually, how much luck is involved with every animal. A seeming paradox: the more “successful” a hunter becomes, the more he or she realizes it is all built upon a scaffolding of luck, or chance, or some other third thing, that invisible and inaudible contract of spirit wherein, if your desire is sustained and intense and pure enough, the animal will sometimes appear for a moment as if summoned, or even as if offering itself—or at least the chance, the opportunity—to the subject of that desire: the desire.

  You might have heard such things before, and dismissed them at first as New Age mumbo jumbo, but ultimately, if you take enough animals, you come to a point where you can’t deny it, and where instead you come to know it. The improbability of Russell catching back up with that deer after it ran off the first time; the improbability of a young hunter being presented with a shot at a magnificent animal, and making it, even as the other older, more veteran hunters receive no such presentation; the improbability of a hunter who, deeply desiring an animal and having hunted hard all season long, is occasionally presented with an opportunity at dusk on the last day of the season . . .

  There’s something up, out there in the woods, a thing that our scientists and atom-chasers and neutron-smashers will likely never be able to prove or discover—a braided spirit, is what it seems like to me—and sometimes a hunter finds him- or herself inside it, and other times, outside it. It exists, though what to make of such knowledge, I am not quite sure, other than to try to remember, always, to say please and thank you.

  I set off up the hill with my grandfather’s old rifle, after everyone—cousins, brothers, father, uncle—had wished me good luck. The whole hunt, I had not really been wanting an animal (which may be why I had not seen one), but now, on this last afternoon, the desire had returned. For seventy-five-plus years, our family’s been hunting this land—it was my twenty-fifth year to hunt it—and these days, often, I prefer to just hike around instead of hunt.

  So it was a joy to feel so sharply that yearning, and that pressure: to be forced, by the last-chance nature of my schedule, to stalk so quietly, so carefully—to be so alive—through the dense dark shade of the cedar, which was where the deer would be bedded down, this hot dry sunny windy afternoon. Creeping through the thickest tangles, moving slowly and almost silently.

  And in my stalk, I began to see the deer that I had not been seeing earlier. Or rather, I was seeing them before they saw me this time, and beneath the low tangled dark canopy of the cedar, with the boughs above whipping and waving in the wind, I was seeing them at extremely close range: a liquid brown eye widening at fifteen yards, also alive; the incandescent illumination of whiskers, light-filled from a thin beam of sun that made it somehow down into the canopy; the lower jaw of a doe, grinding something, chewing . . .

  They were all does. I was searching for the drama of antlers. The does were all beautiful, and I knew the meat would be delicious, but I was looking for those bone-hardened antlers of mahogany, the crown or candelabra.

  And in part, it wasn’t even as if I was looking for a deer, but instead, as if I was just walking carefully, stalking, more intent upon preserving that desire, rather than desiring the deer, if that makes any sense.

  Time seemed to double in density, slowing and then vanishing. In my mind, there was only the next step, and each step was more vital than any of the previous, for it would do no good to be silent with all the other steps only to then crack a twig or dislodge a clattering pebble, ruining with that one act all of the earlier investment of silence. I forgot to look at my watch, and even forgot that this was the last afternoon of the last day of the hunt. Instead, I was aware only of timelessness. The landscape before me was as familiar as it had ever been, across the decades, but it seemed also as if I’d entered a new territory—the same land, but in a different era, and whether that era might be the past or the future, I couldn’t say.

  This day, I was just looking for antlers: for a hidden animal that won’t see me.

  I’d been walking even slower, being so cautious not to ruin the afternoon’s stalk. My wanting continued to escalate, until I found myself doing something I rarely do, and never gratuitously: asking the hills for an animal. I hesitated to call it a prayer, but truth be told, that’s pretty close to what it’s like. It’s kind of a semi-urgent, yet utterly respectful asking—a Come on, please, I really want this animal. Not a negotiation—not, If I get this animal, I’ll share it with other folks who aren’t fortunate enough to have procured meat; no If I get this animal, I’ll promise to work harder on behalf of the woods.

  Instead, rather than prayer or plea bargain, it’s more like a submission and a demand both: a submission to the understanding that the animal will not be delivered to the hunter without some intervention, and a demand, an insistence, that the world (and perhaps the animal itself) hear and understand more clearly the fuller weight of the hunter’s desire.

  And yet, how can the animal hear such a demand, for has not the hunter—up until this point—been extraordinarily cautious to avoid alerting the animal to the hunter’s desire, and the hunter’s presence? How can a thing be two things at once, aware and unaware? Or is it in that transition of prayer—if we agree to call it such—that the animal lifts its head and turns and stares back as if into infinity, and decides, or is compelled by other forces, to agree to such a contract?

  A part of you wants to reject completely such an idea. And yet, if you have gone after such animals—into the brush, into the forest—you know that this is often how it is, and that it happens too often, it cannot possibly be coincidence. Something else is happening, even if you do not quite know what.

  And maybe it’s more like a yearning than a true prayer—an imploring, a heartfelt request—sometimes even a beseeching. Whatever it is, you can’t just go around doing it all the time. The moment has to be right, so much so that perhaps the asking is not even your idea, but rather, is initiated from outside forces.

  Key to part of it also, I believe, is that you have to have put in the miles, and be tired, even weary, and near the end of your limits, before you even consider making such an outlandish ask—the life of another animal. You have to be absolutely certain you want it; you have to have been tested. And I don’t know what the other part of it is.

  That morning, I had awakened around three, had arisen and fixed coffee, and sat at the table in the kitchen and worked by flashlight on my novel. In it, I had come to a scene, a passage, in which some sojourners are traveling over a high mountain pass in the Himalayas. They’re starving, on their way down into Burma to try to capture an elephant, and one of the travelers sets out to look for a blue sheep, which is the only game to be found that high in the mountains. And in the novel, the hunter made his little prayer, and a blue sheep was delivered to him, encountered at dusk.

  If this seems like an indulgent digression, forgive me. It was a part of my 3:00 a.m. dream-life and certainly was no longer on my mind. And yet surely it must also have still been within me, for as I was creeping down a dark shady narrow canyon, the pitch and plunge of the creek so steep that it formed a laddered series of waterfalls, I paused behind a tree for some unknown reason, and a few seconds later an animal came sneaking up the creek, its muscles and sandstone-colored coat and horns glinting in the light.

  The animal was deer-sized, as it passed through a beam of gold sunlight that filtered down through the cool shady canopy, and yet it was not a deer; and after my first initial surge of joy and excitement—Thank you, I was already whispering, thrilled by the wildness of the gift—the animal was very close, and yet was still unaware of me—I felt a moment of slight letdown, and felt off-balance. Is it a yearling bull-calf, I wondered, a feral es
capee from some other ranch?

  Then the rest of the herd shifted into focus, giant aoudads, or Barbary sheep, with full-curled horns, and each looking as large as an elk—utter, secret wildness—and I decided that the hunt was back on again.

  I had seen aoudads back in the cliffs before. The first ones escaped from Hill Country game farms more than two decades ago, and found the rocky, arid region similar enough to their native African home that they survived and, said some, even prospered, sometimes displacing white-tailed deer.

  On two occasions when I’d seen them, I’d had no interest in shooting one, even though I knew that a purer hunter might not have given such a thought a second’s pause. They were not native to the landscape and in that regard could be said to be like weeds or pests—and yet, they seemed to me also to be like strangers, even guests, rather than prey, and because they had not even been remotely in my search-image—only deer and turkey—it would have been as unthinkable for me to take one, then, as to shoot a dog or a cat, a parakeet or flamingo, a crane or coyote, simply because I saw them.

  Both times, I watched them clatter away, deft-hoofed, disappearing into slots between boulders—vanishing, as if in a dream. Was I still in Texas, or now the Moorish Coast?

  What makes a native? And how much of such a definition rests in the contract of fit negotiated between species and landscape, and how much in the eye of beholder? And how much in the eye of time?

  I had not gone out hunting for wild sheep—they had not even been in my consciousness—but here, moments after asking for an animal, came an entire herd, so stealthy and wild that my desire did not wane, but was sharpened, and as the entire herd moved one by one through that column of sun and then back into the shadow, with the music of the laddered waterfall filling that tight little canyon, I did my choosing and decided to pass on the larger animals, which I recognized as certain trophies, and to instead take the younger animal, which would surely taste good. I had not asked for a three hundred-pound animal and was not going to take one.

  The smaller animal—a two-year-old?—had long horns that were only beginning to curl. He was very close—I could see the sunlight wet-like in his brown eyes, could see his strange beard—and when I shot, he fell instantly, landing in the shallow little creek.

  The rest of the herd froze for a second, not knowing where the shot had come from. Then they saw or scented me and whirled and crashed off through the brush, cracking limbs and branches like a herd of frightened elk, and again I said thank you, not just for the gift of wild meat, but for such a wonderful hunt—and then I walked down the creek to where the sheep lay, some blood trickling into the clear stone creek like a sacrifice, and I said thank you again, and pulled him out of the water and up the slope into the dense forest, where I examined him then like a scientist, astounded by such a specimen—such uniqueness, after all my life having hunted only deer and turkey on this land. And once again I felt as if I was in the midst of timelessness, and yet also as if I had ridden on the back of some great passage of time—centuries, perhaps—for the animals at the deer pasture to have changed so.

  And as with some of the stories told often by my father and grandfather and uncle, so familiar that sometimes it seemed, in the listening, as if I had lived them myself, I could not be sure if what I felt was that I had traveled forward, or backward. But I felt somehow that I had traveled.

  The sun was setting red against a shoal of clouds. The music of the waterfall was still beautiful. I had been given an animal and a story. I cleaned the animal with care, washed my hands in the cold water of the creek, then rose and hiked back to camp in the red dusk, thinking things over.

  The animal had been killed a long way from a road—in the farthest, deepest canyon possible—so that hauling him out at night was going to be an adventure for a bunch of middle-aged guys, and one I looked forward to. The stars were out, and the night was cold enough that he would have been fine where he was, but I kept thinking about the five coyotes I’d seen in the area, the day before. And it was a sweet feeling, walking back to camp with my hands washed, my knife clean in its sheath, and with meat for the coming year, and having received the animal in such strange, wild fashion. One of the best hunts ever.

  It felt good to be hiking out, climbing the steep rocky hills, and feeling the same strength in my legs that had always been there, and feeling my lungs reach deep to fill with air. Forty-five’s not old. There are good days and bad days—a good day reminding you of how you felt when you were, say, twenty-five, and a bad day seeming like a harbinger, perhaps, of what the body might be like at fifty-five, or even sixty-five, compromised, and reduced—but today was a good day, and my relationship with the steep hills seemed as secure as it always had been, for one more evening at least. And I was old enough now to know to treasure that sensation, and at the top of the last hill I paused for a moment not to catch my breath, but to simply admire the evening’s first stars.

  Back in camp, they could tell something was up. Supper was already cooking, and when someone comes in late like that, it’s usually because they were out later than expected, cleaning an animal. They inspected my hands and knife for blood, but found none. They had not heard the shot from down in the slot canyon, but somehow, they knew: and when they asked if I’d gotten anything, I said that yes I had, that it was just a spike—that his antlers “had no tines”—but that he was a big one and that I was very happy with him, very fortunate and lucky to have encountered him.

  I don’t know how they could tell something was up, but they could. After all the years of jokes and stories, the successes and failures, we can read each other like the blood kin we are—as if the shared blood still communicates, despite being housed in separate vessels. It was my cousins’ opinion that I had shot a huge buck and was only pretending it was a spike, so that they would be surprised when they saw it. They refused to believe I’d shoot a spike, even as I insisted that this was a fine animal, a really big one.

  Cousin Rick—well-versed in the ways of pranks and larceny himself—was working hard to get to the heart of the matter. He knew I wouldn’t lie to them, but they all knew somehow that I was holding a secret, a surprise.

  “Okay, Richard,” he said, attempting to wade to the bottom of it. “Look at my hand.” He held it up vertically like the needle on some calibrated scale. “This is the bullshit meter. Now: Did you shoot a spike?”

  Yes. Said firmly. The hand wavered but did not tilt.

  “You bushwhacked way to the back side and that’s where the animal is still lying?”

  Yes. No wobble.

  “The animal is not a trophy buck.”

  No. Again, no waver.

  “Is there any bullshit associated with this story?”

  Pause. Yes.

  Rick laughed and shook his head. “You see?” he told his brothers. “The bullshit meter works.”

  They frowned, then protested. “You didn’t get anything out of him that he hadn’t already told us.”

  Rick shrugged. “But now you know it’s the truth.”

  “But your last question—he himself admitted it was bullshit . . .”

  Rick just shrugged, laughed again. “But true bullshit,” he explained.

  “The worst kind,” I said.

  We sat down to our big blow-out dinner, the kind that will likely be outlawed by heart surgeons in twenty years—big grilled steaks, big baked potatoes with real butter, real sour cream, real bacon, real cheese. Where did the hunt go, how can another one be over so fast?

  After dinner, Rick and my father were the only ones sporting enough to sally out in search of the animal. I had drawn on a napkin a map of the general place where the animal lay, though my understanding of where the looping, grassed-over dirt roads wandered in relation to that canyon was admittedly inaccurate, and there seemed to be no one place any closer to the animal than another.

  The plan we settled upon in the end was for my father to stay with the jeep, with the headlights burning, and Rick and I
would bushwhack up the creek, find the animal, and then triangulate out in the shortest, most direct route toward those headlights, dragging and carrying the animal through the brush.

  We had not gone more than two minutes into the brush before the glow of the jeep headlights disappeared completely.

  Still, we pushed on, climbing small cliffs and descending little canyons—half a dozen or more little creeks and canyons, over on the back side—thrashing and struggling through eye-level cedar boughs, spitting out bark and berries, dropping our flashlights and stumbling and tripping, veering north then south, east then west, as I tried to recognize in the darkness individual trees and rocks.

  After about half an hour, I seemed to recognize a change in the melody of the creek, a familiar tune now, and shining my light on the ground, I saw a spot of blood where the animal had fallen and a few loose hairs from where I had dragged him up on the hill away from the creek.

  Rick was sweating and stumbling too, about to give up the faith, but when I called him over to look at the animal and he saw what it was, he was properly excited, and understood too, I think, that it was as if we were witnessing some strange cleaving, a Part One and Part Two in our family’s relationship to this place, and the hunt. We’d killed hundreds of deer—maybe a thousand—across all the decades, but never anything like this, and he, too, knelt and gave, with the curiosity of his examination, the animal his own respect.

  An hour later, we had the animal out to a road, though it was not the road we had left from, and we could see on the next mountain over the headlights of my father’s jeep. Having understandably given up on the possibility that we would be coming out at the same spot where we had entered the woods, he had begun driving up and down the sand roads looking for us, certain that we were lost, and we shone our flashlights over toward the little mountain he was on, unsure whether he would even see their firefly-blinkings; though after a while, he turned the jeep around and answered our lights with blinks of his own and circled around to find the grassy road that would take him to where we sat with our strange quarry, visiting, reliving the hunt, and marveling at how even a world that seems more familiar to you than anything is always capable of delivering a surprise.