The Night of Trees

by Thomas Williams

  While Richard watched, and he would never know how long it actually was, the choices he made were the magic ones of a man chosen by the gods, and even as he made them he could hardly believe that he had them to make. Never before, in all his years of hunting, had this happened to him. His shots had always been at deer who had seen or sensed him, and were running. Now, where would he place his bullet? Where in order to stop most perfectly this perfect animal? His deliberation was not buck fever. He was ready, and he trusted his hunter’s instinct not to wait too long, Even though nothing but cold air separated him from their constantly active, vibrant senses, they were not aware of him. Though they constantly tested the wind, looked with one deep eye and then another at various objects around him, they never examined him with anything but cursory attention—then on would go their eyes, their ears would sensitively twist toward something else. His breath, because of his coldness after having sat so long, was not so obvious, as theirs; somehow they never noticed it at all.

  But where, through the body of that miraculous animal, would he direct the energy contained in his rifle? He must have the buck, he knew. Not to have him now, when fate had so offered him, would be a dark and unthinkable loss. The neck, where it arched like a tree? Where was the spine, precisely, in that clutch of round muscle? The shoulders? His bullet should break both shoulders, and if it did the buck would fall—unless the bullet were deflected,, and at this angle (the buck at the moment was quartered toward him) he could not be sure. No, he must run him through the chest, where the heart beat, and the great arteries served the lungs. He would have few parts of a second in which to raise his rifle and fire, but he would do it as near as possible upon the buck’s exhalation of breath. At this range the rifle must aim itself by its correct fit and proper drop; he would see the gold square of the front sight, and it must in one motion, with no correction, arrive straight between his eye and the buck’s great ribcage.

  Now! Up it came, the safety off instinctively on the way: there, the gold, and a tremulous blur of brown, and the rifle pushed him back with a force that seemed stern; not shocking but authoritative, powerful, and as the weight of the barrel and of his arms, brought it back down his right hand slid up and back and forward and the chamber was again full of a bright cartridge. His eyes were clear again, and the buck had leaped (this seen in the slight blur of recoil) above the snow once, then again past two large trees (his flag down, but not the others’, who leaped with huge white pillow-like flags flying and were still leaping off, turning, back around him and up the mountain). He knew that he had hit. That knowledge was immediate; only a miss could be mistaken. But he wanted the buck, and could not wait for full evidence. Yes, he knew exactly where the bullet had entered, and what fatal damage it had done, but again he placed the gold square upon the leaping buck, and fired. This time he heard the shot, and the buck went down. He had placed his shot as nearly as he could—the range had increased in perhaps three seconds to forty yards—toward the ribcage again. He hadn’t led the deer; like most naturally good shots he aimed where he wanted to hit, and his swing and compensating reflexes did all his calculations for him. Again his rifle was loaded, and he began to walk carefully toward the spot where the buck had gone down out of sight. He must not trip on brush or witch hobble hidden beneath the snow. Slowly now; he had to step over a fallen birch. He must watch. There was a brown flank that blended into purest white. No, it was another fallen tree. But on the snow, widely flung, was blood, many scattered roses and rubies on the clean snow, blood as valuable to Richard now as the finest jewels, for these bright marks were, until he found the deer itself, the only part of the wild animal he had stopped, and could touch.

  There. With his last jump, as his wrecked heart had stopped, the buck had dived toward a tangle of brush. Thinking still, of course, with his simple jewel of a mind, he had tried to conceal himself, but just at that moment he had run out of life.

  Richard stood above the deer in the triumph of his luck and his good shots, and it seemed to him that the wild strength and heat of the brawny deer had come over into his own body. He did a little dance of delight, his rifle over his head; now he was warm again, all right. The deer was dead, and he had no need to touch its open eye to know. Its tongue hung red from the side of its mouth, and from this side of the deer Richard could see the two large exit holes made by the expanded bullets.

  His first shot had been a gift. His second had been magnificent; now he was extremely happy that he had shot again, even though it had been unnecessary. It hadn’t destroyed any meat and it had justified this gift to him—shown that his skill deserved it.

  But he had some duty left to the deer, and also to Shim and Murray and their plan. Quickly he opened the bolt, pushed the loaded cartridge down into the magazine and found a firm place to lean the rifle so that it would be out of his way. He took his ten feet of rope from his jacket pocket, made a loop around one of the hind hoofs, then pullied the rope around a branch in order to open the white belly to him. His knife, honed the night before on his sling, was sharp and bright, a standard, carbon steel blade with a blood groove and a bone handle. This he slid from its deep sheath and with it slit and gutted the deer. He had done this ceremony eight times before, and though he had to wet his hands in blood, intestinal fluids, sometimes in the green mess of the stomach when he had shot too far back along the deer’s side, always it was a joyful act, always it was done in triumph and with great respect for the beautiful animal he worked upon. Out upon the snow he slid the tripas of the deer, the small intestine still working as it would, slower and slower until its contractions were stopped forever by the cold. He saved the liver and kidneys—a plastic-lined pocket in the back of his jacket received them, and they warmed the base of his spine; heavy, liquid-feeling, they pressed warmly upon him and pulled down the shoulders of his jacket. The heart was torn, black with the contusions caused by hydraulic rupture, and he did not save its shreds of valves and meat. With nothing but these rags of heart the buck had run at least thirty yards—no wonder he must treat this flesh with respect! The blood he had loosed from tubes and veins rolled out and stained the white crotch, from which he had cut the genitalia, before it made the blotting snow bright crimson at his feet. The lungs in handfuls—they too were wrecked, and now his face entered the steaming cavity where the ribs rose up, silver-ivory, Gothic columns in a dark cathedral. The life, the heat, the humid center of the graceful deer that was now no longer of the wilderness (and yet still was, really, just as Richard knew that he himself was)—his naked, bloody hands could touch, and now all this was his.

  When he had finished he washed his hands and wrists in the numbing snow, which helped coagulate the sticky blood so that it rubbed off in pieces; then with partially numbed fingers he took his license holder apart and tore off the deertag. With the pencil stub he carried for this purpose he filled in the township and date: Leah, N.H., November 2, then pinned the little tag on the buck’s long ear.

  He stood up, and the ache in his back was not unpleasant. Nothing was; he knew himself to be mortal and subject to weariness, but he also knew that this ache would disappear as soon as he began to move. He must try, at least for a while, to push the other two deer up toward the next ridge where Shim and Murray waited. Again he charged his rifle with a cartridge: on a day of so much luck he might see a bear or a wildcat, and wouldn’t that be a record! He felt that if he did see one or the other he couldn’t miss, not on this day.

  Quickly he followed the two tracks, and after a half-mile or so, during which time they headed exactly toward the place he thought Shim had meant, he heard a faint shot from high above him—faint and yet sharp: pow! And then two more, coming almost together. No one else could have been so high at this hour. It must have been Shim and Murray, and each must have had a shot; the two last ones had come too close together to have been from one bolt-action rifle. Wonderful! My God! he thought, I hope Murray scored! He laughed out loud, and turned back toward his own kill. He would hav
e a long drag ahead of him, but that sweat would be all triumphant, and while he horsed the buck down through the woods he could contemplate Murray’s possible triumph, too. Maybe they would all bring in their deer, and it would be a great day. Out with the bourbon and glasses! and he and his son would be sharpshooters, hunters together again.

  20

  SHIM CLIMBED fast, and Murray followed him at a distance he tried to keep at ten yards. Shim, he felt pretty sure, was making a contest out of it, showing this young punk how fifteen years didn’t matter if you were a woodsman. It was tiring enough; the ground was invisible, and sometimes it wasn’t where you expected it to be, but a disconcerting two inches higher or lower, or had a perverse slant to it that necessitated a wearing shift of all muscles and joints in order to maintain balance. But on they climbed, in and out of hummocks, bending flat beneath branches, shifting their rifles from one hand to another for balance or in order to push a prodding branch out of the way, using up energy as if they had an unlimited supply of it. The attention necessary in order to proceed at all had to be directly in front of the body, at a distance of inches or a few feet, and Murray had the same feeling of insulation from his greater surroundings he might have had in a speeding car; the trees, the vistas, slid quickly by, and he hadn’t a chance to look at them at all.

  He had opened his jacket and shirt, and as he sweated and worked he could feel his moist heat rising above him. Every part of his body was hot, even the top of his head beneath his red wool cap, which he had pushed back as far as it would go without its falling off (but it did fall off several times when little branches cleverly grown into hooks tweaked it into the snow). Once the winter bud on the end of a basswood whip, exactly in the shape of a Q-tip, inserted itself straight into his ear with considerable pain and the noise of thunder. For a moment he thought it had punctured something, but soon the pain went away. He hadn’t time to worry about it.

  Up and up they went, sometimes holding and pulling with the one free hand, searching for traction with the edges of their soles, and finally Shim began to slow down a little. They had come upon a narrow trail between rocks and small spruce, and here Shim stopped, turned and grinned as if to say, “Some climb!” He managed not to look so hot as Murray knew he himself did. Shim never wore as many clothes, for one thing—always just a green shirt over his various layers of underwear and other shirts, rather than a regular hunting jacket.

  “ ’Bout a half-mile to go,” Shim said, “but it’s not uphill too much from here on. You been up here before, I think, when you was about sixteen.”

  Yes, they were on the Cooper Cabin trail, named after some long-gone hunter’s shack. Murray remembered his father pointing out a few stones, once, and saying that their vaguely rectangular design meant that they had once been the cabin’s foundation. The Cooper Cabin trail led along a narrow ridge from the top of Gilman Mountain down a gentle curve and then up to the top of Cascom. They must have been nearer Cascom, for the trail slanted up toward the north. The trail was about one foot wide, a little groove in moss and stone, he remembered; now it was a soft line of snow broken only by the marks of partridge feet and one nice walking deer track, according to Shim a doe.

  “You got to watch out for springs here and there,” Shim said. “You’ll hit that ice underneath and go zip down the rock, you ain’t careful.”

  They went on, slower now, and as the trail twisted higher they might have been in northern Canada; the trees changed, the lichens on the few bare faces of the ledge grew strange and arctic, and the few yellow birches among the dense, short spruce were dwarfed and twisted. It was hard for Murray to believe that such a wild northern barren could exist so close in miles to the familiar, comfortable maples and fields of the valleys. They came to promontories where rock jutted out over the beech forest below, and he could look right down the tall trees. At times the trail crossed long, curving spheres of granite, and they went slowly, searching for cracks, holding fast to the few thin trunks—thin as broom handles—of dwarfed spruce. Below would be tangles of trunks and blowdown, the dead and living trees so complicatedly enmeshed nothing larger than a rabbit could have run between them. And then, around a corner as sharp as the arc of a wheel they would come to a cliff, and see the whole white and gray and bluish world curving and heaving out across New Hampshire and Maine, out around over the horizon.

  And he would, even while he recognized the beauty of the cold land, ask himself what he was doing here. Where were the noisy plains full of people? He couldn’t see them. Where were the cities? All he could see was a frozen lake, far off to the southeast, and over everything a bright blue sky full of cold sunlight. Much more real was the frigid wind—up here it seemed not a wind, which somehow would have had dimensions to it, but the whole cap of the earth’s air moving over. Steady, always there, it seemed to move straight through trees and even through sheer walls of the gray granodiorite; they were no protection, and if he stopped against the face of the ledge the air seemed to breathe right out of it, cold as space.

  Shim stopped. “Nearly there,” he said, and from below they heard two shots. “Now, that was your pa!” Shim looked, and turned his head as if to triangulate the faint echoes. “It was your pa, and by the Jesus he wouldn’t shoot no jackrabbit! He’s got something going, Murray!”

  They continued at a cautious run, not trusting the snow, ready at each step for violent maneuvers for balance. It was exhausting work. We’ll head ’em off at the pass! Murray thought hysterically; he had nearly landed on his back, and his riflestock had knocked against the ice, but they ran on, up and down steep little humps, through passages where the trail was merely a narrow corridor at the bottom of a wide crack in the ledge, or between equally impenetrable spruce. Shim fell down once, hard on his knee, got up immediately and kept going, cursing softly and continuously. His boots were older, and smoother on their bottoms, but in certain places this gave him an advantage, for he could half-ski down steep places where Murray had to leap and run with jarring steps.

  Finally Shim stopped and bent over exhaustedly. “Now,” he said, and took a breath before he spoke again. “This is one place. You git yourself set up on the side, there, facing the wind. I’ll be right over that hump. Two places they cross over every goddam time. Nearly every time, anyways.” He ran up over the hump and out of sight.

  Murray’s pass was no more than twenty yards wide, a steep gully running right across the ridge, as if it had been chopped out with an ax to form a V. In the very bottom of it a swampy run had kept the little spruce from sealing it off. He climbed back up the trail, then found a place about ten yards from it to sit; a deer might come down the trail itself, by some chance, even into their scent, and here he would have a chance at it. He had a plastic flap inside the back of his hunting jacket which he let down to form a waterproof seat, and having chosen his spot and broken off a few small branches that crossed his field of vision—and one that would have gouged him in the back of the neck—he arranged his plastic and gratefully let his rear end sink into the soft snow. He shook with weariness, and if a deer had stood broadside to him at that moment he would have had difficulty holding his rifle steady enough to aim.

  As he rested and cooled out, his hands steadied and he buttoned up his jacket and let down the earflaps of his cap. Now he was ready, and he hoped that a nice deer—not too heavy!—would come by soon and he could shoot it. It would make his father so happy if he got a deer. That was what the Old Man really wanted, and then everything would be fine; he could take off tonight and it wouldn’t seem that he was running away from his father. At least it would make it possible for his father to rationalize it that way. If he could only explain it to the man…

  Bang!—just over the hump. Shim. He sat very still. With a deer you couldn’t tell. Another might have chosen this path. The shot had seemed slightly to his right, and if Shim had missed or just wounded it, the deer might come back around this way.

  But the deer hadn’t: there he was—it was—it did
n’t matter, right on the trail Shim had taken. There was the chest, white; there was a thin brown leg, a front one. He raised his rifle slowly, carefully, around a pesky twig, took a clear and good sight picture of that shoulder, both of his eyes open. There was the head—it was a doe—no, a young buck, just the right size. Perfect. His right hand had been squeezing the rifle, and now the trigger was coming in tight. Whomp! The sight picture had been just right. His hand began to come up toward the bolt….

  Shim’s face, ballooned, Shim’s mouth open, eyes bugged out, his red mouth and very regular white teeth like a set of sugar lumps; his mouth open, screaming. No sound, though. Was he deaf?