I think my father said it best when he said, “All right. I’m officially creeped.”
I took him by the sleeve and said, “Can we please, please, please go home now?”
“Yes,” he said. “I think we better.”
We were a few hundred yards upstream from our camp when it happened. Somewhere across the South Fork there was a sound—a deep groan—and all three of us went still.
“Quiet!” my father said when I opened my mouth to speak. He had one hand cupped around his ear, while the other held his rifle. When after a moment, we had heard nothing else, I said, “Do you think it’s a bear?”
He did not have an answer because right then Boo broke away from us and leapt into the river. It was fast-moving and foaming and pulled the dog a good thirty feet downstream before he made it across. Once there he shook off quickly and rushed the sandy bank and entered the woods, and then a moment later appeared again on the bank, barking terribly at something in the trees. “Boo,” my father yelled. “Boo, goddamnit, get over here.”
The dog did not acknowledge him but continued barking as he ran in a wide circle and then vanished into another section of underbrush. For a long time, over the noise of the river, we could hear the branches snapping, the bushes rustling, Boo barking. Then a silence set in that in this deep shadowed canyon seemed too silent.
Dust clung to the air and drifted across the river. Some of it stuck to my skin. My father could not stop shaking his head. He could not believe it. “I’ve never seen a dog act like that,” he said. “I’ve seen salmon act like that, when the hook first surprised them, but never a dog.”
My father wanted to immediately ford the river and search for Boo, but I suggested to him, since we were so close already, that we might make our lunch at camp, and who knows, the smell of fried fish might bring the dog from the forest.
“Or something else,” my father said, and when I said, “What?” he put two fingers to his mouth and whistled a special ear-zinging whistle I have always wished to master. When Boo did not respond he muttered, “Damn, damn, damn,” and began marching toward camp with his rifle held before him.
An hour passed and clouds piled up above us. They moved and met each other, closing the blue gulfs between them, like hands slowly weaving a spell of grayness over the day. The sun filtered through the thinner clouds and shapeless sections of light roamed across the canyon floor and walls.
We returned to find our camp not as we left it. The cooler was open, the lawn chairs were tipped over, and my sleeping bag had been dragged halfway from the tent like a stuck-out tongue.
“What the hell,” I said as adrenaline-soaked panic hummed like Muzak in the background of my brain. “I mean, what the hell, Dad? What did this?” I knew this sounded like a line from a bad movie, and I wanted a line from a good movie, but there was nothing else to say. “Dad?”
My father picked up the sleeping bag and smelled it, clearly lost in thought. “Mmm.”
“Mmm what?”
“Mmm I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Let’s go now,” I said. “Can we just go? Now?”
My father pushed the sleeping bag back into the tent and went to the firepit and squatted next to it and began to arrange fresh kindling. “Not without Boo, we won’t.”
“Look,” I said. “We’ll go to John Day and—”
“Not without Boo, we won’t!” This was said at a scream. A freakish look came into his eyes that I didn’t want to argue with, so I lifted my hands and let them fall, seeking an explanation and giving up on one all in the same motion. “We’ll eat something,” my father said, his voice calm now, “and then we’re going to find him. We’re going to track him. And if we run into anything else along the way, we’ll kill it.”
Soon flames crackled and trout filets sizzled in butter and my brain felt as if the clouds had dropped down and seized it.
We waded the South Fork with our rifles held above our heads. Once across, our boots squished and our pants clung to us uncomfortably and we entered the woods and the light fell away as if in a sudden dusk. Birds sailed around us, squawking and inspecting us, but otherwise we saw no living thing when we followed the rain-gutted game trail bearing Boo’s prints.
We climbed a steep grade and entered a wooded ravine with a stream trickling through it. It was a tight corridor—filled with shadows and jutting knobs of basalt and stunted juniper trees that somehow grew through the stone, their roots like gnarled fingers ready to scrabble down and seize us—and when we left this ravine and entered a wider gulch, it was with the relief of a deep breath and a loosened belt.
“That’s queer.” My father was walking ahead of me and stopped, his body bent in half, searching the ground. “Do you see it?”
I saw nothing.
“Boo’s paw prints end here.” He pointed to the trail. “He’s running along at a good clip and then . . .”
I had a natural explanation. “He left the trail and went into the woods.” My father did not respond, but kneeled and more carefully examined the rain-soaked soil, as easy to read as print on the page. “What is it now?” I said.
He raised his eyes from the trail and stared back at me steadily. “Boo’s paw prints end,” he said. “And something else takes them over.”
I hunkered down next to him, and among the many hoof and paw shapes he indicated a long thin print—vaguely human—except at its tip, where three toes made a tiny constellation in the soil. I was not surprised. I was beyond surprise. I imagined I heard the ghost of a yelp still lingering in the air.
There was a crashing in the trees close to us and we both raised our rifles. But nothing came out of the dimness except a mule deer, a six-point, a big beautiful animal that ripped through the pines and over the fallen timber and into the open trail where it came to a stand, watching us, swishing its tail, not ten feet away—so close I could smell its musk.
I stared down the length of my rifle. It felt cold in my hand. I remembered the deer tangled in barbed wire and considered firing, but didn’t. I didn’t have it in my heart—and apparently neither did my father. He sighed and let his rifle fall. The movement sent the deer bounding up the trail and around the corner.
My father continued forward. I stopped him by beginning a series of broken sentences, but each thought lost its grip in the empty air. I became very aware of him staring at me. “Are you done?” he said and when I didn’t say anything, he resumed tracking.
A chill wind blew suddenly through the gulch, making the pines send out a roaring whistle. Just as quickly, it stopped, as if the forest had taken a deep breath. There followed a tinkling noise, like a tiny bell, not too far ahead of us. We went to it.
The nylon collar hung from a tree branch, some ten feet above the trail, like a grotesque Christmas ornament. The tinkling came from its tags, knocked together by the wind. For a long time we stared at it, and then my father reached with his rifle and used the barrel to pull the collar from the branch. It was torn in places and its color, naturally red, was made redder by the blood that rubbed off on his hand when he held it.
A wince passed over his face and a flush followed it. I remembered his earlier comment about the hay baler. I remembered the dead men. I remembered my buddy Brandon—my buddy from high school—telling me the story of how one time, on a camping trip in the Deschutes National Forest, he woke up with something hunched over him—a black shape against the starlit sky—and he could feel its breath and he could see its unnaturally large eyes, and just when he was trying to decide to scream or go for his knife, it loped away with hardly a sound.
And I imagined someone, months from now, finding my jacket at the mouth of a cave, torn and spotted with blood. Maybe my bones would lie in a nearby pile, broken, with all the marrow sucked from them.
“No,” my father said and twisted and squeezed the collar, as if to wring the blood from it. His face filled with lines of pain and a vein wormed across his forehead. A minute passed befo
re he put the collar in his coat pocket and picked up his rifle, his finger curled around the trigger, his voice wild and fast when he said, “I’m going to . . .”
But he didn’t know what he was going to do.
I said, “Dad?” and he looked at me through a fog of shock and anger and fear and confusion, finally saying, “What leaves tracks like that, Justin? Not a bear. Not a cougar. That’s for goddamn certain. What leaves a collar of a dead dog dangling from a tree like some kind of message?”
My mind chugged through the possibilities, all of them involving horror movie scenarios of long-armed humpbacked creatures covered in hair, and I began to feel very small and vulnerable on this dark game trail, a piece of meat among the shadowy trees.
“You don’t want to say it,” my father said, “but you’re thinking it.”
A tense silence followed his words, broken by a branch cracking somewhere in the distance. Both of us flinched.
He smiled without humor. “Bigfoot? That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?” He laughed at this. “You think Bigfoot killed those men.”
“Maybe we both think—”
“You think Bigfoot killed my dog.” He laughed like someone who never shows emotion, explosively, wretchedly, so I knew it came from somewhere deep inside. His laughter went on and on until it finished with a sob.
I had seen him at funerals—I had seen him break a leg after falling from a tree stand—but this was the first time I had seen him cry. Before I knew what I was doing, I put an arm around his shoulder and drew him against me—and he was utterly overcome.
I thumped him on the back and realized that we had changed places, if only for a moment. It was a strange place to be, just as it was very strange to look back upon yesterday—it lay so distant, so irrevocable. “I’ll be glad when we get out of this canyon,” I said.
“Tell me about it.” He pulled away from me and roughly wiped at his eyes. “We’re acting pretty unstrung for a couple of old guys, aren’t we?”
“Yes.”
From far up the canyon there came a low-throated groan, followed by another, closer by, like a strange series of vapors released from the earth. We held our rifles before us, aiming at nothing and at everything.
My father looked at me, red-faced and hollow-eyed, and I read in his expression what he could never voice out loud.
I knew exactly how he felt. For once we understood each other.
When he started back the way we came, I followed him—and both of us were glad when three hours later we drove from the Ochocos and into the flatter country where among the sagebrush and dry gullies and cattle and knotted systems of fence-line we were no longer surrounded by forest.
The Killing
There is blood on his hands. At the kitchen sink the old man dampens them with hot water and works the soap between his palms, making a pink foam that swirls down the drain with a sucking noise. He dries off with a flour-sack cloth and hangs it from the oven handle and goes to the kitchen table and removes from his belt holster a Colt.45 revolver and opens its cylinder and taps out six bullets—one of them a blackened, empty cartridge—and sets them and the gun on a tablemat before sitting down in a ladder-back chair with a cane seat giving way from years of his weight.
Jim is tall and thin and keeps his long gray hair knotted into a ponytail. His face appears cut from fissured stone. On his arm is a jagged crescent of a scar where a bear once bit him, a bear he shot and thought dead. This is a small scar compared to the other. So many years ago he lost his left foot in Chu Lai and now he wears a flesh-colored prosthesis in the place of it. He can get along fine, but walks heavily to one side.
Through a nearby window he can see the meadow, and the forest beyond it, and further still he can see the foothills that rise steadily into the snow-capped Cascades, the sky above them a cold November blue. A gnarled juniper tree interrupts the view. From it hangs a deer carcass, with a nylon rope strung through its hind hock and over a branch. He shot it with the Colt. He prefers to hunt with a handgun or bow, as it requires marksmanship, the ability to stalk within close range. He thinks it only fair.
The deer is like a hundred before it, and a hundred more to come, all in the same posture of death—its head chopped off, its belly split open and emptied. Blood oozes from it and makes dust into mud. The smell draws the turkey vultures.
At first there are just one or two, drifting overhead, their feathers shining blackly, their wings trembling against the updrafts and wind currents. More soon arrive. Perhaps they too are drawn by the smell of blood. Or perhaps they are drawn from the forest as leaves are swept up into a dust devil, as if summoned, by the endless spinning of the vultures, their cyclonic power.
Jim calls out for his grandson and a moment later the boy appears in the shadows of the hallway, moving into the light of the kitchen. His name is Cody and he is six years old. He wears his sand-colored hair in a buzz cut. A robotic T. rex dangles from his hand.
Jim motions to the chair next to him and with some hesitation the boy sits down in it. Even as he fiddles absently with his dinosaur he keeps his eyes sharp on the gun.
“Look at me.”
The boy looks at Jim, then looks away, and Jim says, “I said look at me,” and a stare seals between them. He asks if the boy heard the shooting earlier and if he had been scared and the boy alternatively shakes his head no, yes.
“Well. Which is it?”
When the boy makes no response Jim says, “I called for you earlier. I could have used your help. You don’t need to be scared anymore. You’re safe here. You understand that? I won’t let nothing bad happen to you. Don’t you understand?”
The boy sets his dinosaur aside and focuses all his attention on the gun and then reaches for it—just briefly, sliding a finger along its stock—before his hand retreats to his lap. And Jim knows what this small gesture means: the boy will try to be brave.
“Good,” he says. “That’s good.” He reaches for the boy and brings a hand to his buzzed scalp, moving it back and forth, making a sizzling sound that makes the boy smile a little.
Then he asks the boy what he knows about guns and when the boy shrugs Jim lifts the Colt, like a fine piece of jewelry, tilting it this way and that so its metal catches the light. It has a nickel finish and wooden grip. At 10.5 inches in length with a 4.75-inch barrel and a range of 50 meters, it weighs only two pounds, but can knock the biggest animal off its feet and into the next world, Jim says.
His father gave it to him and he will give it to the boy, eventually, when he gets a little bigger.
“I’m big,” the boy says, and Jim gives him a thin smile, at once full of judgment and love, and says, “No. You’re not.”
Outside a vulture screams. The scream is a hungry one. Jim watches it come down from the sky and meet its shadow on the ground. When it lands it sends dust swirling with the air it displaces. It hops over to the deer and fits its head up inside the empty sack of it—to drink—like some great and terrible hummingbird.
Jim gets up from the table and limps to the window and pulls it open and yells, “Hey!”
The vulture withdraws its head from the deer and studies him a moment and hisses before hopping off a short distance. There it cocks its head and brings its wings together, giving it the appearance of a small man in a black cloak.
Jim returns to the table and sees that the boy now holds the gun with two hands, marveling at the look and heft of it, as if it holds some great significance.
“Careful,” Jim says, snapping his fingers. “Give it back.”
The boy cradles it close to his body, against his chest, before doing what Jim tells him.
Jim then asks the boy to fetch a rag from the garage. After he retrieves it they work together, cleaning the gun. They unbolt it and remove the springs and slide the rag through its cavities, wiping the oil from the lip of the chamber and swabbing the carbonized residue off the firing pin. Jim checks, and then asks the boy to double-check the chamber,
searching for grit or burrs. Then they reassemble the gun. The hammer snaps, the six-shot cylinder clicks and whizzes.
He hands the gun to the boy and tells him to keep his finger far from the trigger. With some awkwardness the boy takes the gun and holds it out before him and squints one eye and aims at the window, at the vulture beyond it, making a shooting sound with a punch of his lips
The vulture is chewing at the deer, tearing away a long fleshy ribbon. Upon swallowing the meat, its head darts into the torso for more, so that the deer and the bird seem but one nightmarish creature—a long bald neck at the end of which dangles an eyeless feathery head with orange antlers scratching the ground.
Jim reclaims the revolver and selects a bullet to fit into its cylinder and once again rises from his chair and goes to the window. The movement startles the vulture. Its head, so impossibly red, emerges from the torso of the deer. Its beak parts and from it comes a series of asthmatic noises meant to frighten Jim.
With difficulty he squats at the window and rests his elbows on the sill and aims and for the second time today squeezes the trigger. The revolver jumps. The report overwhelms all other sound. The vulture does a dance and falls over with only one of its wings flapping and a fist-sized hole blown through its chest.
He directs the boy to follow him outside and a moment later they stand over the bird. “I want you to drag it out to the meadow. Near where the trees begin.” He indicates where he means with his hand and then lets it drop to urge the boy forward. But the boy resists, looking up at him. He has a lot of white in his eyes that explains his fear.
“Nothing to be afraid of.” Here Jim brings his boot to the vulture and kicks it so that it limply rolls over a few times, the dust sticking to it. “See. It’s dead. What’s dead can’t hurt you.”
So the boy goes to the vulture and kicks it once himself and when it does not respond he looks at Jim and Jim says, “Go on now.” The boy takes the vulture by the claw and drags it away from the house, to the mouth of the forest, where perhaps the coyotes will eat it or perhaps the vultures will eat their own, quarreling over the meat.
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