Home from the Hill

by William Humphrey

  Was it just that he had had too much of it? Could you have too much of hunting? Obviously that was not the answer, for he wanted more, was insatiable for what had ceased to be a pleasure to him.

  And even after he had begun to judge the success of his days solely by the weight of his game pockets, a heavy one still left him dissatisfied. He had a sense of never being alone, and no shot, no matter how difficult, no bag, no matter how large, could win the praise of the companion of his hunts. And perhaps he kept so restlessly on the move to outpace, and thus evade recognizing that companion, hunted all the more urgently in order not to see that hunting had ceased to be its own reward and, with his mother’s help, had become a senseless competition with that bright image he carried always in his heart of his father resplendent in all his prowess and skill.

  He turned furiously to gunning rabbits, the nimbler, gamier jacks first, then, when they gave out, the cottontails. Once he would have scorned to make game of them; but slaughtered in such numbers, they were not to be ashamed of. He supported whole Negro families on cottontail rabbits that winter.

  At last the rabbits too holed up; and it was still two months at least before the spring season of squirrel shooting.

  A new year had begun—the last of which he was to see the end—1938: his eighteenth, his father’s forty-sixth, his mother’s thirty-eighth.

  13

  That spring, early, when the first of the swampers came out of hibernation, news reached town of an invader in Sulphur Bottom. It began when one trapper and trotline-runner, who did a little farming on the side to supplement his diet of mudcat and possum, and raised a razorback hog or two by turning them loose in the Bottom to range on acorns and pignuts, asked his neighbor, whom he had not seen all winter long until that day on the square, whether or not he’d had a hog turn wild and run off on him. Well now, said the neighbor, he had been just fixing to ask him the very same. Nothing more was said, and there the matter rested until the following Saturday, when words to the same effect passed between two more of them, who then went on to compare losses. One had had a young tom turkey he was raising for Christmas dinner stolen on him. The other had indeed missed a pig, but had found him—or what was left of him. The man who had lost the turkey grunted. A few minutes later he added that he had found tracks. The man who had lost the pig nodded and, when he had licked and lit his cigarette, said that he had had his trapline robbed, too. He had found the remains of a fox and two coons. He had found tracks too, that time.

  They just nodded. It was their way to go slowly towards any conclusion. So it was not until the next Saturday, the first in April, when three of the first four and three new ones from down there appeared on the square—more of them in town on one day than had been seen in years—that anything came of it. Then there were additions to the record: chicken coops busted, another pig found dead and half eaten, an entire patch of winter turnips rooted up and tracks everywhere, and this time there was a man who had seen him.

  “Hit’s a wile hawg, sho nuff, Cap,” he said. “I mean, one that never wuz nothin but wile. One lak that other un ye got that time. Not no barnyard pig run wile. Musta worked his way ovah f’om Loozyanner. I seen him. Hit uz Monday a week when I uz runnin mah line. I skeered im up f’om whur he uz bedded down an ef I hadn’ th’owed im the two dead possums I uz totin, why I doubt he’d a et me. I doubt he’ll run ye ever bit ez big ez you other un, Cap.”

  “He’s hangin out aroun the edges,” another volunteered. “He ain’t gone in very deep. I guess he ain’t much skeered of nobody comin after im. I mean, a man wouldn’ have to go very fur to find im. Ef some man wuz to want to.”

  “Well, if that’s the case,” said the Captain, “and since I’m all taken up just now trying to get things ready for spring planting, why, my boy here will take care of him for you.”

  In slow unison, like cattle turning together as they browse, and impassive as the gaze of chewing cattle, the six pairs of eyes turned to look at him, pale, steady, hard eyes, permanently squinched against the sun. He could not tell whether they even tried to judge him. They simply stopped looking after a while and turned back to his father all together. It seemed they nodded—if so, it was too slight to be sure of. But they would not dare appear to doubt that his son was man enough for the job.

  “You better take somebody with you,” said his father, handing him the Winchester and a box of cartridges.

  “You didn’t think I was meaning to go alone?” As a matter of fact he had been, and saw that his father knew it.

  “Take somebody you know you can trust, somebody that can shoot.”

  He would have preferred to take somebody who he and everybody else knew could not shoot, but he said, “Pritchard?”

  “He can shoot. All right, take Pritchard.”

  His father told him what to expect. “When the dogs begin running him he’ll head for the thicket. He’ll most likely go downhill, not up, and get into a swamp if he can. If he goes in too deep call off the dogs—if you can get them to come. Just don’t let him lead you in so deep you get lost. He’ll come back.”

  He barely heard. They were in the den and it was four a.m. and he was eager to be on his way. He was aware only of this: that he had sat at Chauncey’s feet here and listened times beyond number to the tale of how his father had killed the last wild boar in East Texas. But it had not been the last; another had appeared—for him.

  “The dogs won’t be able to head him your direction,” said his father. “You’ll just have to follow the best you can. After a while he’ll stop and take the dogs on in a fight. You’ll be able to tell by the difference in the sound they make, I imagine. It’ll sound scared. Over in Louisiana they hunt them with fifteen or a dozen hounds—you’ve got three and none of them ever hunted boar. When he does make a stand I’d appreciate it if you’d try to get there before he kills all three of them. Now, he’ll lead the dogs into such thick cover that most likely you won’t see him until you’re already close to him—that is, until he’s close to you. The minute he sees you he’ll charge you. He’ll rip right through the dogs to get at you. From the size of him (I expect this one is pretty good sized) you’ll think he’s bound to be slow. Don’t believe it. He’s one of the fastest things that moves. Don’t shoot for the head, it’s too thick. He’ll put his snout down to charge. Shoot for the snout and you ought to hit the heart. You’ve seen them stick hogs at hog-killing time—try to hit that spot. Are you listening?”

  “Yes, sir,” he said. But he had heard nothing since the words I expect this one is pretty good sized. He had turned then to look at the head hanging above the mantel. Was his as big as that? What if it was smaller, much smaller? What if it was plain puny? It had to be as big. It just had to be!

  “Make your first shot count,” his father said. “Because it’s the only one you’re likely to get. And don’t wait then to see if it was good or not. One of those brutes can keep going with a .30-30 bullet in his heart and still hit you hard enough to take off your leg with one of those tusks. Stand by a tree with some low limbs and throw the gun away from you and start climbing the second you pull the trigger. That way there’s nothing to worry about.

  He promised him he would, but he promised himself he would not. He hadn’t, when he shot his.

  14

  So he had no boar hounds, properly speaking. But though they never been used for what they were intended, he had two of the little black-brown hounds that the Plott family has bred to a famous line over the years to run bear and Russian boar in the Great Smoky Mountains, and he had Deuteronomy. Neither he nor his forebears were ever trained to hunt wild boar; but they had never needed to be trained to herd swamp-grazing razorbacks that sometimes turned almost as wild and vicious as a Russian boar. For his master the Captain, Deuteronomy had run coons and sometimes foxes, but pork was his true scent. The two Plott hounds seemed to trust him. They bayed; he barked like a yard dog.

  It took all the early morning to find tracks to set the dogs on.
So it was after nine when they first gave tongue, and after eleven when they gave their frantic fighting cry, when the boar first stopped and turned to take them on. But three dogs were just not enough to hold him at bay. By the time Theron and Pritchard caught up, the chase was on again and at least a mile away from them. In the next hour and a half they heard the boar stop twice again to stand and fight, and the second time, as they ran, above the barking they heard suddenly the scream of one of the hounds. When they arrived at the scene of that stand a quarter of an hour later they found a circle of ground so churned up it looked as if it had been disc-harrowed, and on the edge of it in a pool of blood lay the male Plott hound, his chest ripped from throat to belly to the depth of a man’s hand and his guts spilled out onto the ground. They trailed for another hour, following the sound that rang in the damp and cavernous woods, and then they ceased to hear the baying of the Plott bitch—though still they heard at great distance the barking of Deuteronomy—and in another few minutes they came upon her lying in the trail, not dead, not even injured, and not cowed, just worn out. They quit then for the day, and Theron called Deuteronomy off with his father’s hunting horn.

  He spent the night at Pritchard’s. He was not going home without what he had come after. He had told his mother he would be gone a day or two, probably not more than two. Amazingly, she had made no fuss about his setting off to encounter a wild boar. Perhaps she did not realize what was involved. Perhaps he didn’t either. But now, seeing himself already as its killer, a vision which this first unsuccessful day, by adding a day’s hot chase and a dead, valiant hound to the story it made in his mind, only made seem more real, he could not imagine ever going back to town, leading an everyday sort of town life.

  Waiting for sleep that night in the strange bed, a worry he had already had returned to bother him. He remembered the confident way his father had offered him to the swamp men for this job, and their non-committal looks. What if Pritchard got the first shot, brought down the boar? And even if he did not, people still could say, Pritchard had been there with a shotgun loaded with heavy slugs, backing him up all the while. Where was the danger, where was the glory in that?

  But it was not what “people” could say that he was thinking of, and he knew it. It was only his father’s opinion that he cared about.

  It had long been his habit to wake before daybreak, and the next morning he got up in the dark and with his rifle in one hand and shoes and clothes in the other, stole out of the sleeping house. Fortunately he had made friends with Pritchard’s foxhounds the day before; now they kept silent. He dressed in the barn. He led out Pritchard’s saddle horse and led him across the back lot and down the road and hitched him to a tree and saddled him. He had brought a coil of lariat. With this he leashed the dogs.

  Steam was beginning to lift from the fields, and at his passage, out of the rows of fresh-plowed and seed-sown land rose flocks of indignant crows that glinted blue-black and copper in the first red rays of the sun. Ahead, where the cleared land came to an end and where the sunlight stopped, loomed the dark wall of the woods. The road disappeared between columns of black pines. Inside the shadow he crossed an old logging bridge over a slough. The horse’s hooves rang on the boards and the echo rang in the woods. Soon he would be in the bottom proper; already the dogs were straining on the rope. “God,” he prayed, “let me get him and let him be a big one, as big as Papa’s, and I won’t ever ask you for anything more.” He saw in his mind the mounted head over the mantel in the den, and it was enormous. He succeeded with a little effort in thinking of himself as being engaged in a friendly rivalry. His father would be the first to wish him luck.

  When he reached the spot where the old logging road gave out, where brush had overgrown the ruts, he dismounted and hitched the horse to a tree. He unleashed the dogs, and with Deuteronomy in the lead the two of them at once disappeared into the woods, casting about for a scent. Then he thought, what if the boar came out here and found the horse, and it tied and unable to defend itself? He thought then how little use to him the horse was going to be anymore anyway, when he had three or four hundred pounds of dead wild pig on his hands. No question that he was going to have that boar—or certainly he would not need the horse. Because he was not going back without it. He unhitched the reins and tied them to the saddle pommel. Turning the horse about he slapped it on the rump. It seemed to know its way back. He watched until it disappeared around a turn. At that moment he heard the first bellow from the hound.

  Standing under the soaring pines, branchless for forty feet up, that high above him swished softly in a breeze, looking down from the crest of the knoll where four years before, his first, they had sat around the fire all night listening to the hounds run foxes and he had heard for the first time that sudden gasping scream of a person being strangled to death: the bark of a fox; watching the dew distilling up out of the woods, the fog rising off the sluggish, yellow river branch, he could feel the teeming, deceptive somnolence of the land beating up to him like the ponderous ebb and wash of some vast body of water. He remembered that wet November dawn three years before when, carrying his father’s .30-30, he had stood on this same hill before plunging in and thought that somewhere in there, grazing or asleep, was his first buck, his first big game. Now he was going in after game of a kind that no man but his father had ever brought out of Sulphur Bottom. “God, let me get him and let him be a big one and I’ll never, never ask you for anything more.” He was ashamed of praying for such a thing.

  It had been Pritchard’s opinion over the supper table the night before that the boar would be in deep, sulking, this morning. Theron’s feeling had been that yesterday had not given the boar many fears. He was right. In fifteen minutes the hound was joined by Deuteronomy’s bark, and his message was unmistakable: the trail was warm.

  When that sound reached him, Theron was in a stand of liveoaks where the going was good. He broke into a run. He figured the dogs were leading him by not more than half a mile. But the good-going soon gave out. He waded through a slough and tore through a canebrake with wet trousers flopping against his legs, and the land took its first sharp dip. He found himself in what his father had told him to expect—brush, thick as a privet hedge, with mud underfoot. He held the gun with both hands above his head and felt the brush tear at him, stinging his face and ears, and as he ran and stumbled he heard the hound change her note and then heard Deuteronomy begin to yelp. The boar had turned. And now the hound was not able to hold her note, but went sliding up and down the scale in broken-voiced frenzy. And now he could no longer even stumble. He was on his hands and knees in the mud, crawling blindly.

  Then he heard baying again, tore his way out to a little clearing, got to his feet, and heard the baying already fading in volume, like a pail knocking against the sides as if plummeted down a deep well shaft. The boar had broken stand, and the chase was on again.

  And so it went. Twice again the boar turned and took the dogs on, twice again broke through them, and the second time, when Theron reached the stand, it was noon. There was blood on the ground there. He stood on the edge of the glade in the sunlight to get away from the swarming gnats and mosquitoes. Beyond, in the direction from which the hound’s note reached him like a faint echo of itself, a call as soft as the cooing of a mourning dove, the land dipped sharply and he could see rattan vines festooning the oaks like nets. He knew, as if a fence had been there, that he stood at the bounds of the land he knew. It was hot and airless, the sun was high, and all its rays seemed aimed, as though gathered by some giant magnifying glass into a point, at the spot on which he stood.

  He crossed the glade, following the tracks, deeper now as the ground suddenly softened—though his first impression was that the boar had suddenly put on a great deal of weight—and plunged into the hot, stagnant shadow. Just inside it he stopped. The air hit him. It seemed to have hung there unstirred since the beginning of time. A bird shot brightly across his sight like a fish darting through a still green po
ol. The trail was lost in shadow a dozen feet ahead and it was as if the boar and the dogs had waded in where water had washed and crumbled away their tracks. His impulse was to step slowly and softly backwards. Ancient and inviolable and pathless as the bottom of the sea, it seemed a place where men were not meant to go. He was sweating fast and steadily notwithstanding the shaded and cavernous gloom. He heard again the distant ululation of the hound, and, taking a breath, he plunged in.

  In that green light he had to strain to see. As the trees grew in height, it was as if he himself was walking down an incline into darkness, down into a cavern, or swimming on the bottom of a deepening lake, into a strange growth like submarine plants and into a silence that seemed to exert a pressure on his eardrums.

  And it was as if he had surfaced when at four o’clock he climbed a knoll and emerged into a little clearing. It was the first time since noon that he had looked at his watch. What it told him, or rather the implications of the time, stunned him. Even if he turned back now, the last hour at least of the trip would be in the dark.

  It would be more than an hour—because before he could start back, before he could recover wind enough to blow the horn for the dogs, he had to rest.

  It was four o’clock when he sat down, five-fifteen when he awoke. There was utter silence. The dogs were not in hearing. Retracing his steps, he re-entered the woods, and he learned then that even had he not fallen asleep, he had still miscalculated. He had counted on the long spring daylight hours of the outside world or in the thinner woods where he was used to hunting. For at five-fifteen there was daylight; now at a quarter of six the sun dived below the high treetops, and it was dusk.