Slow and steady. Careful and quiet.
He knows he needs to mark the trees he’s passing, to be able to identify them if he comes this way again, but doesn’t want to reveal his whereabouts to the others.
Gnawing.
Growling.
Grumbling.
He hasn’t eaten since lunch, and his body pangs remind him.
Cold.
Hungry.
Tired.
Lost.
Lonely.
Afraid.
He wants to sit down, find a place to rest a while. Just a few minutes. But he keeps moving, stumbling forward in the foggy forest, not sure where his unsteady steps are leading him.
Rustling in a thicket to his right. He stops. Listens.
A large, dark marsh rabbit darts out of the bushes, stops, turns, speeds away. Its small, red, rodent-like feet carrying it beneath a fallen tree. It then disappears into the dense undergrowth beyond.
Exhaling, he begins breathing again, his heart thumping on his breastbone the way the rabbit’s back feet do on the ground when sending out alarm signals.
Freeze.
Fear.
Panic. Inside.
He’s taken very few steps before he hears—what? The approach of a man? Has to be. Sound’s too distinctive to be anything else.
Hairs rise. Goose bumps.
Quickly. Quietly.
Ducking behind the base of a large pine and into the surrounding underbrush, Remington tries to hide and to still his racing heart enough to hear where the man is coming from.
Listen.
Heart pounding.
Deep breaths. Calm down. Relax.
Close. Footsteps. Forest floor.
Whatta I do?
Be still. But—
The steps stop suddenly.
Bracing.
Waiting.
Nothing.
Don’t forget to breathe.
Crouching so low, clenching so tight, holding himself so still . . . his body aches from the tension.
What happened? Where’d he go? Can he see me? Hear me? I’m not ready to die—not in any sense of the word. So much left undone, so much more to become. Please don’t let me die. Not now. Not like this.
Eventually, inexplicably, the footsteps begin again.
Waiting. As he listens to the retreat of the steps, carrying the unseen man farther and farther away from him, until he can no longer hear them, he counsels himself.
Not ready to die? You better get ready. Don’t let someone get the drop on you again and not be ready.
How do I prepare to die?
Don’t know exactly, but you better figure it out.
This treacherous trek through the tall timbers reminds him of the many his dad dragged him on as a boy.
These same trees were old then, he thinks. Ancient. Now they’re still here and Dad’s gone. Soon, I’ll be no more, and yet they’ll still remain.
The earth is a graveyard, it’ll swallow us whole, its seasoned trees our headstones.
Dad loved this land. Loved being outdoors, loved to hunt and track and fish. He had been a man of the land. Unlike Remington’s, his skin stayed brown, tanned—at least the parts that were exposed.
You can tell how much a person loves something by how much of their free time and disposable income they spend on it. Every free moment, every spare nickel—his dad spent them all out here.
Early in his life, little Remington had been awakened before dawn, bundled in too-big camouflaged clothing, loaded in the old truck, and deposited deep in the woods. Moving his short legs as fast as he could to keep up with his dad’s long stride, his small boot prints a tiny fraction of the huge craters his dad’s left in the clay.
Running to keep up, he had trailed his small Bear compound bow through the dirt and leaves behind him, a quiver of short arrows slung over his shoulder continually sliding down on his arm, catching in the crook of his elbow. When bow season was over, it was .22 rifles and .410 shotguns that were every bit as tall as him.
—Come on, buddy. Try to keep up.
—I am.
He’d been trying to keep up with Cole his whole life.
—You okay back there?
—Yes, sir. Great.
He wasn’t. Hadn’t been for a mile or more, but would never tell his dad. Could never.
—Isn’t this great? Worth missing a little sleep over, huh?
—Yes, sir.
There was nowhere he’d rather be than in his soft, warm bed.
Cole cast a big shadow. Out here. In town. Not only a man of the land, but a man’s man, everybody’s buddy.
As Remington got older, his Saturday morning hunting trips with his father occurred far less frequently. It was obvious, hunting wasn’t for him. Obvious even to Cole, though he never verbalized it, never in any way acknowledged it.
Adolescence.
Fridays.
Football.
Dances.
Girls.
Late nights.
Saturday mornings.
Sleep.
Guilt.
No matter how different he and his dad were, Remington had an innate, deeply ingrained desire to please him.
Alarm.
Rolling out of bed.
Stumbling out into the cold dark.
On occasion, he would be waiting in the uncomfortable, mud-covered old Chevy when his dad opened the door and the little dome light twitched on.
Look who decided not to sleep all day. How was the dance?
Cole never showed it, but Remington could tell this small, simple gesture meant more than nearly anything else he could do for his dad.
Remington never learned to like hunting, but he learned how to handle himself in the woods, learned how to use a gun, learned lessons that just might help him survive the night.
Dirty jokes.
Any attempt at imparting the mysterious facts of life came in the form of playful remarks or dirty jokes—both of which made Remington uncomfortable and a little embarrassed for his dad.
One had a mother throwing spaghetti against the wall to see if it was done and a daughter doing the same thing with her panties after a date. If the noodle sticks to the wall, it’s done. If my panties stick to the wall, I had fun.
The jokes were bad enough, but his father’s feeling the need to explain them was just way, way too much.
Then there was the inevitable question: You gettin’ any? And the obligatory warning: Don’t go divin’ until you’ve put on your wet suit. No glove, no love. I’m too young for any little snot-nosed youngin’ to be callin’ me granddaddy.
It was at this age that Remington first picked up a camera for anything other than snapshots, and at this stage that he first began carrying one into the woods.
He still carried a shotgun, but more for show than anything else. The shooting he was doing involved film, not ammunition—captured life, not ended it.
—You ever get a big buck, ’bout an eight point or better, you’ll put that camera down and have your gun ready at all times. You just wait.
His dad had waited his whole life, and it had never happened. The last time they had been on this land together had been less than a month before Cole died. Then, it’d been his dad who’d put a camera in his hands, asking him to document the changes he had made to the land—the new trails he had carved into it, the controlled burns he had conducted, and the one hundred or so acres of timber he had cut down to help pay his wife’s medical bills.
Realizing even then how short life is, how little time we get with those we love—though not knowing just how short his dad’s life would be and how very little time they had left together—Remington had taken several shots of his dad and put together a small photojournal piece he had never shown anyone.
Amidst photographs of his dad enjoying the day and the land and the son he so loved, Remington had penned these words:
Time.
We talk about buying it or saving it, but we can do neither.
We all spend it at a cost of sixty seconds a minute, sixty minutes an hour, and twenty-four hours per day. It’s running out for all of us and there’s nothing we can do about it. We can break every clock we encounter, and our lives will still continue to tick away, counting down to the bang or whimper or big silence that bookends the backside of our lives.
Time is one of the most precious resources we have—a priceless, limited, finite gift we get to do with what we want.
Some people, like my dad, spend their time leisurely, like they have a limitless supply. These people spend time, waste time, kill time. Others, like me, spend it rapidly, filling every moment. These people never have any time to spare, they’re always out of time.
How we spend our time defines who we are. What we do with our days determines our destinies.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the time we get with our loved ones.
My wife Heather’s mother died recently. Suddenly, abruptly, her time with her family and friends was over. There was no more time to do anything—not a single second.
Experiencing Heather’s loss with her has served to heighten my awareness of the brevity of life in general and our time with our parents in particular.
Twice this week I rode ATVs with my dad across acres and acres of land that’s been in our family for over seventy years—land many other James fathers and sons have traversed—and as we did I thought what a gift this time we have together is.
If things take their natural course (and there’s no guarantee they will), then my father will precede me in taking that step alone into the great unknown, the way his dad did him. At some point he will be gone and I will become a fatherless son, and all I’ll have is the time we spent together. Time well spent together—some of it on this very same land when I was a boy and he was a god.
Knowing how limited and precious and priceless time is, I continually question the ways in which I’m spending mine. Am I using the gifts that have been entrusted to me to help others? Am I doing enough? Am I leaving the world in some small way better than I found it?
I don’t get as much time with my dad as I would like, but as different as we are, as our interests are, all the time I do get with him, every second, every single one is time well spent.
Now, his time with his dad is over. Completely. Finally. Forever. He will never again walk these woods with the god of his childhood. Never. Not ever.
And there’s a very real possibility that this will be his last night—in these woods or anywhere else. He tries to consider that, to really let it penetrate, but finds he’s incapable of contemplating his own end. He can think about it on a superficial, surface, intellectual level, but not on a deeper emotional, spiritual, or existential one.
Rust-colored facial discs around yellow eyes.
Dark brown feathers.
White throat.
Prominent ear tufts.
Bird of prey.
A great horned owl swoops down out of a loblolly pine, talons spread wide, and snatches up a small cotton mouse scurrying along the forest floor, its long tail whipping about as it’s hoisted into the air.
The squeals of the mouse are overpowered by the deep, resonant hoo-hoo-hooooo of the magnificent owl.
Small slope.
Very little vegetation.
Thick, broad leaves cover the ground.
Dense tree canopy above.
Layers and layers of light and dark green leaves.
He’s entered a beech-magnolia forest.
Thousands of years in the making.
Southern magnolias: Smooth, gray bark. Large, oblong leaves.
American beeches: Smooth, gray bark. Small, crinkly leaves.
The trees are so close together, the canopy they form so thick, very little sunlight ever reaches the forest floor. If not for the fallen leaves, there would be little more than dirt on the ground. Among the magnolia and beech are many other species, including the overstory trees of pine, oak, maple, sweetgum, walnut, ash, and the midstory holly, elm, palm, dogwood, and plum. So many trees in such close proximity survive by layering, shedding their leaves at different times, and by capturing sunlight in differing color wavelengths; green above, bluish beneath.
As he makes his way through the relative ease of the terrain, he wonders how his mom’s doing.
Please let her be okay. Let her sleep through the night or send someone to help her.
Because she was sick most of his life, he didn’t realize until young adulthood that he was much more like her than his dad. Or would have been if the MS hadn’t changed her.
She had given him his first camera. It was his fourteenth birthday.
—Follow me, she says.
Easing down the hallway with the help of her creaking aluminum walker, she leads him to her bedroom and into her closet.
—Grab that for me.
He reaches up to the back shelf above her hanging clothes and pulls down a large shoe box and camera bag.
Backing over to the bed and leaning back onto it, she pats the comforter and he places the items next to her and sits down beside them.
—I want you to have this.
—Your camera?
—I won’t be able to use it again.
—Sure you will.
—Don’t be condescending.
—Sorry.
—Look at these.
She lifts the dusty lid from the shoe box to reveal a few hundred small black and white photos she had developed herself.
High contrast. Artistic. Moving. Powerful.
What might she have been if her disease hadn’t ended her life so early?
—They’re great, he says.
—You’ve got the eye for it. I can tell. Open the case.
He unzips the dusty old case to find a pristine Nikon F2A.
—Mom, I can’t take your camera.
—It’s not mine anymore. It’s yours. Get out there and do what I can’t. For me. Please.
—I will, he says. Thank you so much.
—Happy birthday.
For a while he had honored her requests, honored her art form, but it was too short-lived. In pleasing his practical father, he had not only betrayed himself, but his artistic mother. His ad work was creativity of a kind, but not this, not art.
Not that ads can’t be art. They can. Often are. But he had worked in a restrictive environment, forced to be fast—and far too crassly commercial to ever even approach anything like art.
If I can just show her the shots I’ve gotten tonight, just see her face as she sees the mother bear and cub, the bobcat and bats.
Please let me do that.
Thinking of those images reminds him of the others—of someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, someone’s friend.
Evening. Glow.
Dark figures.
Shot.
Explosion.
Bloom of blood.
Body dropping to the cold ground.
Death. Digging.
Fire.
Red-orange flames licking at black outlines backlit by red-orange horizon.
Dampness.
Haze.
Biting.
Fog thick as gauze. Moisture laden. Vaporous.
Limited visibility.
The moon a small, solitary headlight smothered by a blanket of smog.
The swamp tapers off and he enters a large, open pinewood flat. Unlike pine forests planted by people, the trees of these naturally occurring longleaf flats are spread out, some eight to ten feet apart, a rich carpet of wiregrass covering the ground between them.
So hungry. So thirsty. So spent.
The break from the hardwood canopy makes it possible for him to better see the night sky, and he searches the horizon for Polaris. If he can spot it, he’ll find north. If he finds north, he can find east, and then the river.
He thinks of the nameless, faceless girl again. Pictures her partially charred body surrounded by the cold dirt of the opened and recovered earth.
What if t
hat were Heather? It is. She’s somebody’s Heather, somebody’s flower.
The clouds have cleared out, but the fog continues to fill the world, diffusing the starlight, making it impossible to identify the Little Dipper, its handle, or the north star.
Looking down from the foggy sky, he scans the scattered pines.
Eerie.
Like men standing unnaturally still in the mist, the silent trees shrouded in the film of fog unnerve Remington, and his eyes dart from one to the other to confirm that they are in fact just trees.
Occasionally glancing up in hopes of a break in the fog, he quickly looks down again to continue his search of the pine barren.
When he spies a man in the distance, standing among the trees, he thinks it’s an illusion, a trick of light or an apparition conjured by his mind.
But then the man radios the others and raises his rifle.
—I got ’im. I got ’im. South edge of the big bay swamp. I’m gonna run ’im to you.
Before Remington can react, a round whistles by his head and thwacks the bark of a laurel oak beside him.
Turning.
Running.
Stumbling.
Remington spins and reenters the hardwood forest he had just stepped out of a few moments before.
Tripping.
Falling.
Rolling.
His boot catches on a fallen black walnut tree and he goes down hard. Tucking in on himself, he manages to roll, mitigating the impact—until he bangs into the base of a hickory tree.
—He’s running. He’s running. South end of the swamp. Heading west.
They know where I am, Remington thinks. I can’t run toward them. Staying on the ground, he slides over and lies beneath the black walnut that had tripped him.
And waits.
—I don’t see him, the man yells into his radio.
Running. Breathless.
—I’ve lost him.
—Maintain pursuit, the calm voice of the murderer replies. Run him toward us.
Though not much of a hunter, Remington knows the culture and practices well. If a group of men after deer go into the woods without dogs, they’ll split up. A small group will make a stand while the others go upriver a few miles, get out, and walk the deer toward them. Why more men aren’t shot using this practice he’s never understood.
The Remington James Box Set Page 6