Snapper

by Brian Kimberling

  I can only speculate. I suppose they propositioned him, offered him some office and responsibility. Perhaps they just sounded him out to confirm that his views were in line with theirs. Perhaps the subject didn’t even come up—yet—though it was hard to see why eight men would gather at five in the morning miles from anywhere, unless it was illicit.

  Whatever he told them, they didn’t like it much.

  That became clear the next day when Loretta was invited for tea by a couple on the brow of a furry hill a mile from where I worked. She arrived to find half the women of Box County already assembled. They didn’t talk about politics. They talked about Texas recipes and Audubon’s beautiful birds, prints of which were framed throughout the living room and represented just outside the window, too, in lesser numbers than they used to be.

  Loretta told them what I did.

  They discussed whether it was better to shop in Boxville, which had limited supplies of everything, or to make the long drive to Bloomington or even the Indianapolis outskirts to buy everything in bulk.

  The lady hosting this tea party was about Loretta’s age and had come originally from Louisiana, so there was a sketchy bond between them.

  “I understand,” she announced to the room, “that you have some family in Indianapolis.”

  Loretta had been free with this information when they had first met, and could not understand why the woman was bringing it up in this labored fashion.

  “Yes,” she said from across the room, which had fallen silent. “My son and his wife and their new baby.”

  “And I understand they live in Broad Ripple,” said the woman from Louisiana.

  Loretta had not told her that.

  “He’s a software engineer, is that right?”

  Loretta hadn’t said that, either. Someone had clearly been doing some homework, and they wanted her to know it.

  She stayed long enough to be polite, and then she drove angrily home to give Dart a new hiding about that sign.

  I don’t know what they wanted from Dart: I suppose after that first encounter he knew who they were, and they feared him. In an earlier age I think they would have shown him a noose in a tree and told him to make his choice. That, after all, is how they came to dominate state politics half a century before. Tactics had changed, though, and their intimidations had become more subtle and discreet.

  They paid a personal visit to Dave when he was having his lunch in a Broad Ripple café. A stubbled young man in a leather jacket squeezed into his booth unasked.

  “Your old man lives in Box County, right?”

  “How the hell do you know that?” said Dave through his bagel.

  “We want to know what he’s doing there,” said the man.

  “Who’s we?”

  “Me and some friends.”

  “I’d like to know why you’re asking,” said Dave.

  “Neighborhood Watch,” said the man, and got up as suddenly as he had sat down. His point was already made.

  Despite their diligence, they seemed to miss Elia’s nationality. They never mentioned it, even obliquely, and it would have been a sure sign that Dart was not one of them. I assume they staked out Dave’s home, but I suppose Elia must have stayed in.

  I was the next natural target. The stickers on the back of my pickup for Amnesty International, the World Wildlife Fund, and Charles Darwin probably didn’t do me any favors.

  It wasn’t unusual for me to encounter hunters in the forest. They made me very nervous and I made them nervous too. I couldn’t wear bright colors—in case the birds try to mate with you, said Dart. In the eyes of those hunters I was an accident waiting to happen, not to mention a fool—even when, or especially when, I explained what I did for a living. The last thing a serious hunter wants in his woods is an invisible human being. I usually told them I had seen deer in this direction or that, though I was lying to get them off my patch.

  The park rangers knew who and where I was, and they advised hunters to avoid me, too. Not everyone asked them, though.

  I was visiting a wood thrush family twenty feet up in a sugar maple when I noticed a man in full camouflage creeping along a dry creek bed thirty yards away. Luckily for me the wood thrush is a pretty mellow bird.

  Full camouflage is not recommended. It’s also not very effective compared to the mud and tree sap you accumulate studying birds. He was crouching with a gun held across his thighs. Dart or Loretta could have told me it was a shotgun, but I found that out later. He moved slowly, silently, as if he had some quarry in sight, but I couldn’t imagine what.

  Gradually it became clear that he was stalking one of my nest flags.

  Near every nest I tied an orange tape with a reference number on it—in this case AF12 for Acadian flycatcher 12. The flag was directly under the nest. The female stayed put, and the male began circling the intruder quietly.

  He turned the tape over as if he hoped to find a BACK IN FIVE MINUTES message on the other side. Then he fetched a bowie knife from his belt, cut the tape, and pocketed it.

  He had my attention.

  I was sure he was a competent woodsman adept at tracking all kinds of game. But I was adept at tracking small birds, which put me in a league he had never even heard of. Moreover, there wasn’t a square inch of ground in that square mile that didn’t have recent boot prints of mine; tracking me would be like chasing a mob wearing identical shoes.

  He crept around a corner of the creek bed and out of sight, which was good, in case he felt me watching him. Sixty feet over his head was a scarlet tanager I called Rory. Spend enough time out there and you start naming things. Rory flew a reliable mid-morning triangle between two red maples and an enormous tulip poplar I called the Devil’s Toothbrush. He’d land on the outside of a branch and sing a few notes, then move on. When he spied an intruder—usually me—Rory kept still at the base of a branch and watched carefully for the duration. It took me a long time to learn to sneak up on Rory, even though he’s the most conspicuous thing out there himself—a splash of neon red against the canopy green. I could see him eyeballing the camouflage man below.

  I got out of my tree and kept an eye on Rory while I moved parallel to the creek bed along a small ridge, quietly and well below the crest. Another twenty yards from where he stood he should see another nest flag—RV4, for a red-eyed vireo I called Pedro. Ten feet from that was a hollow log containing a fox den. Between five and six in the morning I sometimes watched the kits playing on top of that log, and they would let me get as close as I liked. Their mother—I never named the foxes for some reason—put them to bed at sunrise and slept lightly herself near the entrance during the day. Whenever there was a disturbance—that is, whenever I checked RV4—her face would emerge from the log tentatively, nose quivering. She never got used to me.

  I stood behind an oak; I could not see the nest flag from there, but I could see the den. Most important, there was no way that he would be able to see me. It had dawned on me as I moved that this man might be connected to Dart and Loretta’s predicament—that I might be, in short, alone in the woods with an armed Klansman. I remembered that girl selling her encyclopedias from door to door. In retrospect, I am sure I should have fled the scene, but I was young, and someone was tampering with my work. I didn’t need the flags to remind me of nest locations, but the references were important. I couldn’t expect to get paid if I filed a report to the university stating that Pedro’s kids were all fine.

  The vixen’s face appeared, and she was watching the nest flag.

  I couldn’t predict what he would do next, and I couldn’t be certain of sentries like Rory and the fox. Some birds are born watchdogs: cardinals in particular will raise an alarm at any hint of trouble. Most birds, however, like most animals, will sensibly hide, unless you are actively poking your fingers into their nests.

  I could track him only by sound—not the sounds that he made, which I was not close enough to hear, but by following the wake of silence he left on the map of birdsong in m
y head, and occasionally the uproar he caused if he pissed off an ovenbird, or some other sensitive species.

  Wood thrushes were my best informants. Neighboring pairs sing to each other in a chain of call-and-response that occurs in every wood in the Midwest. If one pair fell silent I could place the intruder within fifty or sixty feet of a nest tree. A male indigo bunting will try desperately to get your attention if you stray near its nest—usually, in my experience, by leading you into the thorniest, muddiest, hottest smilax thicket nearby. Any outcry of bunting chirps would give him away instantly. Warblers are passionate about warbling and any reticence from them was a likely sign.

  It helps in tracking by sound to close your eyes. I kept well back and moved slowly, looking every few steps at the ground to make sure I didn’t trip on a root or snap a twig or run into a tree. I heard an angry bunting. A pileated woodpecker laughed and winged noisily toward me. I concentrated on what I heard to my right and left and behind me—business as usual. Ahead, canopy birds with a long view fell silent first, and their cousins nearer the forest floor followed suit. A number of nest flags ahead of me were gone—that, with the silence from that quarter, was a sure sign I was heading in the right direction.

  The creek bed diverged and he had taken the left or eastern branch. I took the right or western. Between them lay a huge ridge, and five hundred yards along that I climbed up and lay on the lip on my belly to peer into the valley below. It had been logged the previous summer, and I doubt he knew that. I was going to get a good look at him in the clearing if I could, but I wouldn’t risk binoculars in the sun.

  He sat on a tree stump smoking, an indication that he had given up on stealth. He might as well have put on his white bedsheet. He didn’t carry binoculars or water or food that I could see. I was still a hundred yards off, and I didn’t recognize him at all. Perhaps up close he would have been one of Dart and Loretta’s neighbors, but to me he was a vague outdoorsy type—long brown hair in a ponytail beneath a backward camouflage baseball cap, baggy camouflage shirt and pants that hadn’t seen much use—not by my standards, anyway—and new boots that wouldn’t stand up to smilax very long.

  A bluebird I called Larry landed on a tree stump twenty feet from his. He lifted his shotgun and blew it away.

  There was nothing I could do about it. He spied a brown-headed cowbird watching him and he shot at that too. Unfortunately he missed. Cowbirds are parasites.

  He waited for more birds to appear, but they didn’t, so he began retracing his steps. This time he made no attempt to creep. In mid-stride he blasted an indigo bunting off a maple branch, the same bunting who gave him away. He took a shot at a cardinal but missed. Farther down the creek bed he knocked out a flycatcher nest, AF28, with the mother on the nest lip and three nestlings inside due to fledge within twenty-four hours. He saw Rory watching him from sixty feet up, and he took aim, but he didn’t shoot. Rory was smart. He was probably seventy feet up just in case and keeping most of himself on the other side of a thick branch. Either way it would have been shooting gravity in the face.

  Killing songbirds is deeply illegal, even in Indiana. I couldn’t intervene, but I shadowed him back to his car, a pale blue Chevy Impala, and I wrote down his license plate number.

  I never reported it, though. At most he’d be heavily fined and stripped of his hunting license. But he’d surely guess who had reported him, and what if he was one of them?

  Every white middle-class Southerner in my experience claims some Confederate hero in the family tree. I have never understood this; even today you can sometimes overhear them bragging about the battles their ancestors nobly and gloriously lost. Uncle Dart had enough of this kind of lore to supply ten families. If even a fraction of it could stand up under scrutiny then I must owe my existence to some wildly glamorous Confederate brothel: there is no other way to weave so many illustrious warriors into a single genealogical line.

  My favorite among them was a private who stood six feet seven in his socks and served without distinction until late in the war, when he captured seventeen Union soldiers single-handedly. Asked by his commanding officer how he had accomplished this, he replied, “Aw, hell. I just surrounded ’em.”

  I had challenged Dart once, in Texas, over dinner. I was sixteen and had become absorbed in the Civil War thanks to my high school history teacher, a fierce black woman from Alabama. I asked Dart, in my uninformed and adolescent way, whether he didn’t think that ending slavery was worth the cost.

  “Now that is a dumb Yankee question,” he said. “That is a question you got from your dumb Yankee high school.”

  “But wasn’t it worth it?”

  “Let me ask you a Southern question,” he said, laying his knife and fork on his plate, though he hadn’t finished eating.

  “Don’t, Dart,” said Loretta.

  “Let me ask you a Southern question,” he repeated. “Was it wise or humane to make four million people homeless, unemployed, not to mention uneducated, at the stroke of a pen?”

  It took me a moment to work out who he meant.

  “Is it a surprise that one hundred thirty years later a third of them are in prison and another third are living in ghettoes shooting each other? Do you include that in your cost of the war? There were cooler heads then. Plenty of cooler heads. But nothing can stand up to a crowd of sanctimonious Yankees wanting to feel better about themselves and damn the consequences.”

  “He means slavery could have been phased out, with job training programs and such,” said Loretta.

  “That’s not what I mean,” said Dart. “They teach you about Hiroshima in that school of yours? Nagasaki? Dresden?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Where do you think they got the idea for those?”

  “It was a war,” I said.

  “That’s right. And they looked back eighty years to when William Tecumseh Sherman went to Abraham Lincoln and said, sir, the way to end this war is to make the civilians suffer. I repeat, make civilians suffer. And then he burned Atlanta to the ground. Now does that enter into your cost of the war? Showing the whole world how to mount unbridled barbarism on an industrial scale?”

  “I think the world would have figured it out eventually,” said Loretta.

  “But they wouldn’t have learned it from us!” said Dart, smacking the table with his open palm. It was only years later that I reflected that his short sharp statement could stand up proudly to any other more flowery iteration of American purpose and aspiration. When I read in the newspapers about interrogation techniques or civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan I always picture Dart’s open hand landing on the pecan dinner table his grandfather made. Despite his selective history and dubious theories he was a man of such integrity that even when he was wrong, he was right.

  When I told them both about my birds he got into the Cadillac wordlessly and drove away.

  “Where’s he going?” I asked Loretta.

  “Hell if I know,” she said. “We’ll find out when he gets back. Come into the kitchen.”

  The whole house aside from that dining table was furnished in antiques made in Box County; the kitchen table was a spindly sparse maple thing and the chairs were worn and wobbly. They suggested the modest charm and comfort of the Midwest, in stark contrast to their lavish oak and pecan furniture back in Texas, and Loretta, sitting at that table, seemed taller, broader, and less delicate than she ever had back home. She looked harassed and exasperated, too. I wondered if she and Dart had been arguing before I arrived.

  “Sit down,” she said. I sat.

  “Tell me what you are going to do when your friend comes to visit you in the forest again.”

  “Same thing, I guess. Rory’s a good lookout even if he is a preening, self-satisfied Yankee.” She did not laugh.

  “I have another project upstate in two weeks anyway,” I said. “Breeding season is nearly over.”

  “So for two weeks you’re going to wander around alone while a man with a shotgun looks for
you.”

  “I expect he’s already made his point.”

  She stood up and crossed to a drawer next to the sink.

  “I told your mother not to name you Nathan. Did she ever tell you that?”

  “No,” I said.

  “She ever tell you your great-great-grandfather was named Nathan?”

  “No,” I said.

  “He is a blot on the family name I would like to expunge,” said Loretta.

  “Why?”

  “Never mind.” She fetched a long-nosed black revolver from a drawer beneath the table and placed it on the tabletop.

  “If you come across that man with a shotgun again,” she said.

  “I’d probably shoot myself in the ass,” I said. She didn’t laugh at that either.

  “If he had meant business he would have brought dogs,” I added.

  The revolver sat between us, emblematic of something I couldn’t name, for several silent minutes.

  “Dart and I have decided to return to Texas,” she said at last.

  “Because of all this?”

  “Because of all this and some other things,” she said. “Dart needs to work. I can’t have him under my feet all day.”

  “But mainly because of the business with the neighbors,” I said.

  “Mainly, yes. Can you see any pretty way out of all this?”

  “Call the police?” I said, but then I remembered that I hadn’t done that myself. They were Box County police, after all. Even if they weren’t involved themselves, they surely knew people who were, and they let them be.

  “We have good neighbors in Texas,” she said. “We’d settle for likable neighbors here. I can’t see that happening.”

  “What about Dave and Elia?”