The doe looked quickly back into the murk of the brush, turned her head to examine the truck with her other eye, then moved her head again, ears turning and quivering slightly as the truck’s engine creaked and cooled. John leaned tensely across the top of the cab, trying to breathe slowly, trying to keep his nostrils from moving as he breathed. One second the deer was plain and clear, the next only a pair of ears and a shaft of smooth brown neck faded to the grayness of the million-lined brush—one black eye at a great depth of grayness. Then a white flag bounded silently past trees. Two more flags appeared beside it, one much larger than the other two: a buck and another, smaller doe, perhaps one of this year’s skippers, had been watching too.
The truck started and lurched forward. Billy parked next to his shack and jumped out, the case of beer in his arms. “Did you see the buck? Oh, Johnny!”
“I just saw him at the end,” John said.
“Oh, I seen him! You see the doe look around at him? Two, three times. Looked straight at him. I seen him clear. Eight pointer. Seen him before. Wasn’t that something now, Johnny?”
“Was that a wild deer?” Franklin asked.
“Wild as wild,” Billy said. “Frank, you saw something! Lot more’n most goddam hunters see. Warn’t that doe nice and fat? Hundred, hundred-ten pounds dressed out. Buck’ll go two hundred. I seen him around all summer. You see him, Frank?”
“I saw something run off after the first one went,” Franklin said.
“Sure you did. You picked him out! Oh, Jesus! Johnny, you see him?”
“I’m glad Frank saw them too,” John said.
“So am I,” Franklin said.
“I love deer,” Billy said. “I just love deer. There ain’t nothing I love better than deer. I love to see, shoot and eat deer! There ain’t nothing better than a deer. I love to gut ’em and skin ’em. Prettiest thing there is on earth. By far. Ain’t nothing can match a deer! I see a deer, I feel good all day. Just to see it. Don’t care if I shoot it or not, now or later. I love deer.”
They went into Billy’s little yellow house. Billy cleaned off the one chair and set a box on end for Franklin. “Sit down,” he said. “By God I How about you, Frank? You like beer?”
“I never had any,” Franklin said, looking at John as if to ask permission.
“Give him a little to try it,” John said.
“Hell, here’s a can, Frank. You don’t finish it, I will. You don’t care for it, don’t drink it. I recall when Johnny, here, when he was a little older than you, he used to come up and see me once in a while with some of the boys. He couldn’t stand beer, you could tell, but by the Jesus he’d stuff her down. Look like he’d rather suck woodpecker eggs. You got to learn to like it.”
Billy settled back on his cot and loosened his overall suspenders, laughing and burping.
Franklin held his beer stiffly in front of him, smelled it but didn’t drink until John did. Then he took a small sip.
“You like it?” Billy asked, about to grin.
“It’s not as bad as it smells,” Franklin said.
Billy leaned back to laugh. “You know, Johnny,” he said finally, “it sure is funny, now, a boy about Frank’s age. How old are you, Frank? About twelve?” He winked at John.
“Ten,” Franklin said. “That’s all.”
“Well, now. Thought you was older than that.” He winked at John again. “Anyways, you take your average, normal, regular boy of ten, twelve, fourteen. He just naturally don’t care for beer. Give him a couple years and by the Jesus you got to watch him he don’t drink anything’ll run downhill!” He leaned back again and laughed and laughed. Franklin evidently thought that was pretty funny, too. He took a larger, longer pull at his can.
“That deer, though,” Billy said. “Frank, you don’t git to see a deer that close to, once a year. You can see them in the fields at night with your headlights, or early in the morning ‘way far across, next the woods. You don’t seldom come across deer like we done today. Johnny, you recall that fall you come home from service? We hunted some that year.”
“I’ll never forget that time, Billy.”
“I guess not. Well, Frank, I met Johnny out in the woods—Cascom side of Pike Hill, it was. First day of the season, first of November. Warm day, wet and quiet—been raining for two days and everything was soaked clean through. Quiet. So quiet I seen Johnny ‘fore I heard him, scratching right through all them blackberry bushes under the apple trees….”
He had been particularly fed up with Bruce, with his mother and father and the town of Leah, and it was one of those times when he didn’t have enough money to take off. His discharge hadn’t come yet. He was on terminal leave, and somehow his pay and the few hundred dollars he’d saved were snafued up with his discharge. He’d spent his travel pay and he had nothing he could do but wait until the Army got around to straightening things out. Hunting licenses were free to servicemen, so he went hunting. He could have borrowed a few dollars from his father, but this time his own money was coming and he waited for it, too broke even to buy beer. Just to get away from the town he took his rifle and climbed Pike Hill, slowly worked his way through the abandoned, grown-over Huckins farm, not really trying to hunt, but going as slowly and silently as possible, out of habit.
Near some apple trees several partridges zoomed up and whistled through the branches, down across the bushes and out of sight before he got near enough to find them on the ground. The leaves underfoot were so quiet he began to suspect the birds had been jumped by something or somebody else. He searched carefully, trying to find one on the ground, trying to pick out one of the straggly little jack-in-the-box heads. There were many partridges that year; bunches of seven or eight fed together. Nearer the apple trees he saw one bird nervously walking and ducking around in the blackberries, and he waited for a clear shot at its head. A body-shot with the .30-.3O and the plump bird would explode into fragments of torn pink flesh and brown feathers. Yet the head, the size of a quarter on a neck thin as a pencil under the fluffed feathers, never came clearly in sight. The partridge strutted, skulked and bobbed along in its apparently aimless, idiotic fashion until it was securely out of sight in the brambles. A moment later he heard it flush out and skim away.
All this time Billy had been watching him, standing in plain sight, laughing silently. Finally, Billy sucked in air and let out a long, rolling belch. John moved his head slowly—something he was thankful for when he saw Billy. Instead of the kidding he expected, Billy nodded his head.
“Well, Johnny,” he said, “maybe you’ll make a hunter someday after all.”
“I sure thought there was a deer made that noise,” John said.
“Could of been. Sounded just like a deer. I got a deer to come to me once, making that same, identical noise.” He tried it again. “Dang hard on the tonsils, though.”
The sun came out in the fresh, washed air and the apples on one tree shone as red as the glass balls on a Christmas tree; on another they were waxy yellow, striped with pink. Billy threw a stick into the branches, and four yellow apples came bouncing down. He picked one up and snapped his fingernail on it. The frost had not softened it. It made a noise like a tight little drum.
“I got to pick them apples tomorrow,” Billy said, tossing it to John. The apple was ice-cold, sweet and puckery, leaving a taste in John’s mouth clean as spring water.
“Peach apple,” Billy said. “Late, though. This here tree’s always late.” He took a bite, chewed out the juice and spat out the meat. “You know, Johnny, sometimes I don’t go hunting at all, just mosey around the woods from apple tree to apple tree, tasting. I’ll bet you I know about every apple tree in the woods. Beech trees—when there’s beechnuts sometimes I just grub around all afternoon eating beechnuts. Same in spring. I act just like a bear. First strawberries, then raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, cranberries, checkerberries—I even like juniper berries. I love buttnuts, too. Sometimes I act just like a bear.”
“You eat ants
and grubs?”
“Haw HAW Hell no!” Billy yelled, raring back, his eyes watering. Then he looked sham-thoughtful. “Though I got a mind to. I don’t imagine grubs would be too bad, fried up nice.” He nodded his head, mock-serious, then burst loose and roared for a while. Then he picked up his rifle and handed it to John.
“This here’s Old Bungaloo, Johnny. You ever see her before?”
He had never seen the rifle in Billy’s shack. He shook his head.
“You ding-dang right you never! I keep her out of sight in case somebody comes around I ain’t home.”
John put down his little .30-.30 and hefted the heavy rifle.
“It must weigh ten pounds,” he said. It was an old Winchester ‘95 lever action, heavily breeched and rugged as a club. “Some piece,” he said. “Old Bungaloo?”
“That’s what my dad called her.” Billy turned Old Bungaloo upside down and pointed to a line of little dents along the stock.
“Twenty-nine deer been shot with Old Bungaloo, and that don’t count the ones I shot with her—ten, fifteen more. I never made no notches.”
“Why not?”
“Tell the truth, I forgot the first couple times. Seemed afterward it warn’t right to go notching in cold blood, so to speak. We going hunting?” Billy looked at the sun, watched the leaves for wind, and nodded his head. “You want to git a deer Johnny? You do what I say and maybe we can show you one. I ain’t going to shoot it for you. Now. You go slow and easy back down to the crick. You know where that great big hemlock fell across?”
He did all that Billy told him to do, and late that afternoon he killed his first deer. He’d been walking some, standing still most of the time, or sitting. For once he was not impatient, not looking over the tops of rises or around the edges of thick brush tangles as if he could, by seeing more places, by covering more of the space of the woods, find the standing, clearly outlined deer the impatient hunter always sees in his mind.
This time he did not expect to see a deer at all. He followed Billy’s instructions as he might have followed the steps of an old ritual, and the ritual itself occupied all of his attention; he hardly had time to look for deer, so carefully he moved and placed his feet.
Then came the time, a few seconds out of all the years of his life that he would always remember fully—a time made vivid and everlasting by an act perfect, instinctive and final. It seemed like love: he first saw a white flag flickering through the black trunks of a spruce grove, angling away from him, yet heading toward a small clearing open to him through a chance avenue of trees. The deer had seen him first and ran low to the ground, stealthy even in its long leaps, silent on the waterlogged spruce needles. As he saw the deer’s long gray body his rifle came up and for once, still under the spell of the ritual of slowness, he did not begin firing through the trees. He waited, watching the brighter clearing through his sights, the black bar of his front sight waving at the level of a deer’s chest. It seemed a miracle that the deer came on and crossed the space of daylight. He fired just ahead of the deer as it leaped for darkness and heard a rattle of aimless hoofs and a thud. His spent cartridge tinkled on the breach and fell brightly to the spruce needles. His hand flicked the lever and the action slid forward with a new shell in its teeth. It snapped shut loudly. As he ran forward he automatically put the hammer on half-cock—and the deer was there. A miracle again—so big, so obvious against the ground now that it was dead. He poked one large round bottomless eye with his rifle barrel. The deer was dead.
He saw now for the first time that the deer was a buck, with four perfect, beautiful tines on the left antler. On the right a strangely dwarfed single spike grew like a root. And then he thought it was too bad the buck had run into such bad luck in a single season—a dwarfed horn and a .30-.30 slug. He might have been a bachelor buck with his strange antler; a poor, frustrated fellow who ran into bad luck wherever he went. And yet he was a beautiful animal, strong and muscular, with a fine clean coat. And heavy.
John fired three shots in the air, counting slowly to five between each, then rolled up his sleeves and spread the linen-white belly, legs open, to the air. He was still trembling, still awed by the amazing, beautiful treasure the deer was to him then.
His knife drew through the hair easily, then through the skin and peritoneum. He was careful. The bullet had gone clean through the ribcage, and he was able to draw the stomach and entrails out unbroken and steaming, genitals attached. In the round, hot heap, peristalsis slowly, steadily worked. Billy came, and John borrowed Billy’s big knife to chop through the pelvis and clean out the anus. The heart was smashed, but the kidneys and liver were whole and clean.
When the deer was gutted and ready, Billy crowed with joy and whacked John on the back.
“A buck! Johnny, ain’t you happy?”
He was happy. He could only grin and rub his bloody hands together. The blood rolled off easily on the spruce needles. Much later he remembered and wondered why, with all the blood and matter he had probed with his hands, the image of the old Filipino had never come; the old women hadn’t screamed in his head.
But they hadn’t, thank God. It was too perfect. He sat down, shaking, leaned against a tree and took out a cigarette. Billy reached into the deer and took out another small handful of lung.
“Clean as a whistle. No sense dragging more than we have to. Let him bleed out a while, too. No hurry. We ain’t got more than a couple hundred yards to drag. By God, Johnny, you done good!”
“He was running,” John said. “I was right back—look right down there—I was right back there. Right back by that blowdown. Ash. See it? He was running.”
Billy paced it off, counting out loud. “Seventy-five yards!” he called as he started back, counting again. “Seventy-five yards and a hair,” he said.
“He was running,” John said, “but he wasn’t going out straight. He saw me first. I went slow like you told me.” He found that he was out of breath. The cigarette had given him the hiccups. He tried to erase an inane grin from his face, but couldn’t. His cheeks ached with it. He looked up through the trees to the sky, pale fall blue and turning cold; fine cirrus clouds were forming high up above Leah.
“Well, ain’t you going to tell me from the start?” Billy said.
He could see the white flag flickering past the black trunks of the spruces, and the black front sight waving again. He told it to Billy from the beginning. When he came to the end and found the deer, the grin fastened itself to his face again.
“There he was!”
“There he is!” Billy said, slapping his knee. “Give me your rifle!”
John handed it over. Billy took his knife and pressed the point into the bottom of the stock, leaving a little triangular dent.
“There you are. You got a witness to prove it.”
Finally they began to drag the deer toward Billy’s house. When they reached Billy’s dooryard they hoisted it into the back of the truck and went inside. John had blisters on both hands.
“You can have him weighed if you want,” Billy said, “but I’ll tell you right now he weighs a hundred-seventy pounds. I dragged out enough deer in my time. I can tell every time. You take him down to the freezers and have him weighed. You just do that. Hundred-seventy pounds.”
“I’ll give you a hindquarter, Billy.”
“Like hell you will! Never you mind about that. I got more meat picked out right now than I can use.”
“You got yours already?”
“Hell, no! Know where it is, though. Keeps better in this warm weather, it ain’t dead. Git my buck any day I want, providing some damn’ fool don’t run on him meanwhile.”
“You take the liver.”
“Well, O.K., Johnny. I’m kind of sweet on liver. I’ll take it.”
“How about some backstrap? Peel some off, Billy.”
“Nope. Nothing doing. Now, we going to have a snort?”
They were both a little drunk on hard cider when they brought the deer down to Le
ah and hung it in the Cotter garage. John’s father brought beer out to them and they all stood around with the neighbors, admiring, hefting and patting the deer. When Bruce came home he had one thing to say: “I suppose Billy shot it for you.”
Franklin sat on the edge of his box, his beer held carefully in both hands, his expression tense and interested. Billy had come to the place where they were dragging the deer out of the woods.
“Heaviest hundred-seventy pound deer I ever dragged out,” he said. “I told Johnny. I says, ‘That deer weighs a hundred-seventy pounds.’ You know what they weighed him down to the freezer lockers?”
Franklin shook his head.
“Hundred-sixty-eight pounds! Now that was next day. See, Frank? He bled and dried out a little that night. I bet my skivvies he weighed one-seventy on the nose, we got him dragged up here. I dragged out enough deer, by God. I can tell every time!”
Franklin shook his head in amazement, and John was startled to see on his face a quick look of amusement.
“How was the liver?” Franklin asked. By his expression he didn’t like liver, but the idea of eating the liver out of the deer obviously fascinated him.
“Tender,” Billy said. “Tender as all hell, as I recall.”
“What’s that?” Franklin asked, pointing under the table and drawing his feet up.
Jake the raccoon put his pointed nose out into the light, and snarled.
“That’s Jake,” John said. “He’s a friend of Billy’s.”
“Sometimes he is and sometimes he ain’t,” Billy said. “He sort of hangs around here.”
Franklin watched the raccoon warily.
“He’s wild?” he asked.
“He is when he wants to be,” Billy said. “The other day I caught him thinking how good one of my chickens would be could he git the feathers off. He could, too. I laid down the law, by God I I put the law on them chickens, far as Jake’s concerned. Old Jake, he got kind of riled up in the process and so didn’t I. What come of it, he took off and never come back for three days. Figured he never would come back, but I guess he cooled off some. He’s a hell of a lush, far as cider’s concerned. Can’t leave it alone. That’s why he’s mad now. Got himself a hangover.”
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