High Hunt

by David Eddings

  “Sure, Jack.” I went on back in and carted out the six-pack.

  “I’ll make arrangements with Clem to pick up the trailer,” he said as I got into the front seat with him. He started the car.

  “Where we going?” I asked him.

  “Just down the road a ways. I can’t stand to look at that damn trailer is all.”

  “OK.”

  We drove on out to the highway and then pulled off into a little roadside park.

  “God, man,” he said, opening a can of beer, “I’m just completely wiped out. It was all I could do to keep from tossin’ my cookies when you hauled out my shotgun.”

  “It’ll probably take you a while to get over this,” I told him, popping open a can for myself.

  “I don’t know if I ever will,” he said. “Danny, my hands shake all the time. I’m afraid, and I don’t know what the hell it is I’m afraid of—maybe everything. Shit, I’m afraid of guns, the trailer, bathrooms, blood—Christ, anything at all, and I just come all apart.”

  “You’ll be all right, Jack. It’s just going to take you some time, that’s all.”

  He sat at the wheel, staring moodily out at the murky day. “I don’t know if you remember or not, but I had an argument with the Old Man once when I was a kid. I said that when a guy grew up, he wasn’t afraid of anything anymore.”

  “I remember,” I said.

  “He tried to tell me I was all wet, but I wouldn’t listen to him. I know what he meant now.”

  We sat drinking beer and not saying much.

  “You fixed OK for money?” I asked him.

  “Christ, I don’t know. I don’t think Old Clem’ll spring loose with my check until Saturday. I hadn’t thought about that.”

  “I can give you twenty,” I said.

  “Hell,” he said, “I could always tap Sloane.”

  “I’d rather give it to you myself,” I said.

  “Shit,” he said, “you already done more than enough.”

  I shrugged. “You’re my brother, Jack. That’s what it’s all about.” I gave him a twenty.

  “Thanks, Kid,” he said. “I’ll get it back to you.”

  “No rush,” I said.

  “I suppose I ought to get goin’,” he said. “I’d like to make it to Portland before too late.”

  “Sure, Jack. Just drop me at the gate of the trailer court, OK?”

  “Right.”

  We drove on back and stopped outside the court.

  He held out his hand and we shook.

  “I probably won’t see you for a while,” he said, “but I’ll keep in touch.”

  “Sure, Jack.”

  “It’s been a wild six months or so, hasn’t it?”

  “Far out,” I said.

  “At least we got to go huntin’ together,” he said. “That’s somethin’ anyway.”

  “It was the best of it,” I told him.

  He nodded and I opened the door.

  “You know somethin’, Danny? What I was sayin’ about a guy bein’ afraid of things—that argument me and the Old Man had?”

  “Yeah?”

  “He was right, you know that?”

  “He usually was, Jack.”

  “Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you somethin’, and this is the straight stuff. Maybe I hide it pretty good, but to tell you the honest-to-God truth, I been afraid all my life. It just took somethin’ like this to make me realize it.”

  “Everybody’s afraid, Jack, not just you. That’s what Dad was trying to tell you. You’ve just got to learn to live with it.”

  He nodded. “Well,” he said, “take care now.”

  “You too, Jack.”

  We shook hands again, and I got out.

  I stood at the side of the road watching his battered Plymouth until it disappeared around a corner about a half mile down the highway.

  That evening I told Clydine about it.

  “I told you a long time ago that it was going to happen,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “How did you know, anyhow?”

  “I just knew, that’s all.”

  “That sure isn’t much help,” I said. “I mean, if I were to suddenly go into the business of suicide prevention, it wouldn’t give me much to go on, would it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said thoughtfully, “the girl just seemed to think of herself in the past tense somehow. Even that creepy Helen talked about what she planned to do next week or next year. Sandy just never did. She didn’t have any future. A woman always thinks about the future—always. When you find one who doesn’t, watch out.”

  “As simple as that?”

  She nodded. “Along with a good healthy gut-feel for it. Being around her was like being at a funeral. It wasn’t anything recent, because she had gotten pretty well used to it by then. She was just waiting for the right time.”

  “I should have warned Jack,” I said.

  “He couldn’t have stopped her.”

  “That’s not what I meant. He got tangled up in it, and it’s tearing him all up inside.”

  “He’ll come out of it,” she said. “He’s too much of an egomaniac not to.”

  “Why, you heartless little witch!” I said.

  “Oo, poo,” she said.

  “Poo?”

  “All right then, shit!” she snapped. “Your brother’s got all the sensitivity of a telephone pole, and about as much compassion as a meat grinder. He’ll make out.”

  There was no point pushing the issue. She didn’t like Jack, and she wasn’t about to waste any sympathy on him.

  That night I had the dream again. I caught flashes of a sad-eyed old dog rolling over and over in the snow and of the white deer lying huddled at the foot of that gravel bank, the masculinity of his antlers sheared off by his fall and his deep red eye gazing reproachfully at me through the film of dust that powdered it. And Sandy was there, too, standing nude by the sink in that house out in Milton, her nudity sexless—even meaningless, and her voice echoing back to me:

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s only for a little while, just a little while.”

  Epilogue

  I didn’t get the chance to get back up to the Methow Valley that spring. The money ran short on me. I wrote to Cap, of course, telling him how sorry I was, and through the stiff formality of his letters, I could sense his disappointment as well.

  I guess I had talked up the high country to my little Bolshevik to the point that she finally got a bellyful of hearing about it because she finally put her foot down.

  “This is it,” she said in early July, delivering her non-negotiable demands. “We are both going to take two weeks off and go up there. I’m going to meet the great Cap Miller and his crotchety but lovable sidekick Clint. I am also going up to look at that damned Valhalla of yours.”

  “We can’t afford it.”

  “Chicken-pucky we can’t. We’ve both got a steady income during the school year and good steady jobs this summer. The office I work in shuts down for the first two weeks in August so that all the regular people can take their vacations, and that crazy Swede boat builder you work for is so convinced that you’re the greatest thing since sliced bread that he’ll probably give you the two weeks with pay.”

  “Chicken-pucky?”

  “Oh, shut up!”

  We argued about it for a week or so, but my heart wasn’t really in it.

  When I approached Norstrom, my boss, he screamed for twenty minutes about how he couldn’t possibly spare me and wound up trying to convince me that I ought to go fishing up the inside passage instead.

  I had to lie a little in my letter to Cap, and I didn’t like that at all. Though I knew he wouldn’t have said anything, I also knew that he probably wouldn’t have approved of the irregularity of Clydine and myself going off into the hill without benefit of clergy, as it were. I told him we were going to elope, and that this was going to be our honeymoon. It was a big mistake because he insisted on furnishing everything for our trip at no charge. I felt lik
e a real shitheel about it.

  Anyway, on the third of August, Blossom and I were batting along on the highway north to Lake Chelan, headed for Twisp. It was about eight o’clock in the morning and we were both a little sleepy.

  “I don’t see why we couldn’t have slept a little later,” she complained. We’d spent the night at a motel in Cashmere.

  “It takes a good long while to get up there,” I said. “It’s not exactly a roadside campground, Tulip.”

  “Couldn’t we at least stop someplace? I’m starved.”

  “We’ll be there in another hour,” I told her. “You’ll need all the appetite you can muster to get even partway around the kind of breakfast Clint cooks up.”

  She grunted and curled back up in the seat.

  I woke her when we got to Twisp, and she insisted on stopping at a gas station. I fidgeted around for the twenty minutes or so that she was in the rest room with her overnight bag, wondering what she was up to.

  When she came out, she looked like a different girl. She’d put in her contact lenses, caught her hair in a loose coil at the back of her neck, and she was wearing a white blouse and tailored slacks. She’d even put on lipstick, for God’s sake!

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Oh, be quiet.”

  “You’re gorgeous, Rosebud. I mean it.”

  She looked at me to see if I were kidding her, and when she saw that I wasn’t, she actually blushed.

  “All right,” she said, “let’s go meet your family.”

  What she’d said didn’t really register on me until we were a ways out of town.

  “Why did you say that?” I asked her.

  “Say what?”

  “About meeting my family?”

  “Just a bad joke,” she said. “Forget it.”

  We drove along the twisting, narrow road out toward Miller’s place. The road looked different with the poplar leaves all green instead of the gold I’d remembered from the preceding autumn, but the whole stretch of road was still breathtaking.

  “It’s really beautiful, isn’t it?” she said finally, touching nervously at her hair.

  “Wait till we get up higher,” I said. “It gets even better.”

  I slowed the car and turned into Miller’s driveway. The colt was a yearling now, but he still loved to run. He galloped alongside us, tossing his head.

  “I didn’t know horses chased cars, too,” she said.

  I laughed. I hadn’t thought of it that way.

  “Oh, dear,” she said, her voice faltering.

  Cap was waiting for us out in the yard, and he looked even more rugged than I remembered him. Then he grinned and it was like the sun coming up.

  The two of them almost fell all over themselves charming each other, and I got a helluva big lump in my throat watching the two people in the world I cared most about getting along so well. Then Clint came out, and the party really got started.

  Finally we went on into the big, musty old dining room and sat down to breakfast. Miller bowed his head and said grace, probably in Clydine’s honor, just a few simple words, but it moved me pretty profoundly.

  “My wife always used to like havin’ grace before a meal,” he said. “Me and Clint kinda got out of the habit since we take a lot of our meals standin’ up.”

  “Let’s eat it before it gets cold,” Clint said gruffly. He’d outdone himself on the whole meal. I knew damned well he’d been at it since about four that morning. He’d even shaved in her honor.

  “I’m real sorry, Dan,” he said with his eyes sparkling at me, “but I just couldn’t manage to whip up a big mess of that whatever-it-was you fixed for us that time. I just never got around to gettin’ the recipe from you.”

  “All right, smart-aleck,” I said.

  “Besides,” he said, “we’re runnin’ a little short of packhorses.”

  “What’s this?” Clydine asked.

  They told her.

  “What was in it?” she asked me.

  I explained how I’d made it.

  “No wonder it tasted like stewed packhorse,” she commented blandly.

  I thought Cap and Clint were going to fall off their chairs laughing.

  After breakfast we went on back outside.

  “I figured Old Dusty would be about the best horse for the little lady,” Cap said. “That’s the one the Professor rode up there. He’s pretty easygoin’, and he’s good and dependable.”

  I nodded.

  “We knew you’d want Old Ned again.” He grinned.

  “You’re all heart, Cap.”

  He laughed and slapped me on the shoulder.

  We loaded the horses in the stock-truck and the camping gear and saddles in the pickup and drove on down the driveway again, Cap in front in the pickup, then Clydine and me in my car and Clint bringing up the rear in the stock-truck.

  “Oh, Danny,” she said, nestling up beside me, “I just love them both. They’re wonderful.”

  I nodded happily.

  “Do you think they liked me at all?”

  “They loved you, dear.”

  “That’s just because of you,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “They can’t do that. Not either one of them. They don’t know how.”

  “I guess they couldn’t, could they?”

  “No way.”

  “You love them two old men, too, don’t you?” she said suddenly.

  I nodded. I probably wouldn’t have put it exactly that way, but that’s what it boiled down to.

  The sun was very bright and the sky very blue. The whole world seemed as if it had been washed clean just that morning.

  We turned off the highway and started up the long gravel road toward the beginning of the trail. When we came around that corner and caught the first full glimpse of Glacier Park looming white above us, she gasped.

  “Pretty impressive, huh?” I said.

  “Wow!” was all she could say.

  We all stopped when we got to the road-end and went through the ritual of unloading the packhorses first again.

  “Boy, did you get lucky,” Clint said as we climbed up into the truck after Dusty.

  “How’s that?”

  “That wife of yours. Now, I just know you ain’t been good enough to deserve somebody like her. You ain’t got it in you.”

  I laughed and the little old guy grinned at me.

  We led Dusty out and saddled him.

  “Just ride ’im up and down the road kinda easy like, honey,” Cap told Clydine after he’d helped her get aboard.

  The three of us watched her amble the patient old horse on down the road.

  “She sets a saddle well, too,” Cap said approvingly. “I think you got yourself a good one, son.”

  “She’ll do,” I agreed happily.

  Then Clint and I got Ned out.

  The big gray glared at me with suspicion and then sniffed at me a couple times. I scratched his ears.

  “I think the damned old fool remembers you,” Clint said.

  “We’ll find out in a minute or so,” I said, swinging the saddle up on Ned’s back. I cinched it good and tight and then climbed on.

  “Just how big a head of steam have you two let him build up?” I asked them.

  Then they really started to laugh.

  “Hell, boy,” Cap said, still laughing, “we worked him every day this week. We weren’t about to let him break one of your legs for you on your honeymoon.”

  “Everybody’s a comedian these days,” I said dryly and rode off down the road to catch up with Clydine.

  “Did you see his face?” I heard Clint howl from behind me.

  Just before we left, she jumped down off her horse and kissed the two surprised old men and then hopped back up into the saddle. We rode off on up the trail towing a pair of packhorses, leaving the two of them blushing and scuffing their boots in the dust like a pair of schoolboys.

  When we stopped at the top of the first ridge to let the horses blow a little, we could see t
heir tiny figures still standing down by the parked vehicles. We all waved back and forth for a while, and then Clydine and I rode on down into the next valley.

  It was about three thirty in the afternoon when we came on down into the little basin. In spite of Cap’s assurances, I’d been about halfway worried that we might find about a thousand sheep and a couple herders up there, but the camp was empty.

  She sat in her saddle, looking around, not saying anything.

  “Well?” I said.

  She nodded slowly. “I see what you meant,” she said simply.

  “Let’s get to work,” I said. “We’ve got a lot to do before the sun goes down.”

  We got down from our horses and checked the corrals. They were still sound. I unsaddled the horses and turned them loose in the corrals and then we went on up to the tent frames. It took us a while to get the two tents up, but we finally got them squared away. The moss we’d all gathered the year before was gone—deer or something, I suppose—so we got to work and hauled in fresh stuff.

  Miller or Clint—one or the other—had substituted, with some delicacy, a pair of sleeping bags that zipped together into a double for the mismatched pair that we’d brought, so I modified the log bunk frames in our tent to accommodate the double bag.

  The beaver had scattered our firewood, but it didn’t take long to get together enough for the night at least.

  “I don’t know about you, Bwana,” she said finally, “but I’m starved again.”

  I kissed her nose for her. “I’ll get right on it,” I said. I dug out the big iron grill and got a fired started.

  “Clint said he had supper all packed up for us,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I told her, “it’s that big sack right at the top of the food pack.”

  She fished around in the cook tent and came out with the big sack. She carried it over to McKlearey’s table and opened it.

  “Oh, wow!” she said. “Look at this.” She ripped down the side of the sack. “There’s a banquet in here. How am I supposed to cook all of this over an open fire? They even put in a bottle of champagne, for cryin’ out loud.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said.

  “What a pair of old sweeties,” she said.

  Clint had included a note, the first of a dozen or so we found tucked away in various places among the packs. It gave very specific instructions on how to fix supper.