It might ’a’ been a signal, a good-bye, a farewell. Still walking, we passed the other three old dogs in the middle of the glade, laying down, too, now jest where they was when the buck vanished, and not trying to get up neither when we passed; and still that hundred yards ahead of them, Eagle, too, not laying down, because he was still on his feet, but his legs was spraddled and his head was down; maybe jest waiting until we was out of sight of his shame, his eyes saying plain as talk when we passed, “I’m sorry, boys, but this here is all.”
Mister Ernest stopped Dan. “Jump down and look at his feet,” he said.
“Ain’t nothing wrong with his feet,” I said. “It’s his wind has done give out.”
“Jump down and look at his feet,” Mister Ernest said.
So I done it, and while I was stooping over Eagle I could hear the pump gun go, “Snick-cluck. Snick-cluck. Snick-cluck” three times, except that I never thought nothing then. Maybe he was jest running the shells through to be sho it would work when we seen him again or maybe to make sho they was all buckshot. Then I got up again, and we went on, still walking; a little west of north now, because when we seen his white flag that second or two before the thicket hid it, it was on a beeline for that notch in the bayou. And it was evening, too, now. The wind had done dropped and there was a edge to the air and the sun jest touched the tops of the trees now, except jest now and then, when it found a hole to come almost level through onto the ground. And he was taking the easiest way, too, now, going straight as he could. When we seen his foot in the soft places he was running for a while at first after his rest. But soon he was walking, too, like he knowed, too, where Eagle and the dogs was.
And then we seen him again. It was the last time—a thicket, with the sun coming through a hole onto it like a searchlight. He crashed jest once; then he was standing there broadside to us, not twenty yards away, big as a statue and red as gold in the sun, and the sun sparking on the tips of his horns—they was twelve of them—so that he looked like he had twelve lighted candles branched around his head, standing there looking at us while Mister Ernest raised the gun and aimed at his neck, and the gun went, “Click. Snick-cluck. Click. Snick-cluck. Click. Snick-cluck” three times, and Mister Ernest still holding the gun aimed while the buck turned and give one long bound, the white underside of his tail like a blaze of fire, too, until the thicket and the shadows put it out; and Mister Ernest laid the gun slow and gentle back across the saddle in front of him, saying quiet and peaceful, and not much louder than jest breathing, “God dawg. God dawg.”
Then he jogged me with his elbow and we got down, easy and careful because of that ere cinch strop, and he reached into his vest and taken out one of the cigars. It was busted where I had fell on it, I reckon, when we hit the ground. He throwed it away and taken out the other one. It was busted, too, so he bit off a hunk of it to chew and throwed the rest away. And now the sun was gone even from the tops of the trees and there wasn’t nothing left but a big red glare in the west.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I ain’t going to tell them you forgot to load your gun. For that matter, they don’t need to know we ever seed him.”
“Much oblige,” Mister Ernest said. There wasn’t going to be no moon tonight neither, so he taken the compass off the whang leather loop in his buttonhole and handed me the gun and set the compass on a stump and stepped back and looked at it. “Jest about the way we’re headed now,” he said, and taken the gun from me and opened it and put one shell in the britch and taken up the compass, and I taken Dan’s reins and we started, with him in front with the compass in his hand.
And after a while it was full dark; Mister Ernest would have to strike a match ever now and then to read the compass, until the stars come out good and we could pick out one to follow, because I said, “How fur do you reckon it is?” and he said, “A little more than one box of matches.” So we used a star when we could, only we couldn’t see it all the time because the woods was too dense and we would git a little off until he would have to spend another match. And now it was good and late, and he stopped and said, “Get on the horse.”
“I ain’t tired,” I said.
“Get on the horse,” he said. “We don’t want to spoil him.”
Because he had been a good feller ever since I had knowed him, which was even before that day two years ago when maw went off with the Vicksburg roadhouse feller and the next day pap didn’t come home neither, and on the third one Mister Ernest rid Dan up to the door of the cabin on the river he let us live in, so pap could work his piece of land and run his fish line, too, and said, “Put that gun down and come on here and climb up behind.”
So I got in the saddle even if I couldn’t reach the stirrups, and Mister Ernest taken the reins and I must ’a’ went to sleep, because the next thing I knowed a buttonhole of my lumberjack was tied to the saddle horn with that ere whang cord off the compass, and it was good and late now and we wasn’t fur, because Dan was already smelling water, the river. Or maybe it was the feed lot itself he smelled, because we struck the fire road not a quarter below it, and soon I could see the river, too, with the white mist laying on it soft and still as cotton. Then the lot, home; and up yonder in the dark, not no piece akchully, close enough to hear us unsaddling and shucking corn prob’ly, and sholy close enough to hear Mister Ernest blowing his horn at the dark camp for Simon to come in the boat and git us, that old buck in his brake in the bayou; home, too, resting, too, after the hard run, waking hisself now and then, dreaming of dogs behind him or maybe it was the racket we was making would wake him, but not neither of them for more than jest a little while before sleeping again.
Then Mister Ernest stood on the bank blowing until Simon’s lantern went bobbing down into the mist; then we clumb down to the landing and Mister Ernest blowed again now and then to guide Simon, until we seen the lantern in the mist, and then Simon and the boat; only it looked like ever time I set down and got still, I went back to sleep, because Mister Ernest was shaking me again to git out and climb the bank into the dark camp, until I felt a bed against my knees and tumbled into it.
Then it was morning, tomorrow; it was all over now until next November, next year, and we could come back. Uncle Ike and Willy and Walter and Roth and the rest of them had come in yestiddy, soon as Eagle taken the buck out of hearing and they knowed that deer was gone, to pack up and be ready to leave this morning for Yoknapatawpha, where they lived, until it would be November again and they could come back again.
So, as soon as we et breakfast, Simon run them back up the river in the big boat to where they left their cars and pickups, and now it wasn’t nobody but jest me and Mister Ernest setting on the bench against the kitchen wall in the sun; Mister Ernest smoking a cigar—a whole one this time that Dan hadn’t had no chance to jump him through a grapevine and bust. He hadn’t washed his face neither where that vine had throwed him into the mud. But that was all right, too; his face usually did have a smudge of mud or tractor grease or beard stubble on it, because he wasn’t jest a planter; he was a farmer, he worked as hard as ara one of his hands and tenants—which is why I knowed from the very first that we would git along, that I wouldn’t have no trouble with him and he wouldn’t have no trouble with me, from that very first day when I woke up and maw had done gone off with that Vicksburg roadhouse feller without even waiting to cook breakfast, and the next morning pap was gone, too, and it was almost night the next day when I heard a horse coming up and I taken the gun that I had already throwed a shell into the britch when pap never come home last night, and stood in the door while Mister Ernest rid up and said, “Come on. Your paw ain’t coming back neither.”
“You mean he give me to you?” I said.
“Who cares?” he said. “Come on. I brought a lock for the door. We’ll send the pickup back tomorrow for whatever you want.”
So I come home with him and it was all right, it was jest fine—his wife had died about three years ago—without no women to worry us or take of
f in the middle of the night with a durn Vicksburg roadhouse jake without even waiting to cook breakfast. And we would go home this afternoon, too, but not jest yet; we always stayed one more day after the others left because Uncle Ike always left what grub they hadn’t et, and the rest of the homemade corn whisky he drunk and that town whisky of Roth Edmondziz he called Scotch that smelled like it come out of a old bucket of roof paint; setting in the sun for one more day before we went back home to git ready to put in next year’s crop of cotton and oats and beans and hay; and across the river yonder, behind the wall of trees where the big woods started, that old buck laying up today in the sun, too—resting today, too, without nobody to bother him until next November.
So at least one of us was glad it would be eleven months and two weeks before he would have to run that fur that fast again. So he was glad of the very same thing we was sorry of, and so all of a sudden I thought about how maybe planting and working and then harvesting oats and cotton and beans and hay wasn’t jest something me and Mister Ernest done three hundred and fifty-one days to fill in the time until we could come back hunting again, but it was something we had to do, and do honest and good during the three hundred and fifty-one days, to have the right to come back into the big woods and hunt for the other fourteen; and the fourteen days that old buck run in front of dogs wasn’t jest something to fill his time until the three hundred and fifty-one when he didn’t have to, but the running and the risking in front of guns and dogs was something he had to do for fourteen days to have the right not to be bothered for the other three hundred and fifty-one. And so the hunting and the farming wasn’t two different things atall—they was jest the other side of each other.
“Yes,” I said. “All we got to do now is put in that next year’s crop. Then November won’t be no time away atall.”
“You ain’t going to put in the crop next year,” Mister Ernest said. “You’re going to school.”
So at first I didn’t even believe I had heard him. “What?” I said. “Me? Go to school?”
“Yes,” Mister Ernest said. “You must make something out of yourself.”
“I am,” I said. “I’m doing it now. I’m going to be a hunter and a farmer like you.”
“No,” Mister Ernest said. “That ain’t enough any more. Time was when all a man had to do was just farm eleven and a half months, and hunt the other half. But not now. Now just to belong to the farming business and the hunting business ain’t enough. You got to belong to the business of mankind.”
“Mankind?” I said.
“Yes,” Mister Ernest said. “So you’re going to school. Because you got to know why. You can belong to the farming and hunting business and you can learn the difference between what’s right and what’s wrong, and do right. And that used to be enough—just to do right. But not now. You got to know why it’s right and why it’s wrong, and be able to tell the folks that never had no chance to learn it; teach them how to do what’s right, not just because they know it’s right, but because they know now why it’s right because you just showed them, told them, taught them why. So you’re going to school.”
“It’s because you been listening to that durn Will Legate and Walter Ewell!” I said.
“No,” Mister Ernest said.
“Yes!” I said. “No wonder you missed that buck yestiddy, taking ideas from the very fellers that let him git away, after me and you had run Dan and the dogs durn night clean to death! Because you never even missed him! You never forgot to load that gun! You had done already unloaded it a purpose! I heard you!”
“All right, all right,” Mister Ernest said. “Which would you rather have? His bloody head and hide on the kitchen floor yonder and half his meat in a pickup truck on the way to Yoknapatawpha County, or him with his head and hide and meat still together over yonder in that brake, waiting for next November for us to run him again?”
“And git him, too,” I said. “We won’t even fool with no Willy Legate and Walter Ewell next time.”
“Maybe,” Mister Ernest said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Maybe,” Mister Ernest said. “The best word in our language, the best of all. That’s what mankind keeps going on: Maybe. The best days of his life ain’t the ones when he said ‘Yes’ beforehand: they’re the ones when all he knew to say was ‘Maybe.’ He can’t say ‘Yes’ until afterward because he not only don’t know it until then, he don’t want to know ‘Yes’ until then.… Step in the kitchen and make me a toddy. Then we’ll see about dinner.”
“All right,” I said. I got up. “You want some of Uncle Ike’s corn or that town whisky of Roth Edmondziz?”
“Can’t you say Mister Roth or Mister Edmonds?” Mister Ernest said.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Well, which do you want? Uncle Ike’s corn or that ere stuff of Roth Edmondziz?”
The old hunter said:
soon we will enter the woods. It is not new to me, since I have been doing it each November for over seventy years—this last hill, at the foot of which the rich unbroken alluvial flatness begins as the sea begins at the base of its cliffs, dissolving away beneath the unhurried November rain as the seat itself dissolves away.
In the old days we came in wagons: the guns, the bedding, the dogs, the food, the whisky; the young men then who could drive all night and all the next day in the cold rain and pitch a camp in the rain and sleep in wet blankets and rise at daylight the next morning and hunt. There had been bear then. A man shot a doe or a fawn as quickly as he did a buck, and in the afternoons we shot wild turkey with pistols to test our stalking skill and aim, feeding all but the breasts to the dogs. But that time is gone now. Now we go in cars, driving faster and faster each year because the roads are better and the distance greater, the Big Woods where game still runs drawing yearly inward as my life is doing, until now I am the last of those who once made the trip in wagons without feeling it; and now those who accompany me are the sons and even grandsons of the men who rode for twenty-four hours in rain or sleet behind the steaming mules. They call me “Uncle Ike” now and few of them even care how much past eighty I am: all they care is what I myself know too: that I probably no longer have any business making this trip, even by car.
In fact, each time now, on the first night in camp, lying aching and unable to sleep in the harsh blankets, my blood only faintly warmed by the single whisky-and-water which I allow myself, I tell myself that this will be my last one. But I would stand that trip—I still shoot about as well as I ever did, still kill almost as much of the game I see as I ever killed; I have forgotten, if I ever kept a count, of how many bear or deer my gun has scored—and the warmth, heat, of next summer would restore me, renew me. Then November; again in the car with two or three of the sons or even grandsons of men whom I had taught to distinguish between not only the prints left by a buck or a doe, but between the sound they made moving, I would look ahead beyond the jerking windshield wiper and see the land flatten and dissolve away beneath the rain as the sea itself does, and say, “Well, boys, there it is again.”
Because to them, there it was. They are too recent to have any past in the history of its change; to them, it has simply moved intact in geography. Only to me has it exposed geography as the dying of a body exposes its defenseless mortality. At first there had been only the old towns along the River and the old towns along the hills, from each of which the planters with their gangs of slaves and then of hired laborers advanced to wrest from the cane and gum and cypress and holly and oak, the cotton patches which as the years passed became fields and then plantations; the very paths made by bear and deer and panther become the roads and highways linking the little towns still bearing the names of the old hunting stands: Panther Burn, Bucksnort, Bear Gun.
Now a man has to drive two hundred miles to find enough woods to harbor game worth hunting. Now the land lies open from hills to levee, standing horseman-tall in cotton for the world’s looms, right up to the doorsteps of the Negroes who work it and the white men wh
o own it. Because it is too rich for anything else, too rich and strong to have remained wilderness—land so rich and strong that, as those who live in and by it say, it exhausts the life of a dog in one year, a mule in five and a man in twenty—a land where neon flashes past us in the gray rain from the little countless towns and countless shining this-year’s automobiles, the plumb-straight roads stringing like endless beads the tremendous cotton-gins, all looking brand-new as though clapped together yesterday from numbered sections of sheet-iron, like the houses, the homes themselves, since no man, no matter how many times a millionaire, would build more than a simple roof and walls to camp in while he grows still richer in this land where every decade or so even the dyked streams will overflow up to the second storey—this land across which comes now not the scream of panther but the hooting of locomotives: trains of incredible length and drawn by one engine, since there are no grades anywhere except the dirt mounds of the old precessors, used in their turn by Chickasaw and Choctaw to sepulchure their fathers’ bones; these gone too now so that all which remains are the Indian names on the little towns, usually pertaining to water: Aluschaskuna, Tillatoba, Homochitto, Yazoo.
But even two hundred miles end in time, and now we are on water: the river of our destination, the last highway into the last of the Big Woods. We unload from the cars and trucks, into the boats; the horses will follow the river bank on to a point opposite camp, where they will be swum across. It is my hand, though it has more than eighty years, which coaxes and soothes them until, backing and filling, trembling a little, they spring scrambling down from the truck. It will be my hand again later when we reach the camp site with two hours of daylight left. “You go over under that driest tree and set down,” Will Legate tells me “—if you can find it. Me and these other young boys will ten’ to this.” But I am not tired yet. That will come later. Maybe it will not come at all this time, I think, as I have thought at this point each November for the last five or six of them. Maybe I will even go out on a stand in the morning too, I tell myself, knowing that I will not. Because it will not be the fatigue. It will be because I shall not sleep tonight but instead lie wakeful and peaceful on my cot amid the tent-filling snoring and the rain’s whisper as I always do on this first night in camp, who don’t have enough of them left now to waste one sleeping.
Big Woods: The Hunting Stories Page 15
