by Don Bajema
Pete passed me in six steps. I ran along behind him. My uncles were gliding in something like a run — low, level, silent, and real fast. We were gaining a lot of ground on the fifteen or so deer we were trailing. I thought I saw them, but I couldn’t have, it was too dark. There was another sense at play, one I had no recollection of. It was just there as we ran over the pasture.
Our speed increased when we dipped into a deep grass ravine. Birds flushed. At the top of the opposite side we froze, three statues low in the field, pretending to be hallucinations, being I guess, psychologically invisible. It was part of a rhythm, a ritual of our ghostly northern clan — the hunt in the dark and all the hoodoo that goes with it. The connection with the night, the deer, my uncles, the rhythm, and the fact that I had somehow known when and how to freeze as they froze — all this burst a small dam of adrenaline inside me.
I stood there invisible with my uncles. A wave of energy passed over the field from a jittery doe. It hit my uncles; it hit me too. I felt a smile coming over my face. From the ground through our senses into our blood. We stopped and time stopped. And nobody was there but the deer. The three of us had changed into something else through the energy of standing motionless. Until that moment I thought hunting was pursuit and killing. What it is — is infiltration. Because the deer forgot about us, they moved closer and broke their own perimeter, putting us just inside the herd. We’d crossed the line that would normally have made them run, and the deer, lacking imagination, figured we couldn’t be there. Like magic.
And since my dad got busted for drunk driving and they held him over the weekend because he needed to cool off, I was his representative in the spell we had on the deer. I was being initiated. Not through my uncles’ intentions. Just because it happens that way.
We were out in our field heading for the cutoff road between town and the county line. A road driven by drunks — like my dad last night — and state troopers. The blacktop crossed at the far end of our northern pasture. I’d been thinking the whole time we were hunting deer. But when we started to move again it didn’t seem like it.
Sam was the best archer in the entire Pacific Northwest. These deer were “gimmes” as far as his aim and the power of his bow was concerned. Pete was almost as good as Sam. We stood within a herd of deer with eight-point bucks almost close enough to spit on, and neither man had nocked an arrow on his string.
It was more like we were driving the herd instead of setting it up to get shots. Sam kept up the pressure, closing space on them enough to move them, but not enough to get them to run. Just very subtle suggestions in the way Sam leaned would be enough to shift the herd. It was like a dance between us, and in the next half hour we must have moved them a half mile. By the time we had them near our fence line we stopped, and I listened to them cropping the grass and snuffling. I either smelled them or imagined it; I couldn’t tell.
Three cars dotted the distance. One of them broke free of the other two and began to unwind down the road. As the light went from stars to the shimmer of starlight, the deer went from invisible shadows to outlines, and as the car growled steadily beyond, they froze. The headlights passed, the shimmer wiped away and the taillights burned smaller and smaller.
I knew the terrain well enough from walking it every summer. Although it was black as pitch out there, fingernail moon or not, I knew the ground beneath me. I was connected to it.
I unconsciously started to move. Sam put his hand on my arm to stop me. The deer broke and then settled. Sam pointed at his eye and whispered.
“They almost see us.”
Sam put me in a headlock and slowly pulled me down on the grass, breathing in my ear.
“Deer see in the dark. That’s what the Hoeks is banking on. Blindin’ them with their car lights, then shooting them when they’s helpless.”
I was freezing in the wet dew. We laid there for what seemed like a hour. The deer snorting and stamping, cropping and blowing. That and silence.
Two more cars passed by, trying to approximate the speed limit and stay in their lanes.
Sam put his mouth over my ear and whispered, “The Hoeks are gonna have a hunting accident.”
I got scared right there laying on my belly, the world of men had gotten a little too heavy for me.
Sam got up to his feet, flanked the herd and moved it closer to the corner fence. Pete flanked the far side and I stayed where I was.
Two cars raced down the road and a third pair of headlights lingered behind. The first two cars accelerated and became taillights. But the third pair of lights cut out. I could still hear the engine in the distance. The sound stopped at one of our cattle crossings and then started into the field, coming our way.
Pete hissed, “Them sons of bitches is on our land.”
You didn’t have to see his face to know what he looked like. I would not have wanted to be a Hoek for all the deer in Watcom County.
The truck was purring toward us in the dark. I heard a voice and the deer nearest me looked back in its direction. The truck killed its engine and rolled. I heard the heel of a boot thud on the side of a fender and a drunken, burping laugh. I saw the truck looming toward us with a figure sitting above each fender.
Then the high beams flashed, illuminating several of the herd around me. Two deer facing me looked side to side with ears bent backward and took off. They went into the air in a single spring and landed eight feet away. They launched again and disappeared. Three others stared into the headlights and were frozen. I saw their chests heaving and the smoke of their breath fanning in the white light. A gun blast from the truck rocked one to its side and it dropped in the grass.
Sam was running like a ghost along the edge of the headlight’s glare in the distance. Pete disappeared in a low ravine.
Sam stopped. He pulled his bow in the dark and a dart zipped toward the truck. A man on a fender yelped, and I heard the echoing of the truck hood as he banged around on it.
The men in the truck started howling. One of them was doing a crazy dance in the headlights; I could see his arm pinned against his chest. Another arrow knocked him down.
“Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus!”
A man went into the headlights and fired several shots in even spacing, from one end of the light to the other. I heard a pop over my head, like the air had cracked.
One deer remained in the light standing like a lawn decoration. The man on the ground was yelling and thrashing. The men in the truck were screaming. The driver was grinding gears into reverse. A man stood in the light, his shadow cast long and short as the headlights bounced. He fired off more rounds in our general direction.
Pete was yelling, “Don’t, don’t, don’t!”
But Sam wouldn’t listen.
Sam’s arrow hit the man with the gun in the knees and he threw his arms in the air. One of the Hoeks jumped out of the truck and tried to pull his fallen brother to the truck. The man yelled.
“Don’t move me! Don’t move me!”
This in time with the “don’ts” Pete was yelling. It became a kind of duet. One of Sam’s arrows went through the windshield and the driver hit the gas in reverse. The tires whined in the grass.
Why the troopers were coming I don’t know, but they were. Lights spinning and sirens blaring.
Pete said, “Oh, shit.”
In a second or two, Sam was over and beyond me and with Pete.
The troopers were stopped at our cattle crossing and were on their way in.
Pete had Sam around the neck and was spitting words through his clenched teeth. Sam was trying to push him away. I ran up to them as though I had a purpose, but I couldn’t do anything but watch Pete work his way behind Sam, his elbow vised around his neck. Sam was trying to throw him off and Pete jerked Sam’s feet off the ground the whole time saying, “Do what I tell ya. Do what I tell ya.”
They didn’t have handcuffs for all of us. I rode in the front seat between two troopers. Pete and Sam rode in the back seat. An ambulance was supposed to be on the way, but one of the brothers died before it got there.
Pete said he’d done the shooting and Sam had tried to stop him. Pete said he’d do it again so they might as well put him away right now.
The trooper driving said, “I believe you are gonna get your wish.”
Pete got life.
His seven brothers, four sisters and their families went to see him on his birthday the first year. We’ve kept that tradition for the most part, but over the years, five brothers have died, and the divorces and what all, has limited the number. I’ve been remiss. I’ve seen him twice in seven years. We write, once in a while. It gets hard to keep things in common. Him in a time capsule and us outside getting the wear and tear. He reads a lot.
Sam got elected to Congress until the Republicans took over. He never missed Pete’s birthday. Sam died in 1981. I think it nearly killed Pete to miss the funeral.
Last time I saw him, I went with my father. Dad hadn’t seen him in a long while. I guess after a time, men aren’t afraid to show what they feel. For most of the couple hours, they stood in each other’s arms, laughing and talking quietly in a corner.
I sat smoking in the day room, watching the men around me trying to get comfortable with children they weren’t raising and women they couldn’t have. A teenager would saunter in, reluctant, hoping Dad would be cool, which they almost always were. Cool, controlled, nodding. Fingers on chins, pants pressed, collars sharp, eyes clear. Looking at their sons growing up, becoming men, leaving them behind.
With my father waiting at the door and the guards getting impatient, I finally put the question to him.
“Why’d you say it was you?”
He looked at me from another planet, one with an orbit that spun out of time, accelerating at me until the years between us caught up.
Have you ever been smiled at by someone who knows much more than you? See Pete, his eyes wrinkled at the corners, his face worn and dignified, his mouth suppressing his smile.
“Aww, Eddie. Some get caught, some don’t. You know that, don’tcha?”
Before I could respond, his arms were around me. His cheek banging into mine. His old muscles still powerful.
Before I could respond, he released his grip, spun on his heel and walked to the impatient guard. His shoes were shined, his cuffs were low — an old man walking close to the earth.
Before I could respond, they closed the door behind him.
BEAR FLAG STATE
An expanse of giant thighs spread wide, thrusting and falling, spines snaking over the Central Valley horizon. Sierra’s foothills rolling for three hundred miles in ecstasy beneath California’s fiery sky.
Shasta stands white to the north.
The Pacific blasts cliffs from Big Sur to Mexico, prehistoric monsters stalk beneath the Red Triangle’s shimmering surface.
The Mojave extends to the coast to the south. Sunset in summer brings euphoria as though the day were a dream changing below warm breezes and stars. Fertile plains lined with mossy ditches replace lakes and marshes. The winter blows arctic hail over valley floors, ice grips mountain peaks.
The dusk of August the tenth, seventeen ninety-two, is hot. Heading south on El Camino Real, one hundred miles north of San Juan Bautista, are nine mounted churchmen recently from Spain, seventeen of Yerba Buena’s garrison leading twenty-three mules, six wranglers, and thirty-four slaves from outposts near Shasta. The slaves are silent and caked in dust. Each male tied at each side to a female who are themselves tied to children. Young males are further discouraged from running by having their elbows bound behind their back. Even so, the churchmen have blindfolded two males in sacks cinched at the neck. Two prepubescent girls tethered to an anguished priest. His lips work in silent repetition staring along the rolling ridges, becoming, to him, the inner thighs and the adjacent tendons jutting beside gaping valleys. His eyes follow the cracks undulating beneath the spines and heaving bellies defining his horizon.
Their worlds differ. Those in the dust see the plague of conquerors, replaced in the absence of their gods. Those aloft ride glory and purpose into the next century, delivering order under the stern imperatives of their own Almighty. Each hoping their Heavenly Father will choose this time to bestow his long-promised mercy.
These hours-upon-hours sway with the ripple of horses, creaking leather, and incessant whispering of this priest’s pornographic mantras inhabiting his dark consciousness. The hills and the beast beneath, the bottomless eyes and unspoiled frames of these children become one thing. One huge anticipated desire for as much sin and raw perversion as he can possibly embrace in one night. Stolen away from camp where slaves are gagged and counted lost in the morning. He blinks as one girl’s attempt to become invisible fails her. He turns away wondering how it is they always know.
The hours go on, the hillsides taunt obscenely before him. His eyes follow the round weight spilling from a golden giant whose curves lie still. Her leg draped over the shoulder of another, asleep. Slowly the sun casts rocking shadows on his left and in his eye’s corner he sees the dark shadow of the girls, the rolling haunches of his fabulous horse and his own body high above all. His shadow turns forward. A mule squalls and bucks its burden and suddenly as though dreaming, resumes his clopping gait.
These slaves will not labor. They are hopeless servants. Two decades of torture has taught them nothing. The mature females stare blindly in the heat, their feet bled dry running at any chance to return to their spot beneath a stand of oak trees. The males sit hunched refusing to see what is before their rage-glistening eyes. The children try patience to the breaking point. Silent, sullen, seeming to owe their masters nothing, showing no effort other than ministering to those younger than themselves.
Even while on their knees in the shadow of God, they remain vacant, empty of any instruction, lost with the withering that precedes disease clouding deep within the vast depth of their eyes. They are good for very little for a very short period of time. Then in a single night they are lost. As though recalled into their savage ways. They resist. Whole villages die in numbers that can only stand as evidence of God’s displeasure with them. Today driven with the mules to Mission San Diego. Given their last chance in the faint hope that distance will open their eyes and return them to their knees staring as they must into God’s sky above.
Gusts of wind slant yellow fields of wild mustard, catching the travelers’ clothes, winding them in the raising dust, swirling everything into disorder. Swimming through gritty tears the horses snort and stamp; the trailing mule squalls and plants its feet honking a series of protests. Each mule in line responds either kicking the mule nearest, or rearing and tangling themselves in a web leaving them immobile, facing all directions at once, their necks wrapped over each other’s backs. The wranglers sort them and the procession halts. The slaves face the breeze. Their impassive gaze moving along the horizon and back, their field of vision expanding with each pass until what they see is not through their eyes.
As though the beasts have discovered snakes beneath their hooves, they squeal in unison, leaping into the air spinning and stumbling. Three break clear and sprint awkwardly east. One’s balance fails against its heavy load and topples on its side, rolls and stands stupidly until it begins to backtrack along the trail. The others are run down by the caballeros. Some order is restored, but the more prescient beasts must be beaten. Meanwhile riders from the garrison cross their legs over their mounts’ backs and await the order to move on.
The slaves are statues. Two horses scream. The male slaves glance at one another and begin praying for a puma or grizzly to descend on them, freeing those who can escape into the hills beyond. The priest whispers questions betraying his fear. The question
s are ignored. All eyes search the horizon upwind. Hearts can be seen pounding beneath ribs, horses lower their bellies, their eyes wide white and wild. The hooded slaves stand resigned and motionless as though frozen in an icy wind.
The sun rides the crests to the west, blazing the rolling rims, fighting in a golden fury igniting the sky above the hills.
The beast sees dark forms in the distance and hears the pandemonium of the mules and screaming horses. It charges. Each stride shivers giant muscles under silver-tipped fur. The grizzly groans in a series that could almost sound as though it were urging itself on, if it were not so apparent that nothing represents opposition. A shot cracks. The grizzly ignores it. Three more shots ring out. The garrison forms a half-circle rotating in a wide arc, the muskets firing with the grizzly still out of range. Several riders remove their shirts and balancing under their horses’ necks, blindfold their mounts. A wrangler distributes long pikes tipped in a pointing steel finger and thumb. Two horses spring into the air, their riders clinging to their backs.
The churchman yanks the tethers of the girls, losing his grip on one. She senses the slack and immediately disappears into the grass beside the trail. The tether vanishes behind her like a lizard’s tail. The other captive snaps side to side against her ever shortening leash. He grabs her by her hair and lifts her cleanly into the air securing her over his mount, his reins in one hand and the other gripped in a claw on the back of her neck.
The beast towers on hind legs rocking left to right surveying the pack train. A shot is followed by another and the bear spins to one side and charges again, reaching a mule, ripping its haunches and pulling it off its feet. A paw clubs the side of its head breaking its skull. The mule drops flat. Two shots thunk into the bear’s hide. Enraged, it charges past a hooded slave and bowls over a horse. Its rider runs to the side of a compañero whose horse rears and throws its own rider clinging for life to the reins. He is stomped beneath his mount’s hooves. The rider afoot stands behind several mounted soldiers who struggle to reload. The grizzly is hugging an old slave to his chest, biting her scalp. He tosses her aside. Now lowering its head, gouging her with rapid bites on her face and neck. A shot stings the grizzly on one side. The beast looks for an instant, curious as the ridges over his shoulder bow and swell and his neck lurches forward until it bellows a sound more horrible than those already echoing in the valley around them.
