Hunters

by Chet Williamson

  "You know, we could go back to my place," Sheldon said when they were out in the parking lot, "but I don't think I want to wait that long. How about you?"

  "I'm ready anytime," Terry said.

  "You are? Well, that's good, 'cause so am I. I am really ready. My van's behind the building here, come on, let's go." He put his arm on Terry's shoulder, and led him around the back of the building.

  When Terry saw that there were no vans or cars parked there, he started to say something, but Sheldon hit him with a sharp right jab to the face. He heard the cartilage of the nose crunch, and felt the wetness of Terry's blood on his knuckles.

  He laughed and swung a left cross across the man's jaw, giving a short gasp as he raked the skin of his knuckles open on Terry's teeth. Even though Terry hadn't raised a hand against him, it was as though he was fighting back, and the pain enraged Sheldon so that he pummeled the smaller man in the stomach. Terry's knees buckled and he fell moaning onto the loose gravel.

  But that wasn't enough for Sheldon. He reached down, grabbed Terry's shirt in his right hand, pulled him off the gravel, and smashed his left fist into the bleeding face over and over again, until Terry couldn't even beg him to stop. Then Sheldon let him fall back onto the ground, wiped his hands on his jeans, and walked back to the motel, where he fell into bed exhausted.

  He woke up early the next morning, checked out, and drove home. He never heard another thing about Terry Whoever-He-Was. Never another thing.

  Until today. Until the doctor told him he had AIDS, and Sheldon knew all right where it had come from. From Terry-Whoever-He-Was, that sonovabitch faggot whose filthy blood had gotten in Sheldon's cut hands.

  Terry up in Bradford.

  He called Steve, his foreman, and told him that he wouldn't be in for the rest of the day. Steve bitched that he was the only good man he had on shift that day because everyone else was deer hunting. "I need more medical tests, Steve," Sheldon said.

  "More tests?" Steve sounded impatient. "Christ, what for?"

  "They think maybe I got cancer." That would shut him up. And it wasn't so far from the truth either.

  "Cancer?" He heard the awe in Steve's voice. "Shit...well, okay then, you just do whatever you have to, we'll get along. I hope everything'll...be okay."

  No sir, buddy, never again. "Thanks. Bye."

  Nothing would ever be okay again, but maybe he could make something right. If he could just find his old pal Terry.

  Andrew Kenton hated the woods. He hated the cold, he hated walking on wet, dead leaves, and he hadn't even liked deer all that much until he met Jean Catlett. What he liked was Los Angeles and sunshine and acting, which he was very good at.

  But it was no act that he loved Jean Catlett. He thought she was terrific the first time he met her at the Friends of Animals fundraiser, and nothing had happened since then to change his mind. In fact, the more he knew about her, the better he liked her. He liked her looks, he liked the way she made love, and he especially liked the fact that she was the only child of Mel Catlett of Catcoll Productions.

  Andrew had worked for Catcoll, playing the gay neighbor on the recently canceled Fox sitcom, "Who's Knockin'?" He appeared in only six of the twenty-two episodes the previous season, and was surprised that Jean even recognized him. But she explained that she watched the show regularly because of Ginnie Marsh, the lead, who was also active in the animal rights group. She also told him that she wondered if such a macho looking guy was really gay, and that Ginnie had assured her that Andrew was not.

  He asked her out, and one thing led to another. He was sure that if he had met her anywhere other than at the meeting he wouldn't have gotten a smile. But Jeannie loved her animals, man. It had rubbed off on him as well. When he sat and listened to her talk about what they did to lab animals and animals raised for fur, it made him want to go out and break into labs and ranches and unlock all the cages. But what really got her hot was hunters.

  "The so-called scientists and fur butchers are bad enough," she had said on one of their first dates. "But to think that people actually go out into the wild, to the animals' homes, and hunt them down...that is totally unacceptable and unforgivable."

  "But a lot of them do it for the meat, don't they? I mean, we both eat meat." Jean, however, didn't touch beef or pork.

  "We eat meat to live, not for pleasure. And the chicken and turkey we eat wouldn't even exist if we didn't raise them for food. I'm talking about invaders of their territory. Andrew, it's like if some aliens came down to earth one week a year and were allowed to kill as many people as they wanted, throw them on the roof of their spaceship, and then fly away till next year."

  Jean ate seafood, and Andrew was about to ask if fishermen didn't invade the fishes' home, but then decided not to. He didn't think Jean would like the parallel.

  Over the year that he dated her, Andrew watched her concern become a passion, and the passion become a mania. But it was a mania that he slowly learned to share. It wasn't too long before they and Tim Weems and Michael Brewster decided over drinks that it would be a good idea to set an example, to hunt down and do to a hunter exactly what a hunter did to a deer. It was then that the four of them became the Wildlife Liberation Front. Then when Chuck Marriner and Sam Rogers joined them, the violence quotient escalated, until they thought about doing even more.

  But first they had to find the right camp.

  Andrew moved through the Pennsylvania State Game Lands 25 unconcerned with stealth. He was hunting a place, not a deer. Most of the primitive, backwoods cabins were along creeks to insure a good supply of water, so Andrew walked toward where the topographical map said was a stream, but grew frustrated when he didn't come across one.

  These maps were a pain in the ass. Chuck was the only one who really knew how to read them, but he was an impatient teacher, and hadn't been able to pass the art along to the others. So Andrew trudged on as the sun came up, looking for the stream.

  So where was it? Where the hell was the goddam stream?

  The one-room cabin that Pete Diffenderfer shared with his two fellow hunters was next to a stream. It had been built in the early forties, when hundreds of cabins had been constructed on leased state land.

  That morning Pete Diffenderfer had awakened an hour before dawn, pushed in the button of the wind-up alarm clock, and shivered with excitement and the cold. The fire he had set the night before in the wood stove was dead, and he was glad he had worn his insulated long underwear in his sleeping bag. He didn't think he could have stood the chilly air against his bare trunk and legs. He woke his friends, slid out of his bunk, and put on two pairs of socks, one cotton, the other heavy wool. He stepped into his thick trousers, then slipped his feet into ankle-high L. L. Bean hunting boots.

  Pete was out the front door before the others had disentangled themselves from their sleeping bags. He breathed in the air, reveling in the sharp crispness that stung his throat. He walked up the hill from the cabin to the outhouse, defecated quickly and efficiently, and walked back again. Then he broke the ice in the basin that sat on the railing of the tiny porch, and splashed frigid water on his face. It made him even more wakeful than before.

  Back inside, the men joked, ate donuts, and drank the coffee they had made the night before. Then they finished dressing, ending with the heavy coats of blaze orange, put wads of toilet paper under their scope covers so the lenses wouldn't fog in the colder outside air, and stepped outside to hunt.

  It took Pete Diffenderfer a half hour of walking in near darkness to reach the spot he had chosen the day before, when they had helped each other erect their stands, the elevated platforms in which they would perch and wait for a deer to wander by. One of his friends was a half mile to the northwest, the other a mile south. Pete could easily hear their shots, and if he did he would hold still for five, ten minutes, waiting even more silently in case of a miss or a wounding that would make a deer run, limp, or drag itself past his stand.

  By the time Pete had climbed on
to his perch, he could just make out streaks of rose through the ragged treetops to the east. He settled himself, his Remington pump .760 resting across his legs. His feet dangled over the edge of the stand, fifteen feet above the ground. For comfort's sake, Pete had placed a small, flat pillow under the spot where his knees rested against the sharp edge of the stand.

  Pete thought that it seemed colder than it had in years gone by. He rubbed his fingers against each other inside the heavy mittens, and wished that the orange of his jacket was as warm to the touch as it was to the eye. The deer must really be colorblind if that hue didn't startle them. He had heard other hunters say that it appeared white to the deer's eyes. Well, if it did it did. It didn't much matter, and besides, it was the law.

  In his fifty years of deer hunting, Pete Diffenderfer had always obeyed the law. His father had taught him that when he had given him his first deer rifle at the age of fourteen. One deer a year, no more. No shooting one for your friend, and no shooting a doe in buck season. Pete had done none of those things. He considered himself a good and honest hunter.

  He was an effective one as well. In fifty years he had brought home thirty-eight bucks, and had gotten one consecutively for the past eight years. The actual kills made his heart pound, but it was the hunt itself and all that went with it that he relished. Every year he went through the ritual of taking out the bullets and the rifle, cleaning it, sighting it in at the sportsmen's club to which he belonged, and shooting at the targets on the range until his offhand scores equaled those of men years his junior.

  Pete loved the ritual, the preparations, the chance to be with his friends and by himself. His two companions with whom he had come to Elk County shared his love of the outdoors, but he seldom saw them outside of deer season, so that when they did get together there was much to catch up on.

  But the solitude was the best part, the sense that there was no one but him in the world to see the sky grow brighter, feel the air become less bitterly cold, behold the dread miracle of winter. He sat and waited, and while he was alert to the sounds of the woods, he also escaped into himself, his past, his thoughts and memories of seasons before.

  He thought of his wife, of when they had both been young, though no happier than they were now, of the job at the steel mill he had held for over thirty years before he had retired four years ago, of his church where he served on the budget committee, of his three grandchildren, of the oldest boy who wanted to go hunting with him next year when he was old enough.

  Pete Diffenderfer thought of many things as the morning brightened, until the sun slashed bright streaks through the latticework of branches, bathing his orange garb with fire, making him a perfect target.

  Andrew Kenton saw his first dead deer at 7:00 that morning. He was coming across a gully when he heard a shot that sounded so close to him that it froze him for a moment. Then he realized it had been off to his right, and he heard someone shout, and then saw a patch of blaze orange against the brown of the trees. It was moving away from him, and further down the gully to his right. He turned and followed and in another minute came across two men.

  No, he was wrong. The one kneeling next to the dead animal was only a boy, no older than fourteen. He looked like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting, bucktoothed and freckled, with a tuft of red hair sticking out from beneath his hunting cap. But on that cherubic face was a grin that Andrew saw only as sadistic; sadism mirrored in the face of the man, apparently the boy's father, who stood over the grisly sight.

  "You believe this?" the man said, a delighted chuckle in his voice. "His first time out, I haven't walked away from him more than three minutes when bang, he gets this." The man gestured to the dead animal's head. "Ten-point, gotta be an eighteen inch spread, don't you think?"

  Andrew had no idea what the man was talking about. All he could see was the deer, dead, blood still trickling from a hole beneath its shoulder. But he nodded and said, "Yeah...I guess so."

  "He just went down, Dad," said the boy. "I mean, his legs just went out and he went down."

  "That's the way you want to do it," the father said. "He didn't feel a thing. Now let me get a quick shot here..." He took a pocket camera from the folds of his coat and took a shot of the boy and the dead deer. "Say," he said to Andrew, "would you mind taking a shot of the two of us with the buck? Pretty special day for both of us."

  Andrew nodded bleakly, laid his rifle on the ground, and took the camera. He centered the two and the deer in the frame, and tripped the shutter, then handed it back to the man, who thanked him and turned back to the boy, grinning. "Now let's get him field dressed. This is not the fun part."

  He was right. What followed was a nightmare of knives and blood and steam rising off of flesh, and a smoking, multi-hued mound of entrails settling itself on the dead leaves like a nest of lazy snakes in sunshine. Andrew could watch no more. He turned away, picked up his gun, and walked back down the gully.

  "So long," the man called after him. "Good luck to you!"

  Andrew was sickened. He had never seen anything like it before, a man and a boy, washed to their elbows in an innocent animal's blood, scooping out its innards and laughing and joking at the same time. It repulsed him and it angered him.

  As he shuffled through the dead leaves, he thought about all the things he might have done. He could have told them what they were, immoral killers to murder an animal that had never offended them; but he had not spoken a word against them. He could have taken their camera and opened the back, ruining the film; but he had carefully framed the shot he took to preserve the bloody moment forever. He could have even lifted his rifle and shot them both.

  That was the plan, wasn't it? Whether today or tomorrow, killing was on the itinerary. But there had been two of them, both armed, and he was not used to guns, and he had been too close. If he had shot one, the other could have gotten to him.

  But maybe he could shoot somebody else. Not tomorrow or the day after, but today. Shoot them and leave them the way they had planned, leave them like an animal.

  In another fifteen minutes, Andrew might have calmed down enough to see the foolishness of his haste. But when he saw Pete Diffenderfer, his mind was full of fury and vengeance for the deer he had just seen butchered.

  Andrew stepped behind a thick-boled pine tree, and peered around it at the man in the tree stand seventy yards away. The man gave no indication that he had been seen. Andrew slipped the glove off his right hand, put it into his coat pocket, and wadded small bits of wax into his ears. Then he lifted his rifle, a Ruger Model 77, 7mm Magnum, and leaned against the tree. He placed his right cheek against the smooth walnut stock, and looked through the Weaver scope with his right eye.

  The man in the stand did not fill the field of vision, but Andrew could make out certain details. The man was older, in his sixties, had a little gray moustache, and wore glasses with black frames. His booted feet dangled over the edge of the stand.

  How many deer had he killed and gutted over the years? Andrew wondered. Whatever the number, now it was payback time.

  Andrew flicked off the safety, breathed in icy air, leaned against the tree so that his forehead rubbed roughly against the bark, moved his Ruger in a series of infinitesimal motions until the plain of blaze orange was settled directly under the scope's cross hair. Only then did he place his bare finger on the cold metal of the trigger, let out half his breath in a white puff, hold the rest, and begin, very gently, to squeeze. His last thought before the rifle fired was that Jean would be proud of him.

  When he had exerted enough pressure on the trigger, the firing pin descended, the powder ignited, the bullet left the barrel and flew across the seventy yards in the merest fraction of a second, meeting the man in the tree, expanding the instant it struck the orange jacket, widening as it tore through flesh and muscle and bone. The man flew backwards into a red cloud, and fell from the tree, landing on the dry leaves below like a sack of lime.

  Andrew held his pose for a moment, the
sound of the explosion reverberating like a great gong. Then he operated the bolt and lowered the rifle so that he still looked through the scope at the man on the ground, ready to fire a second shot at the hint of motion.

  There was none. He had died so easily. His legs just went out and he went down, Dad. Yeah, just that easy.

  From the corner of his eye, Andrew had seen the spent shell fly from the ejector, and it took him only a moment to find the gleaming brass amid the floor of dead pine needles. He dropped it into his pocket and walked to the tree stand, pulling the wax wads from his ears. Although he listened intently, he heard no other sounds, neither voices nor footsteps in dead leaves.

  No, no one would come. No one would leave their stands and jeopardize their own chances of making a kill. It would be safe, safe to do, what did they call it? Oh yes, the field dressing.

  The sight of the dead man close up made Andrew stop and breathe deeply for a moment as the forest seemed to shimmer about him. It was incredible, he thought, the damage a single, small projectile could do to a human body. The man had not moved since he had fallen, and the glassy stare told Andrew he was dead. Heart and lungs had been ripped through, and the blood must have ceased its pumping to the brain instantly. He hoped the man had felt little pain, only one, short, sharp, and savage, before he lost consciousness and his life.

  Andrew stood for a long time, looking down at the first man he had ever killed, indeed ever even harmed. He thought he had been ready for it, but nothing had prepared him for this moment. He struggled to stop shaking telling himself it was only the cold and that he could not be shaking from emotion because he had none. He couldn't allow himself that luxury. It was what Jean had told him, and he had repeated it to the others many times. No feeling but will, no goal but the mission.

  All right then. He had killed, and now he must continue, be strong, finish the lesson, plant the first seeds of legend and terror.