Tracker

by Gary Paulsen

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  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  'This Side of Wild' Excerpt

  To Nancy Polette,

  who earned it

  ONE

  John Borne sat at the breakfast table and tried to see the look of death on his grandfather. He could not. If a change were there, he could not see it.

  Clay Borne had ruddy cheeks, a head of white hair, clear eyes and steady hands as he buttered a great slab of fresh bread hot from the wood stove, and humor in the corners of his eyes just as he always had.

  He is life, John thought - not death.

  He will never be death. Whenever I turn around and need him, Grandpa will be there.

  But that’s not what the doctors said. Two weeks ago, at the hospital in Grand Forks, the doctors had asked them to come into a small green room—or had asked his grandparents and John had gone with them because nobody said he couldn’t.

  “There is nothing more to do,” the doctors said. They looked sad. But it was a sadness that would go away. “We can’t stop the cancer.”

  And John had watched his grandmother sag. She made no sound but just sagged. A part of her went out at the words and she started down and John caught her on one side and his grandfather on the other and they put her in a chair.

  “It will be all right,” Clay told her gently. “It will be all right.”

  But how could it be?

  The doctors had done tests and more tests and worked with chemicals and knives and finally had sent John Borne’s grandfather home to die in peace on the small farm at the edge of the woods, the farm where he had been born and lived all his life, the farm where John had lived for nine years, since he was four and his parents were killed in a plane crash in the northern woods.

  Home.

  “You’re not eating, John.” His grandmother turned from the stove. “Cold breakfast sits hard, and a hard breakfast won’t warm you on a snowy morning.”

  He nodded and put food in his mouth but tasted nothing, felt only the texture of the eggs and crumbled bacon. His grandmother talked like that, as though she were just about to break into poetry. When John listened to her for a while he caught himself expecting things to rhyme but they never quite did.

  She had cried for a time, for days, but she was through with that now just as John had cried but was through with it now. Crying changed nothing.

  There was still the fact that the doctors said his grandfather had only a few months to live and so John had tried to see the look of death on him but could not.

  He had seen it on many things. They lived close to the land and made all their own meat, and to make meat it was necessary to make death. He had helped his grandfather slaughter cattle and seen death there, and once on a man, the farmer who had lived next door. His tractor had backed over him and John had been the one to find the body when he went to deliver eggs and there had been death on the ground.

  But it wasn’t here now.

  There wasn’t the looseness of death or the hotsweet smell of it or even the tiredness of it. There was no change in his grandfather, no change at all. He kept right on working and carving the little woodcarvings in the kitchen at night and laughing and playing small jokes and eating well and looking to the next day. Always looking to the next day.

  His grandfather glanced up from his plate suddenly, his fork halfway to his mouth. “Isn’t the food good enough for you?”

  John had stopped eating again without knowing it. “Of course …” He took another mouthful.

  “There’s an inch of snow out there.” The old man chewed slowly and carefully. “Deer season starts Saturday. The snow will be good for tracking.”

  They hunted deer every year and normally John would start getting excited two or three days before season. He’d clean and reclean his rifle, look more and more to the woods and start losing sleep. This year was different. Normally they would get up at three in the morning and do chores and the milking so they could be in the woods by first gray light; and they would do that for the entire two weeks of deer season or until they got a deer. But this year that was all changed.

  His grandfather wasn’t going to hunt this year. “I’ll stay home and do the chores,” he’d said one morning, sitting in the yellow glow of the kerosene lamp on the kitchen table, his hands folded in front of him on the oilcloth. “It’s time you hunted alone.”

  And John had nodded but it had been wrong, too wrong. They always hunted together, they always did everything together.

  John had started hunting deer when he was ten, first without a gun, just going with his grandfather. Then when he was eleven he took a shotgun and got his first deer and he had taken deer every season since, using a rifle after the first year. He was now thirteen.

  Three deer he had taken with his grandfather, hunting the cold crisp mornings in November, hunting down the long cold trails in the swamps in the new snow. Three times he had given death to the deer, seen the new blood on the snow, seen the look of death …

  He stopped thinking, concentrated on eating the pancakes his grandmother had put in front of him. But it was impossible to keep the memories out. Things don’t change, he thought. People don’t die. They couldn’t … It was always somebody else who died, never people you were close to. Even though his parents had gone down in a plane crash and were surely dead, it had happened when he was very young and so he didn’t know them. He had not seen the change brought by death—the change that was supposed to come but, for John, never did.

  But for his grandfather to stay home from hunting deer—that was too much. Too much of a change. It was like admitting that death was coming.

  He got the last of the pancakes down. They tasted like sticky wood. Then he took his plate to the sink and used the hand pump to rinse the syrup down the drain.

  “I’ll go do chores,” he said, turning from the pump, looking at his grandfather at the table but still not looking, saying but not saying. I’ll go do chores and you can’t die, he thought, a scream in his mind. “I’ll go start milking.”

  His grandfather nodded. “I’ll be out in a minute, after I finish my coffee.”

  And that wasn’t a change. He always hung back and had coffee with Agatha, John’s grandmother. They sat in the morning dark, in the yellow of the lamp, and sipped coffee and talked about what the day might bring and at least that hadn’t changed.

  John threw his chores jacket with all the holes over his shirt and pulled on the rubber barn boots and went outside into the cold, crunching in the new snow. His breath made small puffs, led the way to the warm smells of the barn.

  Once he was out of the house in the dark of the morning he could use his mind to make things all right. It was still a cold clear morning, he was still going to milk the cows and clean the barn and feed and water the stock, still going to smell and feel the heat of the barn.

  Those things hadn’t changed and so maybe the other thing wouldn’t change, maybe the doctors were wrong. They were just people. They could be wrong.

  He kicked the ice from the barn
door and went in, swinging the door wide and brushing the new snow back. letting his spirits come up.

  It was impossible to feel bad when you entered a barn in the winter where the cows were waiting to be fed; impossible to be sad when there was work to do.

  He started chores.

  TWO

  His grandfather did not come out to help with chores and John did them alone.

  He didn’t mind. It had happened before many times and in some ways he liked it. During the week, the school bus came before chores were finished and John had to leave the farm then. He always felt as if he were missing something. Now that it was Sunday he did not have to leave and so he could work morning chores all the way to done. That’s how his grandfather always talked about work—you didn’t just work so many hours or days. You worked a job to done. All the way to done. No matter how long it took.

  And chores, morning chores, milking, and cleaning the barn and feeding calves and pigs and chickens was work but more, too. There was something about it that lifted it above work for John.

  At school his best friend was a boy named Emil Peterson and Emil thought he was crazy to like chores.

  “That’s just hard work, that’s all it is,” he’d told John more than once. Emil hated chores at his own place, or anyplace else for that matter. “You think it’s fun to slop around in cow crap all morning? You’re crazy.”

  John had tried to explain but nothing had come out right. Chores was the first thing of the day, it was the new thing of each day and it was work but it touched something else in his mind, touched a place that made him think of good things, of growing and rich things.

  More than once in the winter he had come into the barn only to stop just inside the door and listen and smell and feel the richness of it. The stink of the manure was even rich, and the rumbling of the cows’ stomachs in the dark, the fresh warm smell of them just after he came in from the bitter cold, the sound of their teeth as they chewed their cuds, the quiet grunts and chuckles that came from the horses in the stalls at the end …

  “It’s gentle,” he’d tried to tell Emil. “Gentle and right, somehow. The feeling of the barn in the morning.”

  But Emil hadn’t agreed and John hadn’t brought it up again because when somebody doesn’t want to see a thing you can’t make him see it.

  His grandfather had fought the Japanese in World War II and had been wounded and later had been in the occupying force in Japan, and the hating part of war had gone and he had come to love them. That’s how he put it, talking to John one morning during the morning lunch break.

  “I came to love them and the beauty they see in things and the way they see the beauty. They look for small beauty, look for the beauty in even ugly things, and they compose songs and poetry to celebrate that beauty. Whole poems have been written about a single petal on a flower. One tear on a child’s cheek.”

  And in a way that was what morning chores were for John—a whole series of small beauties. All the sounds and smells and feelings came as separate little bursts of beauty and he found himself making small poems in his mind while he did even the dirtiest work.

  The cows greet

  gently.

  On a cold morning.

  The words went through his head while he was taking the manure fork and sweeping it down the gutter to clean the night’s mess and he decided he would tell them to his grandfather when he came out.

  The ritual of chores was always the same, at least in the fall and winter when the cows were kept in: clean the gutters, feed hay, feed silage—the warm rich smell of the hot corn from the silo always made his mouth water—and milk. There were seventeen milk cows and four about to come in to milk season and when the milking was done it was time to feed milk to the calves in buckets and separate the rest of the milk and cream in the separator.

  John could have done it with his eyes closed by the time he was twelve. At thirteen it was so automatic that he didn’t have to use his mind at all and could think of other things.

  He brought the milk stool from where it hung and settled in alongside Eunice, the first cow, and nestled his head in her flank and began pulling milk into the bucket with a hissy tingling foamy sound.

  Don’t watch the milk, he thought. After you’d been milking for a while you learned to not watch the milk, because it came in a small stream and never seemed to fill the bucket if you watched it. But if you looked away for a time and then looked back, the level in the bucket would have come up, and he wondered while he milked how many other things were like that. Wondered if there were many parts of living that only changed when you looked away and looked back.

  Like Grandpa.

  It came in like a hot worm, the thought—like a needle in a blister. He didn’t want to think of his grandfather. Not now, not yet. There would be time for that later, too much time for that later.

  But it came. He couldn’t stop it. The thought slid in the side and with it a small hope.

  If I don’t see what is happening to him, the hope said, then it isn’t happening.

  It’s the opposite of filling the bucket with milk. If I watch him all the time I won’t see the change that death is bringing and so it can’t be.

  Can’t be.

  Death couldn’t come if you were watching for it.

  John went to the next cow, Marge, a big Holstein who was an easy milker because she dropped the milk as soon as you started pulling.

  The ritual again. The foamy hiss of the milk, the head cradled in the flank of the cow, the warmsweet smell of milk coming up and the thinking.

  The thinking came again. There was school tomorrow, school all week and then deer season would start. He would think about that: getting through school all week and going deer hunting.

  If he worked at that the other thing wouldn’t come in. If he kept his mind going on school and going deer hunting …

  School was a strange time for John. He was pretty much a loner, except for his best friend Emil, and he didn’t get the entertainment part of school at all.

  He approached school like a job—work to do. Something that had to get done, like chores. Usually he brought none of his home life to school and very little school came home.

  But he did talk to Emil about his grandfather. The pressure had been too great—a building, blinding thing—and he had told Emil about it last week by their lockers.

  All around was noise, kids moving, hall traffic with teachers watching.

  “He’s going to die,” John had said.

  “What?” Emil slammed his locker. It wouldn’t catch any other way.

  “Grandpa’s going to die,” John repeated, slightly louder. “Of cancer.”

  Emil looked directly into his eyes. “That’s not fair. He’s too good. Too good for dying.”

  “Just the same,” John said, starting to cry. “Just the same—the doctors said.”

  “That doesn’t make it fair.”

  And Emil was right. It wasn’t fair.

  He thought suddenly of the deer he had killed.

  Three of them. The first one a doe, then a buck and a doe, and he had killed them all.

  Jolts of noise and violence—that’s what he remembered—the slam of the shotgun as it recoiled into his shoulder, the flat-crack of the bullet leaving the barrel, the second that hung forever in his mind as he saw the bullet hit the deer just in back of the shoulder, the hair and blood that flew with the bullet and the deer staggering sideways with the shock of being hit.

  Sideways and down, he remembered, and the eyes looking, always looking for what had happened, looking in confusion and pain and finally clouding as death came; clouding and filming over with death.

  The first deer.

  And the thought crept in that maybe the deer had been good, just as his grandfather was good, and maybe it wasn’t fair for the deer, either.

  The second deer had been worse. The bullet had taken it too far back, in the lungs, and death had come slowly and John had to shoot again to kill it and
it had seen him and that bothered him.

  For a time.

  Then that thing happened that happens to all people who hunt, or to everybody he’d talked to about deer hunting. They were sad about it, but the sad part only lasted a short time and wore off and was replaced by a hard feeling, almost an excitement. And after that it wasn’t hard to kill deer anymore, wasn’t hard to give them death, and sometimes that bothered John, too. More than he admitted to other kids at school or even to his grandfather.

  He wasn’t sure it was right to feel that hard way about killing, about death, about shooting animals and giving them death.

  He realized with a start that he was crying while he milked, the tears dropping off his cheeks into the foam of the milk at the side of the bucket, making round holes down through the foam.

  He couldn’t remember starting to cry, couldn’t think when the great sadness came down on his shoulders, but it was there and he thought of his grandfather and the crying got worse and he buried his face in the cow’s flank and ground his teeth together and made the crying stop. There would be nothing from crying, he felt—nothing to help at all from crying.

  But still the sobs came, jerking his head as he milked, the tears dripping down in the foam.

  THREE

  During the next week things almost went back to normal, if a bit quiet, around the house. Now and then John would catch his grandmother crying, just little tears as she worked, and once he saw his grandfather staring out the window when there was nothing to see but darkness, his hands still upon the carving he was working on. But other than that things were almost the same as always.

  And in a way the week was the same as the ritual of the chores. There was getting up and working in the barn and then school, and for a change John liked school—it gave him something outside himself to think about, forced him to look away from his own life.

  In the mornings at breakfast he forced himself to not stare at his grandfather and by Tuesday it was easier and he could talk without his voice catching.