A Thousand Deer

by Rick Bass

  They were, of course, flattened, out on the streets. There were no roads in the summer that were not decoupaged with the tarpaper-flat legacy of what and where they had been.

  They were slippery and squishy beneath the wheels, at night, but the next day the summer sun quickly baked them paper thin. Mockingbirds and blue jays carried most of them away like miniature sandwich boards, but despite the nightly reduction, there were always more; they kept coming, again as if answering the tides.

  My friends and I would some nights for entertainment walk up and down the sidewalks of our streets, collecting the living ones from beneath the streetlamps, simply to see how full we could fill our tall buckets. (There is nothing, I realize now, more repulsive than a boy.) The buckets grew heavy and stretched our arms, the toads hopped and wriggled and writhed, it was a strange sensation to be carrying the lives of so many in each bucket.

  We would have wars with them. I don’t mean that we used them as weapons, but instead, we set up rows and columns of tiny plastic green Army men at one end of our sandboxes, then emptied a bucket of a hundred or more toads into the other end of the sandbox, and watched, like Romans observing the Christians versus the lions, as the toads galloped over the tops of the Army men, the soldiers’ rifles and grenades utterly ineffective against the power of the living. We would laugh to see how easily the infantry of mankind was crushed, laid to level beneath the advance of the legions of toads.

  Firefly lanterns lined our bedside tables in the summer, back then. Cicadas whirred and crash-landed, spinning and buzzing at our feet, glittering jewels dropping like the bombs we practiced for in school fallout shelters but that never came. We stood in richness at the edge of loss—some would say at the edge of an abyss—and yet we did not see it. Our days were not freighted with foreknowledge. It was not so much an innocence as instead a blessing.

  What blessings might we inhabit now, similarly unrecognized? They must be out there. They must be all around us, still.

  RECORDS

  It’s Christmas Eve, and we’re in Houston at my parents’ house, and I’m watching A Christmas Carol, with all my grandparents home for the holidays. They’re all ancient, and healthy as bulls: Grandma Robson, ninety-two and spry after breaking her hip a couple of months earlier—the first bone she ever broke—and my grandparents Bass, both eighty-eight.

  I don’t care how healthy you are, this human system of pipes and plumbing is only good for so far, and it’s got to make a person nervous, when you get that close to the end, that close to lying down and going to sleep, to see ghosts—even if only on television—and coffins, and snow blowing across gravestones, and the terror in George C. Scott’s eyes when he wipes the snow off one gravestone and sees his own name. And all the ghosts, all the dead, coming and going in that movie, and looking and sounding so unhappy and horrible—black robes, unmentionable faces, and above all, so unhappy. Everyone in the family figures, roughly, another decade for all of the grandparents: but then, no more. No way.

  Those ghosts rattling their chains and shimmering in that blue ghost-light they have—half-here and half-not, and sounding so grisly: I was the only one in the room with the old folks—everyone else had gone to bed.

  I’d like for the respect I have for all three of my old grandparents to come through between the lines, but to make sure it is understood, I’m going to go ahead and say it: it’s there, and it’s huge.

  Each generation, I think, learns less and less about death these days, rather than more—and so there I am, in this room full of old people, my three oldest living relatives, and all of them in such wonderful shape.

  I wonder how often they think about it.

  Probably by this point they have got it all bucked out, and don’t think about it nearly as much as one might suppose. Probably they made their peace with the aging of their bodies many years ago—these days, maybe it’s all gravy; maybe they no longer fill their days with the push-ahead hurry to get things done, important things. Nor do they gaze upon sights, all sights, with both the terror and the wonder of things being seen for the last time—but rather, perhaps they simply go about their daily chores in a manner once again small and regular, like the rest of us.

  But still: maybe it was just my imagination, but it seemed to me that this movie was making them a little nervous; that after a while, when it started to get really scary, my old grandparents, with everyone else gone, asleep with wine after the Christmas Eve dinner, were able to pull back and away from the movie’s grip and its mood in a way that I was not.

  “I just think it’s a marvel that you’re walking,” Grandma Bass murmurs to Grandma Robson, turning her back on the television.

  Grandma Robson starts to say something and then just shrugs, as if to say, the way she can with those shrugs, that everything’s a miracle, but then, too, everything’s the result of hard work. She rocks in her chair, remembering, I suppose, all the therapy sessions, and her having to train like a halfback.

  Grandma Bass doesn’t want to go back to watching the movie. I can see that she’s feeling the keen chill of luck pass through her, a shiver that it had not been her, but that it could have been, and that it might yet be.

  “So many of my friends break their hips, and that’s it, they never walk again,” Grandma Bass says, and Grandma Robson just shrugs again.

  Earlier this fall, up in Montana, where I live now, I shot a deer. Killed a deer, hunted a deer, got a deer, took a deer off the planet.

  I’ve been hunting all my life. I like to hunt, and I like the way I do it. I go off into the far woods by myself and do what I do, and when it’s over, I carry the deer, or elk, out of the woods; I bring it home, process it, put it into the freezer. I won’t defend hunting under the frail arguments of meat and population balance. I like doing it. I would not do it if I did not love venison, did not eat it—for that would be killing, instead of hunting—but still, I will not run for cover from anti-hunters beneath the argument of meat.

  I like doing it. I feel sad when the big old deer is down, but still, I like, even love, to hunt.

  Little bucks, generally, are easy to hunt. Usually they come to you, if you’re quiet in the woods; or sometimes, you can walk up on them. Some hunters have a system of scoring points—measurements, based on the size of a deer’s antlers—measurements that, frankly, sometimes bother me.

  I love to try to hunt big-antlered deer—and this year, I got one—but I don’t like this idea of measuring them, scoring them. I won’t criticize the hunters who do this, because it’s not my place to say they’re wrong to love the pursuit of records, any more than it’s someone else’s place to say it’s wrong for me to love to hunt—but still, I don’t ever measure the big deer I shoot. I just hunt them, shoot them, and remember them.

  Many of my friends detest hunting—I mean, close friends. They take active stands against it and even refuse to eat the game I’ve killed—grouse, elk, deer—when I fix it and serve it to them when they visit. They’re not vegetarians—and they don’t tell me I shouldn’t hunt—they just boycott the food I have in my freezer.

  I stay cool about it. I’m sorry for them—especially when I fix the grouse (with balsamic vinegar and figs)—and I think it’s silly, but I’m not so dumb as to not realize that they think my hunting is silly, and they’re biting their tongues, too. And who can say who’s right, who’s wrong?

  Sometimes I feel like my friends are frightened of me—like there’s this distance, between my soul and everyone else’s. It seems like their lives in the city are so forward-moving, so ordered, so sure—and yet, for two months a year, hunting’s almost all I want to do.

  I want to get into those same woods that I hike in, in the springs and summers, only I want to hunt them in the fall. Everything’s electric; the days matter.

  When I’m hunting, I get lost. I love getting lost.

  I was fortunate enough to get a deer this year, up here in Montana, where one per year is the limit, by law: one deer and one elk. (I don
’t hunt the monstrous moose, which are slow and unafraid, which you can walk up on in the woods and touch with a feather duster, if you are brave enough. I did plink one once, with a slingshot I use on grouse, to try to make him wild, so he would run from record-hunters, if he heard them coming—but he only stared at me, and then snorted and, finally, charged. My heart flew up into my mouth, and I fell, running for a tree, but he was only bluffing, he turned and went back into the woods . . . .)

  This deer I shot, this year—he’s the largest I’ve ever seen. His antlers splayed everywhere, and his body was as big as a small elk’s. I have no interest in or desire to swell myself up as a panther-of-the-woods, the way some record-hunters seem to do, because I know I’m not. There’s skill, but there’s also luck, and mostly perseverance.

  The deer I got this year is—and I can tell, just by looking—some kind of monstrous record, but he was also a gift. It was grace that brought him to me.

  I’d been out hunting all morning in a heavy snow and had seen two small bucks, deep in a jungle, but hadn’t had a good shot on either of them: they were racing through the heavy trees. I’d come back home a little discouraged, and a little worried—because (this is not a defense) I do count on that meat. The steroid-meat in the stores scares me, consumed over a lifetime.

  But this is not a defense.

  I like to hunt.

  My rifle was wet, so I stripped it and took the bullets out and oiled it and set it by the fireplace, and went in to eat breakfast.

  My back was to the big breakfast room window. Elizabeth was drinking coffee with me, reading a magazine. We had a guest staying with us, and he’d just gone upstairs, thank goodness—he’s not a hunter. Did he lure that deer to me? Perhaps.

  “There’s a deer in the backyard,” Elizabeth said, rising, and even as I was standing myself, and turning, I asked, “Is it a buck?” There were two days left in the season.

  I looked out the window and saw that it was not a buck, that it was a doe, and she was running hard across the backyard, and then came something I’d never seen before.

  A huge buck came leaping out of the forest, sailing through the air—his antlers, and his violent, brush-crashing appearance so huge that he appeared menacing, as if, unbelievably, he had come to attack the house—and he was chasing that doe, running her. I ran over to the fireplace, grabbed the rifle, and ran out onto the back steps, knelt, and followed, in the scope, the rocking, stiff-backed run of this huge deer—following his neck and big-antlered head in my scope, the scope like a telescope, the instrument of death, a precision tool, bringing the deer and his huge antlers in to me.

  He was racing about looking for that doe, intent only upon that doe, who had fled back into the forest—and then the buck paused, right before going back into the woods himself—one last frantic, wild-eyed, hard-dicked look of fierceness—where was that doe? The future was at stake!

  I squeezed the trigger, his huge neck blocking the tiny crosshairs of my scope, and there was the click of metal, for my bullets were not in the rifle where they belonged, but were drying on a shelf—and the buck, though he did not hear the click!, lunged into the woods, to look for his heart’s desire there, to look for what was running from him, what was fleeing him—and I cursed, meat lost, and ran back into the cabin and snatched up two bullets, though I did not believe I would ever see the buck again, and when I ran back out into the snow, he was gone.

  I walked out through the snow to where the buck had been standing and looked off into the woods, up the mountain in the direction he had gone, and imagined how he was still running, how he might never stop running, and Elizabeth came out across the yard to the edge of the woods where I was standing, and we just stood there.

  It was starting to snow, and I was wearing only my long underwear. My boots were still unlaced.

  We stood there with the snow coming down, the snow landing on us, the snow burying the mistake—I’d spent all my life hunting, and hunting hard, but had never been presented with that kind of grace—and we both knew that we’d never see such a sight again.

  “Well,” Elizabeth said, finally. “I’m sorry.”

  “Boy,” I said, or something like that. “He was big, wasn’t he?”

  “I don’t guess he’ll come back?” Elizabeth asked, and I laughed.

  “I guess I’d better go look for him,” I said. “I don’t think I’ll ever see him again, but I know I won’t if I don’t try.”

  I went back into the house, and dressed, and then went into the woods, with the rifle in one hand. The snow was coming down hard now, burying his big tracks quickly. I carried a pair of loose antlers in my other hand and wore a grunt tube around my neck. I walked through the woods, rattling those antlers from time to time so that it would sound like two bucks were fighting—banging their antlers against each other’s—and I’d blow on the grunt tube, too, so that it would sound as if one of the deer was injured, or was angry, or was following a doe, calling to her.

  I walked quietly and slowly for more than a mile. There’s no surprise here. We already know that I did catch up with the deer; after a while, his tracks slowed to a walk, and then he began making circles, walking rings around trees to look back at the sound of the fight that he thought was going on behind him—a fight he must have been sure he could easily win.

  Before I get to the part about how I saw him again, I want to put in a sort of postscript—about something I didn’t know at the time, but found out later.

  Some other people in the valley had been getting their deer from this same area—big deer—but they were complaining because a lot of those deer had puncture wounds in their rut-swollen necks—infected wounds that ruined the neck meat—where their big deer had been injured in fights with an even larger deer.

  I never thought I’d see this big buck again. I was just following his tracks up the mountain, in that falling snow, more for penance than for anything else. I would follow his tracks for as long as I could pick them out from all the other deer’s tracks in the woods, and until the falling snow filled them in. I would not get in a hurry. It was really just a sense of mild wonder with which I was following that huge deer—rattling those antlers occasionally, as if I really believed he was still out there, and grunting on the grunt tube, as if I were a deer myself.

  I went into some heavy timber, the buck’s tracks still making complete circles around trees and bushes sometimes, as he must have been pausing to look back.

  When I came out of the timber, he was standing in a small opening, in deep snow, about fifteen yards in front of me, looking right at me—the sky a sea of antlers, all around him, like Medusa, and him standing in snow so deep that his great belly rested against the top of it.

  I threw the rifle up—the scope was foggy from all the moisture, and I could barely see his outline through it, but at fifteen yards, one does not miss, and he lunged when I shot, hit in the heart, and ran across the tiny clearing and into more timber, where he fell dead, his big antlers tangling up in all the limbs and branches above him.

  I cleaned him, and dragged him, with great effort—I could barely pull him—across the snow, and out to a logging road. Then I walked home to get the truck.

  The dogs were happy to smell the blood on my hands and a spot of it on my pants, and I was pleased that I had gone after the deer, and found him again. Elizabeth was happy, both for me and the meat, and for the size of the deer, and also the proximity of it—usually I have to pack out several miles, making several trips, and it was starting to snow really hard.

  I took the truck down to where I’d dragged him out to the road, and by crawling under the deer and lifting him with my back, I was able to roll him onto the tailgate and drive home with him.

  The dogs went nearly berserk when I came up the driveway.

  What is the moral? This is where I live now; this is what I do. Does there need to be a moral? We had meat for the winter. There had been three of us, in the valley—Elizabeth, and myself, and that big, mi
ssed, escaped deer, which would always have been lingering in my consciousness and later, my subconscious—but now there were only two of us again—and all that meat, and all those antlers, and all that snow coming down, late November, and only one day left in the season.

  My life—it’s moving along. I’m trying to sort out the things in it that matter.

  Grandma Robson is telling one more story, about how she fell off a ladder in her kitchen, when she was eighty.

  This was eight years ago.

  “I was putting dishes back up into the pantry,” she says, “the way I always do—used to do, I mean. Putting them on the top shelf.

  “I guess I got dizzy or something, and I just fell straight backwards.” Grandma Robson’s house is an old one, with high ceilings.

  “I was way up that ladder,” she says. “I just fell straight back, with my arms outstretched, and landed on my back, with my arms straight out like this”—Grandma Robson leans back and demonstrates the crucifix position—the movie forgotten—meaningless blue light in a box, electricity—we’re listening to stories, now—Granddaddy Bass frowns and looks away, and Grandma Bass winces, almost afraid to listen—“and the floor shook when I hit, and dishes began to rain down all around me, sliding out of the pantry and breaking on the floor all around me. I wasn’t hurt, miraculously, and all those dishes—plates, cups and saucers, salad bowls, china—just kept falling and breaking, and I was lying there on my back, looking up at the ceiling, and I got to thinking of how I must have looked, an old woman, and I had to just lie there and laugh.”