A Thousand Deer

by Rick Bass

  Then I heard the sound of a goose honking—approaching from the north. There is no sound more beautiful, especially at night, and I stood there and listened as it drew close.

  Another goose joined in—that wild, magnificent honking—and then still another. It seemed—standing there in the dark, with the cabin’s light behind me (the snap! snap! snap! sound of Granddaddy the domino king playing his ivories against the linoleum table)—that I could barely, in that moment, stand the hugeness, the unlimited possibility of life. I could feel my youth, could feel my heart beating, and it seemed those geese were coming straight for me, as if they too could feel that barely controlled wildness.

  When they were directly above me, they began to fly in circles, more and more geese joining them. They came lower and lower, too, until I could hear the underlying readiness of those magnificent, resonant honks; I could hear their grunts, their intake of air before each wild honk.

  My father came out to see what was going on.

  “They must be lost,” he said. “This fog must be all over the Hill Country. Our light may be the only one they can see for miles. They’re probably looking for a place to land, to rest for the night, but can’t find their way down through the fog.”

  The geese were still honking and flying in circles not a hundred feet over our heads. I’m sure they could hear the gurgle of the creek below, buried just beneath that fog bank. I stared intently up into the fog, expecting to see the first brave goose come slipping down through that fog, wings set in a glide of faith for the water, the harbor, it knew was just below, but which it could not see. They were so close.

  But they did not come. They circled our camp lights all night, keeping us awake, trying, it seemed, to pray that fog away with their honking, their sweet music; and in the morning, both the fog and the geese were gone, and it seemed that some part of me was gone with them, some tame or civilized part, and they had left behind a boy, a young man, who was now thoroughly wild, and who thoroughly loved wild things. And I often still have the dream I had that night, that I was up with the geese, up in the cold night, peering down at the fuzzy glow of the cabin lights in the fog, that dim beacon of hope and mystery and safety and longing . . .

  The geese flew away with much of my civility that night, but I realize now it was a theft, a welcome theft, that had begun much earlier in life. That’s one of the greatest blessings of the Hill Country: it is a salve, a twentieth-century poultice to take away the crippling fever of too much civility, too much numbness.

  All of the Hill Country’s creatures had been helping me, in this regard, even before the geese came. It was along that same creek—Willow Creek—where as a child of nine or ten I had gone down to the creek with a flashlight to get a bucket of water. It was December then, too, Christmas Eve, and bitterly cold. In the creek’s eddies there was half-an-inch of ice over the shallow pools. I had never seen ice before in the wild.

  I shined my flashlight onto that ice. The creek made its trickling murmur, cutting down the center of the stream between the ice banks on either side, like a knife, but in the eddies the ice was thick enough to hold the weight of a fallen branch, or a small rock, a piece of iron ore.

  There were fish swimming under that ice! Little green perch! The creek was only a few yards wide, but it had fish in it, living just beneath the ice!

  Why weren’t they dead? How could they live beneath the surface of ice, as if in another system, another universe? Wasn’t it too cold for them?

  The blaze of my flashlight stunned them into a hanging kind of paralysis; they hung as suspended as mobiles, unblinking. I tapped on the ice and they stirred a little, but still I could not get their full attention. They were listening to something else—to the gurgle of the creek, to the tilt of the planet, or the pull of the moon. I tapped on the ice again. Up at the cabin, someone called my name. I was getting cold and had to go in. Perhaps I left the first bit of my civility—my first grateful relinquishing of it—there under that strange ice, for the little green fish to carry downstream and return it to its proper place, the muck and moss beneath an old submerged log. I ran up to the cabin with the bucket of cold water, as fresh and alive as we can ever hope to be, having been graced with the sight and idea of something new, something wild, something—thank God—just beyond our reach.

  Finally the day came when I was old enough for my first trip up to the deer pasture. My father took me up there for “the second hunt,” in late December. I would not go on a “real” hunt—the first hunt, the November hunt—until after I graduated from college.

  My father and I drove through the night in his old green and white Ford—through country I’d never see, beneath stars I’d never seen. My father poured black coffee from an old thermos to stay awake as he drove. The trip took a long time in those days—more than six hours, with gravel clattering beneath the car for the last couple of hours.

  I put my hand up against the car window. It was colder, up in the hills. The stars were brighter. When I couldn’t stay awake any longer—overwhelmed by the senses—I climbed into the back seat and wrapped up in an old Hudson’s Bay blanket and lay down on the seat and slept. The land’s rough murmur and jostling beneath me—just under the floorboard—were a lullaby.

  When I awoke, we had stopped for gas in Llano. We were the only car at the service station. We were surrounded by a pool of light. I could see the dark woods at the edge of the gravel parking lot, could smell the cedar. My father was talking to the gas station attendant. Before I was all the way awake, I grabbed a flashlight and got out and hurried out toward the woods. I went into the cedars, got down on my hands and knees, and with the flashlight began searching for the magnetite that I knew was all over the place. I picked up small red rocks and held them against the metal flashlight, to see if they’d stick.

  When my father and the attendant came and got me out of the woods and asked where I had been going, and what I’d been doing, I told them, “Looking for magnetite.”

  We drove on: an improbable series of twists and turns, down washed-out canyons and up ridges, following thin caliche roads that shone ghostly white in the moonlight. I did not know then that I would come to learn every bend in those roads, every dip and rise. We clattered across a high-centered narrow cattle guard, and then another, and we were there.

  It was so cold. We were on our land. We did not own it all, but it was ours because we loved it, belonged to it, and because we were engaged in its system. It dictated our movements, as surely as those of any winter-range deer herd, any migrating warbler. It was ours because we belonged to it.

  We descended toward the creek, toward our cabin. The country came into view, brilliant in the headlights. Nighthawks flipped in the road before us, danced eerie, acrobatic flights that looked as if they were smothering the dust in the road with their soft wings. Their eyes were glittering red in the headlights. It was as if we had stumbled into a witches’ coven, but I wasn’t frightened. They weren’t bad witches; they were just wild.

  Giant jackrabbits, with their ears as tall again as they were, raced back and forth before us—leapt six feet into the air and reversed direction mid-leap, hit the ground running: a sea of jackrabbits before us, flowing, the high side of their seven-year cycle. A coyote darted into our headlights’ beams, grabbed a jackrabbit, and raced away. One jackrabbit sailed over the hood of our car, coming so close to the windshield that I could see his wide, manic eyes, looking so human. A buck galloped across the road, ahead of us. It was an explosion of wildness, ahead of us. We had arrived at the wild place.

  The first longing years of my life that were spent exploring the small and doomed hemmed-in woods around Houston sometimes seem like days of the imagination, compared to the later days in the Hill Country. It seemed, when I went to Hidden Lake, or to the zoo, or the arboretum, or the museum, that I was only treading water.

  I fell asleep each night with my aquariums bubbling, the post-game baseball show murmuring. That magic rock from Llano County, the
magnetite, stuck to the side of my bed like a remora, or like a guardian, seeing me through the night, and perhaps filling me with a strange energy, a strange allegiance for a place I had not yet seen.

  DEER CAMP

  Some years we need the woodstove, other years the air conditioner. In the old days the season started in mid–November, around the peak of the rut, but for a long time now opening day has been moved back to the first Saturday in November. The lore from the old days is that of hunts amid ice storms and even flurries of snow: tales befitting those from a century ago. They used to sleep in wall tents, then a shabby old bunkhouse they threw together and shared with snakes and wrens and scorpions. Not until 1987 did we build a new and more hospitable bunkhouse.

  The tin roof of it gets pounded by marbled hail, and, for those of us sleeping on the upper bunks, our faces grow chilled by each night’s frost, and our hair stands on end during the electrical storms that cause the tin roof to crackle. On balmier nights the branches of overhanging oaks scrape and scratch against the roof like the soundtrack for an old horror movie. It’s comforting, ancient, familiar.

  Relatives of Davy Crockett had once owned this place, and before that, the Comanches. I like to think that the place was as special to them as it is to us, and from the incredible density of arrowheads scattered here and there—shards, points, spearheads, ax blades, awls—I believe it was. On one mesa I found ancient lichen-spattered sandstone rocks arranged in a perfect circle, the size of a teepee ring, with a view that looked over the entire Hill Country. Lower down, at the mouth of one of the canyons, there are fantastic granite monoliths, eroded into visages eerily reminiscent of the giant heads at Easter Island, and other boulders loom in the shapes of elephants, rhinos, clenched fists.

  Every strong rain exposes a new sheet of shards and chips and still, all these years later, a perfect arrowhead. Now and again you encounter an old blue-tarnished bullet casing. The dozen or so of us who have hunted here every year have fired a lot of shells. If each of us shoots but once or twice a year, the math suggests there would be close to two thousand bullet casings breech-jacked into the brush, cartwheeling gold-glinting through the sun, to be lost for a while, until encountered by another, perhaps decades later, sitting in the same location, or passing through.

  Some of us have shot more than once or twice a year. Over time, the deer tend to be drawn to the same shapes of the land—passing through the same slots and ravines and trails, often at the same crepuscular hours. By learning so well the shape of the land and the timing of the deer as they pass across it, we have found a curious way of slowing time down, or at least bending time, like a blacksmith forging an iron wagon wheel, into something less linear, something with an arc and, for all we know yet, ultimately a full circle.

  The slow motion melt of our faces in the mirror, and our yearly photograph, picking up more and more lines in our faces: it’s as if Granddaddy’s coming back. It’s as if we’re all stepping forward. We’re the same, yet we’re different. Time is erasing the overburden of our destinies like the thunderstorms eroding the present to summon once more the past.

  How can nature not develop in us a poetic sensibility? How can the specificity of the woods not spread through the canyons of our minds, bringing light and fuller understanding to all manner of broader truths, abstractions, similes, and metaphors?

  As some of time’s advancement reveals to each of us our previously concealed futures, our youth dissolving into the past that has preceded us, so too do we see pathways of disassembly being halted by time, held loosely together by a kind of time-in-balance. The beautiful pink granite with the fantastic cubic crystals of feldspar and mica (the larger and more developed the crystals, the slower the cooling) is going to eventually disassemble. The frozen fire cannot hold together forever, but for a little while longer, it appears that the rain-moistened lichens—brilliant turquoise, russet, blood red, and cornflower blue—are clutching the boulders so fiercely that they will never let them crumble.

  The scientist in me understands that indeed there are processes in the lichen that, by extracting faint nutrition in the interchange between roots and stones, create a kind of acid that eventually decomposes the rock further. But the poet in me sees no acid, only the wildly intricate floral patterns of lichens growing broader each year and appearing to hold the boulders together.

  In the morning after a storm the webs of garden spiders glint like necklaces in the spaces between the cedars, holding together the white spaces through which, soon, the world will begin moving once more, piercing the day, piercing the diamonds.

  The more deeply we come to know this Hill Country place, the more we come to understand that there is a reassuring sameness everywhere. The green translucence of each sunfish in the little creek casts a delicate fish-shaped shadow when sun-struck, so much so that the shadow seems more real, more visible, than the fish themselves.

  A hike through the high boulders on the east side of the lease—boots scritching on the pink wash of gravel that is the detritus of the decomposing granite—takes me past the tooth-shaped crystals of quartz that lie next to the bleached skull of a wild hog; teeth and savage tusks, loosened from his jaw, appear in their repose no different from the bed of ivory crystals in which he now rests.

  Elsewhere on the same hike, far back in the brush, I encounter the skull of a bobcat, with its formidable rabbit-killing canines still intact, resting amidst a mound of dried rabbit pellets. Who controls whom, predator or prey?

  I suppose we should be more intent upon finding and killing deer, but we have killed so many, across the decades, that it’s not so much like there’s a truce, nor is it a fatigue, as instead a desire, I think, for everything to move more slowly—to move as slowly as possible—and, as we all know, when you kill a deer, the hunt is over. At this stage of our lives, we are all less eager for the hunt to be over.

  A close observation of nature cannot help but yield a poetic sensibility, and who observes nature more closely than a hunter? Not all hunters, however, devolve, or evolve, into poets. Certainly Old Granddaddy did not yield or change in this regard, but remained instead a resolute slayer of deer all the way to the end, chain-smoking cigarettes around the dry cedar all day. An eater of fried foods, particularly pork—“I never see a pig I don’t tip my hat”—he probably would have lived to be about 120, had he had even remotely better habits. He’s gone now, though steadfastly, we each and all follow him.

  Like little else in the world, hunting demands presence and attentiveness, summons an imagination electric with possibility. Even as we age and lose the fire for killing and procuring—as if made weary by our relentless success—the habit of noticing nature continues. We watch how things in nature strive to hold together, even in the midst of massive disassembly, and we are comforted. We are comforted by the steadfast regularity of patterns—from the four seasons to the phases of the moon to the cycles of the deer in the fall breeding period, and everything in-between—even as our hunter’s eye stays watchful always for the anomaly, the one interesting thing outside the cycle.

  This ability to be two things in the world—pattern-viewer but anomaly-seeker—has sharpened who we are as a species and as a family and as individuals, and it occurs to me that stories serve the same purpose.

  Each year we re-tell so many of the old ones—are reassured, re-knit together, by them—even as we seek new ones as well. Assembly, reassembly, disassembly: each year, we step through and between all of these stages. We keep moving forward.

  Sometimes as we grow older we just want to sit around the fire and rest, but we keep moving forward, even knowing full well that it leads us right back to where we started.

  Where once Comanches raided the settlers who sought to eradicate their way of life, we now raid each other. Again and again we re-tell the old stories of gone-by pranks, while remaining vigilant for opportunities for new ones. Long ago, in his snake-fearing youth, a cousin who shall remain nameless killed a big rattlesnake—old-schoo
l Texas, back before people knew better—and he decided to bring it back to camp to skin and fry, curious as to whether it really did taste like chicken.

  The snake was rendered headless before being tossed into the back of the truck and onto a pile of firewood that was being gathered for the campfire that evening. It was dark by the time he got back, and this nameless cousin straightaway asked his brother, Randy, for help unloading the vast scramble of limbs and branches.

  Always an enthusiastic worker, Randy seized a big armful of wood, branches splaying every which-way, and as he was walking over to the fire, his face so close to the branches that he could barely see where he was going, I inquired, “Say, is that a rattlesnake in there with all that wood?”

  Randy refocused upon the immense snake that was in the midst of his double-armful grip and threw the wood into the sky with a most satisfying scream.

  Another time, I found myself walking back to camp alone, well after dark, without a flashlight. There was no need for one—we know every inch of the tangled thousand acres better, I think, than we know the canyons and corridors of our own minds—and walking in the darkness, still far from camp, I began to smell propane. I was walking along the creek beneath the high canopy of live oaks that formed a long eerie tunnel along the trail, and a short distance farther, I saw the spot of light that was the source of the scent: Randy with his hissing gas lantern. He’s too old-school to use a flashlight; he likes the more democratic throw of the lantern for his night walking, and as I watched his lantern drifting through the all-else darkness like a firefly, a plan came to mind, one too good to pass up.