A Thousand Deer

by Rick Bass

  Knowing that he could hear nothing over the dull roar of the lantern, I ran down the dark corridor after him and drew right up behind him. Spanish moss hung in ghostly looping tendrils from the canopy. I took in as much air as I could and then let loose with the loudest panther scream I could muster, inches behind him, then jumped back out of the sphere of light as he dropped the lantern. The globe glass cracked and the mantles crumpled, but the twin burners kept jetting orange firelight.

  Randy sat down promptly—in that tiny sphere of light, he looked pale and sick—and he peered wild-eyed into the darkness. “Richard?” he said, and I did not have the heart to scream again.

  That was twenty years ago, and those days are gone now, all our hearts are too frail and worn-out for such shenanigans.

  It’s not just Randy who’s the target of pranks; we all are. No one escapes. One year Russell shot a nice eight-point down in the creek. I heard his single shot, and knew he’d been successful. A few moments later, I saw a nice little forkhorn slipping through an opening on the other side of the creek, illuminated by the mid-morning sun on the side of Buck Hill.

  It was a long shot but I had a good brace and was confident; I made the shot, and the buck dropped instantly. I climbed down out of the rocks, crossed the creek, ascended Buck Hill, cleaned the little buck, and then, feeling strong, began dragging him out, back toward camp, as had been done in the old days, rather than going to get a truck.

  I had dragged it for only about fifteen minutes before coming through a clearing and seeing Russell’s much larger buck, also gutted, hanging in a tree; Russell had already gone back to camp for a truck. His was a very nice buck, and I had no qualms about untying it from its limb, hiding it in the bushes, and replacing it with mine.

  I then continued on to camp, where Russell was regaling everyone with the tale of his big deer. We were all excited to hear about it, and he was proud to show us, so after lunch we all drove out there in a caravan.

  It pleases me to recall the confusion with which Russell slowly approached the deer—the disbelief in his face—and the way he turned to us slowly and said “This is not my deer.”

  “Oh Russell,” my father said, “they always look bigger when they’re in the woods.”

  Other times we’re less brutal. As we age, we take midmorning naps more and more often, and our hearing is no longer keen. It’s easy to sneak up on one another. We’ll spy a hunter dozing against the trunk of a tree, camouflaged within the ground shrubbery of agarita or shin oak, and will slip right in and place a wildflower—a late-season aster—in the gun barrel, then pass on, unaccounted.

  We used to kill deer like crazy. They were drawn to us as if by our desire alone. There were times known to each of us when we knew the day beforehand—the night beforehand—where we would see the deer. It was not with confidence that such certainty impressed itself upon us but instead a kind of wonder. The incandescence of our yearning for the hunter’s contract—the way the world had lathed us, for at least the last 180,000 years—was at times a kind of brilliance within us, and we never took such dreams or foreknowledge for granted, but instead marveled at them, and the next day, moved toward those places—those appointments, those rendezvous—with the surety of faith.

  And when the deer appeared, in much the time and manner as we had imagined, we were grateful, never arrogant. We understood that the success of such ventures never depended on our skill but was always instead the decision of some larger thing, some larger force—something a little like the electricity created by the confluence of our desire, the landscape, and the deer, as well as the world’s desire to keep on moving.

  To be hunters, we had to hunt—and to hunt, we had to be willing to gather our own meat. And back then, we were enthused about it.

  Those kinds of dreams no longer occur. A central strand of the electrical current—our desire to find deer—has gone silent. Instead, now we sit quietly among the oaks and cedars. Sometimes the deer pass by us anyway, and sometimes—unless it is only my imagination—they almost look confused, as if wondering why their world has tipped, and where the hunters have gone. We admire the morning sunlight in their eyes.

  We admire the smooth grace of their muscles. They have been here far longer than we have. They may or may not outlast us. Watching them pass by, it is very hard to imagine that any of it ever ends, but that instead it all goes on forever; that it, that current in which we once so enthusiastically participated, will last even longer than the stone itself.

  THIS YEAR’S HUNT

  There is nowhere where we have not killed deer. The dimensions of our history on and love of this place are beginning to become significant, from either a deer’s or a man’s perspective, though not, I am sure, from a mountain’s.

  But it is an old story that time has a way of breaking things down (building other things just behind you, even as you are staring at the breaking-down), and eventually each of the hunters in our family dissolves the one mystery, topography (even while assembling new ones), and we learn each inch, each stone, of the deer pasture.

  What are the cubic dimensions of a family’s spirit? Nine men times seventy-six years times one week per year—days spent fully in the heightened sense of awareness that hunting brings—well, the cubic dimensions of things felt, land learned, senses touched accumulate to create within us, or impress upon us, like a stamp or a brand, something as new and deeply organic as a just-born, living thing.

  It’s like learning a foreign language. In the beginning, you seize upon a word or two, one whose shape or sound or translation has meaning for you. The great rounded granite boulder perched above the old camp on the lip of the bluff on the east side—visible almost from anywhere on the pasture. (I’ll never know or understand why Old Granddaddy called it a pasture, the deer pasture, as if it were a damn croquet lawn or something, instead of hardscrabble rattlesnake and buck country.)

  The flattop hulk of Hudson Mountain also in the east—shaped exactly like the lonely old buttes and mesas of our Hollywood cowboy movie youth.

  The Water Gap, on the north end, where the big creek, Willow Creek, flows under the fence as it “leaves”—though it never leaves, the creek is still always there.

  Turkey Hollow, once called Panther Hollow (my grandfather and sometimes even my father and his brother pronounced it “Holler,” but my brothers and cousins cannot or will not, and so in that manner we are bending the language slightly, altering the story even more slightly, like rivulets of rain streaming down a mountain . . .).

  You learn the outlines of the place—the fencelines, the roads, the rough shape—and then, over the years, you begin to explore the interiors, following the creeks and ridgelines at first—getting lost, finding yourself; getting lost, finding yourself—stumbling often. But then you begin to cherish getting lost—you seek out the deeper interiors, the really wild places—and out of that lost and groping stumbling, a fluency emerges.

  They say that in learning a new language, one of the surest signs of fluency being achieved is when you begin to dream in that new language, and certainly, it is that way for us now, and has been for a long time.

  There is nowhere on the pasture where we have not killed deer. They have always been there for the nine of us, now eight, across the years, and each year we kill a few, as if eating our way through the years on deer, or as if eating, gnawing at incessantly, the mountain, the thousand acres, itself; but the deer keep coming back, as if springing up out of the mountain, while it is we who fade and sink and erode and submerge, eventually, back beneath the surface.

  Howard, the old man who owned the place so long ago, gone. Old Granddaddy, gone. And suddenly Uncle Jimmy’s no spring chicken; nor is my father.

  Hell, we’re all getting old. Is it belaboring an obvious fact that when we first came to this place, we were young, and strong, strong as the rocks themselves?

  And surely that is one of the finer or sharper ways in which we have each and all learned this landscape, have made
our own interior maps of it. If you follow this creek quietly up to its headwaters, you’ll find the little mesquite flat where the ten-point was killed last year, grunted in shortly after dawn.

  This ledge is where you sat motionless for hours, a long time ago—you couldn’t have been more than twenty-five—and where the eight-point emerged, materialized, at dusk.

  The stories, the micro-sites of where a deer fell, assemble like the patches of a quilt. You learn intently, deeply. You remember wind directions, soil type, pockets of dampness, species of underbrush. The land lives deeper in your mind after you walk away, whether you have killed or not—but I’ve found that the places where I’ve dropped a deer, then cleaned it and hung it, act in my mind as anchors or islands for the rest of the matrix.

  Those places where the deer or turkey fell aren’t necessarily more important to me than other places on the pasture. They just possess a depth, a resonance, that seem more lasting, even unforgettable, in my memory. I pass by them, again and again, wandering, each year. Sometimes I will kill a deer not ten or twenty yards away from where I killed one in earlier years. I’m sure that when such analytical tools are available, it will be figured out that such happenings consisted of a perfectly equal mix of chance and destiny. It’s really not even worth worrying over or grappling with. That’s just how it goes: a forced move in a designed space with “closed” borders—only a thousand acres, but a lifetime, several lifetimes.

  The senses are inflamed and connected during the hunt; after the kill, in the stillness, as you sit there for a moment with the thing you have taken, the thing you have been given, the world seems truly frozen in time; and it remains stopped as you begin to clean the deer.

  After a little while the world (glittering in its beauty, and you, amazed at your luck) begins to move again, though so slowly—and you become aware for the first time, though only dimly, as you drag or tote the deer (gripping him by the mahogany antlers), that had you not killed the deer, he might be across the creek by this time, further into the day, browsing oak leaves or nibbling at grapevine. But that is not how it turned out, and you continue hauling the deer, dragging it out to a road so that you can drive it back to camp and hang it from the bar from which all the years’ previous deer have hung, to age in the night breezes and day shadows for a day or two before being rendered by your hands and the steel blade: backstrap, rib skirt, tenderloin, neck loin, neck roast, shoulder, ham, butt steak. Ribs like a bird’s ribs. You know the workings of a deer’s muscles, a deer’s body, as well as your own.

  All afternoon, the world moves for you at that slower pace. Maybe biology can explain it all by “causing” that lovely, wondrous feeling of completion to be a desired state for the hunter-gatherer so as to give positive reinforcement for replication in all the years or hunts to come. Whatever it is, and whatever its reason, it’s strong and strange, and the shape of it fits a space in me, as I bend and flex to learn the shape of this land, those thousand acres, draping myself across it.

  This year, midway up the backside of the Burned-Off Hill, moving through the cedars, I spooked two does, who bounded away. A buck was following them, walking as if drunk on their scent, and I fired, but missed; when I went over to look for hair or blood, to be sure I had indeed missed, I found the branch the bullet had hit, sparing that deer’s life for a bit longer.

  I looked long and hard anyway, to be sure. In the end all I found was an ancient gray cartridge, a spent 25.20, which is the caliber my father and uncle used to hunt with when they were young, more than fifty years ago. There was just the one cartridge, indicating in all likelihood that they’d made a kill. (My grandfather used to listen to the shots in the distant hills and count the number of times a hunter fired, telling us, “One shot, good shot, two shots, maybe, three shots, bullshit,” the principle being, back then, when you could see farther—before the cedar crept in all over the hills like Einstein’s wild hair—that if you shot only once, it meant you’d dropped the buck.

  The second shot, following the miss, might be a hit. Sometimes the buck would be so surprised by the noise that he would pause, not wanting to run until he could figure out where the shot came from—maybe—but by the time a hunter had fired a third shot, if he did, that buck would most surely be up and running, wide-open, and if the hunter had missed the one or two standing shots, there was no way he was going to connect on a running third. Bullshit.

  Now, however, the cedar has clotted almost all of the spaces between the oaks, so that the land, despite its aridity, is a jungle, a miasma of interlocked limb-and-branch. You see the deer but once, a wraith, as you yourself must be a wraith, trying to move through that clotted jungle, or sitting very still, waiting for the all-but-silent approach of the deer. One shot is all you get now, hit or miss.

  The reason, or the main reason, the hills are becoming overrun with cedar—or so it seems to us, who first learned the land when there was not so much cedar—is that our white culture, ever since we arrived here in force, has been putting out fires of any size or shape. Fire is the enemy of cedar, which has thin bark, and cannot withstand the fire’s heat. The oak trees, which bear the mast so favored by deer and turkeys, has a thick, “corky” bark and does well with fire, traditionally surviving the frequent low-intensity fires that once washed across this land like summer rainstorms, keeping the cedar at bay.

  Now, in the long absence of fire, the encroachment of the cedar has become like its own kind of fire, spreading rapidly and at wind’s whim: crawling, leaping, climbing, growing. It is not a new story or lesson—that in attempting overmuch to hold a thing back, you nurture the forces required to release it—but it is new to us, and sometimes now it seems that I can hear the crackling of the cedar as it grows from one year to the next, ever taller and thicker, obscuring—as if already to ash—the places where I walked and hunted as a child, and then a young man.

  Other borders, boundaries, relationships, are shifting, too. Uncle Jimmy had a stroke at his home in Houston, a big stroke, and spent the year recovering the use of his right arm (not to worry, he’s a left-handed shooter), as well as the mysteries of speech. He still goes into work for a few hours every day, but the only words he can really master at present are “yes” and “no.”

  It made a graceful kind of sense—not overly pleasant, but acceptable, in a rough way—to watch Old Granddaddy get old, near the end; to care for him, on those last hunts of his, driving him out to an easy crossing where deer were likely to be active, and setting him up, and tending to him. (Some of those years, even after his stroke—including his eighty-seventh year, his last—he would get a deer, bracing the little .222, the lightweight flat-shooting gun in the crook of his elbow, and with his unblinking eye made briefly young again through the scope’s optics, squeezing the trigger once more, and the deer would leap, then fall.)

  He and Howard were the ones who taught Uncle Jimmy and my father, Charlie, how to hunt; and then there at the end, my father and Jimmy helped Old Granddaddy to keep hunting. It made full-circle sense.

  But now, already, to see the men who taught my cousins and me how to hunt becoming so much older—to see my father, five years younger, assisting Uncle Jimmy, buttoning his sleeve for him, or tying a boot lace—I’m not ready for it. I’d like time—long time, not just the short time that transpires in the hours and days after you’ve killed a deer—to slow down a little. But it won’t.

  You would think that dealing more directly with death, as a hunter does—acknowledging actively that we live at the expense of the space and sometimes lives of others—that it would be easy to watch one’s elders fade away, settling slowly back down into their beloved land, near the end of full and intensely lived lives.

  But it really doesn’t work that way. You might be one or two steps closer to accepting it—that place in the cycle. But here is still a gap in the witnessing of and participation in the unraveling of a family and a time. Only the place remains.

  When I speak of the hunting of deer, I don
’t mean at all to be wading toward an attempt to defend that way of life. Better men than I have tried to explain it and, in my opinion, have come up wanting. (The older I get, such an effort—defense—seems more and more like trying to defend the sky, or the weather.)

  I’m only trying to explain how I came to learn a landscape.

  The mountains are crumbling before our eyes. It’s an amazing privilege, to see this speeded-up view of the geologic process framed and compressed within the blink of a human lifetime. Not all of the mountains are crumbling; some, like the Burned-Off Hill (which last burned in 1907), are composed of some of the oldest exposed rock in the world, the early Cambrian sandstones. They’ve been here for more than a billion years and will probably be around a little longer. The earth’s yawnings and stretchings have fractured them in places along the lines of their initial calm-water deposition, square to rectangular, so that they are perfect for building stone walls.

  I would go so far as to say they are alluring in this regard; that the beauty of their shape gives rise to the idea of a stone wall, and for many years in my spare time I have been playing with these exquisite stones, making walkways around the cabin, and low stone walls. I like particularly the leaden density of these flat and square rocks—the enduring stoutness of them—and I like too the peculiar odor that arises from them when I accidentally drop one against another. A sift of dust-powder will arise from the point of fracture, and I’ll smell an odor that’s been trapped in that hundred-pound stone for ten thousand millennia.

  But the land here is no one thing; the eastern boundary of it possesses one of the rarer geologic events in the state, a system of exposed granitic batholiths: places where the earth’s guts roiled in her fire-belly, seeking and searching their way along seams of fracture of weakness in the stony earth far below—boiling, following those underground cracks and crevices like, I imagine, a hunter—wolf, lion, cat, coyote—following indefatigably the track or scent of some quarry.