A Thousand Deer

by Rick Bass

  I had no way of knowing if the tracks and trails I followed were those that my deer had taken or those of dozens of others. Over on the back side of the deer pasture, up and over the top of Buck Hill, nearly a mile from where I had shot, I found a drop of fresh blood on a rock, and, believing it to be from my deer—for no one else had fired a shot—I worked that area hard, hoping to find the deer bedded down under a tree, waiting to die, or dead. There were no other clues that I could find, out on the rocks like that, to indicate in which direction the animal had been traveling, or the nature of the wound, or even if the blood was that of a deer.

  I searched until dark, casting in wider and wider circles around that one mysterious drop of blood, with each deerless hour that passed reducing proportionately the already faint hope that I would find this deer.

  I had examined and re-examined every square inch of the back side: I was convinced there was no dead deer back there. It occurred to me, with the slimmest of hopes, that this blood drop had nothing to do with my deer and that perhaps I had simply overlooked my deer there at the creek. I hiked back that long mile to where I had shot the deer and played it all over again: followed the initial heavy blood sign right down to the creek, then crossed on that ledge, and examined the other side, where still I could find nothing.

  I went back to the blood side yet again and this time went up and down the stream, searching, wondering if the deer might have stopped at the wild creek, panicked by its injury and by the creek’s unfamiliar, flood-swollen state, and veered left or right, but here, too, I could discern no tracks, blood, or hair.

  There was still a little bit of light left in the day. I decided to go back to camp and see if Randy and Nathan were in, to get them to help me search, and to bring Colter along on a leash to see if he, with his incredible bird-finding nose, might be inspired to investigate the area in such a way as to give me a hint whether the deer had turned and run along the creek bank upstream or downstream. Indeed, it was my hope that if the deer was piled up somewhere nearby, dead under a juniper bush, Colter might point this out to me, that he might pull me over in that direction, tugging on his leash, urging me to investigate an area I had bypassed.

  Randy and Nathan were gone when I got back to camp, so I made a quick sandwich, left a note, got Colter, and headed back out. I’d been walking all day, slowly but ceaselessly, and was tired. I had also been feeling uncomfortable back in camp, separated from the deer like that, or separated from the search.

  I took Colter directly to the canyon, where the blood had dried from red to brown. Already it looked like something ancient, even geologic, rather than the legacy of anything that had happened mere hours ago.

  Colter dropped his nose to the spot anyway, suddenly electric with interest, and holding his leash, I puzzled over how sage he seemed in that moment: as if, in that single scent, he was able to delve into and discern that which had happened in the past, as well as casting ahead to the future, and the knowledge not only of where that deer had been, but also of where it might yet be.

  Stub tail twitching, he followed the trail quickly down to the creek, then snuffled hurriedly left and right. Whether he was nosing out my earlier scent from where I had tracked up and down the creek or was still detecting the deer’s scent, I had no real way of knowing, although I was grateful for his enthusiasm.

  As I had done, he hurried across the creek on the rock ledge—the water had already dropped several inches, so that the stone was dimly visible, though the water was still fast and turbulent and crawfish-colored—and hot on the trail now, with me hurrying along behind, still gripping the leash, he ran a few more steps, heading toward the tracked-up sandpit, where I had anticipated the deer to land, but then Colter stopped, slamming on the brakes so hard that I tripped over him.

  So suddenly did he halt, and so confused did he seem, that I thought he might have gotten wind of a sluggish January water moccasin. And like a snake charmer himself, he lifted his broad head and stared back upwind, across to the other side of the creek, across the plunge-pool that sat relatively serene below the little waterfall.

  With his muscles beginning to quiver and tense, he lifted one paw, cautious at first—as if he was receiving a contradiction of the senses, as if he could not quite believe that which the natural world was telling him—but then, increasingly confident, he tucked that left paw all the way tight against his chest and crouched, striking the beautiful pose of dog-on-point.

  I stood there puzzled for several seconds, wondering if he was only just now picking up the blood-scent that I thought I had already shown to him. This wasn’t what I wanted at all, and carefully, I tugged on his leash, hoping to entice him into walking farther downstream.

  He was staunch, however, and would not release to my tug. His green eyes bulged and burned with an odd mix of confusion and certainty, and I knelt to pat him on his chest, and to thank him for his intensity if not his accuracy, and to urge him along. There was so little time left in the day.

  It was only then, down at eye level with him, that I saw the world from his perspective, and saw the deer’s antlers sticking up from the center of the mudwater pond below the falls, with only the very candelabra tips sticking up: five or six of the very tip-tops of the longer tines, only an inch or two above water, so that at first glance, or no-glance, they would have appeared like the tips of a big tree limb that had been washed downstream.

  Colter eased his nose forward. The antler-branches were almost close enough to reach out and touch. And though I was looking right at them, and recognized them now as the top inch-tips of antlers, I could not yet reconcile the transition, in my mind, of how the entire body of a huge deer could be reduced now to but an inch, or two inches, of bone. The antlers themselves were almost the same color as the medium in which they now resided.

  Still gripping Colter’s leash, I eased forward, squinting, and now—as much by faith or hope at first, as by true visual acuity—I could see dimly the outline of the submerged deer, with the deer’s underwater silhouette still almost as much a function of imagination as reality, and the deer’s coat almost the exact color of brown as the night-before’s floodwaters.

  I thanked Colter and gave general thanks to the deer and to the world, too—I had definitely not found this deer; it had found me, had been delivered to me—and I reached out and gripped the underwater antlers and pulled the deer to shore, dragged it up onto the grass on the other side of the creek, not thirty yards from where I had shot. It was a huge deer, as large a deer as I had ever killed on the deer pasture, and Colter released himself from his point and began sniffing at the deer, checking it out, running all around it and nosing it, as if surprised and agitated at this strange revelation that he, even with all his millennial innate wisdom, had never previously understood—that creatures like deer, and, who knew now, perhaps even quail and doves and pheasants, might be found beneath us, in some other, lower world’s layer.

  I petted him, congratulated him, and sat there in the dusk with our discovery, our little miracle, there in the bluing of twilight, on that cold clear first day of January.

  It was a marvel and an amazement to me that a thing I had so desired could be given to me, returned to me, in such dramatic and miraculous fashion, even as the heavier and colder knowledge returned to me all over again that there were other things, much more desired, that would never be forthcoming: that I would have to be forever-after content with memories, thoughts, and recollections, and those strange quiet moments of communion when the two worlds, the departed and the still-here, yet occasionally intersect and transact, as if between the thin layers of some larger world, or two worlds, above and beneath the surface.

  I still felt alone, there above the surface, though it was a beautiful surface, the one she had brought me out into—and, grateful for that, despite my sorrow, I hauled the deer up into the woods and cleaned it, as the men in our family had always hunted deer back when she had still been living, and then I started back to camp in darkness,
with Colter trotting alongside me, and my rifle in one hand, and dragging the heavy deer behind.

  AOUDADS

  Six days pass fast when you’re building a myth—or living in one, sinking ever deeper in the years of accretion. Even if each accruing year brings only one or two new stories, then over the course of a lifetime, or half a lifetime, an incredible architecture can and will be constructed nonetheless, an architecture of family and self, of place and time, and even consequence and meaning.

  Even the dramatically incorrect mistakes are preserved and put to good use in the erection of such an edifice, and the good or lucky or even just plain interesting events are highlighted and revered brightest of all. I’m not sure what the cultural or evolutionary advantage of such internal, personal architecture is, but I suspect that it is something as complex and wonderful and ultimately valuable—perhaps even necessary—as the construction of the intricate mazes of honeycombs in bee colonies or the underground multi-chambered warrens of prairie dogs. And I sometimes wonder if the Biblical descriptions of the gold-lined streets of heaven, and the ornate mansions with all those many rooms, are both allegory and reality and that there are times when we are already living in the midst of such treasures, certainly not through any earned efforts, but glimpsing such dwellings anyway—and that the many rooms in the father’s mansion are but the stories—the useful stories of love, compassion, and courage, and even sheer undeserving luck that we’re able to lay in during the mortal years, each of us accumulating such stories—bright myths—for the afterlife, as a stonemason might hoard the finest self-selected, hand-picked stones for the one great creation of his life, the dwelling place in which he will spend all of his afterlife.

  I might be wrong. There might be no connection at all between heaven and earth. And the world and its great religions might all be completely literal, as fundamental and nonnegotiable in the long run as the tangible blocks of stones that I am trying to make abstract, vaporous things of spirit and memory rather than the dense-packed residue of the ages: silica, carbon, feldspar, iron, potassium, phosphorous. Pyrite.

  At the deer pasture, it seems to me sometimes that it is not so much that we have constructed our own little myths and legends over the years, or constructed any certain edifice, but that instead have wandered into a mythological dwelling place that was already made, replete with all the many chambers and rooms and caverns of creek and canyon ridge and ravine, hollow and swale, syncline and anticline, trough and depression, knob and peak. That the architecture was made long ago and has always been waiting, and that to claim it, we have only to learn how to fit it—indeed, how to revere and worship it, as well as the stunning force that made it.

  And yet, within those chambers, and out and about on these thousand acres (and from that lodestone, on out into the rest of our lives), we continue to make, or observe, our own little myths. Perhaps these smaller constructs even mimic, in some fashion, the larger arrangement of the ages before us. Perhaps, if we are allowed to consider the richness of metaphor and allegory, that might even be one of the lessons that some larger force, for whatever reason—call it love, or compassion—desired, and desires, to impress upon us.

  In any event, I have noticed here a proclivity for storytelling, mythmaking, tale-building. The affinity is in us for some reason, was instilled there for some purpose, and again, it has to me the same pleasant, comforting feeling as hefting a nice big square-cut stone, dense and durable—and our mortal lives, are the quarry from which the stones derive.

  I’m not sure when I heard some of the stories the second time or, certainly, the hundredth. Nor can I quite trace, in the looking-back, the continuum between the joy of hearing one of the stories for the first time, with the imagination of the first-time listener fully engaged, and the feeling of pride of familiarity, then, upon hearing one of the stories of place for the fifth or sixth time—my cousins and brothers and I knowing it so well by that point that we could fill in any of the gaps or skips and could anticipate each forthcoming image, if not quite yet knowing precisely each telling’s choice of language or cadence.

  I would have guessed the continuum would have ended there and that our task as children, even grown children, was to continue listening to the old stories, which, in their hundredth-or-more telling, were now more of a comfort to the tellers than to the listeners: the tellers resurrecting memories so vibrant that they would never vanish, never be buried or plowed asunder. The tellers reassuring themselves of this fact with each telling.

  I would not have been able to foresee that across that continuum there might be another phase, as the stories took root in us and became somehow our responsibilities, as listeners, even though we had never lived those stories.

  Having heard the stories on each and every hunt—sometimes at lunch, sometimes in the evenings—certainly, we possess the ability, if not the authority, to tell them almost as well as the tellers. To tell them well enough to keep them alive—though in our own second-telling, there will surely be somewhat the absence of the strange shine or luster that accompanied the original tellers’ tellings, as they polished bright once more their memories.

  Our own second-tellings will be polishing only the memories of memories, and will be like shadows, rather than the things themselves.

  But somewhere, it occurred to us that that would be required of us one day—that we would be in charge of deciding which stories to keep alive, in telling, and which ones would vanish with the men who had once told them.

  Someday, we would be required to cull and select, to weed and prune, to caretake in some strange fashion, the memory of those who could no longer remember.

  Do we keep the story about the night the wild pigs chased Uncle Jimmy up a tree, even though we were not there—were still nearly twenty years away from being there with the river of time already sweeping past that spot? Yes, certainly. But what about the time their friend, Newt, who sometimes hunted with them in those early years, caught all the baby pigs with his belt, made into a lasso, and stored them in a little dollhouse of a corral, on a cliff way back in the middle of nowhere, so that for a day or so, his fellow hunters were puzzled by the little grunts and squeals, until they discovered his “pigpen”—a crude structure that still stands, weathered and rotting, the pigpen itself more shadow of story, forty years later?

  Yes. But others tumble, disintegrate, are washed away.

  There is this one spot, this one tilted rock along a trail, where, my father informs me every time we pass, he killed a deer when he was a young man: fired a long shot with his open-sight 30–30 from up on that cliff, nearly two hundred yards distant. He points to it. The cedar has grown in over what was once open country, so that it’s hard to imagine being able to see so far.

  The deer fell instantly and lay kicking, briefly, just as his father came walking around the corner, so that it was almost as if the buck had landed in his lap. My grandfather had not been hunting that deer, had not even known it was on the trail such a short distance in front of him—but here it was now suddenly, as if having fallen from the sky.

  Every time we pass that place, my father tells me that story, so that it is almost—almost—mine, and I am never able to pass that stone (the blood has long since been washed clean) without remembering that telling and that image, so that now the landscape is an intermediary in the story.

  The landscape initiated the original story, and now it acts as the liaison between the teller and the listener—as close a conduit to memory as is perhaps possible, closer even than the written word, or the recorded word—for to stand next to that rock in the autumn, and to look up at that cliff from which the shot was fired, is quite a different thing from reading about it or looking at a photograph of it, and in some comforting and positive way deflects back toward the source, the story: though still, it is an echo, and the main river, the one river of each person’s life, is moving past, is long past.

  So the old guys have a lifetime of stories, which serve as their own found
ation, as well as in some immeasurable and unknowable way our own foundation—my cousins’ and brothers’ and mine. As the old guys themselves, Dad, Uncle Jimmy, and gone-away Granddad—composed of stories—serve, of course, as our foundation, too, in a tangible, measurable, knowable way. Excuse me for belaboring the obvious then, but while it’s certain we’d be here without the old-timers’ stories, it’s far less certain that we’d have any foundation, without their stories, even if for us they are echoes of stories.

  We would go on to witness and experience our own stories, surely, with or without that foundation of the past, but in our hands, then, our own stories would be like loose rubble: fine quarrystone, perhaps, but without the foundation of the old stories against which to compare and contrast, and replicate or alter, our own stacked stories would possess less structure—and in that formlessness, I suspect, less power and meaning.

  So it’s important, I understand, to not get up and leave the room when my father—Grandpa Charlie, the kids are calling him now, a moniker that would once have seemed so alien to me, but that now sounds right, and natural—begins one of the old stories as if for the thousandth time. He knows we’ve all heard it before—often he’ll be telling it to Uncle Jimmy, who likely as not experienced the story with him, fifty or sixty years ago.

  It’s important, I realize, for me to hang in there and hear it again, for that thousandth time, listening to the story this time as one would listen to the rain falling on the tin roof, or to the clinking sound of stones being stacked outside on some ongoing masonry project, two upon one, one upon two—like overlaying unlike, unlike overlaying like, so that even in the stories’ differences, the wall being constructed is pleasing in its uniformity, and strong, and imminently durable.