A Thousand Deer

by Rick Bass

  I can see and know his pleasure, joy, excitement, happiness, pride, relief, but I can no longer quite grasp it. I do not feel any older than I did last year physically, but the boat is pulling away and that distance is widening, even if painlessly.

  “I was already heading in to lunch,” Russell said. “I had my gun slung over my shoulder and was packing it in, when this nice buck with really dark antlers ran right in front of me and then stopped about fifty yards out and turned back and looked at me. I knelt down and put the scope on him, but he was turned around and looking right at me, so that all I could see was his neck, and I didn’t have a brace. My gun was wavering a little bit. Maybe I should have shot, but I kept waiting for him to turn broadside.

  “Then I heard Uncle Charlie coming up the road in the jeep. The deer bolted and went over the hill. I was kicking myself, thinking maybe I should have taken the shot, that I’d blown the only other chance I’d get the whole hunt.

  “I could hear the jeep coming. I figured that deer was long gone, but I decided to hurry on up over the hill before the jeep got to me, to see if the buck might have stopped on the other side of the hill.

  “I didn’t think I had a chance in a million, but when I got over the hill, there he was, standing in the rain, back in the mesquite, about seventy-five yards away. I didn’t waste any time, but braced against the crotch of a tree—the jeep was really close now—and squeezed. He dropped like a rock,” Russell said, with that relief and happiness and wonder—that completeness—filling his voice again: the utter improbability of having wanted something badly, and having gone out after it, against the odds, and being successful. Mostly luck; almost all luck. Any hunter knows that. And yet, that’s the best part: as if in the end it was the sharpness of your desire—your need—that delivered the animal to you. That allowed the animal to be delivered to you.

  It’s an awful lot like prayer. It’s not a prayer exactly, or precisely, I don’t think, but then again, maybe it is. You don’t really come right out and ask for it—well, almost never—but you come right to the edge of that ask. And then you hold that desire, and hold it, as if carrying a great iron weight; and then it is as if a door or gate opens, and what you desired is delivered to you, often in seemingly miraculous fashion, as if to underscore your undeservingness, and the strange wild mercy of the gift.

  I remember it. And I remember how it feels back in camp, or back home, after such a day: that first night back from the land of miracles.

  That same day, Randy has secured something maybe even finer, in my mind, and after Russell finishes his story, Randy, in the quiet way that he has, shows us the handful of arrowheads he’s found, the points exposed from beneath the thin soil due to the erosion from the sustained and heavy rains, the past re-made and resurrected. Any one of the arrowheads is enough to make us exclaim, enough to make me jump up and shout my admiration with an enthusiasm that might be summoned by me now for only the most amazing buck, and Randy smiles and shrugs.

  I remember a deer I wanted badly, a long time ago; could it have been fifteen years, maybe more? It was the second or third morning, we did not yet have any deer in camp, and there had been a hard frost that night. The woods were glittering, autumn-dead grass spangled with diamonds, and as I sat crouched within a mot of old oaks, I saw a nice buck come walking through the oaks, his nose wet and bright black in the cold, his eyes glistening dark in the morning sun, his breath leaving him in twin plumes. He stopped, sensing something, and just stood there, breathing. His coat was acorn fat, and I could not remember having ever seen a more beautiful deer. He wasn’t a trophy, just a big handsome deer on the most beautiful morning of the year.

  I eased the rifle up and placed him in the scope. It was the same scope through which my grandfather had squinted at countless deer. I squeezed the trigger, breaking the frozen morning, and the deer jumped, hunchbacked, as they will sometimes do when hit. He didn’t fall, however, nor did he run. Instead, he just stood there, between me and the rising ball of the sun, stock-still, and I could see a third plume rising from him, not the twin-pulse of his nostrils’ breath, but a steady steaming, like smoke from a chimney. I had creased the top of his back, a flesh wound. With the sun in his eyes and the report of the rifle so loud, he was not sure what had happened.

  It was just the faintest paper-cut of a wound.

  I raised the rifle, disbelieving at my good fortune to have a second chance, braced more firmly, took a breath, exhaled as I squeezed the trigger, and he collapsed. I have never cared for the phrase “never knew what hit him”—a graceless way of acknowledging every hunter’s goal—but while other, more eloquent phrases might be crafted, the goal does remain the same, and when I walked up to examine the deer, he was already over on the other side, while I was still here, and gifted with bounty.

  There’s a slight break in the rain, finally, the next-to-last night, and we’re able to have a campfire, another long-standing tradition—sitting out on the porch, or around the campfire ring, watching the stars and telling the old stories and trying out new ones.

  When my cousins and I were all children, Randy, who was hell-on-wheels with his Havahart live trap, was forever capturing wild things and attempting to domesticate them. I seem to recall him almost always in one state of bandaging or another, swathed like a mummy sometimes, from where he had been bitten: by rabbits, snakes both poisonous and non, raccoons, owls, skunks—he caught it all, and it all bit him.

  This evening, we’re reminiscing about some of the raccoons of our childhood: Randy’s raccoons. Weecha. Ajax. Miss Phyllis.

  “That Ajax was the mean one,” Russell says, his voice dreamy. “My God, I hadn’t thought about that sonofabitch in over thirty years. That was the one that would chase me down when I was little and start chewing on me, with me too little to fight back, and you just standing there laughing, like some Dark Lord or something, right? What was I, five, six, maybe seven years old?”

  Randy smiles. “He was a mean one,” he says.

  “Who named him?” I ask. “Who was he named for?” Randy and Russell look at each other with puzzlement. They once knew, but now can’t remember; and the surprise on their faces, that they could possibly have forgotten such a vital fact, is interesting to me, bittersweet.

  Even as it’s a bit of a bummer to see how quickly my cousins and I are marching into the years, one of the real pleasures of this year’s hunt is to see how much responsibility the youngest among us, B. J., is assuming. His birthday is the first of November—the first week of deer season—and he’s fifteen years younger than I am. We used to joke about how one day he’d be the one running the camp, taking care of a bunch of old folks—cooking, cleaning, and toting our deer, patching leaks in the cabin, repairing broken water pumps—but darned if he’s not already there, and enjoying it. It’s strange and nice to be content to just lean back in the lawn chair and sip a drink at the end of a long and physical day and listen to the rustling sounds of B. J. down in the brush, foraging for firewood and then hauling it up the hill.

  He gathers great funeral-pyre quantities of it, and then—like Old Granddaddy, from whose block he is chipped—a sonic-boom whoosh turns the night briefly to day.

  And every morning, he’s the first one up, padding cold-footed across the floor to get the coffee going—the hissing, percolating sounds of it awakening us with the reminder that everything’s all right, B. J. is here—and each morning, even in this incredible spell of rain, he somehow has a cheery fire blazing in our little woodstove, having pirated away tiny damp twigs and kindling from the day before, which he dried all evening in front of our one-watt electrical heater (whose range is confined exclusively to the bathroom), in front of which are also stacked, each evening, our charred and smoldering socks and steaming boots, like burnt offerings at an altar, the boots never quite drying out in time for the next day’s use, but warming and contracting slightly, the leather tongues twisting like the carcasses of roadstruck creatures along a desert highway, so that w
e must grunt and struggle each next-morning, laboring to pull them on.

  It’s so awesome to be proud of one’s younger family members. It’s such powerful antidote against the sometimes haunting tally or inventory of the fading or rounding of one’s own enthusiasms. Sometimes I feel like an old person in a rest home, staring slack-jawed at and spellbound by the vitality of youth, remembering, I was there—just last year, I was there, I can see how much joy the world brings you, andI used to be there every minute of every day. . .

  It is not that the world no longer brings joy, or wonder—it still does, and with even more of the latter than ever.

  I’m not quite sure what it is I’m trying to say. Something about the force of that joy, I think, or maybe the randomness of it: being made joyful and alive by getting up early on a cold morning and getting a crackling fire going before anyone else is up.

  I remember that kind of wild and random force of joy, and what is sweetest and most hopeful of all, I think, is the realization that I can still get there—that it is still within reach, on any given day, as long as I remember not to take the world, or anything else, for granted.

  Bert, who lives on the property adjacent to ours, and who helps look after ours too, during the many long months of absence, comes by at lunch on the fourth and last full day of hunting. It’s a beautiful crisp blue day, with the rain finally breaking, and we saw some animals, even a few small bucks, though nothing anyone wanted to shoot.

  Bert always comes on the last day during lunch, to sip a Coke and check out the deer we’ve been fortunate enough to find, and, in essence, to say hello and good-bye at the same time. He’s friendly, but respects our privacy. He understands what the hunt is about for us these days. And although he’s only in his late fifties, it seems he’s been here forever. Certainly he’s been here long enough to have known us back when we really used to like to kill deer, and he has watched that transformation come over us, one by one, wherein the importance of the deer has receded (as it has for him) ever further. He has a sharp eye for such things, and he knows, can tell just in a glance, who among us the shadow has not yet crossed over: in this year’s case, the two youngest, Russell and B. J.

  Before coming inside, he walks over to the deer-skinning pole and looks at our paltry take: remembering, doubtless, the old days, when eight hunters would surely have hanging at least eight nice bucks, and maybe more. (The limit is two bucks per hunter.)

  Three this year; all nice deer, it’s true, but three deer for seven hunters?

  Bert’s got the worst kind of a sense of humor—or rather, that best and most difficult kind, where he’s so damned serious and earnest almost all of the time that when he truly does happen onto a piece of humor, he guards it deliciously, frugal as a Scot, and only gives it out to you in tiny pieces, so that often it might be ten or fifteen minutes after he’s finished talking before you even begin to understand that humor’s been delivered. And this is how it is this last day at lunch, as he stands there admiring the deer. He spends a lot of time out on the pasture and it’s always of interest to us to see if he recognizes the deer we’ve been fortunate enough to take.

  Usually, with most of the deer, he recognizes them—nods at each of them, as if they were near-strangers of only passing acquaintance—though sometimes there will be a deer he’s never seen before, and he’ll stand before that one a little longer, studying it, and wondering, always, if it was just some shy and totally nocturnal deer, one that had kept successfully out of sight for years, not even showing itself in the headlights when Bert would come driving back in from town at night, or if the unknown mystery deer was some unfortunate wayfarer, merely passing through, who simply found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  This year, Bert is standing before Russell’s buck in that manner, or so it seems to us, even though Russell’s buck is not the largest of the three. It’s a pretty deer, all right, but it seems to me that Bert’s spending a disproportionate, perhaps even inordinate amount of time before that deer—though finally, after staring at it just a little longer, he grunts, and then comes on in through the screen door. He doesn’t know who shot which deer: that part comes later, after he’s caught us up on all the year’s doings, and we likewise, and when there are fewer things to talk about. That’s when he might gesture toward Rick’s nice big fat deer and say, “Who got that eight-point? I’ve been seeing him running does on the east side for the last week,” or something like that.

  And that’s how it goes this year—antlered-deer chitchat—and then, after the briefest of Bert-pauses—you would have to have known him for a lifetime to know that some sort of bedevilment is up, and of the best sort—the true, the found, the unmanipulated.

  “You know that seven-point hanging out there?” Bert begins, tentatively—and like the wariest, wildest of creatures, Russell tenses, understanding somehow intuitively that he does not want to hear what it is that Bert has to say, and that furthermore, he, Russell, does not want the rest of us to hear whatever it is that Bert, clarion-caller of the truth, has to say.

  As Bert begins with his own intuitions and observations to understand that it’s Russell’s deer (tipped off, perhaps, by the paleness of Russell’s face), he proceeds cautiously. And is it my imagination, or does a deeper flicker of amusement cross Bert’s almost sorrowful or at least straightforward-reporting expression? A jumble of emotions, and all so carefully moderated. In the end, he decides to put Russell out of his misery quickly. “I used to feed that little deer,” he says. Bert’s not a harsh man, but he’s a countryman, a good hand: he’s birthed and buried as many animals as anyone and lives daily in the life-and-death cycle of nature. “Two years ago, he was sort of my pet,” Bert says. And again, there’s the strange mix of sorrow and yet devilment: knowing, of course, that it is the nature of male deer to be shot—if not this November, then the next, or surely the next. “Last year he went over to some other folks’ property, where there weren’t any hunters,” he said. Away from the likes of you, he might as well have said. Not angry: just matter-of-fact. Life on the farm.

  What’s worst of all, perhaps, is that Bert’s not trying to drive the knife in further. He’s just spilling the truth: compelled to testify, it seems, upon this most sorrowful of reunions.

  “I used to feed him grain from a bucket,” Bert says. “I don’t know why he was so tame. He’d hear my truck and come running from halfway across the pasture to meet me.” Bert shakes his head dolefully and then, worst of all, seems to truly reach deep, as if trying to buck up and be a rancher about all this. “I guess those days are gone now,” he says, trying to make a little wry rancher joke. He smiles ruefully, as if to tell us Don’t feel bad, fellas, some other hunter would have gotten him anyway—and with that, he nods, shakes our hands, and we trade our good-byes, telling him that we’ll see him next season.

  On the way out to his truck, he glances only briefly once more at the nice buck.

  Later that afternoon, we can’t help ourselves. Cousin Rick is the first to approach the subject, which all day long has been lingering just beneath the surface, like the shadow of a fish, barely seen.

  “When Charlie and Jimmy came driving up the hill,” he speculates—addressing Russell—“and your deer went running over the hill—he must have stopped and let you catch up because he thought the truck, the jeep, was Daddy Bert, after all those years, coming back with another bucket of grain. Their jeep sounds just like his old truck,” Rick says, and Russell just shakes his head, having known the shit was coming, and seeming almost relieved, perhaps, that it is finally beginning. Still, he looks a little glum, and I feel compelled to speak the obvious.

  “Aww, Russell, he was a wild buck. That was a long time ago . . .”

  “Don’t patronize him,” Randy snaps, mock wild-eyed, and we all laugh, even Russell, though still, it is a head-shaking, disbelieving laugh, an Aw-shit-I-can’t-believe-what-I-stepped-in laugh—and yet, as any of us would be the first to admit, he was a very fine deer, a
fine handsome specimen of a buck, and there is always luck involved, luck and the desires of the world always trump skill, and we find ourselves in possession of still another story to trade back and forth with each other, sanding and polishing and refining, across the coming decades, and I think we’re each more than a little grateful that it’s Russell’s, and not our own.

  I know already that in future years we will be passing this story back and forth, passing it around like another arrowhead, with the sight but also the touch of each flaked edge pleasing, each of us touching and handling and even slightly altering, in each re-telling, the worked ridges of the artifact itself, until it is shaped just right, and some more elegant version of the truth—if not entirely the original facts—might emerge.

  We finish our lunch with the awe of having been given—handed—a story—all of us except Russell, that is—and I don’t know what it is, but something about the incredible blue sky, and the quality of crisp dry November light, and the familiar sounds and scents of midday camp, and the unexpected arrival of story, conspire to reconnect me to older memories, and to this place, and to my own place among my family. And while each year’s November hunt is no longer about making game, about securing meat, I finally feel, for the first time of the entire trip, like a deer hunter, instead of a vacationer—and I am aware of keenly desiring to hunt one.

  The fact that it is so late in the hunt—the last day—seems only to sweeten the desire. Better for it to return late than not at all; and who knows, I tell myself, this might be the last time. Maybe there comes a point where the desire never comes back, but passes on to other, younger hunters. Who knows what contract, what negotiation, exists in the world between the spirits of the hunters and the hunted?