A Thousand Deer

by Rick Bass

  Not frequently, perhaps, but always, such possibility exists. Sometimes for the asking, and other times, whether you ask or not.

  Back in camp, there was, to my way of thinking, appropriate marveling at the appearance of such a strange creature—an ambassador from the future—and, in the story-telling that accompanied his arrival, a foundation that would one day—next year, already—become the past, our past. We understood that fifty or sixty years from now our own sons and daughters and nieces and nephews—if they still cared about such things, and about this place, with even remotely the same intensity as we do—might be curious as to when and how, roughly, the first animal was taken. It seemed significant to us, a reflector of the natural history of the place—an artifact, already, and a story, already, which we were sure we would pass back and forth, shaping and re-shaping.

  A hundred years ago, even the juniper upon which the animal browsed had not been here, save for a few smatterings. Everything changes, even the shape of the hills themselves, beneath the millennia of wind and fire and running water. The aoudad was not a huge animal, hanging there next to the deer in camp, with the strange dark stripe down its back, its long crenulated horns, its odd tail and its strange circus-beard. But it felt huge, in a way we could not quite place.

  I think each of us suspected that one day, looking back, we would be able to come closer to explaining that feeling. But that night, and the next morning, as we cleaned our animals and packed up to leave, all we knew to do was to make it and the rest of the hunt into another story, or stories, and to pass them back and forth, shaping them already, even as we knew also it was more the tellers than the stories themselves who were being shaped.

  MARY KATHERINE’S FIRST DEER

  You can’t push her, any more than you can push her mother—and it occurs to me only now that in this regard I too may share some responsibility for my oldest daughter’s character. I’m trying to avoid using the s word, “stubborn,” but really can’t see much way around it. The word I’m trying to think of would have more positive and pleasant connotations than “headstrong,” “willful,” or “stubborn.” I don’t know what that word would be, but I know that it can often describe Mary Katherine.

  She took her hunter’s certification test when she was eleven, mostly because her friends were taking it, I think—in rural northwestern Montana, rarely is a family without at least one hunter—but in the year following that, she chose not to go hunting, though I had imagined that it would be quite fine to take her into the woods early in the mornings in the autumn, and particularly after a new snow was down, and particularly up into the high country, to look for, and perhaps follow, a deer or an elk. Not so much to find one, but to follow one, and draw nearer to it: to know that passion.

  I think, however, it might have been a little off-putting: the way I had come in from the hunt so many times frozen or ragged, drenched and soggy, and the way, at each season’s end, my feet were blistered and tattered. I would tell her it didn’t have to be that way, but she didn’t seem eager to go try it, and whether that was the reason, or the killing was the reason, or any of a braid of a hundred others, I couldn’t quite tell, and didn’t probe too much, and sure know better than to push. Twelve is awfully young, even in Montana.

  That autumn passed, and a couple of her friends were fortunate enough to find, and shoot, a deer. I exclaimed my pleasure to them, offered my congratulations, and we traveled on into her thirteenth year.

  We still went over to the east side of the state, bird hunting as we always had, a couple of times each year—Mary Katherine and Lowry, neither of them carrying guns, but walking behind me and the dogs, wading the prairie beneath that huge sky, following the dogs as if harnessed to them, and them helping me flush the birds when the dogs went on point—but still there was no desire by Mary Katherine to go after deer or elk, with or even without rifle in hand.

  Thirteen years old is not always the greatest age for togetherness between any child and parent, and my mantra, as I watched her beginning to grow up quickly, became Meet her where she is. Not to spoil her, and not to overcrowd her, and not to push her, but still, to remain vigilant and be present, and to watch for the opportunity to simply remain somewhat in her life and to pretty much forget, for the time being, about having her in my life—within the borders and boundaries of my own passions—as had been the sweet and wonderful case once-upon-a-time, and for a long while.

  Those days were gone, and the trick, the task—the opportunity—was to find sweetness in these new days: for surely it was there, too, simply in different form and fashion. After a long period of not growing, I would be asked—or presented the opportunity—to grow, too. Not as fast as she was—no one, save her peers, could keep up with that. But to grow again, after a long time of not: as if I had been out wandering the mountains and had crossed over into another valley, one unfamiliar to me.

  If I am making it sound like the position of fatherhood in such a time is somewhat akin to that of an old hound sitting around on the porch waiting to be let back in, certainly, there are days when that’s pretty much how it is. Watching, and waiting.

  The season of her thirteenth year passed—I continued to let her know that anytime she changed her mind, I’d be happy to take her out to look for an animal, for any period of time—but she had not even bought a license, and seemed by now to have pretty much made her peace with the decision that she didn’t want to hunt. She wasn’t opposed to it, by any means; she just didn’t have that spark in her. And while I would have liked for her to have that spark, I accepted her choice as part of the wonderful young woman she would become, was becoming.

  Late in October, a friend of hers went out with her older sister’s boyfriend and was fortunate enough to take a cow elk.

  The rut began in mid-November, and a couple of boys at her school were fortunate enough to find some bucks.

  The snow was down by this time.

  “I think I can find you an animal,” I said. “We could just go out for an hour or so.” Pushing, again. Hoping, again, I guess.

  She shook her head. She didn’t yell at me, didn’t shout “Leave me alone!” But it was still a no.

  Thanksgiving came—the peak of drama, for the hunting season—deep cold, and wild deer, elk, turkey on the table, celebrated, and time spent away from school, deep in the heart of home, and deep in the heart of the valley—and I continued to wander out each day, just looking around to see what I might see. I had been very fortunate to find a young bull after a long hard season of hunting and had just finished packing him all out, so that we were not short on meat. I was hunting with leisure, as such, rather than deepest need.

  The season was winding down. That weekend—that Saturday—I decided to float the offer out there one last time, ever so casually. There was a light snow predicted, and for whatever reason—perhaps boredom, antsiness after being away from her friends for two days, or perhaps having gestated deeply on the matter for two years, or, more likely, a combination of these and other reasons—she agreed to possibly go out the next day, the last day, though only for a very little while.

  I was, of course, exultant. The snow was already beginning to fall. I cleaned my grandfather’s old rifle and showed her how to use it; we practiced with its “false” trigger: the first 90 percent of the squeeze mushy, but then the calming firmness that indicated the last 10 percent—the final breath, final thought—was at the ready.

  We did not snap the firing pin, nor did we shoot a live round, for I remembered how loud the rifle was the first time I had shot it, at an older age than she, and I did not want her being flinchy, nor did I want to give her any possible reason for changing her mind again.

  I went to bed disbelieving my great luck—to be a father to these two girls is more than I could ever possibly deserve or hope for, but to then be able to take one of them out into the woods, into the valley I love, to go on our first hunt, felt as if I had been wandering in a field of happiness and then had fallen, as if
through a trapdoor, into greater happiness.

  I awakened early on that last morning, my blood afizz with winter insomnia, and wrote from about four until daylight, and then woke Mary Katherine. That had been part of the bargain, to which I had willingly agreed: letting her sleep in and get her teenager’s rest. Certainly it’s much finer to be out in the woods before first light, but to tell the truth I was enjoying it at least as much sitting there by the woodstove while everyone else slept, warm and dry, in my house over the Thanksgiving holidays and knowing that I would, soon enough—after thirteen years of waiting—be walking out into the woods to go hunting, deer hunting, with my older daughter, as my father had once gone out into the woods with me, as his father had once first gone out into the woods with him, as had my grandfather’s father once—and so on, perhaps all the way back to the source of the time of man.

  I was not in a rush. It was very calm and wonderful, standing there by the window listening to the fire, and watching the snow coming down, and listening also to the good silence of everyone else in the house asleep at such a fine time of day, over the holiday.

  In my morning’s work—which on the best mornings, as any writer knows, is a kind of deep meditation, which, after an hour or two, can approach the realm of prayer or dialogue with a further, other world, nearing whispers, or encountering the space and silence preceding those whispers, if such exist—it had begun to occur to me that we might be fortunate enough to find a deer.

  That was neither my goal nor my expectation—all I wanted was to walk quietly in the woods with my older daughter, during hunting season, and to hope and watch for a deer: to go hunting—but that morning, as I had worked on a manuscript, on a passage that involved the paths of travelers crossing over into unmapped territory, a metaphor began to develop in my mind, if not on the page or yet in the real world, in which the conditions were right—given the new snow and the rut—for travelers such as ourselves to be rewarded with a little miracle, or maybe even a big one, if we dared to hope and believe.

  No real matter. I already had all in the world that I wanted.

  It was strange, packing two of everything, even for so short a jaunt as we were preparing to take: a thermos of hot chocolate with two cups; two blaze-orange camouflage jackets, two pair of dry socks, two stocking caps. And as we drove to the trailhead of the place I planned to hunt—a place where I knew there were several deer in a beautiful old larch forest—the effervescence of my blood continued to shine and shimmer. I do not think our frail bodies could withstand every day being like that one, in which nearly all that one has asked or hoped for is delivered and in which everything beyond that deliverance—unasked for, and unexpected—is gravy.

  We parked, fastened our gaiters, got out, closing the doors quietly, and started up the steep trail, walking on brilliant new snow, with more coming down around us. After a lifetime of hunting by myself, it was quite a different thing to be looking at the mountain not just with my eyes, but also those of another, and for another. Whispering to her, now and again, and pointing out the direction of the breeze and the bark-rubbed saplings where the bucks had been at work. Complimenting her quiet footsteps and pointing out the old tracks, as well as those from earlier in the morning. Entering with her that electric, other world, as if passing through a looking glass: and on the other side of it, with her, now.

  Anything could happen. That’s one of the greatest things about hunting this northern valley: in the next step, or the next, we could see absolutely anything, or the sign of that thing’s passage. A great grey owl, or the track of a late-to-hibernate black bear, or maybe even a grizzly. A herd of elk, a lion, a lynx, anything. A deer.

  We walked slowly and carefully, ascending to a shelf where there was etched so great a stippling of that morning’s tracks that it reminded me of the trident calligraphy of shorebirds on the beach. We had been walking only about fifteen minutes, and I was looking for a good place to sit and watch. It was important not to overdo it, this first time: to not push on to the next horizon, and then beyond.

  The snow was lessening, and a north wind was picking up, scrubbing the fog and rime from the forest and cleaning out our lungs, our blood, our hearts. It was that wintertime north breeze from the forest that is so clear, and wedges and puzzle-pieces of blue sky were appearing now, and the openings in the clouds were allowing that buttery-rich yellow-gold winter sunlight to plunge down through the old larch forest—their branches bare in winter, shrouded now only in moss and lichen—and in one such column of light, I saw the head and ears of a doe lying down behind a fallen log, resting. She was bedded by a rushing little creek and was as illuminated, at two or three hundred yards’ distance, as if a spotlight had been fixed upon her. The new snow around her sparkled in that rare vertical plume of sunlight, making it look frosted. She did not see us and seemed extraordinarily becalmed, as animals often do on certain peaceful or beautiful mornings.

  We watched her for a while, and it was an interesting and curious whispered conversation I had with Mary Katherine, trying to explain to her the inexplicable: that I did not care for us to hunt this doe, for any number of reasons, of which the beauty and creekside tranquility were only one, but that it might be fun to try to sneak in closer to her and wait and watch to see if a buck might be nearby, or might even come in to her.

  And as we were watching, a young-of-the-year fawn, a five-month-old, popped up from behind the same log, and, made frisky by the same cold clean air that was filling us, he ran in two quick circles around his mother. More columns of sunlight were spreading into the forest now, and the whole sky above was going to blue, up on the shelf, with the fog being swept southward and filling the lower trough of the valley. The fawn pranced and whirled, bucking and twisting like a tiny rodeo horse, trying to throw some equally tiny, and unseen, rider: and it was more gravy, this opportunity, or lesson, to show her right from the start that hunting, like some lives—not enough, in my opinion—consists of a significant amount of intuition; that when one is fully engaged, one has greater authority, not less, to operate by one’s senses and instincts. You’re not always right, but you are sometimes, and it was gratifying to see the previously inexplicable, that which was not quite able to be articulated, so clearly explicated, as if in the next breath, and by the breath of another, about why it had not felt right to hunt this bedded doe.

  We crept, crawled, stalked toward the recumbent doe and her goofy fawn, always keeping a big tree or a tangle of fallen lodgepole between us and her. The north wind was in our face, protecting our scent completely, and it seemed that the sound of the creek, along which we were creeping, and beside which she was resting, had mesmerized her.

  We crept to within sixty or seventy yards and then hunkered down behind a random corral of blowdown: as if laborers had begun building a cabin or other structure, setting the first two or three courses before being called away for some little irrelevance—a glass of water, a cup of coffee—from which they had never returned.

  For me, everything is an equal part of the hunt, and all of it is wonderful—boiling the water for hot chocolate and making sure we had our licenses, etc. were no different from us tucking in tight against that fallen natural corral of logs and breathing smoke plumes of frost as we watched the doe and her fawn—but I noticed that for Mary Katherine, this new part was quite a bit different, which of course made sense. For me, it was the point where she might soon lift the rifle and put the scope on the heart of a deer.

  We were hidden well, a near-perfect set-up, and existing deliciously, intensely, in the moment. Much later I would allow myself the thought, the pondering, of how long ago the wind had passed through that had tipped over this matchstick arrangement of lodgepole—from the looks of them, it could easily have been thirteen years ago, or even longer—that gust of wind preparing a place, some distance into the future, for Mary Katherine, even before she was here—but there by the creek, I was thinking none of these things, was only tucked in with her against the housestack
ing of logs, watching and waiting.

  In less than a minute, another deer appeared, a nice young four-point buck, trotting in from stage left, just as I had whispered to her might happen. I tensed with excitement, pleasure, hope, disbelief, gratitude, hunger, desire—the whole complex and utterly specific, utterly inexplicable chain reaction of responses known only to a hunter when his or her quarry presents itself—and I felt Mary Katherine, beside me, respond in the same way.

  It’s not a question of right or wrong—there is and should be no set prescription for responses to the human experience—but I find it hard to imagine that almost anyone in such a setting would not likewise tense with anticipation, joy, wonder, and excitement, for it was not so long ago at all that this, as much as anything, was the main currency of human existence, and the human condition.

  It’s fine, I suppose, for individuals to have lost such connection or rootstock—there’s no stopping time, and no stopping change—and it would have been all right with me if Mary Katherine was one of those people who, for whatever reason, no longer possessed, nor even understood, that connection. But this was what I wanted to show her—to lead her right up to the edge of it—and it pleased me, and only surprised me a little, to see that, given this baseline shared experience, she felt pretty much the same jolt that I did.

  Anything from here on was more gravy. Nothing but marvel, nothing but miracle.

  The buck stopped, posing—angled forty-five degrees toward us, an impossible shot at any distance, and with parts of his body obscured also by trees—and gazed for long moments at the bedded doe, who turned her head to look back at him as if—or so it seemed to me—trying to pretend she had not known he was in the neighborhood.