The Best Hunting Stories Ever Told

by Jay Cassell

  There were Hungarian partridge that roared out in front of my horse, putting his head suddenly in my lap. And hawks tobogganed on the low air currents, astonished to find me there. One finger canyon ended in a vertical rock wall from which issued a spring of the kind elsewhere associated with the Virgin Mary, hung with ex-votos and the orthopedic supplications of satisfied miracle customers. Here, instead, were nine identical piles of bear shit, neatly adorned with undigested berries.

  One canyon planed up and topped out on an endless grassy rise. There were deer there, does and a young buck. A thousand yards away and staring at me with semaphore ears.

  They assembled at a stiff trot from the haphazard array of feeding and strung out in a precise line against the far hill in a dogtrot. When I removed my hat, they went into their pogostick gait and that was that.

  “What did a deer ever do to you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I’m serious. What do you have to go and kill them for?”

  “I can’t explain it talking like this.”

  “Why should they die for you? Would you die for deer?”

  “If it came to that.”

  My boy and I went up the North Fork to look for grouse. We had my old pointer Molly, and Thomas’s .22 pump. We flushed a number of birds climbing through the wild roses; but they roared away at knee level, leaving me little opportunity for my over-andunder, much less an opening for Thomas to ground-sluice one with his .22. We started out at the meteor hole above the last ranch and went all the way to the national forest. Thomas had his cap on the bridge of his nose and wobbled through the trees until we hit cross fences. We went out into the last open pasture before he got winded. So we sat down and looked across the valley at the Gallatin Range, furiously white and serrated, a bleak edge of the world. We sat in the sun and watched the chickadees make their way through the russet brush.

  “Are you having a good time?”

  “Sure,” he said, and curled a small hand around the octagonal barrel of the Winchester. I was not sure what I had meant by my question.

  The rear quarters of the antelope came from the smoker so dense and finely grained it should have been sliced as prosciutto. We had edgy, crumbling cheddar from British Columbia and everybody kept an eye on the food and tried to pace themselves. The snow whirled in the window light and puffed the smoke down the chimney around the cedar flames. I had a stretch of enumerating things: my family, hayfields, saddle horses, friends, thirty-aught-six, French and Russian novels. I had a baby girl, colts coming, and a new roof on the barn. I finished a big corral made of railroad ties and two-by-sixes. I was within eighteen months of my father’s death, my sister’s death, and the collapse of my marriage. Still, the washouts were repairing; and when a few things had been set aside, not excluding paranoia, some features were left standing, not excluding lovers, children, friends, and saddle horses. In time, it would be clear as a bell. I did want venison again that winter and couldn’t help but feel some old ridge-runner had my number on him.

  I didn’t want to read and I didn’t want to write or acknowledge the phone with its tendrils into the zombie enclaves. I didn’t want the New Rugged; I wanted the Old Rugged and a pot to piss in. Otherwise, it’s deteriorata, with mice undermining the wiring in my frame house, sparks jumping in the insulation, the dog turning queer, and a horned owl staring at the baby through the nursery window.

  It was pitch black in the bedroom and the windows radiated cold across the blankets. The top of my head felt this side of frost and the stars hung like ice crystals over the chimney. I scrambled out of bed and slipped into my long johns, put on a heavy shirt and my wool logger pants with the police suspenders. I carried the boots down to the kitchen so as not to wake the house and turned the percolator on. I put some cheese and chocolate in my coat, and when the coffee was done I filled a chili bowl and quaffed it against the winter.

  When I hit the front steps I heard the hard squeaking of new snow under my boots and the wind moved against my face like a machine for refinishing hardwood floors. I backed the truck up to the horse trailer, the lights wheeling against the ghostly trunks of the bare cottonwoods. I connected the trailer and pulled it forward to a flat spot for loading the horse.

  I had figured that when I got to the corral I could tell one horse from another by starlight; but the horses were in the shadow of the barn and I went in feeling my way among their shapes trying to find my hunting horse Rocky and trying to get the front end of the big sorrel who kicks when surprised. Suddenly Rocky was looking in my face and I reached around his neck with the halter. A twelve-hundred-pound bay quarter horse, his withers angled up like a fighting bull, he wondered where we were going but ambled after me on a slack lead rope as we headed out of the darkened corral.

  I have an old trailer made by a Texas horse vet years ago. It has none of the amenities of newer trailers. I wish it had a dome light for loading in the dark; but it doesn’t. You ought to check and see if the cat’s sleeping in it before you load; and I didn’t do that either. Instead, I climbed inside the trailer and the horse followed me. I tied the horse down to a D-ring and started back out, when he blew up. The two of us were confined in the small space and he was ripping and bucking between the walls with such noise and violence that I had a brief disassociated moment of suspension from fear. I jumped up on the manger with my arms around my head while the horse shattered the inside of the trailer and rocked it furiously on its axles. Then he blew the steel rings out of the halter and fell over backward in the snow. The cat darted out and was gone. I slipped down off the manger and looked for the horse; he had gotten up and was sidling down past the granary in the star shadows.

  I put two blankets on him, saddled him, played with his feet, and calmed him. I loaded him without incident and headed out.

  I went through the aspen line at daybreak, still climbing. The horse ascended steadily toward a high basin, creaking the saddle metronomically. It was getting colder as the sun came up, and the rifle scabbard held my left leg far enough from the horse that I was chilling on that side.

  We touched the bottom of the basin and I could see the rock wall defined by a black stripe of evergreens on one side and the remains of an avalanche on the other. I thought how utterly desolate this country can look in winter and how one could hardly think of human travel in it at all, not white horsemen nor Indians dragging travois, just aerial raptors with their rending talons and heads like cameras slicing across the geometry of winter.

  Then we stepped into a deep hole and the horse went to his chest in the powder, splashing the snow out before him as he floundered toward the other side. I got my feet out of the stirrups in case we went over. Then we were on wind-scoured rock and I hunted some lee for the two of us. I thought of my son’s words after our last cold ride: “Dad, you know in 4-H? Well, I want to switch from Horsemanship to Aviation.”

  The spot was like this: a crest of snow crowned in a sculpted edge high enough to protect us. There was a tough little juniper to picket the horse to, and a good place to sit out of the cold and noise. Over my head, a long, curling plume of snow poured out unchanging in shape against the pale blue sky. I ate some of the cheese and rewrapped it. I got the rifle down from the scabbard, loosened the cinch, and undid the flank cinch. I put the stirrup over the horn to remind me my saddle was loose, loaded two cartridges into the blind magazine, and slipped one in the chamber. Then I started toward the rock wall, staring at the patterned discolorations: old seeps, lichen, cracks, and the madhouse calligraphy of immemorial weather.

  There were a lot of tracks where the snow had crusted out of the wind: all deer except for one well-used bobcat trail winding along the edges of a long rocky slot. I moved as carefully as I could, stretching my eyes as far out in front of my detectable movement as I could. I tried to work into the wind, but it turned erratically in the basin as the temperature of the new day changed.

  The buck was studying me as soon as I came out on the open slope: he was a long
way away and I stopped motionless to wait for him to feed again. He stared straight at me from five hundred yards. I waited until I could no longer feel my feet nor finally my legs. It was nearly an hour before he suddenly ducked his head and began to feed. Every time he fed I moved a few feet, but he was working away from me and I wasn’t getting anywhere. Over the next half-hour he made his way to a little rim and, in the half hour after that, moved the twenty feet that dropped him over the rim.

  I went as fast as I could move quietly. I now had the rim to cover me and the buck should be less than a hundred yards from me when I looked over. It was all browse for a half-mile, wild roses, buck brush, and young quakies where there was any runoff.

  When I reached the rim. I took off my bat and set it in the snow with my gloves inside. I wanted to be looking in the right direction when I cleared the rim rise a half step and be looking straight at the buck, not scanning for the buck with him running sixty, a degree or two out of my periphery. And I didn’t want to gum it up with thinking or trajectory guessing. People are always trajectory guessing their way into got shots and clean misses. So, before I took the last step, all there was to do was lower the rim with my feet, lower the buck into my vision, and isolate the path of the bullet.

  As I took that step. I knew he was running. He wasn’t in the browse at all, but angling into invisibility at the rock wall, racing straight into the elevation, bounding toward zero gravity taking his longest are into the bullet and the finality and terror of all you have made of the world, the finality you know that you share even with your babies with their inherited and ambiguous dentition, the finality that any minute now you will meet as well.

  He slid a hundred yards in a rush of snow. I dressed him and skidded him by one antler to the horse. I made a slit behind the last ribs, pulled him over the saddle and put the horn through the slit, lashed the feet to the cinch dees, and led the horse downhill. The horse had bells of clear ice around his hoofs, and when he slipped, I chipped them out from under his feet with the point of a bullet.

  I hung the buck in the open woodshed with a lariat over a rafter. He turned slowly against the cooling air. I could see the intermittent blue light of the television against the bedroom ceiling from where I stood. I stopped the twirling of the buck, my hands deep in the sage-scented fur, and thought: This is either the beginning or the end of everything.

  Lost

  LAURIE BOGART MORROW

  You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really

  stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, “I lived through this

  horror. I can take the next thing that comes along. . . . You must do the thing you

  think you cannot do.

  —Eleanor Roosevelt

  She knew the tears would come. They didn’t come often, and she hated it when they did. But she was lost, really lost in the woods, and she was beginning to get frightened. She had never been frightened before, at least not like this—but it came from the same place, the fear. It came from within, that helpless place in her soul, the dark compartment she kept securely locked. She knew too well what it was to feel helpless. Helpless, like the day she lost her only daughter. She didn’t want to think about that right now; she couldn’t. She had to find her way out of the woods and get home. Home to her family. It was going to be dark in a couple of hours, and she was completely turned around.

  They would be getting worried. Even her little springer spaniel seemed concerned as she stood alongside her, looking up expectantly. Her husband knew where she had gone, or at least where she was going. Her sons knew this place well, too. They learned to hunt here. That was . . . what? Ten years ago . . . “Don’t worry,” her husband had assured her. “I’ll take care of them. No, they’re not too young. I was eight when my father took me bird hunting for the first time. . . . ” Now their sons were at the cusp of adulthood, and yet it seemed like only yesterday. She wouldn’t have been lost if they were with her; she shouldn’t have gotten lost in the first place. After all, she learned to hunt here, too, all those years ago. But then she gave it up, had the children, kept the home fires burning. Then the baby died. Afterwards, when she learned to live with the terrible emptiness in her heart and tried to get on with it, she took up hunting again. Bird hunting, and now this fall she was going after deer with her husband and their boys. She loved the woods; it was so peaceful. And the hunting, well, that was a good way to fill the place her daughter was meant to fill, to dull the loss, to understand that expectation always falls short when you want something so very, very much.

  No, she shouldn’t have gotten lost, but she did. These woods went on and on for miles, through swamps and hills and valleys and on to nowhere, for all anyone knew.

  Once it had been a thriving New Hampshire village with homesteads and even a meetinghouse. You could still make out the road that led to it, but now it was only forested trail. Here and there lay foundations of old houses and barns. A stone corral for sheep had tumbled with time, barely, an outline, bordered by ancient lilac bushes. Apple trees marked the foundation of an outlying farmhouse, out here, another there; they were overgrown and gnarled and shouldn’t, but did, bear fruit, still, in the fall. She picked a ruby-red apple and pierced it lightly with her teeth, expecting bitter juice. But the apple was sweet, and she was hungry, and she ate it and picked another. Her pup jumped up, begging for a bite, and she gave her the core to devour. She stopped crying because the apple was comforting and she felt revived.

  The leaves were brilliant, more brilliant against the blanket of darkening gray sky than they ever are on a cloudless, peacock-blue day. Good artists never attempted to paint autumn, she thought, because only nature knew how to mix the right palette. She used to paint, but she had given it up. When the baby died, she lost her inspiration. She couldn’t deal with joy unrealized after she had been robbed of her only chance to raise a daughter. She wanted her so much. As time passed, it hurt more, and she didn’t understand why. Tears again pinched her eyes, and she tried to fight them back.

  Would she have raised her little girl to hunt? Probably not. When her sons and husband went hunting, she and her daughter would have gone shopping and done girlish things together. It would have become a joke. She would have threatened her husband with a big credit card bill as he and the boys took off for yet another weekend hunting deer. And he would have put her over his knee and pretended to spank her, and the children would have laughed. Yes, he and the boys would have gone hunting, and she and their daughter would have gone shopping, and everyone would have had a good time and lots to tell over Sunday night supper.

  But her husband couldn’t hold her over his knee anymore, not since he got sick. That was just after the baby died, when his legs got weak and he couldn’t go hunting anymore, at least not like he used to. Now that the boys were older, they would drive their dad to a promising place, and he’d sit and wait for a deer while his sons went stalking in the forest. Last year, he took a fine buck that way, just under two hundred pounds dressed. Lately he felt better, and he could walk a mile sometimes. Last Sunday grouse season opened, and they took their hot little springer pup out for her first opening day. She put up four grouse. It was such a delight to finally have a good dog to flush their favorite coverts that they missed every single shot; and laughed, like they used to.

  How did she get so turned around? She hefted her shotgun, breech open, over her shoulder and headed out of the old orchard, away from the once-was town. Stupidly, she left her compass in her other jacket, but the sun was setting, and she made that her marker. Her dog became lively again, as if to say, “Good, let’s go home.” But that wasn’t it, she thought, that wasn’t it at all. She brought her gun down, loaded a shell in each chamber, and no sooner had she closed the breech than her dog pounced on a fat grouse hen. The bird exploded from the forest floor with a whirrrr, hell-bent for safe haven. She swung her gun to her shoulder, pointed the barrels, and felled the bird with the secon
d shot.

  A sudden gust like a tailwind lifted the spaniel high over a crumbling stone wall as she bounded to retrieve the grouse. So majestic, the grouse, and she remembered the legend her husband told her of how Indians would say a prayer over their game, thanking their brother of the forest for sacrificing his life to sustain theirs. She whispered a tender prayer. She needed to speak to the silence; and the mighty pines arched overhead like a forest cathedral. The brisk evening wind blew her damp cheeks dry. It was at dusk eight Octobers ago today that her baby died in her arms.

  Now she found herself in a fern-covered glen. The forest floor was awash with that golden cast peculiar to autumn sunsets. It reminded her of a happy time—how many years ago?—it must be going on twenty-five, when she and her husband first hunted together here. Here? Yes! She knew this place: She was at the beaver pond. They had brought a picnic and had drunk wine and then made love in the soft grass there, at the shoulder of the pond. The leaves shivered and shook loose the memory of a long-ago soft summer breeze that caressed their bare bodies, warmed by the sun, warmed from the loving. She wanted those days back, she wanted her daughter, she wanted to go home.

  She saw the hill beyond the beaver pond and knew that uphill was the forgotten cemetery and beyond that, the road. It was a hard climb, but she was sure about it now, and it gave her renewed strength and hope. Her pup took the hill with trouble, for the ground was thick with brambles. She kept up with the little springer, her eye marking a birch tree that had splintered and fallen into the fork of a giant maple. Out of nowhere, a limb suddenly slingshot and cut her above her chin. She felt it sting, and a drop of blood trickled onto her red turtleneck, against her black hair, and she grabbed at the branch that dared injure her and broke it off with a snap. High above she could see the horizon through the pines, and she lunged forward, her arm bent to shield her face as tree limbs tore at her clothes as if trying to hold her back. There it was, the little cemetery. Seven headstones, that’s all. Only seven, but they told the whole story. “Their name was Eldridge,” her husband’s voice spoke to her across the years, “and they owned that farm over there. Look. You can see the foundation.” She again turned her eyes in the direction he had pointed. It was still there, just a vestige of a place and a time that was no more.