High Hunt

by Eddings, David

  I cringed.

  "Well," she said, laughing, "it's cooler out there."

  "Which one of you bastards can tap a keg?" Sloane screamed. "I'm afraid to touch the goddamn thing."

  "Help is on the way," Mike called. We went on through the dining room and the kitchen and on out to the patio through the sliding French doors.

  "I'm sure you fellows can manage now," Claudia said, picking up a pair of black gloves from the kitchen table and coming over to stand in the open doorway. "I have to run, so just make yourselves at home." She raised her voice slightly, obviously talking to Sloane. "Just remember to keep the screens closed on the French doors. I don't want a house full of bugs."

  "Yes, ma'am," Sloane yelped, coming to attention and throwing her a mock salute.

  "Clown," she said, smiling. She started to pull on the gloves, smoothing each finger carefully. "Oh, Calvin, I finished with the books for the car lot and the pawnshop. Be sure to put them where you can find them Monday morning — before you swandive into that beer keg."

  "Have we got any money?" Cal asked.

  "We'll get by," she said. "Be sure and remind Charlie and Mel out at the Hideout that I'll be by to check their books on Tuesday."

  "Right," he said. He turned to us. "My wife, the IBM machine."

  "Somebody has to do the books," she said placidly, still working on the gloves, "and after I watched this great financier add two and two and get five about nine times out of ten, I decided that it was going to be up to me to keep us out of bankruptcy court." She smiled sweetly at nun, and he made a face.

  "I'm so glad to have met you, Dan," she said, holding her hand out to me again. Her deep musical voice sent a shiver up my back. "I'm sure I'll be seeing you again."

  "I'd hate to think we were driving you out of your own house," I said sincerely.

  "No, no. I have a meeting downtown, and then I'm running over to Yakima to visit an aunt. I'd just be in the way here anyway. You boys have fun." She raised her voice again. "I'll see you Monday evening, Calvin."

  He waved a brusque farewell and turned his attention back to the beer keg.

  She looked at him for a moment, sighed, and went smoothly on back into the house. I suddenly wanted very much to go down to the patio and give Sloane a good solid shot to the mouth. A kiss on the cheek by way of good-bye wouldn't have inconvenienced him all that much, and it would have spared her the humiliation of that public brush-off.

  I went slowly down the three steps to the patio, staring out over the Narrows and the dark timber on the other side.

  There was a sudden burst of spray from the keg and a solid "klunk" as Mike set the tap home. "There you go, men," he said. "The beer-drinking lamp is lit."

  "Well, ahoy there, matey," Jack said, putting it on a bit too much.

  The first pitcher was foam, and Sloane dumped it in the fishpond. "Drink, you little bastards." He giggled.

  Somebody, Claudia probably, had set a trayful of beer mugs up on a permanently anchored picnic table under one of the trees. I got one of them and filled it at the keg and drifted over to the edge of the patio where the hill broke sharply away, running down to the tangled Scotch-broom and madrona thicket below.

  I could hear the others horsing around back at the keg, but I ignored them for the moment, concentrating on the fading line of daylight along the top of the hills across the Narrows.

  "Pretty, huh?"

  It was Sloane. He stood with a mug of beer, looking out over the water. "I used to come up here when I was a kid and just look at it. Weren't many houses or anything up here men."

  Somehow I couldn't picture Sloane as a kid.

  "I made up my mind then that someday I was gonna live up here," he went on. "Took me a long time, but I made it."

  "Was it worth it?" I couldn't resist asking him. I didn't like him much right then.

  "Every lousy, scratching, money-grubbing, fuckin' minute of it," he said with a strange intensity. "Sometimes I sit up here lookin' out at it, and I just break out laughing at all the shit I had to crawl through to get here."

  "We all do funny things," I said. Now he had me confused.

  "I'd have never made it without Claudia," he said. "She's really something, isn't she?"

  "She's a real lady," I said.

  "She was hoppin' tables in a beer bar when I met her," he said. "She had it even then. I can meet guys and swing deals and all, but she's the one who puts it all together and makes it go. She's one in a million, Dan."

  "I can tell that," I said. How the hell do you figure a guy like Sloane?

  "Hey, you bastards," Jack called to us, "this is a party, not a private little conflab. Come on back here."

  "Just showin' off my scenery," Cal said. The two of us went back to the keg.

  Sloane went over and pawed around under one of the shrubs. "As soon as you guys get all squared away," he said, "I've got a little goodie here for you." He pulled out a half-gallon jug of clear liquid.

  "Oh, shit!" Jack said. "Auburn tanglefoot. Goddamn Sloane and his pop-skull moonshine."

  "Guaranteed to have been aged at least two hours." Sloane giggled.

  "I thought the government men had busted up all those stills years ago," Mike said.

  "No way," Jack said. "Auburn'd blow away if it wasn't anchored down by all those pot stills."

  McKlearey got up and took the jug from Sloane. He opened it and sniffed suspiciously. "You sure this stuff is all right?"

  "Pure, one-hundred-per-cent rotgut," Sloane said.

  "I mean, they don't spike it with wood alcohol, do they?" There was a note of worry in Lou's voice. "Sometimes they do that. Makes a guy go blind. His eyes fall out."

  "What's the sense of poisoning your customers?" Sloane asked. "You ain't gonna get much repeat business that way."

  "I've heard that they do it sometimes, is all," McKlearey said. "They spike it with wood alcohol, or they use an old car radiator instead of that copper coil — then the booze gets tainted with all that gunk off the solder. Either way it makes a guy go blind. Fuckin' eyes fall right out."

  "Bounce around on the floor like marbles, huh, Lou?" Jack said. "I can see it now. McKlearey's eyes bouncin' off across the patio with him chasin' 'em." He laughed harshly. He knew about Lou and Margaret, all right. There was no question about that now.

  "I don't think I want any," McKlearey said, handing the jug back to Sloane.

  "Old Lou's worried about his baby-blue eyeballs," Jack said, rubbing it in.

  "I just don't want any. OK, Alders?"

  "Well, I'm gonna have some," Mike said, reaching for the jug. "I cut my teeth on Auburn moonshine. My eyes might get a little loose now and then, but they sure as hell don't fall out." He rolled the jug back over his arm professionally and took a long belt.

  "Now, there's an old moonshine drinker," Jack said. "Notice the way he handles that jug."

  We passed the jug around, and each of us tried to emulate Mike's technique. Frankly, the stuff wasn't much good — I've gotten a better taste siphoning gas. But we all smacked our lips appreciatively, said some silly-ass thing like "damn good whiskey," and had a quick beer to flush out the taste.

  McKlearey still refused to touch the stuff. He went back to his lawn chair, scowling.

  "Hey, man," Jack said, "I think my eyes are gettin' loose." He pressed his fingers to his eyelids.

  "Fuck you, Alders," Lou said.

  "Yeah," Jack said. "They're definitely gettin' loose — oops! There goes one now." He squinted one eye shut and started pawing around on the flagstones. "Come back here, you little bastard!"

  "Aw, go fuck yourself, Alders!" Lou snapped. "You're so goddamn fuckin' funny!"

  "Oh, Mother," Jack cried, "help me find my fuckin' eyeball." He was grinding Lou for all he was worth.

  Lou was starting to get pretty hot, and I figured another crack or two from my brother ought to do it. I knew I should say something to cool it down, but I figured that Jack knew what he was doing. If he wanted a piece
of McKlearey, that was his business.

  "Hey, you guys," Mike said, inspecting Sloane's substantial outside fireplace, "let's build a fire." It was a smooth way to handle the situation.

  "Why?" Sloane demanded. "You cold or something, for Chrissake?"

  "No, but a fire's kinda nice, isn't it? I mean, what the hell?"

  "Shit, I don't care," Cal said. "Come on. There's a woodpile over behind the garage."

  The four of us left McKlearey sulking in his lawn chair and trooped on over to the woodpile.

  It took us a while to get the fire going. We wound up going through the usual business of squatting down and blowing on it to make it catch. Finally, it took hold, and we stood around looking at it with a beery sense of having really done something worthwhile.

  Then we all hauled up lawn chairs and moved the keg over handy. Even Lou pulled himself in to join the group. By then it was getting pretty dark.

  Sloane had a stereo in his living room, and outside speakers as well. He was piping out a sort of standard, light music, so it was pleasant. I discovered that a shot of that rotten homemade whiskey in a glass of beer made a pretty acceptable drink, and I sat with the others drinking and telling lies.

  I guess it was Jack who raised the whole damned thing. He was talking about some broad he'd laid while he was on his way down to Willapa Bay to hunt geese.

  "... anyhow," he was saying, "I went on down to Willapa — got there about four thirty or five — and put out my dekes. Colder'n a bastard, and me still about half blind with alcohol. About five thirty the geese came in — only by then my drunk had worn off, and my head felt like a goddamn balloon. Man, you want to see an act of raw courage? Just watch some poor bastard with a screamin' hangover touch off a 12 gauge with three-inch magnum shells at a high-flyin' goose. Man, I still hurt when I think about it."

  "Get any geese?" I asked.

  "Filled out before seven," he said. "Even filled on mallards before I started back — a real carnage. I picked up my dekes, chucked all the birds in the trunk, and headed on back up the pike. I hauled off the road in Chehalis again and went into the same bar to get well. Damned if she wasn't right there on the first stool again."

  And that started the hunting stories. Have you ever noticed how when a bunch of guys are sitting around, the stories kind of run in cycles? First the drinking stories —”Boy did we get plastered" — then the war stories —”Funny thing happened when I was in the Army" — and then the hunting stories, or the dog stories, or the snake stories. It's almost like a ritual, but very relaxed. Nobody's trying to outdo anybody else. It's just sort of easy and enjoyable. Even McKlearey and Jack called a truce on the eyeball business.

  I guess maybe the fire had something to do with it. You get a bunch of guys around an open fire at night, and nine times out of ten they'll get around to talking about hunting sooner or later. It's almost inevitable. It's funny some anthropologist hasn't noticed it and made a big thing out of it.

  We all sifted back through our themories, lifting out the things we'd done or stories we'd heard from others. We hunted pheasant and quail, ducks and geese, rabbits and squirrels, deer and bear, elk and mountain lions. We talked guns and ammunition, equipment, camping techniques — all of it. A kind of excitement — an urge, if you want to call it that — began to build up. The faint, barely remembered smells of the woods and of gun-oil came back with a sharpness that was almost real. Unconsciously, we all pulled our chairs in closer to the fire, tightening the circle. It was a warm night, so it wasn't that we needed the heat of the fire.

  "You know," Jack was saying, "it's a damn shame there's no season open right now. We could have a real ball huntin' together — just the bunch of us."

  "Too goddamn hot," Lou said, pouring himself another beer.

  "Not up in the mountains, it's not," Mike said.

  "When does deer season open?" Sloane asked.

  "Middle of October," Jack said. "Of course we could go after bear. They're predators on this side of the mountains, and the season's always open."

  "Stick that bear hunting in your ear," Mike said. "First you've got to have dogs; and second, you never know when one of those big hairy bastards is gonna come out of the brush at about ten feet. You got time for about one shot before he's chewin' on your head and scatterin' your bowels around like so much confetti."

  "Yuk!" Sloane gagged. "There's a graphic picture for you."

  "No shit, man," Mike said. "I won't go anywhere near a goddamn bear. I shot one just once. Never again. I had an old .303 British — ten shots, and it took every goddamn one of them. That son of a bitch just kept comin'. Soaked up lead like a blotter. The guys that hunt those babies all carry .44 magnum pistols for close work."

  "Hell, man," McKlearey said, "you can stop a tank with a .44 mag."

  Mike looked at him. "One guy I talked to jumped a bear once and hit him twice in the chest with a .300 Weatherbee and then went to the pistol. Hit him four times at point-blank range with a .44 mag before he went down. Just literally blew him to pieces, and the damned bear was still trying to get at him. I talked to the guy three years later, and his hands were still shakin'. No bears for this little black duck!"

  "Would a .45 stop one?" I asked.

  "Naw, the military bullet's got a hard jacket," Mike said. "Just goes right through."

  "No, I mean the long Colt. It's a 250-grain soft lead bullet."

  "That oughta do it," Jack said. "Just carryin' the weight would slow him down enough for a guy to make a run for it."

  "I've got an old Colt frontier-style stored with my clothes and books in Seattle," I said, leaning over and refilling my beer mug.

  "No kiddin' ?" Jack said. "What the hell did you get a cannon like that for?"

  "Guy I knew needed money. I lent him twenty, and he gave me the gun as security — never saw him again. The gun may be hot for all I know."

  "Ah-ha!" Sloane said. "Pawnbroking without a license!" He giggled.

  "It's got a holster and belt — the whole bit," I said. "I'm going to have to pick up all that junk anyway. I'll bring it on down."

  "I'd like to see it," Jack said, "and Sloane here knows about guns — he takes in a lot of them in pawn — he ought to be able to tell you what it's worth."

  "Sure," Sloane said, "bring it in. Maybe we can dicker."

  "Hey!" Mike shouted suddenly. "Shut up, you guys. I just thought of something." He leaned forward, his slightly round face suddenly excited. "How about the High Hunt?"

  "Are you kiddin'?" Jack demanded. "You really want to try the 'Great White Hunter' bit?"

  "What the goddamn hell is the High Hunt?" McKlearey demanded harshly.

  "Early high Cascade Mountains deer season," Mike said, his eyes gleaming in the firelight.

  " — In some of the roughest, emptiest, steepest, highest country in the whole fuckin' world," Jack finished for him.

  "It's not that bad," Mike said.

  "Aw, bullshit!" Jack snorted. "The damned boundaries start right where the roads all end. And do you know why the roads end there? Because there's not a fuckin' thing back up in there, that's why. Man, most of that country's above the timberline."

  "All alpine meadow," Mike said almost dreamily. "It gets snowed in so early that nobody ever got a chance to hunt it before they opened this special season. Some of the biggest deer in the state are up there. One guy got a nine-pointer that when four hundred pounds."

  "Eastern count, I'll bet," Jack said.

  "Eastern count my ass. Full Western count — the number of points on the smallest side not counting brow tines. Eastern count would have gone twenty — maybe twenty-one points. That was one helluva big deer."

  "And the guy got a hernia gettin' it out of the woods." Sloane giggled.

  "No — hell, they had horses."

  "... and guides," Sloane went on, "and a wrangler, and a camp cook, and a bartender. Probably didn't cost more than a thousand a week for two guys."

  "It's not all that much," Mike said
tentatively. "I know a guy — a rancher — who'll take out a fair-sized party real reasonable. You could get by for fifty bucks apiece for a week — ten days. Food extra, of course. He's tryin' to get into the business, so he's keepin' his rates down for the first couple years." Mike's voice was serious; he wasn't just talking. He was actually proposing it to us as a real possibility. His face had a kind of hunger on it that you don't see very often. Mike wanted this to go, and he wanted it badly.

  "Who the fuck wants to pay to go up in the boonies for ten days?" McKlearey demanded harshly, putting it down.

  It hung there, almost like it was balanced on something. I knew that if I left it alone, McKlearey's raspy vote for inertia would tip it. At that moment I wasn't really sure if I wanted to go up into the high country, but I was sure of one thing; I didn't much like McKlearey, and I did like Mike Carter.

  "It's what we've been talking about for the last hour," I said, lighting a cigarette. "All you guys were so hot to trot, and now Mike comes up with something solid — a real chance to do some real hunting, not just a little Sunday-morning poaching with a twenty-two out of a car window — and everybody gets tongue-tied all of a sudden."

  "Didn't you get enough of maneuvers and bivouac and shit like that in the Army?" McKlearey demanded, his eyes narrowing. I remembered what Jack had told me about crossing him.

  "I did my share of field-soldiering," I told him, "but this is hunting, and that's different."

  "Are you gonna pay to go out and run around in the brush?" He was getting hot again. God, he was a touchy bastard.

  "If the price is like Mike said it was, and if we can work out the details, you're goddamn right I will." A guy will make up his mind to do something for the damnedest reasons sometimes.

  "You're outa your fuckin' skull," McKlearey said, his voice angry and his face getting kind of pinched in.

  "Nobody's twistin' your arm, Lou," Jack said. "You don't have to go no place."

  "I suppose you'd go along, too, huh, Alders?" For some reason, McKlearey was getting madder by the minute. He was twisting around in his chair like a worm on a hot rock.

  "You damn betcha," Jack said. "Just give me ten minutes to pack up my gear, and I'll be gone, buddy — long gone."