High Hunt

by Eddings, David

  I didn't like the looks of it at all, but there wasn't a helluva lot I could do at that point.

  Then Stan raised his face, and it was all shiny and very flushed now. He slowly pulled his rifle forward and poked it out over the edge of the bank.

  I suddenly was very cold.

  Stan got himself squared away. There wasn't any question about what he was aiming at.

  "No, Stan!" It came out a croak. I don't think anybody could have heard it more than five feet away from me. Helplessly I put my scope on McKlearey.

  Stan's shot kicked up dirt about two feet above Lou's head. McKlearey dove for cover. Instinct, I guess.

  I didn't really consciously think about it. I just snapped off the safety, pointed my rifle in the general direction of the other side of the ravine and squeezed the trigger. The sound of my shot mingled and blurred in with the echo of Stan's.

  I saw the white blur of his face suddenly turned up toward me for a moment, and then he scrambled back into the brush.

  McKlearey was burrowing down under his pile of limbs like a man trying to dig a foxhole with his teeth.

  There was something moving on the other side of the ravine. It flickered palely through the bushes, headed down the ridge.

  It was the white deer. Apparently the double echo was confusing hell out of it. It ran down past McKlearey and on down the ravine. A couple minutes later I heard several shots from the stands below. Jack and Cal were shooting.

  I hoped that they'd missed. The poor white bastard was just an innocent bystander really. He had no business being on that other side just then.

  I looked down and saw that my hands were shaking so badly that I could barely hold my rifle. I took several deep breaths and then slowly pulled back the bolt, flipping out the empty in a long, twinkling brass arc. It clinked on a rock and fell in the dirt. I closed the bolt, put the safety back on, and picked up the empty. Then I went back up to my rock and sat down.

  23

  “MAN!” Jack said when I got back down to camp, "the son of a bitch ran right through the whole damn bunch of us!"

  "I shot at him five times!" Sloan gasped, his face red. "Five goddamn times and never touched a hair. I think the son of a bitch is a ghost, and we all shot right through 'im." He tried to giggle but wound up coughing and choking.

  "You OK?" I asked him.

  He tried to nod, still choking and gasping. It took him a minute or so to get settled down.

  "Did you shoot, Dan?" Jack asked me.

  "Once," I said, taking out the empty cartridge case, "and I think Stan did too, didn't you, Stan?"

  He nodded, his face very pale.

  "I got off three," Jack said. He turned to Miller. "I thought you said they always ran uphill, Cap."

  "Ninety-nine times out of a hundred," Miller said.

  "Maybe one of us bit him," Sloan gasped.

  Miller shook his head. "He cut back on up over that far ridge when he got past you men. I expect all the shootin' just kept pushin' him on down. I don't imagine he can see too good in broad daylight with them pink eyes of his."

  Lou didn't say anything, but his eyes looked a little wild.

  We ate lunch and then all of us kind of poked around looking for something to do until time to go back up again.

  I wound up wandering down to the pond again. I stood watching the fish swim by and trying not to think about what had happened that morning.

  "Why don't you watch where the hell you're shootin'?" It was McKlearey.

  I looked at him for a moment. "I know where I was shooting, Lou," I told him.

  "Well, one of them damn shots just barely missed me," he said. His hands were shaking.

  "Must have been a ricochet," I said.

  "I ain't all that sure," he said. He squatted down by the water and began stripping off his bandage.

  "I've got no reason to shoot you, Lou. I don't have a wife." I just let it hang there.

  He looked at me for a long time, but he didn't answer. Then he finished unwinding his hand. The gash in his palm was red and inflamed-looking, and the whole hand looked a little puffy.

  "That's getting infected," I told him. "Clint's got a first-aid kit. You'd better put something on it."

  "It's OK," he said. "I been pourin' whiskey in it."

  "Iodine's cheaper," I said, "and a helluva lot more dependable."

  He stuck the hand into the water, wincing at the chill.

  "That's not a good idea either," I said.

  "I know what I'm doin'," he said shortly.

  I shrugged. It was his hand, after all.

  "Danny," he said finally.

  "Yeah?"

  "You didn't see who shot at me, did you?"

  I didn't really want to lie to him, but I was pretty sure Stan wouldn't try it again. He'd looked too sick when we'd gotten back down. "Look, Lou," I said, "with the scopes on all the rifles in camp, if somebody was trying to shoot you, he'd have nailed you to the cross with the first shot. If one came anywhere near you, it was more than likely just what I said — a ricochet."

  "Maybe —” he said doubtfully.

  "You're just jumpy," I said. "All keyed up. Shit, look at the nightmares you've been having. Maybe you ought to go a little easy on the booze.

  "That's why I drink it," he said, staring out across the beaver pond. "If I drink enough, I don't dream at all. I'm OK then."

  I was about to ask him what was bothering him, but I was pretty sure he wouldn't tell me. Besides, it was none of my business.

  We went back up to camp, and he went into his tent.

  We went out at three thirty again, the same as we had the day before.

  "I thought you wasn't gonna shoot at that deer," Miller said when we got up to the top.

  I couldn't very well tell him why I'd shot, and I didn't want to lie to him. "I was just firing a warning shot," I said. In a way it had been just that.

  He looked at me for a minute but didn't say anything. I'm not sure if he believed me.

  None of us saw anything worth shooting that evening either, and we were all pretty quiet when we got back down.

  "Come on, men," Miller said, trying to cheer us up. "No point in gettin' down in the mouth. It's only a matter of time till you start gettin' the big ones."

  "I know which one I'm gonna get," Jack said. "I'm gonna bust that white bastard."

  "Not if I see 'im first," McKlearey said belligerently, nursing his hand.

  They glared at each other.

  "All right," Jack said finally, "you remember that bet we got?"

  "I remember," Lou said.

  "That deer is the one then."

  "That's fine with me."

  "That wasn't the bet," I said flatly.

  They both scowled at me.

  "Dan's right," Sloan said, gasping heavily. "The original bet was best deer — Boone and Crockett points." His voice sounded pretty wheezy again, but his tone was pretty firm.

  "There's still the side bet," Stan said very quietly. I'd forgotten about that one.

  McKlearey stared back and forth between the two of them. He looked like he was narrowing down his list of enemies. "All right," he said very softly. It didn't sound at all like him.

  "I don't want you men shootin' at that deer when he's up on top of no cliff or somethin'," Miller said. "I seen a couple men after the same deer once — both of 'em so afraid the other was gonna get it that they weren't even thinkin' no more. One of 'em finally shot the deer right off the top of a four-hundred-foot bluff. Wasn't enough left to make a ten-cent hamburger out of it by the time that deer quit bouncin'."

  "We'll watch it," Jack said, still staring at McKlearey.

  Lou edged around until he had his back to a stump and could keep an eye on both Jack and Stan. His eyes had gone kind of flat and dead. He was sort of holding his bandaged hand up in the air so he wouldn't bump it, and his right hand was in his lap, about six inches from the butt of that .38. He looked like he was wound pretty tight.

  We tri
ed talking, but things were pretty nervous.

  After a while Stan got up and went back to the latrine. I waited a couple minutes then followed him. He was leaning against a tree when I found him.

  "Stan," I said.

  "Yes." He didn't look at me. He knew what I was going to say.

  "Be real careful about where you place your shots from now on, OK?"

  He took a quick breath but didn't say anything. I waited a minute and then went on down the trail.

  When the others got up to go to bed, Miller jerked his head very slightly to me, and he and I sat by the fire until they had all gone into their tents.

  "I've got to go check the stock," he said. "You want to come along, son?"

  "Sure, Cap," I said. "Stretch some of the kinks out of my legs."

  We stood up and walked on down toward the corrals. Once we got away from the fire, the stars were very bright, casting even a faint light on the looming snowfields above us.

  Miller leaned his elbows across the top rail of the corral, his mustache silvery in the reflected starlight, and his big cowboy hat shading his eyes. "Them boys seem to be missin' the whole point of what this is all about," he said finally.

  "I'm not very proud of any of them myself, about now," I said. "They're acting like a bunch of damn-fool kids."

  "I've seen this kinda stuff before, son. It always leads to hard feelin's."

  "Maybe I should have shot that deer."

  "Not if you didn't want to," he said.

  "I wouldn't have felt right about it, but it'd sure be better than what's going on right now."

  "Oh, a friendly bet's OK. Men do it all the time, but them boys are takin' it a little too serious."

  "Well, most of that's just talk," I told him. "They go at each other like that all the time. I wouldn't worry too much about it. I just don't like the idea of it, that's all."

  "I don't neither," he said, "and I'll tell you somethin' else I don't much like."

  "What's that?"

  "The feelin' I keep gettin' that we ain't all gonna finish up this hunt. I've had it from the first day."

  I couldn't say much to that.

  "I sure wouldn't want one of my hunters gettin' shot on my first trip out." He looked at me and grinned suddenly. "Wouldn't be much of an advertisement, now would it?"

  24

  SLOANE was much worse the next morning. Much as he tried, he couldn't even get out of the sack. Both Stan and I offered to stay with him, but he insisted that we go ahead on up.

  Breakfast was kind of quiet, and none of us talked very much on the way up the ridge.

  Miller looked down at me from his saddle after I'd dismounted at the top. "If the Big Man don't get no better," he said, "Clint's gonna have to take him on down. This is the fourth day up here. He just ain't comin' around the way he should."

  "I know," I said.

  "I like the Big Man," Miller said. "I don't know when I've ever met a better-natured man, but I ain't gonna be doin' him no favors by lettin' him the up here."

  I nodded. "I'll talk with him when we get back down to camp," I said.

  "I'd sure appreciate it, son," he said. "Good huntin'." He took Ned's reins and went on back down.

  It was chilly up there in the darkness, and the stars were still out. I sat hunched up against the cold and tried not to think too much about things. Every now and then the breeze would gust up the ravine, and I could pick up the faint smell of the pine forest far down below the spruces.

  The sky began to pale off to the east and the stars got dimmer.

  I kind of let my mind drift back to the time before my father died. Once he and I had gone on out to fish on a rainy Sunday morning. The fish had been biting, and we were both catching them as fast as we could bait up. We both got soaked to the skin, and I think we both caught cold from it, but it was still one of the best times I could remember. Neither one of us had said very much, but it had been great. I suddenly felt something I hadn't felt for quite a few years — a sharp, almost unbearable pang of grief for my father.

  It was lighter, and that strange, cold, colorless light of early morning began to flow down the side of the mountain.

  I quite suddenly remembered a guy I hadn't thought about for years. It had been when I was knocking up and down the coast that year after I'd gotten out of high school. I'd been working on a truck farm in the Salinas Valley in California, mostly cultivating between the mile-long lettuce rows. About ten or so one cloudy morning, I'd seen a train go by. About as far as I was going to go that day was eight or ten rows over in the same field. I walked the cultivator back to the farmhouse and picked up my time. That afternoon I'd jumped into an empty boxcar as the train was pulling out of the yard headed north.

  There was an old guy in the car. He wasn't too clean, and he smelled kind of bad, but he was somebody to talk to. We sat in the open doorway looking at the open fields and the woods and the grubby houses and garbage dumps — did you know that people live in garbage dumps? Anyway, we'd talked about this and that, and I'd found out that he had a little pension of some kind, and he just moved up and down the coast, working the crops and riding trains, with those pension checks trailing him from post office to post office. He said that he guessed he could go into almost any post office of any size on the coast, and there'd be at least one of his checks there.

  He'd said that he was sixty-eight and his heart and lungs were bad. Then he'd kind of looked off toward the sunset. "One of these days," he'd said, "I'll miss a jump on one of these boxcars and go under the wheels. Or my heart'll give out, or I'll take the pneumonia. They'll find me after I been picked over by a half-dozen other bums. Not much chance there'd be anything left so they could identify me. But I got that all took care of. Look —”

  He'd unbuttoned his shirt and showed me his pale, flabby, old man's chest. He had a tattoo.

  "My name was Wilmer O. Dugger," it said. "I was born in Wichita, Kansas, on October 4, 1893. I was a Methodist." It was like a tombstone, right on his chest.

  He'd buttoned his shirt back up. "I got the same thing on both arms and both legs," he'd said. "No matter what happens, one of them tattoos is bound to come through it. I used to worry about it — them not bein' able to identify me, I mean. Now I don't worry no more. It's a damn fine thing, you know, not havin' nothin' to worry about."

  I think it had been about then that I'd decided to go to college. I'd caught a quick glimpse of myself fifty years later, riding up and down the coast and waiting to miss my jump on a boxcar or for my heart to quit. About the only difference would have been that I don't think I'd have bothered with the tattoos.

  The breeze dropped, and it got very still. I straightened up suddenly and picked up my rifle. It felt very smooth and comfortable. Something was going to happen. I eased the bolt back very gently and checked to make sure there was one in the tube. I closed it and slipped the safety back on. I could feel an excitement growing, a kind of quivering tension in the pit of my stomach and down my arms and legs, but my hands were steady. I wasn't shaking or anything.

  A doe came out on the far side of the ravine. Very slowly, so as not to startle her, I sprawled out across the rock and got my elbows settled in so I could be absolutely sure of my shot.

  The doe sniffed a time or two, looked back once, and then went on down into the ravine.

  Another doe came out of the same place. After a minute or so she went on down, too.

  Then another doe.

  It was absolutely quiet. I could hear the faint toc-toc-toc of their hooves moving slowly on down the rocky bottom of the ravine.

  I waited. I knew he was there. A minute went by. Then another.

  Then there was a very faint movement in the brush, and he stepped softly out into the open.

  I didn't really count him until later. I just saw the flaring rack and the calm, almost arrogant look on his face, and I knew that he was the one I wanted. He was big and heavily muscled. He was wary but not frightened or timid. It was his mountain.
>
  He stood broadside to me and seemed to be looking straight across at me, though I don't really think he saw me. Maybe he just knew that I was there, as I had known that he would be.

  I put the cross hairs of the scope just behind his front shoulder and slipped off the safety. His ears flicked.

  I slowly squeezed the trigger.

  I didn't hear the shot or feel the recoil of the rifle. The deer jerked and fell awkwardly. Then he stumbled to his feet and fell again. He got up again slowly and kind of walked on back over the other side of the ridge, his head down. It didn't occur to me to shoot again. I knew it wasn't necessary.

  I stood up, listening now to the echo of the shot rolling off down the side of the mountain. I jacked out the empty shell, slipped the safety back on and slung the rifle. Then I started down into the ravine. I could hear the three does scrambling up through the brush on the far side.

  The going was pretty rough, and it took me about ten minutes to get to where he'd been standing. I looked around on the ground until I found a blood spot. Then another. I followed them down the other side.

  He'd gone about a hundred yards down the easy slope of the far side of the ridge and was lying on his side in a little clump of brush. His head was still raised but wobbling, as I walked carefully up to him. His eyes were not panicky or anything. I stepped behind him, out of range of his hooves, and took out my pistol. I thumbed back the hammer and put the muzzle to the side of his head between his eye and ear. His eye watched me calmly.

  "Sorry I took so long to get here, buddy," I said.

  Then I pulled the trigger.

  The gun made a muffled kind of pop — without any echo to it, and the deer's head dropped heavily, and the life went out of his eye. I knelt beside him and ran my hand over his heavy shoulder. The fur felt coarse but very slick, and it was a kind of dark gray with little white tips shot through it. He smelled musky but not rank or anything.

  I stood up, pointed the pistol up toward the top of the mountain, and fired it again. Then I began to wonder if maybe I'd given the wrong signal. I put the pistol back in the holster and slipped the hammer-thong back on. Then I leaned my rifle against a large rock and hauled the deer out in the open. I walked back on up to the ridge and hung my jacket over a bush to mark the spot for whoever came up with a horse.