High Hunt

by Eddings, David

  The next morning they were still pretty quiet, and I got the idea that they both wanted to finish up and get on back down the mountain.

  I went up on the ridge with Jack again, and almost as soon as it was legal shooting time, we heard McKlearey's gun bang off once, and then a minute or so later the flat, single crack of his pistol.

  "Lou got one," I said to Jack. It was pretty obvious, but the silence was beginning to bug me.

  "Yeah," Jack answered indifferently.

  We saw Miller going on up, trailing Lou's horse and a pack animal. About twenty minutes later he went on back down with Lou and what looked like a pretty damn small deer.

  "Shit!" Jack snorted. "The great hunter! I've seen bigger cats." Maybe he was coming out of it a little — maybe not. I couldn't tell for sure.

  It was almost lunchtime when a fair-sized buck came down the draw.

  "Four-point," I whispered to Jack, who hadn't even been watching, I don't think.

  "Where?"

  "Coming down the bottom of the gully."

  "Yeah, I see 'im now," he said. His voice was very flat.

  "I'll take 'im." He squared himself around into a sitting position, aimed, and fired. The buck dropped without a twitch.

  "Good shot!" I said.

  He shrugged and cranked out the empty. It clinked against a rock and rolled on down the hill.

  "You going to signal?" I asked him.

  "Miller'll be up in a few minutes anyway," he said.

  "Yeah, but we'll need a packhorse."

  "Maybe you're right," he said. He wearily pulled out the automatic, thumbed it, and touched it off in the general direction of the mountain above us. "Let's go gut 'im," he said.

  We went down and field-dressed the deer. By the time we were done, Miller was there with the horses and a rope. He tossed us one end, and with a horse pulling from up above and the two of us guiding the carcass, getting the deer up was no trick at all.

  "Damn nice deer," Miller said rather unconvincingly.

  "It's worth the price of the tag, I guess," Jack said. He seemed pretty uninterested.

  We got everything loaded up and went on back down to camp.

  Clint and McKlearey had already gone on down. Miller told us that Lou had been all hot to leave, and there weren't really enough packhorses to haul out all of our gear and the deer as well, so Clint had loaded up and they'd gone on down.

  "How big a one did he get?" Jack inquired.

  "Two-point," Miller said. "Nice enough deer, but I think old Sarge musta made a mistake. He probably shoulda waited till he had a little more light."

  Jack didn't say anything.

  "Clint won't be back till late again," Miller said, "so we'll go on out tomorrow mornin'. We oughta skin your deer out and let it cool anyway. I tried to tell that to Sarge, too, but he seemed to be in a helluva rush for some reason."

  "Probably got a hot date back in Tacoma," Jack said sourly.

  Miller let that one go by.

  We ate lunch and skinned out Jack's deer, and then Jack went into his tent to lie down for a while. I wandered around a bit and then went on down to the pond to molest the fish. The sun was hot and bright on the water, and the fish weren't moving.

  Miller came on down after about a half hour and stood watching me as I fished. "Any action?" he said finally.

  "Pretty slow, Cap," I said.

  "Usually is this time of day."

  "Maybe if I pester 'em enough, they'll bite just to get rid of me."

  He chuckled at that.

  I made another cast.

  "Trip sure turned out funny," he said finally.

  "Yeah," I agreed.

  "I got a hunch Ol' Sarge oughta see a doctor of some kind. He sure went all to pieces yesterday."

  I nodded. "I guess something pretty bad happened to him over in Vietnam," I said. I didn't want to go into too many details. I'd pushed the whole business about Sullivan and Danny — the other one — into the back of my mind, and I was doing my level best not to think about it.

  "I kinda thought that might have somethin' to do with it," Cap said. "It's all kinda soured me on this guidin' business though."

  "Don't judge everybody by us, Cap," I said. "You run a damn fine camp, and you know this country as well as any man could. None of what happened up here was your fault. This was all going on before we ever got up here."

  "I keep thinkin' I shoulda done somethin' to head it all off before it went as far as it did though," he said, squinting up at the mountain. He still looked a lot like God.

  "I don't think anybody could have done anything any differently," I told him. "You just got a bad bunch to work with, that's all. Nobody could have known that Cal was going to get sick or that McKlearey was going off the deep end the way he did. It was just the luck of the draw, that's all."

  "Maybe," he said doubtfully. "Then, maybe too, I just ain't cut out for it. I can tell you right now that you're the only one of the whole bunch I'd care to go out with again. Maybe if a man's goin' into the business, he can't afford to have them kinda likes and dislikes."

  I couldn't say much to that really.

  Finally he cleared his throat. "I'm gonna ask you somethin' that ain't really none of my business, so if you don't want to answer, you can just tell me to keep my nose where it belongs, OK?"

  "Shoot," I said. I knew what he was going to ask.

  "You found that freak deer yesterday, didn't you, son?"

  I nodded.

  "Thought maybe you had. You're too good a hunter not to have, and you was the closest one to the place where he dropped into that gully."

  "He was down in the wash," I said quietly, not looking at him, "all busted up. I dumped one of those gravel banks over on him. I just didn't think he was worth somebody getting killed over."

  "Was it really that bad between your brother and the Sarge?" he asked.

  "Yeah," I said, looking out over the pond. "It was getting real close. I figured that if neither one of them got the damn thing, it'd cool things down."

  "You think pretty fast when you have to, don't you?"

  "I was right in the middle," I said. "It was the only thing I could come up with in a hurry to keep the roof from falling in on me. I'm not very proud of it really." That was the truth, too.

  "I don't know," he said after a minute, "from where I sit, it makes you look pretty tall."

  I didn't understand that at all.

  "A man's more important than a deer," he said, hunkering down and dipping his fingers in the water. "Sometimes a man'll forget that when he gets to huntin'. You're just like me, son. You wouldn't never try to take another man's deer or keep 'im from findin' it. It's just somethin' a man don't do. So you figure that what you done was wrong — particularly since it was the Sarge who shot the damn thing, and you don't like him very much. But you'd have done the same thing if it'd been your brother shot 'im. A lot of men wouldn't, but you would. Takes a pretty big man to do the right thing in a spot like that."

  I felt better. I'd been worrying about it a lot.

  "You gonna reel that fish in, or let 'im run around on the end of your line all day?" he said to me.

  "What?" I looked at the pole I'd laid down across a log. The tip was whipping wildly. I grabbed the rod before the fish could drag it into the water. I brought him in close to shore, reached down into the water and carefully unhooked him. "Don't tell Clint," I said, shooing the exhausted trout back out into deeper water.

  "Wild horses wouldn't get it out of me." He laughed. We went on back up to camp.

  After that, things were OK again. Jack kept pretty much to his tent except for supper, and Cap and I spent the rest of the afternoon getting things squared away so we could break camp the next morning. I moved my gear back into Jack's tent so we could strike the one I'd been sleeping in as well as McKlearey's.

  After supper, Jack had a couple of drinks and went back to his tent. Cap and I sat up telling stories and waiting for Clint to get back.

 
; The little guy came in about ten thirty, madder than hell.

  "That damn burrhead run off on me, Cap," he growled as he rode up.

  "Run off? What do you mean, run off?"

  "We got about a half mite from the bottom, and he kicks ol' Red in the slats and took off like a scared rabbit. When I got to the bottom, ol' Red was all lathered up and blowed and wanderin' around not tied to anything, and that burrhead and that pile of nuts and bolts he called a car was gone."

  "Didn't he take his deer?" Cap asked.

  "He didn't take nothin'! He even left his rifle tied to the saddle."

  "He say anything at all?"

  "Not a word — not a good-bye, go to hell, kiss my ass, or a damn thing. I figured maybe he'd gone on down to the place. I was gonna have some words with him about runnin' off and leavin' me with all the work, but there wasn't a sign of 'im there neither. He just clean, flat took off. I left all his stuff in the barn. I don't know how the hell we'll get it all back to 'im."

  "We'll take it back," I said. "I'll see that he gets it all."

  Clint grunted, still pretty steamed.

  Cap shook his head. "I sure misjudged that one," he said.

  "Somebody oughta take a length of two-by-four to 'im," Clint said. "That was a damn-fool kid stunt, runnin' off like that."

  "Well," Cap said, "we can't do anything about it tonight. Let's unsaddle the stock and get to bed. And you better cool down a mite. You know what the doctor told you about not losin' your temper so much."

  "Hell," Clint said, "I'm all calm and peaceful now. 'Bout time I started up the hill, I was mad enough to bite nails and spit rust."

  We finally got things squared away and got to bed.

  The next morning I was up before the others, so I got the fire started and got coffee going and then wandered around a bit, kind of getting the last feel of things. I like to do that with the good things. The others I kind of just let slide away.

  It had been a good hunt — in spite of everything — and I'd worked out whatever it was that I'd needed to work out. Some people seem to think that things like that have to be all put down in a set of neatly stated propositions, but it isn't really that way at all. A lot of times it's better not to get too specific. If you feel all right about yourself and the world in general where you didn't before, then you've solved your problem — whatever it was. If you don't, you haven't. Verbalizing it isn't going to change anything. One thing I could verbalize, though, was the fact that I had a couple of friends I hadn't had before. Just that by itself made the whole trip worth everything it had cost.

  "Who's the damn early bird?" Clint growled, coming out of the tent all rumpled and grouchy-looking.

  "Me." I grinned at him.

  "Mighta known," he said. "You been bustin' your butt to get your hands on the cookware ever since we got up here."

  "I figured I could ruin a pot of coffee just as well as you could," I said.

  "Oh-ho! Pretty smart-alecky for so damn early in the mornin'," he said. "All right, boy, since you went and started it, we'll just see how much of a camp cook you are. You fix breakfast this mornin'. Anythin' you wanna fix. There's the cook tent."

  "I think I've been had," I said.

  "I guess they don't teach you not to volunteer in the Army no more," he said. "Well, I'm goin' back to bed. You just call us when you got ever-thin' ready." He chuckled and went on back into his tent.

  "You're a dirty old man," I called after him.

  He stuck his head back out, thumbed his nose at me, and disappeared again.

  I rummaged around in the cook-tent and dragged out everything I could think of. I'd fix a breakfast like they'd never seen before.

  Actually, I went a little off the deep end. A prepared biscuit-flour made biscuits and pancakes pretty easy, but I kind of bogged down in a mixture of chopped-up venison, grated potatoes and onions, and a few other odds and ends of vegetables. I wound up adding a can of corned-beef hash to give the whole mess consistency. I didn't think I could manage a pie or anything, so I settled for canned peaches.

  "All right, dammit!" I yelled. "Come and get it or I'll feed it to porky."

  They stumbled out and we dug into it. I'd fried up a bunch of eggs and bacon to go with it all, and they ate without too many complaints — except Clint, of course.

  "Biscuits are a little underdone," he said first, mildly.

  "Can't win 'em all," I told him.

  "Bacon could be a mite crisper, too," he said then.

  Cap ducked his head over his plate to keep from laughing out loud. Even Jack grinned.

  "Flapjacks seem a little chewey, wouldn't you say?" he asked me.

  I was waiting for him to get to that hash. He tried a forkful and chewed meditatively.

  "Now this," he said, pointing at it with the fork, "is the, best whatever-it-is I've ever had." He looked up with a perfectly straight face. "Of course, I ain't never had none of this whatever-it-is before, so that might account for it."

  I didn't say anything.

  "I ain't gonna ask you what's in it," he said," 'cause I don't really wanna know till I'm done eatin', but right after breakfast, I am gonna go count the packhorses."

  Miller suddenly roared with laughter, and pretty soon we were all doing it.

  After breakfast we struck the rest of the tents and began to pack up. It didn't really take very long to get everything all squared away.

  A camp you've lived in for a while always looks so empty when you start to tear it down. We even buried in McKlearey's slit-trench and covered over Clint's garbage pit.

  "Well," Cap said, looking around. "What with that table and all, I guess we're leavin' the place better'n we found it."

  "You bet," Jack said. He seemed to be getting over it all.

  We loaded up the packhorses, saddled up, and rode on down the trail. I looked back once, just before we went into the trees. I didn't do it again.

  "Down there is where Cap and I got the deer for Sloane," I told Jack as we passed the place.

  "That was a nice deer," Jack said. "You wound up shootin' the best two deer we got, you know that?"

  "I hadn't thought of it," I said.

  "That's because you were concentratin' on huntin' instead of all that other shit like the rest of us." Coming from Jack, that was a hell of an admission really.

  We didn't say much the rest of the way down.

  It was a little after noon when we got back down to where the trucks were. It took us a while to get the gear all off the horses and into the stock-truck and the pickup, but by about one we were on our way back to Miller's ranch. Jack got me off to one side and told me he wanted to ride on down with Cap, if I didn't mind.

  "I've got a few things I ought to explain to him," my brother said. "I think I screwed up pretty bad a few times up there, and I'd kinda like a chance to square things, if I can."

  "Sure, Jack," I said. I went over and climbed up into the stock-truck with Clint.

  Maybe there was some hope for Jack after all.

  33

  "I don't know how the hell we're gonna get all that stuff in that car of mine," Jack said when we got to Miller's.

  "We'll have to put a couple of those deer in the back seat," I said. "If we put them all in the trunk, it's going to overbalance so bad it'll pull the front wheels right up off the ground."

  It took some juggling, but we finally managed it all.

  "I'm gonna have to go on into Twisp and pick up a few things," Miller said, coming back from turning the horses out to pasture. "I'll call the game warden. He'll give you a note explainin' why you got so many deer. That way you won't have no trouble with any game checks on down the line."

  "We'd appreciate it, Cap," I said. I walked with him back up toward the house.

  "Your brother told me a few things on the way down," he said.

  "Yeah," I said, "he told me he planned to."

  "I can see where he had a lot workin' on him," Cap said, dumping his clothes bag on the back porch.

/>   "He's not as bad as he seemed to be up there," I said.

  "He's a lot younger'n you," Cap said.

  "No. He's two years older."

  "That's not what I meant."

  "Oh. Maybe — in some ways anyhow."

  "In a lotta ways. I got a feelin' that in a lotta ways your brother ain't never gonna grow up. I started off callin' the wrong man Kid. He's likable enough; he just ain't grown-up."

  "Who really ever grows up all the way, Cap?" I asked him.

  He grinned at me. "If I ever make it, I'll let you know."

  I laughed. "Right," I said.

  "You got my address here?" he asked me.

  "Yeah," I said.

  "Drop me a line once in a while, son. Let me know how you're makin' out."

  "I will, Cap. I really will." I meant it, too.

  He slapped my shoulder. "We stand here talkin' all afternoon, and you two'll never get home."

  We went on back out to the cars. Miller and Clint climbed in the pickup and led out with Jack and me laboring along behind in the overloaded Plymouth.

  I saw Ned rolling out in the pasture where the colt had run when we'd first come here. The old boy was acting pretty frisky. Maybe he wasn't really grown-up yet either.

  The game warden met us in Twisp and put all the necessary information down on a piece of paper for us.

  "Nice bunch of deer," he said. He shook hands around and left.

  "Well, men," Cap said, "I don't want to keep you. I know you got a long trip ahead of you."

  "Cap, Clint," Jack said, "maybe I didn't show it much, but I enjoyed the trip, and I appreciate all you did for us up there." He shook hands with them both and got back in his car.

  I shook hands with Cap and then with Clint.

  "Thanks for everything," I said.

  "You come back, son," Miller said, "you hear me? Even if it's only to borrow money."

  "And don't make yourself obnoxious by not writin' neither," Clint growled, punching my shoulder.

  We were all getting a little watery-eyed.

  "I'd better go," I said quickly. "I'll keep in touch." I got quickly into the car.