Winslow- The Lost Hunters

by David Francis Curran

  He listened as Cassie walked next to him. He was only a few feet away and could barely hear her. Of course, deer could hear far better than either of them. Still he was proud of Cassie.

  They reached the fence at the edge of the park. They could now see out into the open meadow before them. There were no deer in sight.

  Cassie looked at him. They had agreed to keep talking to a minimum. Greg nodded in the direction of the huge rising meadow bordered on either side by trees. Together they both stepped across the strands of barbed wire that now hung only inches above the ground from rotting posts.

  They climbed to the top of the meadow, which was, in fact, a ridge. As they stood on this ridge and faced away from the meadow fence, far below the ground plummeted sharply into a narrow canyon hundreds of feet in depth. Here they turned right and followed the ridge to the bordering treed area. They found neither tracks nor deer. They turned and were soon descending the meadow again at an angle that would take them to the spot where they had crossed the fence. Suddenly, Cassie stopped and pointed. She lifted her own binoculars as Greg glanced down. Far below them, walking along the fence line heading away from them were two deer.

  "An older doe and a younger doe," Cassie said quietly, and then covered her mouth, realizing her mistake in talking.

  Greg said nothing.

  The two deer had seen them now. Both stared upward at them. The deer did not watch for long. Unlike the deer Greg had seen the year before who showed no fear of him, these two seemed to become almost instantly uncomfortable. They did not run but began walking quickly away along the fence line.

  "Should we follow them?" Cassie whispered.

  Greg watched the deer hurry away. Unlike whitetail, which raised their white tails like flags when alarmed, these mule deer whose dark tails were hard to make out at this distance, simply walked away at a fast pace. Greg watched them cross the fence at a spot where a tree limb had fallen on the barbed wire and flattened it. As the deer vanished behind some trees, Greg spoke.

  "Thanks to the snow we can just follow their tracks."

  Cassie nodded smiling.

  Greg and Cassie took their time walking back down toward the fence line. There was always the chance that the deer had stopped and were watching them right now.

  "When you want to follow a deer," Greg had told Cassie, "it’s best to pretend you aren't trying to follow it."

  Near the fence where they had last seen the deer, they began to search the ground.

  "Dad!" Cassie said quietly. She pointed to a spot on the ground not far in front of her.

  Greg walked over and looked down, then took in the snow surrounding the small tracks Cassie had found. It took him only a moment to spot the larger set of tracks, just a few feet away.

  "Let's follow them," he whispered.

  Cassie nodded. Together they followed the tracks. After crossing the fence the deer had gone more or less in a straight line for a while, which twisted around brush and trees, but once the deer felt safe, their tracks seemed to meander.

  "They think they've lost us, or at least are safe," Greg said.

  "So they are feeding?" Cassie asked.

  "I think so." Greg looked at the ground. Though the tracks meandered quite a bit, they were more or less going in the same direction.

  "Let's take a shortcut that way," Greg said pointing off away at a ninety-degree angle. "There's a large open area that way. Maybe we can see something."

  Cassie nodded. Together they made their way toward a thick stand of trees. They did not walk fast but went as quickly as they could without making noise.

  They had been walking for about five minutes when they stepped through a line of trees into the open area where the dirt road they had driven up ran through a very large grassy meadow.

  Cassie pointed far off in the direction they were now moving. Greg followed her finger. There at the other end of the field, off to the right of the road they had come in on, stood a deer. Greg raised his binoculars.

  "It has antlers. It's a four-point." The deer had brownish grey hair on its torso with white hair beneath. The coat outlined a body well-muscled and made for fleeing from threats. The horns were a protective halo of bone. In the spring they grew covered in velvet. And if you touched them they would be hot. By fall, as the mating season began, the velvet had fallen off, giving the buck a many-pointed weapon to protect him from predators and to do battle in competition for a mate.

  Cassie was already lowering herself to the ground. Her favorite shooting position was prone. She got down on the ground and stretched out.

  "Can't see it from this position," she said.

  "Try kneeling."

  Cassie slowly rose and knelt on one leg. The other leg, positioned forward, she used as a rest for her elbow with her rifle resting on the palm of her hand above it. Greg watched her hands shake as she adjusted the scope. She turned the magnification to 4 and sighted in the deer. As Greg looked down the field, the deer raised its head. It looked at them as if wondering if they were a danger. It was a relatively young deer. It had not yet learned to be wary of people. Looking down at Cassie, Greg wanted to advise her. In his head he was saying 'sight him in and squeeze slowly,' but this was not the time to be speaking or giving lessons. He did not want to distract her.

  "Varoom," the report pushed out so loudly, Greg startled. He looked back at the deer and saw it jump, then run to its left toward a wall of brush. It jumped into a small cluster of aspen and in a moment was out of sight.

  "Did I hit it?" Cassie asked. There was a hint of disappointment in her voice that made Greg smile.

  "I do believe you did," Greg replied. "Come on, let's go down there and see."

  Greg counted the paces from their position to where he remembered the deer standing. On the way, above where they had made the turn toward the dead end, they crossed the tracks of a vehicle with a narrower wheelbase that had driven in that very morning and gone up toward the ridge. Greg had paced off two-hundred and twenty-three yards, a long shot, when he stood in the general area where the young buck had been standing. They walked the brush line first, looking down, looking for tracks and blood.

  "I don't see any tracks or blood," Cassie said, the disappointment apparent in her voice.

  "The deer was a little closer to the road when you shot," Greg said. "Let's look over here."

  Cassie looked over at the road almost forty feet away. She was sure the deer had not been standing near the road at all.

  Greg took a few steps away from the brush line into an area where some weeds poked above the snow-covered ground. Then he saw it, a single track. "Found a track, but no blood by it," he said.

  Cassie rushed over, scanning the ground as she did so. "Blood!" she cried excitedly after a moment, pointing at a spot a few steps away.

  Greg walked over. There was a dug-in track, deeper than the hoof print he had just seen. The deer's hoof had dug into the snow as the deer pushed hard against the ground in an effort to escape. Next to the print was a small droplet of blood.

  "I hit it."

  "Yes, you hit it," Greg said.

  "Why didn't it drop?"

  "They rarely do, unless it's a headshot or one in the spine."

  Cassie was looking at him with a puzzled expression.

  "Even with shots that take out the heart or lungs, they can run for a bit. What we have to do now is track it."

  They followed the tracks into the brush. As soon as the tracks had entered the brush, the blood drops seemed to stop. Greg knew this didn't mean that the deer wasn't dying. Although he had tracked a deer he shot some years before for miles before the blood stopped and the deer's tracks became lost in a highway of other deer tracks.

  "I don't see any more blood," Cassie said, her voice troubled. "Does this mean he wasn't hurt bad?"

  "I don't know," Greg said. "We have to just keep following his tracks and hope he doesn't lead us into a maze of other deer's tracks."

  "Couldn't you tell which tracks are
his?"

  "I'm not that good," Greg said.

  The tracks seemed to go on in a wild random way, which made it obvious the deer was trying to lose anything following. Greg had his head down, a step behind Cassie, watching the deer's trail when he heard Cassie gasp. He looked up. The buck lay on its side about ten feet away. It lay still. There was no obvious sign of breathing.

  Cassie ran toward it.

  "Whoa," Greg yelled. "Stay well back and poke it with your rifle first. If it is not dead, it could charge you, and those antlers could hurt you."

  He watched Cassie gently poke the buck with the muzzle of her Winchester. The buck did not move. Greg stepped up. The deer's eyes were clouded. The tongue hung out limp. It was clearly dead.

  The bullet hole had to be under a small patch of bloodstained hair no bigger than a fifty-cent piece high up on the front part of the body.

  "Okay," Greg said, "now comes the fun part. We have to gut it."

  "I know that, Dad!" Cassie said in that tone that mimicked her Mom's voice when she disagreed with Greg about something.

  From one of her large hunting jacket pockets, she pulled out a pair of rubber dishwashing gloves. Greg smiled. Callie had given him a set, too, but had not mentioned giving a set to Cassie. He'd found he had a reaction to the latex gloves they sold hunters in sets. For years he thought it was deer blood on his skin that made him itchy after a kill but realized one time when he'd put the gloves on for a cleaning job that it was the gloves or the powder they used to coat them that he was allergic to.

  Though he offered to help, Cassie insisted she make the incision to open the deer up.

  "Okay, but don't cut too deep or you'll spill its stomach contents, and we don't want that." He'd done that himself when he was a teen and could remember the smell to this day.

  But Cassie, using her own Wyoming knife, a small knife with a short curved blade on one side and a razor inside a small hook-like cover on the other, opened a small incision with the blade beneath the deer's breastbone, then slit the deer's skin open easily with the razor. She let her Dad pull the stomach, liver, and intestines out, but got blood all over her gloves and sleeves while severing the trachea. Her Dad had insisted she do that to remove the lungs and heart. He did do the cutting around the anus and penis because she asked him to. The deer's nether regions were something she did not want to think about or touch.

  Greg looked around. "We're only about twenty yards from the main road. Why don't you stay here, and I'll go back and get the truck and bring it around?"

  Twenty minutes later, each taking a front leg, they dragged it to the truck, lifted it onto the hood, and Cassie held it in place while Greg tied it on with paracord.

  "Ideally it would be better if we could put this deer in the back, but we've got all our camping stuff in there, and Mom will kill us if we get blood all over everything."

  "Won't the heat from the engine cook it?"

  "It's cold, and we aren't going too far. But it is best not to put the deer on the hood."

  "Well," she said, as he stood by the tied-on deer. "Do you want to try to find one, too?"

  Greg laughed. "I think we'd better take this one home and get it skinned and cut up first."

  "Okay," Cassie said, smiling.

  "One thing we have to do first," Greg said. He inserted his right index finger into the open cavity of the deer and brought it out covered with a gob of blood. Cassie just looked at him, puzzled as he approached her. He took his finger and marked the center of her forehead with a spot of blood.

  "Ewwwww," she cried. "Why the hell did you do that?"

  "A rite of passage," Greg said. "My father did it to me, and I'm passing it on. You are now marked as a hunter."

  Cassie stared at him for a moment, then smiled.

  "A successful hunter," she said.

  "I'm going to take my hunting jacket off," Cassie said twenty minutes later, "I'm getting too warm." She unbuckled her seatbelt and began unzipping her coat. They were going around a very sharp curve on the single lane road leading back to town when a red truck came speeding around the curve toward them. There was an open area on his left, so Greg swerved toward it to avoid a head-on crash. As the oncoming vehicle clipped the back end of the Chevy, jarring Greg, his foot hit the accelerator instead of the brake.

  Tracks and Blood

  October 23: 11 a.m.

  I couldn't waste any time. The hunter and his daughter had been missing for two days. Callie told me that the sheriff had told her that no accidents at all had been reported in the 292 hunting district. The 292 hunting district encompasses three counties: Missoula, Garnet, and Powell. And although the Carews lived in Missoula County near Potomac, she had been shunted somehow to the Garnet Sheriff's department who had put her in touch with me.

  The good news was that it had only snowed very lightly since they had gone missing, and it had gotten colder on each of the days since. I might still be able to find their tracks.

  Callie had known her daughter wore a size-eight boot because she had purchased them. But she wasn't that sure about her husband's. She thought he wore a 10-1/2 or 11. She had cried when she told me the sheriff had also asked if she could be more specific about where her husband and daughter had gone hunting, but she had no idea.

  "Murky Gulph," the boy had said then.

  I looked down at the boy and asked a corrected name, "Do you mean Murkey Gulch, Geoff?"

  Geoff had nodded as his mother looked at him in surprise.

  "And how do you know that?" I asked, eagerly.

  "I wanted to hunt too. But Dad said that Murkey Gulch was too hard a place for me to go hunting. I had to wait until I was older."

  "He had pneumonia over the summer. He tires easily. Otherwise, Greg would probably let him tag along even if he couldn't legally hunt."

  I nodded my head. You needed to be twelve and had to take a hunting safety course to hunt in Montana.

  I had looked at Callie. "You didn't have him with you when you went to the sheriff?"

  She shook her head.

  I told her to call the sheriff when she got home and tell him that Murkey Gulch was the probable area where her husband had been hunting. And in the meantime, I would go out there and take a look around.

  A gulch is a narrow canyon with a stream running through it. But to most people, Murkey Gulch referred to all the land surrounding the stream: gullies, hills, meadows, and mountains. I had hunted Murkey Gulch many times, and it was a good place to find game, especially on opening day. Callie told me her husband had been hunting for years and had brought back a buck each year for many years. This told me he was a knowledgeable hunter.

  What the boy had said about his father not believing he'd be able to handle the walking around told me that Greg Carew was not a road hunter--that is someone who drove around hoping to see a deer without ever really getting out of his car.

  This meant that he would have parked somewhere in the Murkey Gulch area and walked. If I could not find the Blue Chevy Silverado in this area, there were two choices. One: he had hunted here, but he or someone else had moved his truck. Or two: he had changed his mind and hunted somewhere else within the 292-50 hunting district they had mule deer tags for. But I thought that it was unlikely he had gone somewhere else. If he had gotten deer in this area for years, it made sense he'd come back. Based on the vibe Callie Carew had given me, I did not think her husband ran away. I had decided that I'd satisfy myself whether he'd been in the area before considering anything else. But I had to hurry. A new snow system was predicted to be coming in from Washington the next day. I had about 24 hours to find them or some sign of where they'd been.

  The road to the areas surrounding Murkey Gulch climbed a mountain called Midas Mountain. I don't know why it was so-called. There were many mines in the area, but I had never heard this mountain being associated with much gold. Near the shoulder of the mountain, this road circled around a steep area where the road itself had been cut into the rock. As I drove it,
on my right a steep slope dotted with snow-covered tree stumps dropped hundreds of feet to Rocker Creek, the next creek over from Murkey. On my left, the land that rose above me had not been logged and conifers, mostly subalpine fir, rose with snow-dusted branches. By instinct or habit, I kept my eyes on the areas between the trees. It was still elk season, and I had not filled my own tag.

  I had left Adahy a note apologizing and explaining that I had to look for two lost hunters and would go elk hunting with him at my next opportunity.

  Almost as if in answer to that thought, a young voice from the back of the Jeep said, "If you see an elk, will you stop to shoot it?"

  I braked so hard Adahy, who must have been hiding in the cargo compartment all this time, fell over the back of the back seat on top of Mariah. Mariah whined.

  "Serves you right for not letting me know he was back there," I said, scolding the girls.

  To Adahy I said, sternly, "How long have you been there?"

  He climbed between the two front seats and sat in the passenger seat. He put his seatbelt on. The Jeep was too old for airbags.

  "I came while you were talking to the two who visited your cabin. I heard what they said. So I got in your Jeep so I could help you."

  Just then my cellphone rang. I hoped it was Callie calling to say her husband and daughter had turned up. It was Yona, Adahy's mother. I assured her he was with me and safe. After the loss of her sister and then her husband she may have become a drinker, but she cared about her son. Adahy was shaking his head, no, over and over.

  "He is answering a call of nature right now. Did you want to wait to speak to him?"

  "No," Yona said. "Tell him I hope you two get an elk."

  After his mother had hung up, I turned to Adahy. "I would feel guilty if I stopped my search for that lady's family to shoot an elk."

  I depend on hunting for meat, but I had already gotten an eight-point mule deer during early gun season in the Scapegoat with my new crossbow.

  "Besides," I added, "Irene and Mariah are with us, and we can't hunt elk with dogs.”