by Annie Proulx
I was sitting next to Tukey. His liver-spotted hands shook; hard to get a straight answer from him or anyone else. They said he was a pretty good man for grouse. They said he might take company. I’d been courting him, hoping for an invitation to go out when the season opened. I thought I had him ready to say, “Hell yes, come on along.”
Banger was at the end of the bar talking nonstop to deaf Fance who had hearing-aid switches all over the front of his shirt. Tukey said Fance had a gun collection in his spare bedroom and was afraid to sleep at night, afraid thieves would break in when the hearing aids lay disconnected on the bedside table.
“God, that Banger. He’s always here, always yapping. Doesn’t he ever go home?” I asked Tukey. In ten seconds I scratched weeks of softening the old man up. All that beer for nothing. His face pleated like a closing concertina.
“Well, now, as a matter of fact, he don’t, much. His place burned down and the wife and kid was fried right up in it. He got nothing left but his dog and the goddamn hardware store his old man left him and which he was never suited to.
“And my advice to you,” Tukey said, “if you want to go out bird shootin’ like you been hintin’ around, or deer or ’coon or rabbit or bear huntin’, or,” and his dried-leaf voice rose to a mincing falsetto, “just enjoying’ the rare beauties of our woodlands …” He broke off to grin maliciously, exposing flawless plastic teeth, to let me know they had seen me walking in the woods with neither rod nor gun in my hands.
His voice dropped again, weighted with sarcasm. “My advice to you if you want to know where the birds is, is to get real friendly with that Banger you think is so tiresome. What he don’t know about this country is less than that.” He raised the dirty stub of an amputated forefinger, the local badge of maimedness that set those who worked with chain saws apart from lesser men.
“Him?” I glanced at Banger punctuating his torrent of words with intricate gestures. He pointed with his chin and his hands flew up into the air like birds.
“Yes, him. And if you go huntin’ with him I’d like to hear about it, because Banger keeps to himself. Nobody, not me, not Fance, has went out huntin’ with him for years.” He turned away from me. I finished my drink and left. There was nothing else to do.
I didn’t bother with the locals again, except Noreen Pineaud: thirties, russet hair, powder-blue stretch pants and golden eyes in a sharp little fox face. On Fridays she cleaned the house.
She stayed for a cup of coffee and smoked a cigarette one Friday, after I wrote her check. We sat at the kitchen table. She told me she was separated from her husband. That old question hung there. They check lay on the table between us.
I didn’t say anything, I didn’t move, and after a minute she tapped out the cigarette in the aluminum frozen-pie pan that was all I could find for an ashtray. She did it gently to show there weren’t any hard feelings.
I had a retreated from other people in other places like a man backing fearfully out of a quicksand bog he has stumbled into unknowingly. This place in Chopping County was my retreat from high, muddy water.
Noreen looked a lot like the kid in Banger’s hardware store. I asked her.
“Yeah, he’s one of my nephews, Raymie. My brother, Raymon’, he don’t want the kid to work for Banger. He’s real strict, Raymon’. Says it’s a job. See, he wants the kid to trap or get a job cuttin’ wood.” She turned her sharp face to follow the trail of drifting headlights outside the window.
“Raymon’ made a lot of money with a trapline when he was a kid, and now the prices for furs are real good again. Foxes and stuff. So he got Raymie these twenty-five traps a coupla weeks ago. Now he says Raymie’s gotta set ’em out and run the trapline before he goes down to the hardware store in the mornin’. You know how long that takes? Raymie takes after his mother. He like things easy.”
She talked on, uncoiling intricate ropes of blood relationship, telling me who was married to whom, the favorite small-town subject. I listened, out of the swamp now and onto dry ground.
That fall I went alone for the birds as I always had. No dog, alone, and with my mother’s gun, a .28-gauge Parker. Thank you kindly, ma am, it’s the only thing you ever gave me except a strong inclination toward mistrust. She wrote her own epitaph, a true doubter to the last.
Although I sleep in dust awhile
Beneath the barren clod,
Ere long I hope to rise and smile
To meet my Saviour God
If He exists.
The first morning of the season was cold, the frosted clumps of tussock grass like spiral nebulae. I went up the hardwood slopes, the trees growing out of a cascade of shattered rock spilled by the last glacier. No birds in this grey monotony of beech and maple, and I kept climbing for the ridges where stands of spruce knotted dark shelter in their branches.
The slope leveled off; in a rain-filled hollow a rind of ice imprisoned the leaves, soot-black, brown, umber, grey-tan like the coals of deer, in its glassy clasp. No birds.
I walked up into the conifers, my panting the only sound. Fox tracks in the hoarfrost. The weight of the somber sky pressed down with the heaviness of a coming storm. No birds in the spruce. Under the trees the hollows between the roots were bowls filled with ice crystals like moth antennae. The birds were somewhere else, close hugging other trees while they waited for the foul weather to hit, or even now above me, rigidly stretched out to imitate broken branch stubs in the web of interlacing conifers, invisible and silent, watching the fool who wandered below, a passing hat and a useless tube of steel tied to the ground by earth’s inertia.
What, I thought, like every grouse hunter has thought, what if I could fly, could glide through the spruce leaders and smile down into the smug, feathery faces like an old ogre confronting the darling princess. The view from the ground was green bottlebrushes, impenetrable, confusing, secretive, against a sky the color of an old galvanized pail. No birds.
The dull afternoon smothered a faraway shotgun blast from some distant ridge, quickly followed by another. He missed the first time, I thought. It was less a sound than a feeling in the bone, muted strokes like a maul driving fence posts. I wondered if it were Banger. Banger would not have missed the first shot. It must have been a double.
Even now, as I stood listening to the locked silence, he was probably taking the second bird from his dog’s mouth, fanning the tail, smoothing down the broken feathers and opening the crop to see the torn leaves of mitrewort and wood sorrel spill out. I could imagine him talking to the dog, to the fallen bird, to his shotgun. I felt an affinity to that distant grouse hunter that I could never feel for the downtown talker.
In the weeks that followed I often hunted that ridge where the beech spread into the spruce like outstretched fingers. I heard the increasingly familiar shotgun from the second ridge beyond mine. I put up birds and I took some down.
Too many times I had to crawl on hands and knees through slash where a wounded bird had dropped, praying it hadn’t crept into a stump where I could never find it, where it would die. One I did lose. Five hours of beating back and forth in a swamp, poking into rotted logs, kicking heaps of slash and damning the lack of a dog and my atrophied sense of smell. Again that maul stroke from the second ridge, a single shot, and I envied Banger his dog. I had to leave my bird unfound.
The loss of the bird spoiled that place for me, and I decided to work over in the lean spine of rock where Banger and his dog hunted. I was sure by now that my distant hunting companion was Banger, mythical friend, sprung from the echoes of a firing mechanism, the unknown Banger imprisoned in the loudmouth’s shell.
The first early snows came and melted and we were into Indian summer. The sky was an intense enamel blue, but the afternoon light had a dying, year’s-end quality, a rich apricot color as though it fell through a cordial glass onto an oak table, the kind of day hunters remember falsely as October.
It was a day for birds. They would be lounging in favorite dust bowls, feeding languidly on thor
n apples like oriental princes sucking sugared dates. A late patch of jewel weed with a few ragged blossoms in a wet swale caught my eye halfway up the ridge. There was a thick stand of balsam at the far end. The jewelweed had a picked-over look, and the balsams had good ground openings for walking birds. It felt birdy.
I breathed shallowly to keep my heartbeat from vibrating the air. I knew the birds saw me, knew that I knew they were there, and I waited for the wave of adrenaline to pass, for the hot blows of blood to subside. I slid the safety off.
The birds were invisible in the runways under the firs, resting after a morning of snapping off the jewelweed flowers that burst halfway down their throats. Young birds, I thought, into the jewelweed. They would fly up as soon as I took a step forward.
I stayed still, never quite ready, the moment taking me. I waited too long, and a delicate pattering in the leaves of the hardwoods beyond the balsams like the first tentative drops of rain told me the birds had walked away, young tender grouse with pinkish breastbones who might have been flushed, might still be flushed, but who had won this particular encounter. Let them have the jewelweed and the October sunlight this time.
I skirted the balsam stand and came out on the back of Banger’s ridge. When I looked down I saw Stone City.
There are some places that fill us with immediate loathing and fear. A friend once described to me a circle of oaks behind a farmhouse in Iowa that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. Later he heard that the body of a murdered child had been found there, half-covered with wet soil, a decade earlier. I felt something evil tincturing the pale light that washed my first view of Stone City.
It was an abandoned farm lying between two ridges, no roads in or out, only a faint track choked with viburnum and alder. The property, shaped like an eye, was bordered on the back by a stream. Popple and spruce had invaded the hayfields, and the broken limbs of the apple trees hung to the ground.
The buildings were gone, collapsed into cellar holes of rotting beams. Blackberry brambles boiled out of the crumbling foundations and across a fallen blue door that half-blocked a cellar hole.
I came cautiously down the slope to the fields. The grass hummed with cicadas, crickets and grasshoppers that had escaped the early frosts. The buzzing stopped as I stepped into the field. The soil looked thin. A long backbone of rock jutted from the pasture. Something of the vanished owner’s grim labor showed in a curious fenceline that would stand another hundred years; the fence “posts” were old iron wagon axles sunk deep into holes hand drilled in the granite ledge.
There was no wind. Yellowjackets were at the rotten apples under the orchard trees. The light fell slow, heavy. Inhaling the sharp odor of acetic, rotted fruit I stepped into the honeycolored field. I remembered the feeling I had as a child, of sadness in the early fall.
A bird tore from the apple tree with a sound like ripping silk straight toward the narrow neck of field that closed into trees. Feathers made a brief aerial fountain and I marked the bird’s fall into quivering grass as I dropped the gun. A second, a third and a fourth roar, the air was full of birds, breakers of sound over my head, bird flight and shotgun beating against the walls of hillside and birds falling like fruits, hitting the ground with ripe thumps. Only the first of them was mine.
A bell tinkled and a Brittany came into the field to pick them up. Banger said, “You stepped out just the same time as I did. You the one I hear shootin’ up in the Choppin’ Swamp these past weeks?” He didn’t look at me. The dog brought all the birds to Banger.
“Nice shooting,” I said. The birds were good-sized. “What is this place?” There were three hens and a smaller cock.
Banger looked around and twisted up his mouth a little. He took up a bird and gutted it.
“This place, this old farm, is a place I used to hunt when I was a kid. I was run offa here three times, and the last time I was helped along with number six birdshot. Still got the little pick scars all acrost my back. Old man Stone. Shot me when I was a kid, tryin’ to run me off.” He pulled the viscera of the second bird from the hot cavity.
“Place used to be called Stone City. I still call it that. Stone City. The Stones all lived up here—three or four different families of them. Their own little city. Tax collector never come up here. No game warden, nobody except me, a kid after the birds. There’s always been birds here.”
“What happened to the Stones?”
“Oh, they just died out and moved away.” His voice trailed off. I didn’t know then he was lying.
The afternoon sun streamed over Banger’s dog who sat close to his leg. His hand went out and cupped her bony skull. “My dog,” he said “All I got in the world, ain’tcha, Lady?”
He squatted on the ground and looked into the dog’s eyes. I was embarrassed by their intimacy, by the banal name, “Lady,” by the self-pity in Banger’s voice. No, I thought, there was no way I could be Banger’s hunting companion. He had his dog. So it was a shock when the dog walked over to me and licked my hand.
“My Jesus,” said Banger. “She never done that in her life.”
He didn’t like it.
We walked back past the cellar holes toward the spruce at the end of the fields. Banger’s dog walked beside and one step behind him.
“Give you a ride,” said Banger.
His old Power Wagon was parked on a logging road half a mile below Stone City. It rode rough, bottoming out on hummocks and rocks. Lady sat in the middle and stared straight ahead like a dowager being driven to the opera. Banger shouted at me over the roar and clatter of the truck.
“Old man Stone … meanest bastard I ever … all his sons and daughters wilder … mean … and they was a lot of them.” The gears crashed and Banger wheeled the truck onto the main road.
“They had all these little shacks with broken-down rusty cars out front, piles of lumber and empty longnecks and pieces of machinery that might come in handy sometime, the weeds growin’ up all crazy through ’em everywhere. The Stone boys was all wild, jacked deer, trapped bear, dynamited trout pools, made snares, shot strange dogs wasn’t their own and knocked up every girl they could put it to. Yessir, they was some bunch.” He turned onto a dirt road that ended at the sugarhouse he’d fixed up.
“Should of looked at what I was doin’. Guess I brought you home with me, I’m so used to turnin’ up the hill. Fried bird for supper. You might as well stay.”
He took down four birds from the side of his woodshed and hung up those in his game vest. He wouldn’t let me help pluck the supper birds but waved me into the sugarhouse. Lady raced around him, chasing the down feathers in the rising late afternoon wind.
I looked around inside. There were a few books on a shelf, some pots and pans hanging from nails, the dog’s dish and a braided Discount Mart rug behind the stove. Banger’s cot, narrow as a plank, stood against the far wall. I thought of him lying in it, night after night, listening to the dog’s snuffling dreams behind the stove.
The place was something of a grouse museum with spread pat tails mounted on the walls—greys, a few cinnamon reds and one rare lemon-yellow albino. Curled snapshots of Banger as a young man with grouse in his hands were stapled up beside colored pages cut from hunting magazines, showing grouse on the wing. There were shotguns hanging from pegs and propped in the corners. A badly mounted grouse of great size, tilted a little to one side as though it were fainting, stood on a section of log behind the door, and nests of dried-up grouse eggs on a little shelf must have dated back to Banger’s boyhood collecting days, featherlight shells filled with dried scraps of embryonic grouse.
I lit the kerosene lamp on the table, illuminating a framed photograph in a wreath of plastic flowers, a picture of a girl standing in front of a farmhouse with a sagging roof. She had long hair, the ends blurred as though the wind were blowing it when the shutter snapped. She squinted into the sunlight, holding a clump of daisies hastily snatched up at the last minute for effect. I could see the clot of soil clinging to the roo
ts. Banger’s dead wife.
Lard spattered out of the frying pan and flared, ticks of flame, as Banger dropped in the floury pieces of grouse. He sprinkled salt and pepper, then threw the fresh livers and giblets of the day’s bag to Lady behind the stove.
We ate in silence. Banger’s jaws worked busily on the savory birds. He said nothing for a change. The oil lamp flame crept higher. I thought of wagon axles set in granite ledge and asked what old Stone was like.
“He was the worst of the whole goddamn tribe. Had kids that was his grandkids. Dirty old tyrant, used to whip ’em all, keep ’em in fear.” His fingers drummed a partridge roll on the table. He shouted at the photograph of the girl, continuing an unfinished argument. “The old pig ought to have had nails pounded into his eyes and a blunt fence post hammered up his asshole!” Banger’s voice choked.
I did not see him for nearly a month after that dinner.
2
The dark fox trotted behind the screen of chokecherries along the highway, undisturbed by the swishing roar of vehicles twenty feet away. This was the extreme southern border of his range and he never crossed this road. The corpse of a less-wise raven lay beneath a bush like a patch of melted tar. The fox rolled in the carrion, grinding his shoulders into it. He got up, shook himself and continued his tour, a black feather in the fur of his shoulder like a dart placed by a picador.
As swiftly as though she were pulling grass Noreen plucked the second bird. The other lay on the white enamel drainboard, a dusky purple color.
“Oh, I don’t mind doin’ it. I done hundreds of ’em. There was one or two years when I was a kid, things were real bad up here, no jobs, no money. We lived on pats and fish—trout, suckers, anything. I used to clean the birds.” Her fingers leaped from the small body in her left hand to the pile of feathers in the sink and back again.
“My brother Raymon’ done the fish. He never liked the smell of a bird’s guts, but it don’t bother me. He can skin out or clean any other kind of animal just as fast and good, but not birds. I don’t mind ’em.”
