A yellow-white sun glared inside his closed eyes.
“Herm. Three-thirty. Time to get up.” Rough fingers brushed his bare shoulder. The boy tightened his eyelids against the flashlight beam and turned his face away, trying to keep consciousness from scratching its way to the surface. If he didn’t wake up, he couldn’t go, his 12-year-old brain reasoned. But he knew better.
Groggy and blinking, he inhaled deeply, threw off the covers and rolled his bare feet onto the hardwood floor. He drew a second long breath and found the dark air cold on this first morning of Monto: Season of the Hunt.
How silly that sounded, he thought. And how serious they had been when they had spoken those words the night before. Then Sam had laughed, and Charlie handed out cans of Falstaff beer-and they ran cleaning rods down the blue-steel barrels of those rifles with the strange names: Three Hundred Savage and Thirty-Ought-Six.
The boy sat on the edge of the bed for a moment. He rested his chin in his hands as he shivered, stared down at a floor he could not see and tried to figure a way out of this. As he had for weeks. Damn, damn, damn, he thought.
No way out.
His cousin Greg, a year older, had “bagged” his first buck the previous deer season. The boy had watched Sam, his thickly muscled stepfather, and his Uncle Charlie string the lifeless, tawny animal up by its hind legs and then run a knife the length of its white-furred belly, opening it like a ripe melon and emptying its purplish-red entrails, wet and steaming, into the frosty morning air. The two men had touched their forefingers to the blood that dripped from the still warm carcass and turned toward Greg. Then Sam ran his crimson-stained finger down his cousin’s left cheek, while Charlie did the same to his right. Greg had looked back at them, deadly serious. Then they had laughed and howled like wolves and hugged each other.
He had felt sick.
Nearly as sick as he had a few years earlier. When he had received a BB gun-a Daisy Red Ryder lever-action carbine-for his birthday and quickly discovered himself to be a crack shot.
After blasting every pop bottle, soap box and soup can in the neighborhood, he went after more challenging targets. So he took aim at a small bird. A sparrow, he thought, or maybe a finch. He wasn’t sure. It was so small that he never really expected to hit it.
The bird had been hopping along a branch when it suddenly stopped, rolled sideways and fell like a tiny gray-brown pouch. He had frozen, horrified. Unable to move or speak. His jaw dropped, then his air rifle. He just stood there. Still at first, then trembling. He pressed his teeth against his lower lip and walked, hesitantly, toward the fallen bird just lying there. Its small black eyes blinked rapidly, and its soft feathered sides rose and fell with terrible speed.
Then its eyes closed. Its breathing stopped. Its oval body seemed to just collapse upon itself, becoming a formless little mound.
Breathing rapidly like the bird had seconds before, he reached out and touched it. Lightly at first, then harder. Poking, prodding. Willing it to rise and fly away. His finger made a shallow dent in its flannel-soft feathers, but the bird did not move. He pulled his finger back and stared at the lifeless lump.
What should he do? What could he do, he thought? Something. Nothing. Stay and keep trying. Run away. He didn’t know-couldn’t move, could hardly breathe. Then he reached out again and petted it, slowly and softly the way he did his sleeping cat, choking out barely audible apologies over and over and over.
As he stroked it, he had pulled a wing back, exposing the ugly red hole.
Now he sat alone on the edge of his bed and stared into the darkness.
His stepfather, Sam, dressed in a black-and-red plaid wool shirt and carrying a metal cup of steaming coffee, opened the door to his room and walked in. A soft light from the kitchen trailed behind him. He knelt near the bed and leaned toward the boy.
“Gonna be a good day, Herm. A good hunt,” his stepfather whispered through his thin lips. “Five’uh the last seven years, we got us a buck the first day. Hell, Greg got his a half hour outta the car last year. Maybe the huntin’ gods’ll give you yours the same way.”
He squatted a few feet away, smiling as the steam from the cup crossed his face, and patted one of the boy’s bare, shaking knees.
“Cold, Herm?” he asked, “or maybe just a little nervous. It’s OK to be a little scared. I was. Charlie, too, the first time. Hell, we still are. Barely slept all night. But that means you’re ready. Alert and all. You’ll be OK.” He lifted the cup to his lips and made a sipping sound.
The boy said nothing in return. He just nodded. Sam was a good man, he thought. He really was. A carpenter who built wonderful things with his hands and who always measured every cut twice to make sure the corners were perfectly square. “A man pays you for square corners, he deserves square corners, even if it takes a little longer,” he had said more than once. Sam had only been his stepfather for maybe three years, but he had treated him like his own. Playing catch, going to his Little League games. Every one of them. “That’s OK, Herm,” he had said just last month as the boy looked up at him through red-rimmed eyes. “Ev’ry ballplayer, even big leaguers, drops one now and then. And don’t forget, it was your two-bagger won the game a few weeks back. Hell, I been drivin’ nails all my life, and I still hit my thumb with a hammer more’n I’d like to admit.”
And now they were going hunting.
Still moving with almost exaggerated slowness, thinking, maybe, that this would make the clock tick more slowly, the boy pulled on his wool socks, warm and scratchy against his hairless calf, and then his old jeans, pausing after buttoning them to sigh and run his tongue over his lips. I’ll make noise, he thought. I’ll cough. I’ll step on twigs. I’ll trip on rocks. Then they maybe won’t want to take me anymore.
“Move it along, Herm. We’re shovin’ off in five minutes,” his stepfather whispered through the open doorway.
“OK. I’m almost ready.” He pulled his T-shirt over his head and reached for the wool plaid shirt, a smaller version of his stepfather’s. His mother had bought it at Pelch’s, the “Outdoorsman’s One Stop Store” a few days ago. Everything had to be just right for the Big Day.
“Don’t forget your rifle now. Wouldn’t be much point in goin’ huntin’ if you left that at home,” his stepfather said, sticking his square-jawed face through the door. Then he chuckled and moved quietly back into the kitchen.
His rifle. A monstrous thing called a Three-Oh-Eight Winchester topped by a Lyman-Alaskan scope with a single vertical post inside the lens instead of the usual cross hairs-better, his stepfather said, because all you have to worry about is putting the top of the post somewhere in the shoulder area, and you’ve got yourself a buck. “Just squeeze the trigger real slow-don’t jerk it, else you’ll pull it to the right-and you’ll drop him.”
No way, no way, he had thought, unable to imagine using a bullet to close those soft brown eyes forever. But he had smiled and nodded and said yessir.
The boy put his old blue wool baseball cap on his head and walked over to his closet. He opened the door and touched the hard leather sling of the rifle that his stepfather had used before he had bought his new one. His mother had let it slip, a few days ago, that the thing was going to be a surprise 13th birthday present in a few weeks. He’d have to remember, he thought, to act excited. He really wanted baseball spikes.
He pulled the bolt back to make sure the chamber was empty, then rammed it back home with a loud, metallic clank, slipped his hand under the sling and slid the weapon over his shoulder. He loved the way the handle of a baseball bat felt in his hands. But he tried not to touch the rifle’s dark walnut stock.
The boy looked down at the floor and took a final deep breath. Then he turned and walked out of his room and into the kitchen.
An hour later, the sun rose on a steep trail covered with flat plates of loose shale that slipped and skidded beneath their boots. The hunters, carrying their rifle barrels pointed to the left across their bodies, leaned into the hill and tried desperately to find firm footing. The boy thought that between the rocks rolling down the hill and their mumbled curses, they were making so much noise that any deer within half a mile would run off long before it saw or smelled them. He made sure that he slipped and fell and cursed and slipped and fell and cursed his share, or more. Even Sam and Charlie, old pros at this their entire adult lives, were having trouble. “Why inna Sam Hill didn’t we follow the middle trail?” his stepfather grumbled for the fifth or sixth time.
But they finally reached the top, and looked out across a flat plateau ringed with forests of birch and maple, beech and aspen.
“There’s a stream ’bout half a mile west,” Charlie said in low tones. “Like the place where Greg got his last year. It’s the first day of the season, and they haven’t figured out yet that they gotta get their water somewhere else. In a week or two, you won’t find none anywhere near here. But we got a good chance today.”
The boy swallowed and licked his lips. He was tired from the long uphill hike and was about to suggest that he rest here and wait for them when his stepfather turned and put an arm around his shoulder.
“You did real well on that trail, Herm. Real dogged. Hell, you slipped less than the rest of us. Looks like you’re a natural-born tracker. Must have a little Arapaho or Kiowa in you,” he said. He smiled, patted the boy’s shoulder and squeezed his neck. “Pretty soon we’ll find out if it was all worth it, won’t we. Excited?”
The boy forced the corners of his mouth upward in what he hoped would pass for a smile, and nodded slowly. It was the best he could manage.
“Let’s move out,” Sam whispered to Charlie, who nodded once in return. “Single file, one foot directly in front of the other. Touch the ground real light at first, then solid-like. Watch for dry sticks. No noise. Deer got ears like radar. Coulda used some ears like that myself in the war. Caught us by surprise. Near got us all.” His voice trailed off.
The boy had heard the story before. He reached into the right front pocket of his jeans and his fingers found the medal Sam had given him almost two years ago. A Bronze Star. The boy had found it in a battered White Owl cigar box while looking through some old Life magazines in the garage when Sam had walked in. “Just some stuff from the war,” he had said. “A long time ago. Don’t mean anything now.” Then he had reached into the box and pulled out the heavy star hooked to a red-and-blue ribbon. “Here, Herm. This is for you,” he said, handing the boy the medal. “For being a helluva baseball player. OK?” Since that day, the boy had put the medal in the rear pocket of his uniform before every game. For luck, he thought. But what kind of luck could it buy today?
One behind the other, they headed toward the stream whose running water they could hear. It wasn’t that far away. The boy saw a dry limb, maybe a foot long, lying near the trail’s edge. He stepped on it. A loud crack sounded in the heavy, damp air. The others stopped, then slowly turned. Be careful, dammit, their frowns said. He looked at Sam who stared at him briefly, then mouthed OK and continued on.
The boy coughed. Not too loud. Just loud enough to be picked up by one of those long, upturned velvet-smooth ears. Thirty yards later, he nudged a softball-sized stone near the trail’s edge over a small ravine and stopped in his tracks as it bounced and careened through the dry brush before coming to a stop with a loud thunk against a larger rock.
Charlie turned, this time with hands on hips, his head cocked slightly, his lips a narrow line. Then the boy looked into the face of his stepfather and the man looked back at him, right in the eyes, for what seemed a long time. The boy met his eyes, then looked away, then met them again. But he couldn’t hold them for very long. What did he see there? A look of, what, disappointment? Disgust? This time, his stepfather said nothing, made no gesture. He just turned and continued walking in slow, exact steps toward the stream, now only 50 yards away, just the other side of a grove of white-barked birch.
The boy felt a strange mix of shame and relief. Surely, no deer could have failed to hear the racket he had made. And his stepfather’s suspicion, if that was what he had seen in Sam’s face, wouldn’t last forever. He closed his eyes for a few seconds and sucked in a huge breath.
Then they were at the tree line. For the first time, he was aware of just how loud the water was. He could barely hear the leaves that brushed Charlie’s arm only five or six feet in front of him. He stopped immediately. His foot stopped in mid-air, then came down slowly. Oh God, what if . . . .
He never finished the thought. He watched his stepfather remove his finger from his closed lips and point to a pool at the base of a large wall of rocks that the water rushed over. Three deer. A huge, four-point buck and two doe. Fifty yards away. No more.
The boy’s breath stalled in his throat. He tried to make it go in or out, but it just stayed stuck somewhere in between. His heart beat in his head. He wanted to scream. Go Away. Run. Please Run. He opened his dry mouth, but nothing came out of it. All three looked at the boy and slowly nodded their heads in his direction. And just as slowly, almost dreamlike, he placed the butt of the rifle stock against his shoulder and raised the muzzle. He thought, `I could miss. I will miss.’ It would be so easy. First-hunt jitters. “Buck fever”-he’d heard them talk about it many times. No one could blame him. That’s OK, they’d say, you’ll get one next time. But he had to at least fake it, he thought. Make it look good.
His whole body trembled as he looked into the scope. Just like his stepfather had said, there it was. The single vertical post. Its tip already nearly touched the deer’s shoulder. The boy breathed deeply and closed his eyes a moment and was able to hold the rifle steadier. Christ, it was so easy. Mechanically, he moved the barrel just slightly to the left so the tip sat right at the animal’s shoulder. Just behind where its leg and shoulder muscles met. Nothing moved. Oh Jesus God, what should I do now? His heartbeat still pounded in his head, but how slowly, he thought. His finger-why couldn’t he make the goddamned thing stop shaking?-had rested against the trigger, touching it lightly. It seemed like hours had gone by.
“HAAA-BOOM!!” His shoulder felt as if it had been hit by a fastball. His ears exploded. The ground under his boots shook. He felt a numbing ache behind both eyes.
“You got him, Herm! Damn, you got him!”
Whose voice it was, he couldn’t tell. The words sounded distant, the voice a stranger’s. He had closed his eyes when the shot rang out and now he opened them. Just in time to see the hooved feet stop quivering and the head slowly settle on the mossy bank.
There was his stepfather, walking toward the dead animal, looking back at him. Sam smiled proudly and waved at him to follow. The boy began to move forward, but his legs were weak, and he felt all hot inside. It took him nearly a minute to walk 50 yards.
“Looks like you’re as good a shot as a centerfielder, Herm,” he said. “This here’s a four-pointer. Bigger than anything Charlie or me ever got, I’ll tell you. And your first one. My Lord.” He shook his head slowly at the wonder of it all.
The boy looked down. At the speckles of blood running from the wet, black nose. Then he knelt and touched the animal’s side. Its fur felt wiry and tough but soft too. He ran his hand from the red-black hole at the shoulder back to the rear haunch. Then he did it a second time. Then a third. He looked at the dead eyes, still open, seeing nothing. His breathing came back. But it felt more like he was biting chunks out of the air than really breathing, and his heart still thumped hotly in his brain.
Then he started shaking again. His shoulders first, then his hands. He couldn’t make it stop. He thought he might drop the rifle. His mouth tasted like copper, like a dozen pennies lying on his tongue, and hot, sour bile came into his throat. God, please don’t let me puke. He closed his eyes again and felt his stepfather’s arm around his shoulders.
He opened his eyes and looked down at the carcass for a long time, then into the face of his grinning stepfather, now squatting right next to him. Then he turned his head just a little and looked past Sam, at the waterfall. And into the dark woods beyond.
