Tracker (3 page)

The horses took the stoneboat down the field and he threw the manure off to each side, a fork left and a fork right, and still the picture was in his thoughts, and on the way home, the quarter mile back to the barn, he realized that the only way he could make the picture whole would be to
compose a poem about it, the way his grandfather said the Japanese did.

 

The doe stood in
puffs of steam
            waiting.

 

Later that night in the kitchen after supper he told his grandfather about it, about the way the deer stood and the beauty of it and the poem he had composed.

“A rare moment,” Clay said. “But the poem only has partial meaning for me. What was she waiting for?”

John thought, wondering why the word had come into the poem in the first place. “I don't know.”

“Sometimes the best beauty comes from that.”

“From what?”

“From where you don't know, from instinct.” His grandfather smiled. “The best joy and beauty are the kinds that are unplanned, and the same is true of painting or poetry. Don't chew at it too much. It's beautiful, and it makes you remember a beautiful part of your life and that's enough.”

John nodded but he couldn't get her out of his mind just the same. Tired as he was, late as it
was, he lay in his bed upstairs and remembered the deer and the small poem and tried to think of what she might have been waiting for—why she would have stood looking at him for so long. Especially in fall, in snow, only two days before deer season when all the deer seem to sense danger around them and get jumpy and will actually run from each other, let alone a man.

It was as if she had been waiting for him, waiting for John, standing in the moonlight against the snow, waiting for him.

But to do what?

FOUR

Deer season.

The time for the taking of meat, the time for the giving of death to the deer for the taking of meat to get through the winter.

John did not think of hunting in the normally accepted manner. Once, a man came up from another state to go deer hunting and he talked of why he hunted.

He talked of how it made him more of a man to hunt and kill a deer. He talked of all the skill it took to kill a deer, all the knowledge it took to kill a deer.

John's grandfather would not allow the man to hunt on his land because he made deer hunting more than it should be.

“We take meat,” he told John, watching the man drive away. “That's all we do—we take meat with a gun. It doesn't make you a man. It doesn't make you anything to kill. We make meat, that's all.”

And that's how John thought of hunting—a way to put meat up for the winter.

After four years, the edge was largely gone from hunting, but there was still a nudge of excitement the night before season, a small thrum in the back of John's mind as he took down the rifle and began to clean it, to make sure the sights were set correctly.

He worked at the kitchen table with a small screwdriver and took the rifle apart completely and used an old toothbrush to clean each part and screw.

His grandfather carved, and drank tea and nodded approval now and then, though it wasn't required.

“If you work that swamp down to the north
early in the morning you should come on some nice bucks. Get a buck first for the tallow. You can take a doe later for good meat.”

John nodded. “I thought about the swamp, but it might be a little rough going with the new snow.” It was snowing outside as they talked, large flakes with almost no weight. They would make a light powder, ideal for tracking. With new snow in the morning any track John saw would be fresh. “I wish you were coming with me.”

“Not this time. I'll take a year off.” His grandfather's hands stopped carving for a moment and he looked out the window. “I'll pass this year—I've had plenty of hunting.”

John felt his eyes moisten and fought the feeling down. “Well. I'll make meat all right but, you know, it's just more fun with you …”

For a time neither of them said anything and his grandmother turned from the stove where she was kneading bread on top of the water reservoir. She said nothing but looked at the table, at them, then looked back and John saw she was crying.

“Dammit. That's enough of that now. There's been enough of that damn caterwauling and carrying on around here …”

John was startled. Rarely did his grandfather swear, and never in the house. He put the parts of the rifle down and sat still.

“What's happening to me happens to every single human being on the face of this earth—nobody gets away from it. Nobody. So quit all this misting up and raining and let's get to the business at hand.”

He sat still, very still, and stayed looking out the window—as if he might have been talking to the world, though it was dark and nothing showed but flakes now and then as they came into the glow from the table lamp.

John's grandmother looked at his back for a full ten seconds and then fled from the room crying and John waited another half a minute before picking up his rifle and starting to clean it again, though it was clean enough.

His grandfather sighed. “I didn't do that well, I'm afraid. I meant it to come out better, come out nice. But you see what I mean, don't you?”

John nodded. “Sort of. It's just that—well—you know. It's you this time, not somebody else. And when it's somebody close…” He let the thought trail off.

“I know. But that doesn't change anything, does
it? It still happens. That's the one fact that holds true about this sort of business, no matter what you do, you can't change it. It's coming.”

How strange it is,
John thought,
for him to talk about it this way. He's talking about his own death, his own end. The end of him.

“When I was young I used to think it couldn't be.” The old man started carving again, looking down at the wood in his hands. He was making a workhorse that would go on a small sled which he had yet to make. The chips and shavings curled off and dropped on the table and when he had a small pile of them he carefully scraped them together and got up and put them in the wood stove. Then he started carving again, gentle curves coming off the soft clear pine. “But I was wrong.”

For a time there was silence, John staring down at the rifle on the table, his grandfather carving. Before they spoke again John's grandmother came back. Her eyes were moist and some hair had loosened from the gray bun at the back of her neck. She stood over the stove but there was nothing to cook and she was just waiting.

“I'm sorry, Aggie,” Clay said, still carving. “Sometimes I lose control and … I'm sorry.”

“Don't be silly.”

And John thought that just then, that second, things were back to normal. He was carving and she was at the stove and there was that making-business sound in her voice, as if they had been fooling around and joking the way they sometimes did and she wanted them to stop.

“You bring the liver home when you get a deer, hear?” His grandfather looked up from the wood. “I've been thinking of fresh liver for a long time. You bring it home.”

“I will.” For the last two years there had been rumors circulating that deer livers were not good because they had some kind of tiny worms, and they had left the livers in the woods when they gutted the deer out. “I promise.”

“Good. You take a fresh liver and fry it up with some fresh onions and some good greasy potatoes and you got a meal.”

“Grease isn't good for you.” Agatha turned from the sink, where she was pumping water to refill the reservoir on the stove. “Too much grease is bad.”

The old man smiled. “Well. Yes. I suppose it is—but I'm not too sure it matters anymore. I think if I want to get a little greasy with my food it should be all right.”

“Just the same, just the same.”

“I'll get the liver,” John cut in. “Don't worry. The liver and the heart. If I get a deer.”

“You'll get one. You've got the touch of it. Some people hunt and hunt and never get a deer and some go out and get one every year. You'll get one just the way I always get one.”

“I wish you were going out with me this year.” It came without John calling for it, just slipped loose and was gone and he saw the corners of the old man's eyes tighten and he hated himself then, hated himself for the stupidity of what he had said, hated himself for causing hurt.

“I'll stay back and do the chores,” his grandfather said, looking down. “This is your year to go alone. This is your year, not mine.”

John clamped his teeth together and went back to cleaning the rifle as, outside, the new flakes came down, roiling in the slight puffs of wind, taking life briefly as they slid past the window and hit the yellow glow from the lamp.

FIVE

John awakened before the alarm went off and sat bolt upright in bed. It was opening morning, deer season, and the old ways had come back, the old excitement. At least for the moment.

He kicked out from under the quilt and put his feet on the floor, the cold floor. John had an upstairs room without heating grates and when the
wood stove went down to a smolder in the kitchen, the upstairs cooled fast. He pulled on wool socks, thick ones his grandmother had knitted out of raw wool, and pulled his pants on over them with a scrape of cold cloth.

He could see his breath.
It must have dropped quite a bit during the night and that's good,
he thought. If it got down around zero and there was new snow it would be still and clear and that was good for hunting.

Downstairs he heard his grandmother moving about in the kitchen and he smiled. It was three in the morning—earlier than he normally got up, so he could do chores before he hit the woods—and it still didn't matter. He couldn't get up ahead of her, even if he tried. She always got up first and put coffee on the stove and had the fire going before he made it to the kitchen.

John pulled his shirt on and went downstairs, two steps at a time but quietly because he knew his grandfather would still be asleep. He was sleeping later now, and needing it.

In the kitchen he was assailed by smells. The tang of the pine kindling in the wood stove cut above everything, but it was mixed with the soft smell of bread warming on the warming rack
and of raw potatoes frying with canned venison from the year before.

“Good morning.” John's mouth was watering already. “Sure smells good in here.”

“Morning.” His grandmother smiled. “I'll have breakfast for you after chores.”

John went to the door and pulled on his jacket. Outside he was met with a wall of cold. It was, he guessed, a little below zero—he could tell because the hair in his nose froze and stuck together—but it felt colder because he'd just come out of a warm room.

The rubber on his shoe pacs stiffened and the snow crunched as he walked to the barn in the dark.

Inside the barn it was warm, as always, and he quickly fed the cows and scraped the gutters and went back to the house for the buckets and separator parts while the cows were eating.

He was surprised to see his grandfather sitting at the kitchen table when he came back in. He was sipping a cup of hot coffee, the steam working up around his cheeks.

“Good morning,” John said.

The old man nodded his greeting. “How are things in the barn?”

“Fine. Calves are all right, cows standing to
milk. I fed silage and hay. Grained the horses. I'm going back out to milk.”

“You go ahead and milk and separate. I'll take it after that so you can hit the woods.”

John hesitated. “Are you sure? There's plenty of time and I can just as easily do it all.”

“No. It'll gray up in the east pretty soon and you want to be out by the swamp when it comes into light.”

John nodded. That was right: hunt early, eat early is what they said. Hunt late, stand and wait. “All right. If you're sure.”