“That’s a good idea,” Jack said. “I got a little gaunt yesterday.”
We finished eating and went down to the corral and saddled up by moonlight again. Then we led the horses back up to camp, got our rifles and sandwiches and started up the ridge.
None of us said very much until after we’d dropped Sloane off. Then Stan dropped back to where I was riding and pulled in beside me.
“Did you hear him last night?” he said, his face tight in the moonlight.
“Who?”
“McKlearey.”
“You mean all that screaming? Hell, how could I help it?”
“No,” he said. “I mean before we went to bed. That clever little remark he made—about a ‘high-class woman.’”
“It didn’t mean anything, Stan,” I said. “He was just talking.”
“Maybe, but I don’t think so.”
“Oh, come on, Stan. He talks like that all the time. It doesn’t mean a thing.”
“I wish I could believe that,” he said, “but somehow I just can’t. I’m about to go out of my mind over this thing.”
“You’re imagining things.” God, he acted so positive!
“Your post, Professor,” Miller said from up in front of us.
Stan nudged his horse away before I could say anymore.
“He was daydreamin’.” McKlearey chuckled raspingly. “He’s got a young wife with a wild body on her.” He laughed again. Stan didn’t turn around, but his back stiffened.
We rode on up the ridge and dropped off McKlearey.
At the top Miller wished me luck and went on back down. He seemed to have something on his mind—probably the same thing the rest of us did.
I sat on my rock waiting for it to get light and trying not to think about it. I didn’t want it to spoil the hunting for me.
Once again the sky paled and the stars faded and the deer started to move. I saw one pretty nice four-point about seven or so, but I held off. I still thought I might be able to do a little better. The rest were all either does or smaller bucks.
The sun came up.
By eight thirty I began to feel as if that rock was beginning to grow to my tailbone. I’d swung my scope up and down the ravine so many times I think I knew every branch and leaf on the scrubby, waist-high brush, and there must have been trails out in the meadow behind me from my eyeballs. Nothing had gone by for about fifteen minutes, and frankly I was bored. Sometimes that happens when you’re hunting—particularly stand-hunting. Maybe I just don’t have the patience for it.
I stood up and walked down the knob a ways. I wondered if I could see any of the others. I made damn sure the safety was on and then ran the scope on down the ridge. I could see the camp a mile and a half or so away. It looked like a toy carelessly dropped at the edge of the spruces. The beaver pond looked like a small bright dime in the middle of the yellow-green meadow.
I was sure I could make out Clint moving around the fire, and I thought I saw Miller among the horses grazing in the lower meadow. I swung the scope up the ridge a ways.
I could see the white boulder that marked Sloane’s post, but Cal himself was under the upswelling brow of the next hump. I spotted Jack rather quickly. He was standing up, tracking a doe over in the ravine with his rifle.
I searched the next post for a long time but couldn’t locate Stan—which was odd, since his post was all out in plain sight with no obstructions in my line of sight. I thought maybe he was lying under some brush, but that orange jacket of his should have stood out pretty vividly against or even under the yellowing leaves of the sparse brush.
I moved the scope on up to the notch. A lazily rising puff of cigarette smoke pinpointed Lou for me—even though he was the only one of us who wasn’t wearing any kind of bright clothing. He’d rigged up a kind of half-assed blind of limbs and brush and was sprawled out behind it, his rifle lying against a limb. He was only about a hundred and fifty yards down the hill. He raised his arm to his face with a glint and a flicker of that white bandage. He had a bottle with him. Maybe that’s what had Miller so worried. McKlearey sure didn’t seem to be hunting very hard.
I was about ready to go on back up to my rock-roost when I caught a flash of color in the thick brush between Stan’s post and McKlearey’s notch. I put the scope on it.
It was Stan. He was crawling through the bushes on his hands and knees. His face looked sweaty and very pale. He seemed to be trembling, but I couldn’t be sure.
“What the hell is he up to?” I muttered under my breath. I watched him inch forward for about five minutes. When he got to the edge of the notch, he stopped and lay facedown on the ground for several minutes. He was about fifty yards above and behind McKlearey.
I didn’t like the looks of it at all, but there wasn’t a helluva lot I could do at that point.
Then Stan raised his face, and it was all shiny and very flushed now. He slowly pulled his rifle forward and poked it out over the edge of the bank.
I suddenly was very cold.
Stan got himself squared away. There wasn’t any question about what he was aiming at.
“No, Stan!” It came out a croak. I don’t think anybody could have heard it more than five feet away from me. Helplessly I put my scope on McKlearey.
Stan’s shot kicked up dirt about two feet above Lou’s head. McKlearey dove for cover. Instinct, I guess.
I didn’t really consciously think about it. I just snapped off the safety, pointed my rifle in the general direction of the other side of the ravine and squeezed the trigger. The sound of my shot mingled and blurred in with the echo of Stan’s.
I saw the white blur of his face suddenly turned up toward me for a moment, and then he scrambled back into the brush.
McKlearey was burrowing down under his pile of limbs like a man trying to dig a foxhole with his teeth.
There was something moving on the other side of the ravine. It flickered palely through the bushes, headed down the ridge.
It was the white deer. Apparently the double echo was confusing hell out of it. It ran down past McKlearey and on down the ravine. A couple minutes later I heard several shots from the stands below. Jack and Cal were shooting.
I hoped that they’d missed. The poor white bastard was just an innocent bystander really. He had no business being on that other side just then.
I looked down and saw that my hands were shaking so badly that I could barely hold my rifle. I took several deep breaths and then slowly pulled back the bolt, flipping out the empty in a long, twinkling brass arc. It clinked on a rock and fell in the dirt. I closed the bolt, put the safety back on, and picked up the empty. Then I went back up to my rock and sat down.
23
“MAN!” Jack said when I got back down to camp, “the son of a bitch ran right through the whole damn bunch of us!”
“I shot at him five times!” Sloan gasped, his face red. “Five goddamn times and never touched a hair. I think the son of a bitch is a ghost, and we all shot right through ’im.” He tried to giggle but wound up coughing and choking.
“You OK?” I asked him.
He tried to nod, still choking and gasping. It took him a minute or so to get settled down.
“Did you shoot, Dan?” Jack asked me.
“Once,” I said, taking out the empty cartridge case, “and I think Stan did too, didn’t you, Stan?”
He nodded, his face very pale.
“I got off three,” Jack said. He turned to Miller. “I thought you said they always ran uphill, Cap.”
“Ninety-nine times out of a hundred,” Miller said.
“Maybe one of us hit him,” Sloan gasped.
Miller shook his head. “He cut back on up over that far ridge when he got past you men. I expect all the shootin’ just kept pushin’ him on down. I don’t imagine he can see too good in broad daylight with them pink eyes of his.”
Lou didn’t say anything, but his eyes looked a little wild.
We ate lunch and then all of us kind of poked
around looking for something to do until time to go back up again.
I wound up wandering down to the pond again. I stood watching the fish swim by and trying not to think about what had happened that morning.
“Why don’t you watch where the hell you’re shootin’?” It was McKlearey.
I looked at him for a moment. “I know where I was shooting, Lou,” I told him.
“Well, one of them damn shots just barely missed me,” he said. His hands were shaking.
“Must have been a ricochet,” I said.
“I ain’t all that sure,” he said. He squatted down by the water and began stripping off his bandage.
“I’ve got no reason to shoot you, Lou. I don’t have a wife.” I just let it hang there.
He looked at me for a long time, but he didn’t answer. Then he finished unwinding his hand. The gash in his palm was red and inflamed-looking, and the whole hand looked a little puffy.
“That’s getting infected,” I told him. “Clint’s got a first-aid kit. You’d better put something on it.”
“It’s OK,” he said. “I been pourin’ whiskey in it.”
“Iodine’s cheaper,” I said, “and a helluva lot more dependable.”
He stuck the hand into the water, wincing at the chill.
“That’s not a good idea either,” I said.
“I know what I’m doin’,” he said shortly.
I shrugged. It was his hand, after all.
“Danny,” he said finally.
“Yeah?”
“You didn’t see who shot at me, did you?”
I didn’t really want to lie to him, but I was pretty sure Stan wouldn’t try it again. He’d looked too sick when we’d gotten back down. “Look, Lou,” I said, “with the scopes on all the rifles in camp, if somebody was trying to shoot you, he’d have nailed you to the cross with the first shot. If one came anywhere near you, it was more than likely just what I said—a ricochet.”
“Maybe—” he said doubtfully.
“You’re just jumpy,” I said. “All keyed up. Shit, look at the nightmares you’ve been having. Maybe you ought to go a little easy on the booze.
“That’s why I drink it,” he said, staring out across the beaver pond. “If I drink enough, I don’t dream at all. I’m OK then.”
I was about to ask him what was bothering him, but I was pretty sure he wouldn’t tell me. Besides, it was none of my business.
We went back up to camp, and he went into his tent.
We went out at three thirty again, the same as we had the day before.
“I thought you wasn’t gonna shoot at that deer,” Miller said when we got up to the top.
I couldn’t very well tell him why I’d shot, and I didn’t want to lie to him. “I was just firing a warning shot,” I said. In a way it had been just that.
He looked at me for a minute but didn’t say anything. I’m not sure if he believed me.
None of us saw anything worth shooting that evening either, and we were all pretty quiet when we got back down.
“Come on, men,” Miller said, trying to cheer us up. “No point in gettin’ down in the mouth. It’s only a matter of time till you start gettin’ the big ones.”
“I know which one I’m gonna get,” Jack said. “I’m gonna bust that white bastard.”
“Not if I see ’im first,” McKlearey said belligerently, nursing his hand.
They glared at each other.
“All right,” Jack said finally, “you remember that bet we got?”
“I remember,” Lou said.
“That deer is the one then.”
“That’s fine with me.”
“That wasn’t the bet,” I said flatly.
They both scowled at me.
“Dan’s right,” Sloan said, gasping heavily. “The original bet was best deer—Boone and Crockett points.” His voice sounded pretty wheezy again, but his tone was pretty firm.
“There’s still the side bet,” Stan said very quietly. I’d forgotten about that one.
McKlearey stared back and forth between the two of them. He looked like he was narrowing down his list of enemies. “All right,” he said very softly. It didn’t sound at all like him.
“I don’t want you men shootin’ at that deer when he’s up on top of no cliff or somethin’,” Miller said. “I seen a couple men after the same deer once—both of ’em so afraid the other was gonna get it that they weren’t even thinkin’ no more. One of ’em finally shot the deer right off the top of a four-hundred-foot bluff. Wasn’t enough left to make a ten-cent hamburger out of it by the time that deer quit bouncin’.”
“We’ll watch it,” Jack said, still staring at McKlearey.
Lou edged around until he had his back to a stump and could keep an eye on both Jack and Stan. His eyes had gone kind of flat and dead. He was sort of holding his bandaged hand up in the air so he wouldn’t bump it, and his right hand was in his lap, about six inches from the butt of that .38. He looked like he was wound pretty tight.
We tried talking, but things were pretty nervous.
After a while Stan got up and went back to the latrine. I waited a couple minutes then followed him. He was leaning against a tree when I found him.
“Stan,” I said.
“Yes.” He didn’t look at me. He knew what I was going to say.
“Be real careful about where you place your shots from now on, OK?”
He took a quick breath but didn’t say anything. I waited a minute and then went on down the trail.
When the others got up to go to bed, Miller jerked his head very slightly to me, and he and I sat by the fire until they had all gone into their tents.
“I’ve got to go check the stock,” he said. “You want to come along, son?”
“Sure, Cap,” I said. “Stretch some of the kinks out of my legs.”
We stood up and walked on down toward the corrals. Once we got away from the fire, the stars were very bright, casting even a faint light on the looming snowfields above us.
Miller leaned his elbows across the top rail of the corral, his mustache silvery in the reflected starlight, and his big cowboy hat shading his eyes. “Them boys seem to be missin’ the whole point of what this is all about,” he said finally.
“I’m not very proud of any of them myself, about now,” I said. “They’re acting like a bunch of damn-fool kids.”
“I’ve seen this kinda stuff before, son. It always leads to hard feelin’s.”
“Maybe I should have shot that deer.”
“Not if you didn’t want to,” he said.
“I wouldn’t have felt right about it, but it’d sure be better than what’s going on right now.”
“Oh, a friendly bet’s OK. Men do it all the time, but them boys are takin’ it a little too serious.”
“Well, most of that’s just talk,” I told him. “They go at each other like that all the time. I wouldn’t worry too much about it. I just don’t like the idea of it, that’s all.”
“I don’t neither,” he said, “and I’ll tell you somethin’ else I don’t much like.”
“What’s that?”
“The feelin’ I keep gettin’ that we ain’t all gonna finish up this hunt. I’ve had it from the first day.”
I couldn’t say much to that.
“I sure wouldn’t want one of my hunters gettin’ shot on my first trip out.” He looked at me and grinned suddenly. “Wouldn’t be much of an advertisement, now would it?”
24
SLOANE was much worse the next morning. Much as he tried, he couldn’t even get out of the sack. Both Stan and I offered to stay with him, but he insisted that we go ahead on up.
Breakfast was kind of quiet, and none of us talked very much on the way up the ridge.
Miller looked down at me from his saddle after I’d dismounted at the top. “If the Big Man don’t get no better,” he said, “Clint’s gonna have to take him on down. This is the fourth day up here. He just ain’t comin’ around t
he way he should.”
“I know,” I said.
“I like the Big Man,” Miller said. “I don’t know when I’ve ever met a better-natured man, but I ain’t gonna be doin’ him no favors by lettin’ him die up here.”
I nodded. “I’ll talk with him when we get back down to camp,” I said.
“I’d sure appreciate it, son,” he said. “Good huntin’.” He took Ned’s reins and went on back down.
It was chilly up there in the darkness, and the stars were still out. I sat hunched up against the cold and tried not to think too much about things. Every now and then the breeze would gust up the ravine, and I could pick up the faint smell of the pine forest far down below the spruces.
The sky began to pale off to the east and the stars got dimmer.
I kind of let my mind drift back to the time before my father died. Once he and I had gone on out to fish on a rainy Sunday morning. The fish had been biting, and we were both catching them as fast as we could bait up. We both got soaked to the skin, and I think we both caught cold from it, but it was still one of the best times I could remember. Neither one of us had said very much, but it had been great. I suddenly felt something I hadn’t felt for quite a few years—a sharp, almost unbearable pang of grief for my father.
It was lighter, and that strange, cold, colorless light of early morning began to flow down the side of the mountain.
I quite suddenly remembered a guy I hadn’t thought about for years. It had been when I was knocking up and down the coast that year after I’d gotten out of high school. I’d been working on a truck farm in the Salinas Valley in California, mostly cultivating between the mile-long lettuce rows. About ten or so one cloudy morning, I’d seen a train go by. About as far as I was going to go that day was eight or ten rows over in the same field. I walked the cultivator back to the farmhouse and picked up my time. That afternoon I’d jumped into an empty boxcar as the train was pulling out of the yard headed north.
There was an old guy in the car. He wasn’t too clean, and he smelled kind of bad, but he was somebody to talk to. We sat in the open doorway looking at the open fields and the woods and the grubby houses and garbage dumps—did you know that people live in garbage dumps? Anyway, we’d talked about this and that, and I’d found out that he had a little pension of some kind, and he just moved up and down the coast, working the crops and riding trains, with those pension checks trailing him from post office to post office. He said that he guessed he could go into almost any post office of any size on the coast, and there’d be at least one of his checks there.