Eulis S. Morgan
The Hunter
After milking, the real work began. Saturday was wash day. Washing our clothes generated many chores, especially during the morning. Oz and I were off the hook because after milking, we had the fence to repair. I was an expert at sabotaging a fencing job while making it look good. This morning though I did a proper job. The hard physical labor helped brighten my mood, which was darkened by the weather as well as the unexpected turbulence of my love life.
The most pleasant autumn that I had ever known was coming to an end. There was no point in clinging. The trees had received the same weather report I did. They were already looking browner than the evening before. At the first gust of a strong wind, the ground would be thick with leaves. Even with doing a bang up job, fixing the fence wasn’t an all day job for Oz and me. Normally Daddy would have found other things for us to do but he was working overtime at the saw mill.
I was still wound up too tightly. I knew I would not unwind until I spent some time beneath the forest canopy. The color was draining from late autumn like grass through a goose. I decided on telling Momma that I was going hunting: not ask, just make the declaration. If she overruled me, I would simply back down. No harm, no foul. But she liked wild game, and I hadn’t been hunting in a while. If the washing was going well, there was a good chance she’d let me go. Oz didn’t like killing, so I would get my alone time in the forest. I didn’t particularly like hunting either, but it was in the natural order of things. I put it down to a sacrifice that my patch of forest and I must sometimes make for love.
By noon, I was carrying my shotgun through the pasture as I walked a path that branched into one of life’s most delicious quandaries: which way to take into the woods. If I turned just before the barn and went out the right side of the pasture, I entered through a stand of sassafras trees and young oak trees. The sassafras trees grew thin and straight, almost like brown bamboo. The oaks had thicker trunks and a much wider spray of branches. The cows liked to find shade in the thicket in the summer, and except for piles of cow manure, they kept the ground clean. With the sun directly overhead, no shadow, and straight tree trunks standing like so many pillars, the sassafras and oak thicket felt serene and somber like an empty train station.
If I turned to the left rather than the right, I exited the pasture through the tractor gate, which opened onto the remains of an old logging road running between our pasture and our field. There had been no logging in the area for decades but enough hunters and fishermen used the road to keep the bushes and blackberry vines from completely taking it over. Big trees grew on both sides of the old road, and in many places; their branches overhung it and intertwined in the middle. In those places, the road cut like a long, leafy corridor through shadows and darkness on either side.
The further into the forest it ran, the more overgrown the road became until it finally petered out altogether. It appeared again, just for a bit, in the form of an old bridge where it used to cross the Cache. The side rails were gone but the bed was still in such good shape that Bossy would cross it. The strip of woods on the far side of the river was narrower than the stretch on the side where my family lived. On the far side, there were places where fields were visible from the river bank. Strange people farmed those fields. Sunday Tice lived across the river. She was one of those strange people. Eric’s remark about witches came back to me. I suppressed him.
The third way into the forest was to walk straight on past the barn and climb over the hog-wire fence at the bottom of the hill. The flimsy metal of the fence was holding back the heart of darkness. If that part of my forest had ever been tamed, it was feral now. The floor was boggy and loamy. Wild grape vines shrouded the trees. Rotten and half rotten old logs served as dens for chipmunks and hunting grounds for whip snakes. The standing trees were ancient and ivy clad, and wherever a ray of sun pierced the canopy, brambles, bushes, and poke salad fought each other for a drink of white life. The place assaulted the lungs with the permanent musk of a leaky old house. Since I was in a dark mood, I chose the dark path. To climb over that fence was to dive face-first into the full force of nature. I went in silently without a splash.
More than I hunted any game, I always stalked myself by drifting from shadow to shadow like a leaf floating sideways. My goal was to become better at moving like an animal. Noise was the friend of the hunted, so I made no noise. Only their peripheral vision and their keen sense of smell protected them against my sixteen gauge. Hoof prints and burrows into rotting vegetation released the telltale scent of decay: always a good scent for a hunter. Noise was the friend of the hunter too. But unless the squirrels were cutting nuts and acorns, the animals also made little noise. I didn’t hear them so much as I felt a disturbance in the silence.
My forward vision, better that 20/20, balanced out their peripheral vision. I could actually see the eyes of a rabbit through the seedy undergrowth of a bramble patch. The last sound it would hear was the click of my shotgun’s hammer. Many days I had bagged a couple of rabbits out back of the barn before even climbing the fence. That certainly wasn’t going to be the case today. I planned on spending the entire afternoon out and about. With so much to consider, I didn’t want the distraction of hauling dead rabbits around.
My first item for consideration was what an idiot I had been for going off on Finkelstein. I could have been out in the woods with a Playboy Magazine. In my world, it didn’t get any better than that. I hadn’t seen a Playboy in ages, literally years. Now I wasn’t likely to see one anytime soon. My mental self-flagellation came to an abrupt end when I heard a raspy cough. Instantly I forgot all about magazines. The cough was a sound I didn’t know. I froze in the shadow of a big hickory tree. To my amazement, a deer, a big buck and an old one judging by the spread of its antlers, ran close by me as if it hadn’t seen me. If I had wanted to shoot a deer—and I didn’t—it would have been the easiest shot I’ve ever taken. Wherever the animal was going, it was in a hurry. Even so I couldn’t believe it hadn’t seen me or smelled me. One more raspy hacking cough and, except for the hoof prints it left in the soft ground, it was gone.
I went after it. I had no intention of harming the deer. My family never ate venison. But the wind was in my favor. I just wanted to see if I could track it. How I wished I had a camera instead of a gun. Then I could have taken the shot and garnered bragging rights forever. A trophy buck was a rare something to see, let alone hear. Never before had I heard a deer make a sound. The big stag was almost as bad as a barking dog. Was it sick or was that cough some sort of call?
Now I had to move fast as well as carefully. I went as quickly as I could without making noise. Even so, it didn’t take me long to lose the trail. The buck was behaving out of character for a deer. It went straight across small meadows that I had to go around. I didn’t know why it hadn’t seen me. Even if I were directly behind it, it would spot me quickly if I broke cover. The soft ground helped enormously. Twice I lost the trail and was able to quickly pick it up on the other side of a clearing. The third time I lost the trail, I wasn’t able to pick it up again.
But I knew these woods, and if the deer kept going in the same general direction, I could guess about where it would run up against the river. If it didn’t cross, I might get another glance at it. Vectoring away from the deer’s tracks, I set a course that approximated two sides of a right triangle. If I guessed correctly the deer’s course would be the hypotenuse. I ran as fast as I could for a few minutes and then made a hard ninety-degree turn straight for the river. My hope lay in cutting the deer’s trail somewhere close to the Cache. I did better than I expected. As I neared the river, I clearly heard the stag’s raspy cough. I was in front of my quarry rather than behind it.
Instantly I dropped to the ground. If I was in front of the buck, the wind was no longer with me. The deer’s keen sense of smell gave it all the advantage. Now I moved slowly and carefully, working my way by a roundabout route back the way I had just come, first going away from the river and then circling back toward it. If I could just get a glimpse of the animal again, it was just as good as having its head to hang on my wall. It coughed again. Oddly enough, it didn’t seem to be moving. The sound gave me a good reference as to its location.
As I moved forward, I could tell from the change in the light that I was coming up on another small clearing. On the side where I approached the clearing, a tree had long since fallen and was in the process of rotting away. A clump of water grass grew at the end that had fallen into the clearing, and that’s where I headed, easing the shotgun along with me and using the rotting log for cover. When I cleared the log and reached the grass, I ended my hunt. The grass was dry and would rustle. I questioned whether I was close enough for a good shot with a shotgun. I decided on trying for a quick peek anyway and then declaring victory.
While moving along the log, I had been on my belly. I had to do a pushup to raise my head above the grass. I had won the hunt. My stag was in full view on the other side of the clearing. As soon as I rose up, the animal sensed me and turned its head to face me. It made no effort to run away. I froze, not because of the deer, but because there was another sight in that meadow that was even more marvelous than a magnificent stag standing uncovered in broad daylight. Kneeling in front of the dangerous wild animal and naked as the day she was born was my intended girlfriend, Sunday Tice.
Now there really was something you don’t see every day. Before I could determine what Sunday was doing, the grass more shivered than rustled and I heard a soft hiss. It was far too late into the season for that sound. Even though its presence was not possible, I knew exactly what it was. My already tense muscles stiffened into a hard freeze except for my eyeballs, which slowly, reluctantly rolled down in their sockets to bring under my gaze yet another something you don’t see every day. There, lifted in an S coil and within easy reach of my hand or my face, was the biggest water moccasin I had ever seen.