Big Country

Here is an essay of mine to get things started. I am currently working on getting this published. As a shameless plug: Brian Doyle liked it (I would use a blurb from him, but that is just TOO presumptuous. I have to write more first.) So here it is:

Big Country

From both sides, sagebrush elbows in on the frozen track and sparkles in the lurching headlights. My father drives, bulked up, same as me; flannel and wool against the cold. He reaches down to turn on the AM radio. You never know where you can get a signal. We don’t even get enough to hear the ads meant to torture the sleepy truckers, and he switches it back off. The suburban ruins the lattice of new ice on a puddle, until at the turn-off my father kills the ignition. The cold stiff stars prick out again. Outside I pull my collar closer and stuff my bandana down to seal the seam of shirt and neck. We load our guns, snapping the cartridges into place. I want to put my gloves on against the cold of the metal and the dawn. The brass shells capture what light there is, angle it into a long highlight, finally bending on the copper bullets where they are seated in the jackets. I feel the slight shift in weight, the deadly grit which pours as I tilt the shells, snapping them into the magazine.

The dawn is engaged in complex diplomacy; in the West still complicit with the earth, in the East a sharp contrast. There are no clouds, only fading stars and a brilliant planet standing on an inverted plumb line up from the division of the black ridge. This is it; how hunting begins.

The Salmon River makes its way in steep country. It is melodramatically known as the “River of No Return,” because of the big country it flows over and past. On that first day we walked ourselves warm in the rain up to the first ridge. My father led, as he always had. From the times I first had tagged along, nine and ten years old, he had been out front, climbing these steep hills, straight up, picking out trails between the willows and sagebrush up to the firs. I still followed, but now he led not to urge me forward, but to hide his tiring. My blood drummed in my ears, but I could hear that his breath was shorter.

We paused halfway to the low clouds, tried to vanish next to a gnarled fir. Looking out across the hillside below us, up the valley, we saw the pattern of sage and earth and grass; willowbreaks in the bottoms where the moraines of the valley met the hillsides proper. We sat and watched this valley, capped off by cloud. We strained to be anything but notable.

The hillside sagebrush below multiplied into camouflage more effective and eye confusing than anything a hunter wears. Somewhere in this view, I knew, there were deer. The countryside was large enough, I could see far enough, that in the circle of my vision, there must be a deer, probably even a buck. I had seen their scat, their tracks. But sign simply meant they were out there. No one could actually follow a deer through open country like this. The deer move with ease, untiring; smelling and hearing a clumsy man from a safe distance. They sit tight, unmoving and invisible. So we simply sought to improve our odds. We walked steep hills all day long. We relied on luck, fate and our feet. Just praying with steps to be granted a view of a buck. I willed myself to notice one, projecting a buck into my view. As I swept my attention downhill, two white patches detached themselves from the pattern of scrubby growth, then one more. Unannounced, just like that.

“There” I said, the single word rasping against the top of my throat. My father quickly brought up his rifle. I knew they were does, but he still computed the distance. My first year carrying a gun, I shot a doe. The law makes it easy on kids, gives them a doe tag so they won’t be skunked. These does weren’t far off. I wouldn’t shoot does now. My father sat in a classic position, his forehead high over the scope, his elbows propped on his knees. His whole posture defined by the line of the scope and barrel, pointed out toward those three deer. He relaxed, unstuck from the gun, and lowered it. He looked out to where the deer came even with us as they headed up and away. “It wouldn’t even be fair if their asses weren’t white,” he whispered. Slowly even those white signals faded back into the hillside.

As we walked back that evening, we chatted, no longer concerned with finding deer. I asked about my rifle, which he had been working to restore. It was a good rifle, an old thirty-ought-six, and he told me about sanding the stock, refinishing it, filling the gap of a floating barrel with glass bedding. We had sighted it in on the drive up. My marksmanship hadn’t declined too much in the long interval since my last hunting trip.

Back in the tent, we fried potatoes and sausages. My father did all the cooking, and cleaning. It wasn’t because he thought I couldn’t. It just needed to be done and he never thought of not doing it. We ate in relative silence, anticipating the next days hunt, waiting for an end to the rain.

By eleven the next day we reached the underside of the clouds, having started late. The rain turned to snow, and we met a harsh wind which never dipped to the valley floor. So late, the chance of seeing deer was slim, until dusk. We both shivered, doing our best to notice any motion. Every bare crooked branch could be an antler. Pausing for lunch on the last ridge on our way back down, we watched the road below us. “You never see other hunters on the hillsides,” my father said, motioning with his sandwich to the big white pickup, a mile off. “You can’t find deer where there aren’t any.” He looked away from the truck, up the valley to the true mountains, miles distant. The clouds clung to the snow-whitened rock, sheets slowly shredding; the clouds would break soon. He shifted on his cold rock seat and rubbed his hands warm.

That evening, as we scouted for the next day, I stopped next to a tall sage. I can’t say why I paused, maybe for the sun uphill on the sympathetic aspens. Looking down into the sagebrush, I saw a plump cottontail. He sat, pulsating rapidly, not a yard from my boot. I smiled.

“Dad,” I called to my father, just a few strides off, “There’s a rabbit under this bush”

“How close?”

“I could grab him.”

“Try it.”

The rabbit’s eyes glistened pure black, his coat the exact color of the sage bark, sprinkled thickly salt and pepper like the beard of an old rancher. His only motion was his rapid breath, the tiny twitches of his nose. I reached down slowly to him. He vanished. I grinned, and looking up at my father. He laughed once, and turned to walk back to camp.

Today the day broke clear. We leave no footprints in the frozen ground, but see frozen tracks and scat. The sky smells metallic, frosty. We head for a knob we saw yesterday. It’s a short hill, a small round point which sits above a seep-toppled aspen grove, and below a rimrock ridge. It offers a wide view of plenty of ground. It’s the coldest point of the day, before the sun has touched the hillside and when the deer are keen on breakfast. The trail is steep. We are hard pressed to quiet our breathing as we sit.

The heat of my face fogs my binoculars. Dropping them to my chest, I blur my vision to look only for movement. In the silence, every heartbeat must carry. The sky is finally blue, only the planet, dimmed to a chip of white, is left of the stars.

“There.”

I snap my head to my father, look up to where his binoculars point. There, tiny in the depressed joint of two ridges, stands a forked horn in silhouette against the pale sky. I slowly raise my rifle. The deer is too far for a shot. My father, whispers, barely audible even to my pricked ears, “There’re more.” The buck turns, and heads up the ridge in perfect outline. The ridge leads toward us. Behind him are several does, of various sizes, and finally, a larger buck. Also a forked horn, but broad in the chest, tall. He stands for a moment at the ridge, looking to the sun. We freeze. The deer move behind the ridge, not timid but alert.

“What should we do?” I ask.

“Let’s try to head them off.”

“I think there’s a trail that leads to the right. They were headed that way.”

“Sure. Let’s come out on the ridge above them,”

As quietly as possible we rise, and start off. Every dried rattle of arrowroot is a trap, a klaxon to the huge ears of those cautious mule deer. We beat the odds to find them, such small animals in such a huge world, and now they will bolt at any misstep, change direction on the other side of the ridge, stop and head back the way they came. They are ours to lose.

I look up to see the trefoil shape of a doe’s head and ears. I stop, sit, propping my leg in the boughs of the sagebrush. I cautiously shoulder my rifle. My father is already crouched behind me. It is light enough to see features, the sun just overshooting the ridge.

Through the scope, everything is flat. The doe swivels her ears back and forth, independent of each other. She takes a tentative step forward. I gauge the distance. My father looks through his scope as well; he is crouched just uphill, one foot still in the game trail. The doe moves onto the flat top of the cliff. She bends, grazes. Two more appear, smaller, yearlings. Their small chests in the scope don’t quite fill the narrow hairs. A young forked horn steps into view. He’s half obscured by the does. There’s no clear shot, and I’m not sure I want one. I saw the bigger buck on the ridge. This must be the same bunch of deer; simply come round the hill faster than expected. I train the rifle on the visible buck. Aim for the shoulder, where neck begins: no drop to account for this close.

My heart is racing. I try my best to hold the rifle steady, but the deer in the crosshairs jump and waver. The buck moves clear of the doe. I hold the sights on him, and start to slowly squeeze against the trigger. My father is antsy. I can tell he doesn’t like how long I am taking, doesn’t think it wise to wait for the bigger buck; I have a shot on this one. It might not even be the same group. I see the points of another set of antlers. I relax my grip. Down to the right, farther out on the ridge of stone, not where the other deer appeared but at a hip in the cliff, the larger head of another buck comes into view. He takes another step forward.

Two years ago my father shot a big old six point. The bullet broke his back. He had only his front legs and still tried to run. I wasn’t there, only heard the stories from my father. The image haunts me. I feel all those times as a boy the gun in my small hands terrified me with potential, when I would think with horror that I could point it to the back of the man in front of me and yank the trigger and end his life. I feel the ducks and doves and quail and whistlepigs who were on the wrong end of a gun and the doe from my first year with a license who fell after my third shot didn’t miss. Above me, the sky is cold and blue. Everything but the very center of my crosshairs and the shoulder of the buck swim out of focus and into unseen nothing.

“You better shoot,” my dad hisses.

I don’t breathe. I add pressure every time the cross swings over the place were neck becomes shoulder. He stands still, looking at me. I can’t tell if he knows what he is looking at. I exhale, hold steady on the trigger. I breathe, shiver, sight, squeeze. The gun jumps into me. A crash rolls back off the far side of the valley. In the scope the deer looses his footing, falls to the ground. The sun warms the side of my face.

“But it sure would be quite a life out here, on one of these ranches,” my father remarks. We are on the way down the country road, just after hitting pavement at the first ranch. Behind us Castle Peak is snowcapped in a sky made bluer by the fall cottonwoods. The smell of pine smoke and mule deer has worked into my clothing. It is the first thing he has said in the half hour drive so far, but he took it up like it was a reply to my thoughts.

“Hard though,” I replied. I thought of the pear tree in my front yard, of the lush watered lawn, of our property far too constrained by neighbors to contain a barn.

“Hard. But you would get to live out your whole life up here.”

I look at the sunken stubbly cheeks beneath his glasses. He is lean, leaner than me, more weathered. I’m not going to be far behind. I looked at the creases on his hands, stained by the same dark deer’s blood which is on my pants, under my nails. He had told me I would gut the deer, and he was only going to show me how. I took the knife for the first few cuts, from penis down to anus, then up to the breastbone. I started, but he had taken over, excited to demonstrate how to avoid piercing the membrane that keeps the viscera together. He had finished out the job, explaining as he went, forgetting I was to learn by doing. I don’t think he noticed my indulgent smile, or maybe accounted it to the early end of the hunt. I helped to pull the guts out, taken as always a bit by surprise at their heat, their size, their monotone confusion. We searched out the heart to keep in a ziploc bag, to be fried at home tonight with onions. The rest we left in a pile for the coyotes and eagles, maybe even wolves these days. We dragged the deer down to the truck in turns. It wasn’t hard, the heft of the buck sliding smoothly over the brush and down the loose gravel hillsides. I did most of the hauling.

As we ride out, over the washboard, past Wickiup Creek and Johnson Creek, I remember all the venison I’ve eaten. I thought of the backstrap, soon to be grilled. As fresh and organic and connected as food can be. I remember the ride in, how the conversation had slowly moved from my future and career, to past outings, to my father’s youthful hunts, to tasks at hand as we set up camp. I think about the 1,000 miles the salmon swim; from here to where I was going to school in the green sliver of coastal Oregon. I think of my father. I think of the beauty in the back of the truck, dead on my account.

The climax came earlier than I had expected. I missed it, actually. The moment of the gunshot barely existed. It was only in the dead deer that it was proven. We couldn’t even find the bullet hole, although we saw the damage to the lungs while cleaning the deer. I wasn’t sure if I had been focused on the crosshairs when the gun went off. In my memory, the only thing I could see in that tunnel vision split second was the deer. Standing, as noble and indifferent as the granite peaks, staring at me. Taking in my vest and gun and cap, wondering what I was about. Then he fell. He died, a piece of that countryside distilled, gathered up over the past few years, the snow, the wind, the sage, the dust. I was responsible. On his first encounter with man, with me, he had died. I wasn’t going to let him become some bleached and scattered pile of unseen bones. His antlers, now in the back of the truck, resting near the guns, would hang on my wall. His life would be remembered in those proud bones, his death honored. I would share his meat with friends and family; tell his story as part of mine. Before we left, we drove up the valley a bit more. At the end of the road, I walked to the top of a knoll to take a meager photo. I looked up at the peaks distant in the deep wilderness and breathed in their winds. The rest of the deer in the valley ought to stay on the ridges. They should wait. I thanked the road for stopping where it did. I turned to my father, we headed for home.

“I can name every hunt, relate the story of every animal I have killed,” my father says quietly, an hour later, as we reach the highway. “When those old geezers sit around jawing about their hunting trips, I know why. It’s what they can remember. It’s how they know.”