sparrows or swallows—take flight, slicing through the still air, before landing again.
Sensing the presence of a large animal besides himself, John cradles the gun in two hands and starts slowly walking toward the pines’ edge, where the half-risen sun gives the trees’ upper branches a bejeweled look. A branch suddenly snaps to his left. Then a sound like rushing water. In one motion, John wheels toward the noise, puts the butt of the shotgun to his shoulder, flicks off the safety, and aims at a bouncing tree limb. Just beyond the limb, he sees a tan-and-white flank disappearing into a patch of thistles and, above the thistles, a large rack of antlers. John fires. He hears the buck snort, sees the antlers tilt to the right, below the level of the bushes, then rise up again, and, as he recocks the shotgun, the deer shoot out the other side of the thistles, beyond his range, and disappear.
John pushes the safety in and runs toward the thistles, but before he gets there, he stops next to a large oblong-shaped indentation in the pine needles. He kneels down, touches with his fingers the center of the spot, feels the warmth left from the sleeping deer, even sees some of its coat lying there. He feels his heart loudly thumping in his chest, air rushing in and out of his nostrils, beads of sweat rolling down from his armpits. And he can smell the buck, the adrenal surge it’s released, like John’s own, pungent and harsh.
Holding the gun in one hand, he trots a half circle to the left of the thistles, doubles back on the far side, stops near where the deer came out, squats down, and sees several fresh drops of blood on the ground. So, it was wounded—probably in the right rear flank, given the way it had pitched forward—and is heading deeper into the woods, through thick underbrush and rough terrain, hoping to tire its pursuer out.
John had hoped to down the deer with one bullet, then drag it quickly back to the trailer, afraid that a gunshot, even at this early hour and distance from town, might be overheard by someone—maybe a hiker in the preserve—and rouse suspicion. Now that he has wounded the animal, though, he has no choice but to pursue it. He can’t just let it limp off somewhere and die slowly.
He follows the trail of blood down the east side of the mountain on a zigzagging course through a stand of white oak undergrown with witch hazel, sumac, mountain laurel, and nettles that tear at his pants and shirt and painfully rake his face, until, after several hundred yards, the brush thins out and is interlarded with moss-slick rocks and vine-covered boulders. Here the buck has headed north, along a narrow ridge parallel to one fork of the hollow road a half mile below. For a few seconds, John hears in front of him the sound of the deer’s hooves clattering noisily against the rocks. It’s bleeding thin, sporadic drops, and John fears it might be a while before it gives out.
Winded, he stops for a short blow, looking east where the sun, now completely up, casts a gold trail from the far mountain to the near. A hawk circles over Cecil Nobie’s red house and barn, which look doll-sized from this height. The day vows to be perfect, if a little hot, but John doesn’t mind hot. He likes to sweat. Taking a deep breath of the warming air, he starts again after the deer.
After nearly an hour more of bushwhacking, he comes to a dry creek bed, crosses it, then follows the deer where it has veered right, up the hill again, toward the west boundary of the preserve. A steep half-hour climb through raspberry bushes and over clear-cut maples and white pine that have been sawed and left by the state brings him finally onto the back side of Hollenbachs’ mountain, where Old Man Hollenbach a dozen years before grazed heifers and sheep. Now the old pasture’s a maze of crab-apple trees, chokecherries, Scotch pine, and brambles, but at least the terrain levels out.
Breathing heavily, John stops next to a thorn-apple tree where the deer must have rubbed its wound because the trunk is marred by blood, and from there the trail gets redder. From the way the grass and bushes are bent above the blood, John guesses the buck is dragging one leg. He thinks it can’t last much longer, and, not for the first time, he worries about how he’s going to lug a two-hundred-pound carcass all those miles back to his house. Maybe he can get Simon Breedlove to help by giving him some of the meat. He worries, too, that the farther he has to cart the deer, the more chance he has of stumbling across someone else.
Wiping his brow, he starts across the pasture. It’s not even nine o’clock and already the temperature feels like it’s gone up twenty degrees. John’s clothes are soaked with sweat and he’s thirsty enough to wring them out and drink it. A hundred yards ahead, at the pasture’s edge, he sees the deep grass swaying back and forth. He guesses it’s the deer, but can’t see it to shoot, then suddenly the buck stumbles out of the grass onto the abandoned dirt road that winds up the northwest side of the mountain to Old Man Hollenbach’s played-out stone quarry. It just stands there, sniffing the air around its knees, looking dazed and ready to cave in. John raises the shotgun to his shoulder but there’s too many trees between him and the deer to get a clear shot off, and besides, he figures by now he can pretty much walk up and put the animal out of its misery. Then the buck lets out a loud snort and, dragging its hindquarters, moves off down the road toward the quarry.
John quietly curses, not because he’s worried about losing the deer—unless it can scale rock walls, there’s only one way in or out of the quarry—but because he’s tired of chasing it and is sorry, too, that the buck has had to endure so much suffering. He hears a dog barking off somewhere and starts to worry again about being caught and wishes it were colder so that he could hide the carcass in the quarry out of sight from buzzards and coyotes and come back for it the next day before sunup. Then he decides maybe he ought to butcher the deer right there in the quarry—behind one of the slag heaps—and bring the meat home in two or three trips. A grouse suddenly breaks cover almost beneath his feet and the frantic beating of its wings nearly gives John a heart attack and he thinks, “Get this the hell over with.”
When he reaches the road five minutes later, the deer is out of sight, but a trail of blood leads directly from there to the quarry, five hundred yards in the distance. The grass on the road looks slightly impacted to John and some of the smaller rocks freshly dislodged. He kneels down and takes a closer look, but can’t tell whether the road has recently been driven on or only disrupted by the hailstorm two days before. “I’m goin’ to go kill that deer,” John tells himself, standing up and starting down the road in a nervous half-jog. “Take what meat I can easy carry, and clear out pronto.”
A flock of blue jays suddenly flies up from the quarry and starts squawking, flat out scaring John until he remembers that right about then the deer, bleeding and snorting, had probably stumbled inside and startled the birds. Still, he can feel his heart pounding in his ears. Slowing to a walk, he raises the gun to his waist. He smells spruce, the trees lining both sides of the road. At the entrance to the quarry, a small canyon with fifty-foot granite walls, he reminds himself that the deer would be crazed enough to charge whatever gets too close, and could, with those antlers, do some damage.
He flicks off the shotgun’s safety, then warily enters the canyon overgrown with briars, pine bushes, and crawling vines, stops just inside, looks around, and sees the same half-a-dozen slag heaps, junked truck chassis, gutted generator, plastic-covered lean-to, that have been there for years, and off to the right, the deep water-filled pit where John, as a boy, caught frogs, and behind it, the circular opening in the wall he had never dared enter, on one side of which stands a rusted shovel and pick.
John looks down for the deer’s blood and at the same time hears to his left a grunt, then branches cracking. He shoulders the gun, wheels toward the sound, spots behind a briar thicket a moving patch of brown-and-white, aims at it, and fires. He figures he’s hit the deer in the head or heart because, without a sound, it drops from sight as if its legs have been severed.
John levers out the spent shell. Dangling the shotgun in one hand, he starts walking toward the thicket, when suddenly a loud snort sounds directly behind him. He spins around and sees charging out from behind a slag heap, straight for him, the injured buck.
John doesn’t even have time to cock or shoulder the gun before the deer is so close he can feel the phlegm flying from its flared nostrils and read the rage in its pain-maddened eyes.
Instinctively hop-stepping to his left, John grabs the rifle barrel with both hands, then swings it upward as hard as he can. With a loud crack, the butt connects with the deer’s jaw a moment before its antlers pierce John’s left shoulder. He goes down and the buck, standing above him, lowers its head as if to gore him, then suddenly lets out a pained bleat, starts to tremble as if it’s been electrically shocked, and drops in a heap next to John.
He rolls to his right, slowly pushes himself with his hands into a squat, then stands. With the effort, the pain in his gored and bleeding shoulder doesn’t increase or radiate. A good sign, thinks John. He extends his arm gradually forward and back, then gingerly loops it in a full circle, heartened that he has full motion in the joint.
At his feet, the deer suddenly twitches, its legs kicking out as if it will rise. Startled, John jumps back. Then the buck lies still. John sees it isn’t going anywhere. His shotgun butt has crushed its jaw, forcing its teeth into a grotesque grin; its rear quarters are a mass of blood, thistle-matted fur, and exposed bone; it’s exhaling as much
