“Any other hunters up here?” Michael asked.
“No. No other hunters. Nobody hunts these parts. Most people usually go south of Pasternak. Good hunting down there and not so far away.”
“The hunting is good up here, though, right?,” Gene asked with a nervous laugh, hoping their money hadn’t been wasted.
“Better hunting up here,” Bill said. “But I’m the only one that has any property, and I keep ’em off. The first thousand acres going north is mine; the rest is state land.”
“Moose, huh?” Gene said.
Bill looked them up and down, clearly eyeing them as a group of weekend warriors who had little business in such a place. “If you didn’t bring enough firepower, just let them walk on by. Otherwise you’re gonna get hurt.”
“Would a .30-06 do the trick?”
Bill turned toward Michael for a moment and then back as if he’d heard a familiar sound. He looked out into the trees through a window. “Yeah. That’ll do it.”
There was a two-way radio in the house with two channels – one to Bill’s apartment and one to the nearest state police barracks.
“They probably couldn’t get out here if they had to,” he said.
Bill finally left, his old pickup rumbling down the road and suddenly buried by the trees. The silence was overwhelming.
“Don’t even hear any birds up here,” Michael said.
“That’s ’cause they’re terrified of the big, bad hunters!” Gene said, slapping him on the back.
The first night, they drank beer and liquor and lit a bonfire in the back. Together, they sat at the edge of Coombs’ Gulch, getting drunk and laughing, the flicker of orange fire dancing in the darkness.
The fears of ancient man crept into the back of their minds, and, looking out at the immense darkness of Coombs’ Gulch, they all felt a little uncomfortable. That first night, while the others kept their eyes on the fire to avoid staring out at the forest, Jonathan snuck glimpses into the blackness. He felt it cloister around him, reaching dangerous tendrils of cold over his shoulders. He felt that ancient presence in the primordial world that forced men into caves with fires just like the one dancing before him. In those endless trees of Coombs’ Gulch were the sounds of rustling dead leaves and footfalls in the night, slight affairs, barely audible above the sound of the crackling fire. For a moment, Jonathan thought he saw something look back at him. He straightened his spine and nerves sparked needles throughout his body. It may have been a trick of light, but he was sure he saw something inhuman exhale a puff of hot breath that rose out of the darkness into the cold night air.
Jonathan told himself it was just his imagination. But he remembered that moment for years to come. He was sure they all felt it. He was sure they drank and joked and laughed to keep that frightening darkness at bay. That first night, he wondered if they were in over their heads – they were not great hunters but still-frightened children wandering and lost in a cold world.
The first morning out they traveled up the west side of the valley. It was early and cold, and their breath formed clouds that dissipated into the miasma of trees. The black spruce was thick, the lower branches like sharpened spikes of some medieval torture device. They could barely get through it without impaling themselves and began to wonder aloud if they’d been had, if old Bill Flood had rented out his cabin with tales of deer and moose when it was just a dead, forgotten wood. But because of the density of the trees they couldn’t help but find the deer trails – they were practically the only way to get through the area. They followed the pellet droppings and spruce trees with the bark scraped off where the bucks sharpened their antlers, down to the vein of water at the base of the Gulch that flowed through an open field of tall brown grass bordered by the thick forest. Jonathan was the man of the hour, so when they finally spotted a large herd at the river’s edge, he lined up the shot first while Conner zeroed in on a second. Jonathan had a good-sized buck in his sights – the biggest he’d ever taken – but for some reason, when he squeezed the trigger, he could only think of that girl from the strip club, Mary, and his suddenly tainted future. Somehow, it all felt like a giant kill shot.
The impact of the bullet rippled the buck’s thick skin, and he took off bounding toward tree cover, disappearing in the brush. Conner put down a doe. It was a vital, precision shot. She dropped like a sack of rocks. Gene accompanied Jonathan into the woods, following the flow of blood that grew heavier and heavier and puddled on the dead leaves until they found the buck panting and moaning beside a massive uprooted tree, whose root system resembled a cave festooned with dirt and moss. The buck panted heavy and hard with its small tongue protruding slightly from its nimble mouth. He was the biggest whitetail Jonathan had ever bagged. Easily two hundred and fifty pounds with twelve points on him. Gene clapped him on the back and said, “Now we gotta drag this son of a bitch all the way back.”
