High Hunt

  His face looked awful. He rubbed his bandaged hand across it again, and his hand was shaking badly. He tucked the gun back under his rolled-up clothes. “Keep the light here a minute, OK?” he said. He rummaged around in his sack and came out with a bottle. He took a long pull at it. I suddenly realized that I was standing there with that silly .45 pointed right at him. It had just kind of automatically followed the light. I lowered it carefully.

  “Want one?” he asked, holding out the bottle toward me.

  “No thanks. You OK now?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “just a nightmare. Happens to a lot of guys.”

  “Sure.”

  “All the time. Lotsa guys have ’em.”

  “Sure, Lou.”

  “That’s true, isn’t it, Danny?” he said, his voice jittery as if he were shivering. “A lot of guys have nightmares don’t they?”

  “Hell,” I said, “I even have some myself.” That seemed to help him.

  “Hey, man,” I said, “I’m about to freeze my ass off. If you’re OK, I’m going back to my nice warm sack.”

  “Sure, man,” he said. “I’m fine now. ‘Night, Danny.”

  “Good night, Lou.”

  “Oh, hey, man?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks for comin’ in with the light.”

  “Sure, Lou.”

  I closed up his tent and hustled back to my sleeping bag. Damn, it was cold out there!

  18

  WHEN the gun went off I think we all came up in panic. After the screaming in the middle of the night, I for one thought McKlearey had been having another nightmare and had unloaded on whatever it was that was haunting him. It was morning or at least starting to get light outside. I could see Miller standing calmly by the fire with a coffee cup in his hand. He didn’t look particularly excited.

  “What’s up?” I heard Sloane call. “Who’s shootin’?”

  “Clint,” Miller said. “He took a little poke out this mornin’ to see if he couldn’t scare up some camp-meat. Sounds like he found what he wanted.”

  “Jesus!” Jack exclaimed. “Sounded like he was right in camp.”

  “No, he’s back down the trail about a quarter mile or so,” Miller said.

  I jerked on my pants and boots, wincing slightly at their clamminess, grabbed up the rest of my clothes, and hustled on out to the warmth of the fire. I stood shivering in my T-shirt for a few minutes, staring back along the bad that poked back into the still-dark woods.

  “Hey, Cap,” Clint’s voice called in from out there.

  “Yeah?” Miller didn’t raise his voice too much.

  “I got one. Send somebody out with a packhorse and a knife. I clean forgot mine.”

  “Right, Clint,” Miller looked across the fire at me. “You want to go?” he asked.

  “Sure.” I said. “Let me finish getting dressed.” I hauled on my shirt and sat down to lace up the boots.

  “No big rush.” He grinned at me. “That deer ain’t goin’ noplace. Ol’ Clint don’t miss very often. Have yourself a cup of coffee whilst I go throw a packsaddle on one of the horses.” He raised his voice again. “Be a few minutes, Clint.”

  “OK, Cap,” Clint’s voice came back. “Better send along a shovel, too.”

  “Right.” Miller went off toward the corral, and I poured myself a cup of coffee and finished lacing up the boots. I went back into the tent and picked up my gun belt.

  Jack was struggling into his plaid shirt, trying to stay in the sleeping bag as much as possible at the same time. “You goin’ out there?” he asked me.

  I nodded, buckling on the belt. “Clint wants a horse and a knife,” I said. I pulled the smaller of the pair of German knives from the double sheath that hung on the left side of the gun belt and tested the edge with my thumb. It seemed OK. I grabbed my jacket and hat and went on back through the pale light to the fire.

  “I’ll be along in a little bit,” Jack called after me.

  There was a bucket of water on the table, and I scooped some out with my hands and doused it in my face. The shock was sharp, and I came up gasping. I raked the hair back out of my face with my fingers and stuffed my hat on. Still shivering, I drank the cup of coffee.

  There was a kind of mist or cloud hanging up on the side of the mountain, blotting out the top. I waded down toward the corral through the gray-wet grass. I could see Miller’s dark track through it and Clint’s angling off toward the woods.

  “You bring a knife?” Miller asked, handing me the lead-rope to the sleepy-looking packhorse he’d saddled.

  I nodded. Somehow, it didn’t seem right to talk too much.

  “He’s prob’ly ‘bout four-five hundred yards down that trail,” he said, pointing. “When you get out there a ways, sing out, and he’ll talk you in.”

  “Right.”

  I led the horse on into the woods. It was still pretty dark back in there, the silvery light filtering down through the thick spruce limbs. The horse walked very close to me—maybe they get nervous about things, too.

  “Clint?” I called after about five minutes.

  “Over here,” his voice came. “That you, Dan?”

  “Yeah.” I followed his voice.

  “I kinda figgered it might be you,” he said. “You bring a knife and a shovel?”

  “Yeah,” I said. Then I saw him sitting on a log, smoking a cigarette. His .30-30 was leaning against the tree behind him.

  “She’s right over there,” he said, pointing. He got up, and we walked back farther into the dim woods.

  The deer, a young mule doe, had fallen on its side in a clump of heather, its sticklike legs protruding awkwardly. A dead deer always looks tiny somehow, not much bigger than a dog. They look big when they’re up and moving, but after you shoot them, they seem to kind of shrink in on themselves. A doe looks even smaller, maybe because there aren’t any horns.”

  “This one ought to last us,” Clint said. “Give me a hand and we’ll drag ’er out in the open.”

  We each grabbed a hind leg and pulled the deer out of the heather-bed. Her front legs flopped limply and her large-eared head wobbled back and forth as it slid over the branches of the low-lying shrub. I didn’t see any blood.

  “Ever gutted many deer?” he asked me.

  “One,” I said. “I didn’t do a very good job of it.”

  “Well, now,” he said, “I’ll show you how it’s done. Hold that leg up and gimme your knife.”

  I handed him the smaller knife and held the hind leg up for him.

  “Now, you start here—” He made a slit through the deer’s white belly-fur and continued it back toward the tail, just cutting through the skin.

  “Idea is to keep as much hair out of the meat as you can,” he told me.

  I watched as he sliced the skin from chin to tail.

  “You going to cut her throat?” I asked him. “I thought you were supposed to do that.”

  “Not much point,” he said. “We’ll have the head off in about five minutes. Carcass’ll bleed out good enough from that, I expect.” He pushed the point of the knife through the belly-muscles with a hollow, ripping sound, and started to saw up through the ribs.

  “Here,” I said, handing him the big knife, “use this one.”

  He grunted, laying the smaller knife aside. He hefted the big one. “Quite a frog-sticker,” he said, looking at the ten-inch blade. He bent back over the deer.

  I tried not to look too closely at the way the sliced muscles twitched and quivered.

  “Hey, where are you guys?” Jack called from back at the nail.

  “Over here,” I said.

  Clint took the big knife and chopped through the pelvis bone, making a sound a lot like somebody chopping wet wood.

  “Ooops,” Jack said as he came up on us. “I’ll just wait till you guys finish up there.”

  “Squeamish?” Clint asked, his arm sunk up to the elbow inside the deer’s body cavity.

  “Not really,” Jack said, “bu
t—” He shrugged and went back to where McKlearey was coming through the trees. The two of them stood back there, watching.

  “Now then,” Clint told me, “you just grab hold of the windpipe here and kind of use it as a handle to pull everything right out.” He grabbed the severed windpipe and slowly pulled out and down, spilling out the deer’s steaming internal organs. Once they were clear of the carcass, he dragged them several feet away and dumped them in a heap. He came back and chopped away the lower half of each leg, the big blade grating sickeningly in the joints.

  “No sense haulin’ anything back we can’t use.” he said. Then he turned to the head.

  “Where’d you hit her?” I asked, looking into the body cavity. “I don’t see any hole.”

  “Right here,” be said, probing a finger into the fur just under the base of the skull.

  “Good shot,” I said. “What was the range?”

  “’Bout forty—maybe fifty yards. If you’re quiet you can get pretty close.”

  He made a slice around the neck with the big knife about where he’d had his finger and then cut the head away. Bone fragments and small gleaming pieces of copper from his bullet were very bright against the dark meat.

  “Let’s dump ‘er out,” he said.

  We picked up the surprisingly heavy carcass and turned it over to drain.

  “Hey, Slim,” Clint called to Jack, “why don’t you and the Sarge there get that shovel off the packhorse and dig a hole so’s we can bury the guts?”

  “Sure,” Jack said, going over to the drowsing horse.

  “Ordinarily, I’d leave ’em for the coyotes and bobcats,” Clint said, “but then I got to thinkin’ that maybe we wouldn’t want ’em comin’ in this close to camp.” He went to the steaming gut-pile and cut the liver free of the other organs. “Breakfast,” he said shortly. He fished a plastic bag out of his coat pocket and slid the dripping liver inside.

  “This deep enough?” McKlearey asked, pointing at their hole. I noticed that he had on a fresh bandage.

  “Yeah, that’ll do it,” Clint answered. “Just kick them guts and hooves and the head in and cover ’em up. We’ll pile rocks on top when you’re done.”

  I looked away. It hadn’t bothered me so far, but the deer’s eyes were still open, and I didn’t want to see them kicking dirt in them.

  “That’s got it,” Jack said.

  Clint gave me back my knives. “Pretty good set,” he said. “Where’d you come by it?”

  “In Germany,” I said. “Got it when I was in the Army.”

  “Damn good steel,” he said. “Holds the edge real good.”

  “They’re a bitch to sharpen.” I grinned at him. Actually, Clydine had sharpened them for me. I don’t know where she’d learned how, but she sure could put an edge on a knife.

  We piled rocks on the buried remains of the deer, and then the three of us lifted the carcass onto the pack-frame saddle while Clint held the horse’s head to keep him from shying at the blood-smell.

  Clint picked up his rifle, and we went on back to camp.

  “Dry doe,” Clint told Miller when we got back to the corral. “Picked ’er up on that little game trail back in there a ways.”

  “Looks like she’ll last us,” Miller said.

  “Should. I’ll skin ’er out after breakfast when you fellers go up on the ridge.”

  They put a short, heavy stick through the hocks of the hind legs and hung the carcass to a tree limb a ways behind camp.

  After they’d unsaddled the packhorse, we all walked back on up to the fire. Clint washed up and started hustling around the cook table McKlearey’d built for him.

  “First blood,” Sloane said in the kind of gaspy voice he’d developed since we’d gotten up into the high country.

  “This one don’t really count.” Miller chuckled.

  “At least there are deer around,” Stan said.

  “Oh, there’s plenty of deer up here, all right,” Miller said.

  I got the enameled washbasin and filled it with warm water from the big pot on the fire and did a little better job of washing up than I’d managed earlier. Then Clint ran us all away from the fire because we were in his way.

  I walked on down to the edge of the beaver pond and looked out over the clear water. It was about four or five feet deep out in the middle, and the bottom was thinly sprinkled with matchstick-sized white twigs. I saw a flicker under the surface about ten feet out and saw a good-sized trout swim slowly past, his angry-looking eye glaring at me with cold suspicion.

  “Hey, man, fish in there, huh?” It was McKlearey. I could smell the whiskey on him. Christ Almighty! The sun wasn’t even up yet!

  “Yeah,” I said. “Wonder if anybody thought to bring any gear.”

  “Doubt it like hell,” he said, jamming his hands deeper into his field-jacket pockets.

  I squatted down by the water and washed off my knives. The edges were still OK, but I thought I’d touch them up a little that afternoon.

  “Sun’s comin’ up,” Lou said.

  I looked up. The very tip of the looming, blue-white peak above us was turning bright pink. As I watched, the pink line crept slowly down, more and more of the mountain catching fire. The blue-white was darkly shadowed now by comparison.

  “Nice, huh?” Lou said. His face was ruddy from the reflected glow off the snow above us, kind of etched out sharply against the dark trees behind him. “I can think of times when I’d have give my left nut for just one look at snow. It never melts up there. Did you know that? It’s always there—summer and winter—always up there. I used to think about that a lot when I was on the Delta. It’s always up there. Kinda gives a guy somethin’ to hang on to.” He snorted with laughter. “Bet it’s colder’n a bitch up there,” he said.

  “If it got too cold you could always think about the Delta, I guess,” I said.

  “No,” he said, still staring at the mountain. “I never think about the Delta. Other places, yeah, but never the Delta.”

  I nodded. “How’s the hand?” I pointed at the bandage.

  “Little sore,” he said. “It’ll be OK.”

  “Chow!” Clint hollered from camp.

  Lou and I walked on back up toward the tents. Maybe there was more to him than I’d realized.

  Clint had fried up a bunch of bacon and then had simmered onion slices in the hot grease and had fried up thin strips of fresh deer liver. There were hot biscuits and more coffee. The little old fart could sure whip up a helluva meal on short notice. We fell on the food like a pack of wolves, and for about ten minutes all you could hear was the sound of eating. The altitude does that to you.

  After we’d eaten and were lazing over a last cup of coffee, watching the edge of the sunlight creep down the mountain toward us, Miller cleared his throat.

  “Soon as you men get your breakfast settled, we’ll saddle up and take a little ride on up the ridge there. I want to show you the stands you’ll be usin’. You’ll need to see ’em in the daylight ’cause it’ll still be dark yet when you get up there tomorrow. Then, too, it’ll give us a chance to scout around some.”

  “You think we’ll see any deer?” Stan asked.

  “We sure should,” Miller said. “I’ve seen five cross that ridge since we set down to breakfast.”

  We all turned and looked sharply up at the ridge.

  “None up there right now though,” he said. “Your bucks’ll all be up there. Now some of you men may’ve hunted mule deer before, and some of you’ve hunted white-tail. These are all mulies up here. They’re bigger’n white-tail and they look and act a whole lot different. A mulie’s got big ears—that’s how he gets his name—and he can hear a pin drop at a half a mile. He’s easy to hunt ’cause you can count on him to do two things—run uphill and stop just before he goes over the ridge. He’ll always run uphill when he’s been spooked—unless, of course, he’s just been shot. Then he’ll go downhill.

  “A white-tail runs kind of flat out, like a horse or
a dog, and if you’re a fair shot you can hit him on the run. Your mulie, on the other hand, bounces like a damn jackrabbit, and you can’t tell from one jump to the next which way he’s goin’. Looks funnier’n hell, but it makes him damn hard to hit on the run. You shoot over ’im or under ’im ever’ time.

  “That’s why it’s good to know that he’s gonna stop. As soon as he gets a ways away from you—and above you—he’ll stop and look back to see what you’re doin’. Some people say they’re curious, and some say they’re dumb, but it’s just somethin’ he’ll always do. Wait for it, and you’re likely to get a clear, standin’ shot.”

  “What’s the range likely to be?” Sloane gasped.

  “Anywhere from one hundred to three hundred yards,” Miller said, looking closely at Cal. “Much out past that and I wouldn’t shoot, if it was me. Too much chance of a gut shot or havin’ the deer drop into one of these ravines. He does that and he’ll likely bounce and roll for about a mile. Won’t be much left when he stops.”

  He stopped and looked around. It was the longest speech I ever heard him make.

  “Let’s go get the horses,” he said, almost as if he were ashamed of himself for talking so much.

  We trooped on down to the corral, and he made each man saddle his own horse. “Might as well learn how to do it now as later,” he said.

  I approached that knotheaded gray horse of mine with a great deal of caution. He didn’t seem particularly tense this morning, but I wasn’t going to take any chances with him. I got him saddled and bridled and led him out of the corral. The others all stopped to watch.

  “Well, buddy,” I said to him as firmly as I could, “how do you want to play it this morning?”

  He turned his head and looked inquiringly at me, his long gray face a mask of equine innocence.

  “You lyin’ son of a bitch,” I muttered. I braced myself and climbed on his back. His ears flicked.

  “All right,” I said grimly, “let’s get it over with.” I nudged him with my heels and he moved out at a gentle walk with not so much as an instant’s hesitation. I walked him out into the bottom, turned him and trotted him back to the corral.