High Hunt

  “How about that?” I called to the others. “Just like a pussy-cat.”

  “You got him all straightened out yesterday,” Miller said. “He won’t give you no more trouble.”

  The others mounted, and we rode off down to the lower end of the basin, crossed the creek, and started up the ridge. Clint’s horse, alone in the saddle-horse corral, whinnied after us a couple times and then went over to the fence nearest the pack-horses.

  I was a little stiff and sore, but it didn’t take too long for that to iron itself out.

  The ridge moved up in a series of steps with low brush breaking off each side. A little way out we rode into the sunlight.

  About a half mile up from camp, Miller stopped.

  “This’ll be the first stand,” he said. “The Big Man’ll be here.” It made sense. This was the lowest post, and Sloane was having trouble with the altitude.

  “You want me to wait here now?” Cal asked, disappointment evident in his voice.

  “No need of that,” Millder said, “but we’d better look around a mite so’s you can get it all set in your mind. I’ll be droppin’ you off by this white rock here.” He pointed at a big pale boulder. “Best place to set is right over there.”

  We all got off and walked on over. A natural rock platform jutted out over the deep ravine that ran down the right-hand side of the ridge. The other, shallower, ravine with its meadows ran down into the basin where we were camped.

  “You see that notch over on the other side?” Miller said, pointing it out to Sloane.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s a main game trail. They’ll be comin’ across that from the next ravine. Then they’ll turn and go on down to the bottom. They’ll be in sight all the way.”

  “How far is it to that notch?” Sloane gasped.

  “’Bout a hundred and fifty yards. It’s best to let ’em get all the way to the bottom before you shoot. That way they won’t fall so far and you’ll have plenty of time to look ’em over.”

  “OK,” Sloane said.

  “Don’t get so interested in this trail that you ignore this draw here that runs on down to camp though. They’ll be crossin’ there, too—lots of ’em. And they’ll be grazin’ in those meadows.”

  Sloane looked it all over. “I think I’ve got it located,” he said, taking a deep breath.

  Jack’s post was on the next step up the ridge. There was a bit more brush there, but another big game trail cut into the ravine from the far side.

  “Watch your shots over there, Slim,” Miller said. “It breaks off pretty sharp, and a deer’d get busted up pretty bad if it was to go over that edge.”

  “Yeah,” Jack replied, his eyes narrowing, “I can see that.”

  Stan was next up the hill, his post much like the two below.

  McKlearey’s post was down in a notch.

  “You’ll have to watch yourself in here, Sarge,” Miller told him. “You’re right in the middle of a trail here, and you might get yourself stampeded over if they start to runnin’.”

  “Stomp your ass right into the ground, McKlearey.” Jack laughed. “Wouldn’t that be a bitch?”

  “I’ll hold ’em off till you guys get here.” Lou grinned. “We’ll ambush the little bastards.”

  My post was the highest on the ridge. The horses scrambled up the rocky trail from McKlearey’s notch, their iron-shod hooves sliding and clattering.

  “I’m puttin’ the Kid up here,” Miller explained, “’cause that horse he’s ridin’ is the biggest and strongest one in the string. This little stretch of trail can be a bitch-kitty in the dark.”

  “Anybody wanna trade horses?” I asked, not meaning it.

  We came out on the rounded knob at the top of the trail and looked around.

  “At least you’ll have scenery,” Jack said. He was right about that. You could literally see for a hundred miles in every direction except where the peak whitely blotted out a quarter of the sky.

  We all got down and walked around, looking out at the surrounding mountains.

  “Buck!” Miller said, his voice not loud but carrying to us with a sharp urgency.

  The deer was above us. I counted him at five points, but that could have been off. He was a hundred and fifty yards away, but he still looked as big as a horse. He watched us, his rack flaring arrogantly above his head like a vast crown. It was probably my imagination, but his face seemed to have an expression of unspeakable contempt on it, an almost royal hauteur that made me feel about two feet tall. None of us moved or made a sound.

  Slowly he turned the white patch of his rump to us, flicked his tail twice, then laid his ears back and bounded up the mountainside as if he had springs on his feet. He soared with each jump as though the grip of earth upon him was very light and he could just as easily fly, if he really wanted to.

  Far up the rockslide he slowed, stopped, and looked back at us again. Then he walked off around the ridge, picking his way delicately over the rocks, his head up and his antlers carried proudly.

  I still felt very small.

  19

  MILLER split us up then and sent us on back down the ridge by several different trails. He told us to ride slowly and keep a good sharp eye out for any really big bucks.

  “Come on, Cal,” I said to Sloane, “let’s ease on down this way.”

  Miller glanced at me and nodded once. One of us was going to have to stick pretty close to Calvin from here on out.

  “Sure thing,” Sloane said with a heartiness that sounded hollow as all hell. He was looking pretty tough again.

  We rode off slowly, and I concentrated pretty much on picking as easy a trail as I could find. The sun was well up by now, and the air up there was very clear. Every limb and rock stood out sharply, and the shadows under the bushes were very dark. I could hear the others clattering over rocks now and then above us. After about five minutes Cal called weakly to me.

  “Better hold up a minute, Dan.” He jumped down off his horse and lurched unsteadily off to the side of the trail. I rolled out of the saddle and caught his bridle before his horse could wander off. I tied both horses to a low bush.

  He was vomiting when I got to him, kneeling beside a rock and retching like a man at the end of a three-day drunk.

  “You OK?” I asked. A guy always asks such damned stupid questions at a time like that.

  He nodded jerkily and then vomited again. He was at it for quite a long time. Finally he got weakly to his feet and stumbled back toward the horses.

  “Jesus, Cal,” I said, trying to help him.

  “Don’t tell the others about this,” he said hoarsely, waving off my hand.

  “Christ, man, you’re really sick, aren’t you?”

  “I’ll be OK,” he said, hanging onto his saddle horn. “Just don’t tell the others, OK?”

  “If you say so,” I said. “Let’s sit down a bit.”

  “Sure,” he agreed.

  I led him over to a clear place and went back to get the water bag hanging on my saddle horn. When I brought it back, he drank some and washed off his face. He looked a little better, but his breathing was still very bad, and his face was pale inside the framing fur of his parka hood.

  “I just can’t seem to get used to it.” He gasped. “God damn, I can’t. It’s like there was a wet blanket over my face all the time.”

  “You ever have trouble at high altitudes before?” I asked him.

  “No more than anybody else, I don’t think. Oh sure, I’d get a little woozy and I’d get winded easy, but nothing like this. Of course, I haven’t been up in the mountains for five or six years now.”

  “It’ll settle down,” I said—not really believing it. “Hell, we’ve only been up here for a day or so.”

  “I sure hope so,” he said. “I don’t know how much more of this I can cut.”

  “Cal,” I said after a minute or so, “if it gets bad—I mean really bad—you’ll let me know, won’t you? I mean, shit, none of this is worth blowing
a coronary over.”

  “Hell,” he said, “my heart’s in good shape—it’s my fuckin’ lungs.”

  “Yeah, I know, but tell me, huh? I mean it.”

  He looked at me for a moment. “OK, Dan,” he said finally, “if it really gets bad.”

  That was a helluva relief.

  “Like you said, though, it’ll settle down.” His face had a longing on it that was awfully damned exposed.

  “I’ve just got to make this one, you know?” he said. “If I don’t make it this time, I don’t think I ever will.”

  “I’m not sure I follow you,” I said.

  “Look, Dan,” he said, “let’s not kid each other. I know what I am—I’m a big fuckin’ kid—that’s what I am.”

  “Hey, man—”

  “No, let’s not shit each other. I wouldn’t say this to any of the others. Hell, they wouldn’t understand it. But you’re different.” He lit a cigarette and then immediately mashed it out. “I sure as shit don’t need those things.”

  “I’ve cut way down, too,” I said, wanting to change the subject.

  “This whole damn trip,” he went on, “it’s a kid thing—for me anyhow. At least it was when it started. It was just another of the things I do with your brother and Carter and McKlearey and a whole bunch of other guys—parties, booze, broads, the whole bit—all kid stuff. I gotta do it though. You see, my old man was fifty-five when I was born. My old lady was his second wife. I can’t ever remember him when he wasn’t an old man. I get this awful feeling when I get around old people—like I want to crawl off and hide someplace.”

  “You’re not alone there,” I told him. “I ever tell you about the Dan Alders’ curse? With me it’s old ladies on buses. Drives me right up the wall every time.”

  He grinned at me briefly. He almost looked like the old Cal again.

  “So I hang around with young guys,” he went on, “and I do the stuff they do. Shit, man, I’m forty-two years old, for Chrissake! Don’t you think it’s time I grew up? I own four businesses outright, and I’m a partner in about six more. Let’s face it, I’m what they’d call a man of substance, and here I am, boozin’ and partyin’ and shackin’ up with cheap floozies like that goddamn Helen. Jesus H. Christ! Claudia’s ten times the woman and about a million times the lady that pig was on the best day she ever saw.” He shook his head. “I’ve gotta be outa my goddamn rabbit-ass mind!”

  “We all do funny things now and then,” I said, wishing he’d change the subject.

  “I don’t know why the hell Claudia puts up with me,” he said. “She knows all about it, of course.”

  “Oh?”

  “Shit yes! Do you think for one minute I could hide anything from her? But she never gives me hell about it, never complains. Hell, she never even mentions it. The goddamn woman’s a saint, you know that?”

  “She’s pretty special,” I agreed.

  Sloane looked out over what Mike used to call the Big Lonely.

  “God, it’s great up here,” he said, “if only I could get my goddamn wind!” He pounded his fist on his leg as if angry with his gross body for having failed him.

  “Anyway”—he picked it up again—“like I was sayin’, this started out as just another kid thing—something I was gonna do with Jack and Carter and some of the guys, right?”

  “If you say so,” I said. He had me baffled now.

  “Only it isn’t that anymore. This is it, baby. This is where little Calvin grows up. This time I make it over the hump. By God, it’s about time, wouldn’t you say? Claudia deserves a real husband, and by God I’m gonna see that she’s got one when I get back. He looked up at the sky again. “This time I’m gonna make it, I really am.” Then he started coughing again, and I started worrying.

  After he got straightened around with his breathing apparatus again, we got up and went back to the horses.

  “You think I can make it, Dan?” he asked after I’d helped him back on his horse.

  I looked at him for a minute. “You already have, Cal,” I said. “That was it back there. Anything else is just going to be a souvenir to remember it by.” I went over and climbed up on Ned. A guy can say some goddamn foolish things sometimes. But Cal needed it, so I said it—even though we both knew “growing up” doesn’t happen like that. It takes a long time—most of your life usually.

  Then we heard the other guys yelling farther up the slope. We nudged the horses over to where we could get a clear view of the ravine. We both looked up and down the opposite ridge for a minute and then we saw what they were yelling about.

  It was a white deer.

  He was a buck, maybe about a seven-pointer, but he wasn’t as big as the five-point we’d seen earlier. His coat was a sort of cream-colored, but his antlers were very dark. He stood about a quarter of a mile away on the other ridge, his ears flickering nervously at all the shouting the others were doing. I suppose like most albinos, his eyes weren’t really too good.

  “Look at that!” Sloane said reverently. “Isn’t that the most beautiful goddamn thing you ever saw?” He handed me his binoculars. They brought the thing up pretty close; they were damn good glasses.

  The deer’s eyes were a deep red, so he was a true albino. You could actually see the pink skin in places where the wind ruffled his fur back. He looked more completely defenseless than any animal I’ve ever seen. For some reason, when I looked at him, I thought of Clydine.

  I gave the glasses back to Sloane and sat on the horse watching until the deer’s nerves finally got wound too tight and he bounded off across the other ridge and out of sight.

  “Isn’t that something?” Cal gasped.

  “Never seen one before,” I said. “I’ve seen a lot of deer, but that’s the first white one I’ve ever seen.”

  “The son of a bitch looked like a ghost, didn’t he?”

  “Or like Moby Dick,” I said, and then I wished I hadn’t said it. It was so goddamn obvious.

  “Yeah. Moby Dick,” Sloane said. “They got him at the end of the book, didn’t they?”

  “No,” I said. “He got them—the whole damn bunch. All but Ishmael, of course.”

  “I never read it,” Sloane admitted. “I saw the movie though—first half of it anyway. I was with this girl—”

  “I’d rather you didn’t mention that name to the others,” I said, forgetting Stan for a moment.

  “What name?”

  “Moby Dick.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a real bad scene, man. Just say it’s a superstititon or something, but don’t get Jack and McKlearey started on something like that. Somebody’s liable to wind up dead.”

  “You are jumpy,” Sloane said. “What’s got you all keyed up?”

  “Man, I’ll tell you, this whole damn trip is like setting up housekeeping on top of a bomb. McKlearey’s been playing McKlearey-type games with a couple women we both know. If we don’t keep a lid on things, Jack and Stan are going to go off in a corner and start to odd-man to see who gets to shoot the son of a bitch.”

  “Jesus!” Sloane said.

  “Amen, brother, amen. This whole trip could turn to shit right in our faces, so let’s not buy trouble by starting any Moby Dick stuff. That son of a bitch sank the whole goddamn boat, and I left my water wings at home.”

  “Hell,” he squawked, “I can’t even swim.”

  Of course the first thing Stan said to me when Sloane and I came trailing into camp was “Call me Ishmael,” in a properly dramatic voice.

  “I only am escaped to tell thee,” I grated back at him just as hard and as sharp-pointed as I could make it, hoping to hell he’d get the point.

  “What the hell are you two babblin’ about?” Jack demanded.

  Stan, of course, had to tell him.

  We unsaddled the horses, turned them loose in the corral, and then all went on up to the fire where Clint was working on lunch.

  “Man”—Jack was still carrying on about the white deer—“wasn’t that the d
amnedest thing you ever saw?”

  “Pretty damn rare,” Miller said. “Most likely a stag though.”

  “Stag?” Sloane asked. “I thought any buck-deer was a stag.”

  “Well, not really,” Miller said. “A stag is kinda like a steer with cows. Either he’s been castrated or had an accident or he just ain’t got the equipment. Most of them freaks are like that—I don’t know why.”

  They talked about it all the way through lunch. I kept trying to pour cold water on it, but I could see all the others visualizing that white head over their mantelpieces or what-not. I began right about then to hate that damned deer. I wished to hell he’d fall off a cliff or something.

  After lunch we hauled in more firewood and cleaned our rifles. McKlearey lashed together a kind of rifle rack and put it in the back of the supply tent. “Keep the scopes from gettin’ knocked around that way,” he rasped. His bandage was dirty again.

  The sun went down early—it always would here, right up against the backside of that peak like we were. The twilight lasted a long time though. We had venison steak for dinner and settled down around the fire to watch the last of the daylight fade out of the sky.

  They went back to talking about that damned white deer again.

  I’d been kind of half-assed watching McKlearey. He’d been making a lot of trips to his tent for one reason or another, and his eyes were getting a little unfocused. I figured he was hitting his jug pretty hard again.

  I caught Miller’s eye, and I knew he’d been counting McKlearey’s trips, too. He didn’t look too happy about it.

  “Well, I’ll sure tell you one thing,” Jack was saying, “if that big white bastard crosses my stand, I’ll dump ’im right in his tracks.”

  “You said it, buddy,” McKlearey said, his voice slurring a little. “How about you, Danny Boy?”

  “I came up here to hunt,” I said. “I’m not declaring war on one single deer.”

  “There’s lots of deer up on that mountain,” Miller said. “Lots are bigger’n that one.”

  “Just like the girls in Hong Kong, huh, Danny?” McKlearey said, trying to focus his eyes on me.

  “I wouldn’t know, Lou,” I said. “I’ve never been there, remember?”