Why Are We in Vietnam?

  Then the trail of the blood took a bend, beat through dwarf alder, and some nasty kind of brush with too much in the way of catbriers. That took quite a few minutes, then a pine grove, then another aisle between trees, parallel to the one we had come down, but now the caribou trail was rising up to timberline again, and in the distance, up along a thousand yards, was what looked to be the caribou, yes, it was, and through the field glasses Big Luke, watching, shook his head. “You hit him an outside rump shot, Pete.”

  “Then he’ll be all right?”

  “No, impact seems to have broke his leg or maybe shocked his spine. He’s using only one hind leg. Walking not much faster than us. That’s bad. We can’t leave him.”

  “Say,” said Pete, trying to shift the rump of the subject, “why’d that buck leave timber?”

  “Didn’t want to die in those woods. Sometimes you get a buck will cross three open ridgelines to get into the particular woods where he wants to hide or give it up.”

  “Then he ain’t too bad if he can move that much.”

  “He,” said Big Luke, “is bad enough that we got to get him.”

  It was going to take all day. We were going to spend our first day walking and jogging to chase a wounded caribou, when there were ten thousand head of them in the Brooks Range. All honors due to M.A. Pete’s Jeffrey Nitro Express. Well, Luke got the helicopter up. It had been down in Fairbanks for repair the day before, he had not mentioned how near it was to reach, oh no, he did not want to have Rusty on his ear all those hours of the packtrain up the mountain from Dolly Ding Bat Lake, but now he took us up the aisle through the trees till we were above timber again and led us along a shallow canyon and over a saddle into our basin, and there while breakfast was made by one of the flunky packer guide cooks, Ed Smith, an Indian, Big Luke got a big-ass walkie-talkie 3200 RC-1A 16 mile range, and rang down to camp at the lake telling them to come on in, and when they did with a smack of static, he told them to bring the helicopter on up.

  That’s how they got Kid Caribou. Helicopter pilot was there in five minutes with Buster Bubbletop, a real wasp of a Bell helicopter, and Big Luke got in with M.A. Pete and M.A. Pete’s cannon, and they zipped up and over the ridge, and Rusty, and Tex, and D.J. went to the top of a knoll and followed them with Rusty’s Hurdle & Reuss 7 × 35 and Tex and D.J.’s own Jap Titan 8 × 35 and Binolux 7 × 35. And, man, this is what they see—half dead ass caribou climbing up those rocks, nice head of antlers (look to be fourteen points through the glass) and a bleeding jagged gored red ass, flap of flesh now wide open, and the caribou makes those rocks with lunge and grunt and like then a whimper you could hear almost through the binocs when the sound of the helicopter began to beat on caribou ear with rings of ether just as when you going out on the operating table. Man, that caribou looks as dogged and frantic as a prospector climbing a mountain to get a hill of gold, and then the helicopter is on top of him and hovering and holding him frozen, and it lands not fifty feet away, and the caribou turns his ass and starts to climb up a cliff with a set of deliberate steps like (1) fuck you, (2) go kill, (3) shit on you, each step a pure phrase of the blues—take me away, Mr. Dixieland—and there is M.A. Pete stepping out gingerly from the copter, like, man, he’s close to the caribou, and got his cannon with him, and just as Old Buck Broken Ass gets to the top of his little cliff, hopping slow on three legs, M.A. Pete sends a Nitro Express up into his gut from the rear, right into the red mask of the old wound and that animal does a Geländesprung right into the air as if his spine is illumined in incandescence, and somersaults in the air, and falls twenty feet from the cliff, smashing one set of antlers off his head (to be wired on later, nothing other) and the .600 900-grain blasted through his intestines, stomach, pancreas, gallbladder, liver and lungs, and left a hole to put your arm in, all your arm, up to the shoulder if you are not squeamish, entrail swimmer, and then bullet breaking, some of the fragments ripped into the brain and out the head, leaving it scarred to the point where M.A. Pete could claim (and believe) two years later that the scars on the mouth and face of his deer trophy were the fighting marks of a big buck caribou fighter; other fragments sawed through the ribs of the lungs, and deteriorated like buckshot in the forequarter. Big Luke brought that animal back to feed us. Its guts, belly and lungs were one old jelly flung together by the bullets, one blood pudding of a cocktail vibrated into total promiscuity by the twenty-foot fall down the rocks. Yes, prince, yes, Big Luke got the head off, and rescued the loose antler, and gutted the entrails, dressed the meat to clean fragments, left the hide which was a mess—clear surprise, yes!—but we had the meat for lunch, and it wasn’t exactly gamy, it tasted loud and clear of nothing but fresh venison steeped in bile, shit, and the half-digested contents of a caribou’s stomach—it was so bad you were living on the other side of existence, down in poverty and stink wallow with your nose beneath the fever—that was Luke’s message to us.

  The helicopter was new to him, you read, and for some parties in the last year or so he’d begun to use it, for some not, but he was an American, what the fuck, he had spent his life living up tight with wilderness and that had eaten at him, wilderness was tasty but boredom was his corruption, he had wanted a jolt, so sees it D.J., Big Luke now got his kicks with the helicopter. He was forever enough of a pro not to use it with real hunters, no, man, but he had us, gaggle of goose fat and asshole, killers of bile-soaked venison, so the rest of the hunt, all next seven days he gave what was secretly wanted, which was helicopter heaven, and it was curious shit, all rules and regulations, for of course we did not hunt from the air, no freakmen from TV land us, but rather noble Dallasassians, so we broke open a war between us and the animals, and the hunt hills of the Moe Henry and Obungekat Safari patch rang with ball’s ass shooting, the real breeze, hopping to the top of a mountain on copter wings to shoot down on goats, nothing so great as the Alaska mountain goat, yeah, you get up at three A.M. in tent camp up high above timber, and you climb, man, on foot above timber, for three hours till dawn, and then climb higher still crabbing up sixty-degree rock slopes, and walking with all heart shit up in your throat along a ledge twelve inches or less, yeah, ooh, making it up, and higher still, quietly, and then if you good, you’re up there, up above Master Mountain Goat, and when you start to shoot on him, he does a step dance like an old Negro heel-and-toe tap man falling down stairs or flying up them, and the first animal D.J. got in Alaska was a mountain goat at two hundred and fifty yards, and with one shot, animal stood on its nose for one long beast of a second, and then did a running dying dance for fifty yards down the rocks like a fakir sprinting through flaming coals, and when he died, Wham! the pain of his exploding heart shot like an arrow into D.J.’s heart, and the animals had gotten him, they were talking all around him now, communicating the unspoken unseen unmeasurable electromagnetism and wave of all the psychic circuits of all the wild of Alaska, and he was only part of them, and part he was of gasoline of Texas, the asshole sulfur smell of money-oil clinging to the helicopter, cause he had not gotten that goat by getting up in the three A.M. of morning and climbing the mountain, no cream not your dear private lace, dear Celia, D.J. had gotten up at seven back in the bunkhouse at Dolly Ding Bat Lake, for once Big Luke had decided this was Helicopter Week for Goose Fat Gaggle, he bundled all souls and A-holes back to the bunkhouse since good old Hail the Cop Turd could take you a day’s walk in ten minutes, and he would drop us on spots, top of a mountain, edge of a bull moose pond, across a canyon from Dall ram, near a feeding ground for the grizzer, that copter was dividing us up, carrying us here, there, every which spot, shooting in parties of two and four, guide and guest, or two guides, two guests, and it was a haul of big-ass game getting, for among the five of us safari payers we had a limit of twenty-five assorted grizzly, moose, ram, goat and caribou, and there was animal steaks being cut and packed all over the place, and trundled out by copter back to Dolly Ding Bat and up again in Super Cub to Fairbanks and freezers, all that hot supersensitive game meat no
w locked in brown paper and stone ice, paralyzed stiff in a freezer, about to suffer for sins it could not locate, yes, that was how D.J. got his mountain goat, he was flown at seven in the morning up to the top of a spiky ridge not too unlike the moon, set down in a bowl with Tex, Ollie, and Kenny Easterly, and waited, and in two hours had his shot, had his action, climbing down a ravine, and up the other side, a walk of four hundred yards, had his work helping Big Ollie skin, butcher, gut and package Mr. Goat (being shown by Ollie how to keep the fur away from the meat so the taste would not be tainted—touch of goat skin on raw goat meat smelling as stale and raunchy as overworked whore) and then Big Ollie having radioed the copter, in came the Hail the Cop and let down a line all hovering and they slung the meat packages, and the horns and head onto the lift line, which pulled it up and then pulled them up—that was the kick of the morning, foot in the stirrup, lifting one hundred feet to the Cop Turd which vibrated above like one giant overgrown Hog! its carburetor farting, its motor giving out that family sputter of gasoline being piston-cooked at medium speed, but D.J. never looked at the head of the goat except once, for the goat had a clown’s expression in his little-ass red dying eyes, the fires of the heart working to keep custard on the clown’s face, it wasn’t until that night when he was in the bunkhouse back at Dolly Ding Bat that D.J. relaxed enough to remember that goat picking his way up and down rocks like a slow motion of a skier through slalom, his legs and ass swinging opposite ways, carefree, like take one leg away, I’ll do it on the other, and it hit D.J. with a second blow on his heart from the exploding heart of the goat and he sat up in bed, in the bunk, listening to the snores, stole out to the night, got one breath of the sense of that force up in the North, of land North North above him and dived back to the bed, his sixteen-year-old heart racing through the first spooks of an encounter with Herr Dread.

  What more you want to hear? They got them all, crazy caribou trophy heads, eighteen-point buck for M.A. Bill, M.A. Bill! his handload .311 cartridge did the job, and tore off the ass—D.J. will not dwell on why an asshole is bound to hit the ass, for that is homeopathic magic, man—we got it all, that helicopter made us like a bee pulling honey from flower after flower, moose and goose if there’d been goose, and Dall ram, horns and horns of Dall ram, all five of us in three teams got to blast our own set of horn before one day was done on a herd up in a sink near a pinnacle, and Big Luke’s Cop Turd pilot was pushing the rules and regs of Hail Cop hunting, for after he lower us out on the line which had even Rusty close to involuntary defecation (and was the most heroic thing corporation execs have done in many a year), why, we got left set up two hundred yards from old herd of Dall ram, Mr. and Mrs. Beautiful Ibex horn (that’s Jew horn, I Beck’n Son, hih, hih) ain’t got the curl and spiral of the universe curving out of their brain for nothing, they took up and off, and Mr. Cop Turd went swinging after them like a darning needle after ladybugs and headed the Dall ram off till they started to run back toward us, at which point he cut them off again (by crossing in front of them only thirty feet above—kick hump in this hunting is: be Cop pilot) since unwritten Copt. rules and regs forbid chasing of game into gun, at which point Dall ram leader was like to be very confused and hit out this way and that way, and the Cop just went circling around until the sheep were fixed, shit they were hypnotized, it was pretty to watch, cause Hail Cop was like a bullfighter twisting a bull through the limits of his neck until he just got to stand and wait and let his neck recover, and the copter having the herd of Dall ram finally fixed on a cleft in a ridge across a bare modest draw from us, us hiding in the rocks on the lip of the sink, he pulled up and out, each circle a little bigger than the one before, and now a little higher until the animals shivering from the release of anxiety, in fact all strung out from the sound of air boiling, breaking, roaring and tearing and the whine—what cry of what beast?—were able to do no more than walk around, hocks trembling, muzzles nuzzling assholes—like get back to that flesh, man! they must have felt they were being born out again.

  I got the first shot. Kneeling behind a rock with a moss hummock not larger than the hand for a rest, it all felt good, I had gotten so hypnotized myself, there was no fever looking through the scope, the eye picked on one ram standing on one rock all four legs together and head silhouetted out against a sawtooth ridge maybe five miles behind him, and in the scope I had one look at the prettiest face D.J. has ever seen, almond oval and butter love for eyes, a little black sweet pursed mouth, all quivering now, two nostrils cunning as an old Negro witch smelling gypsy money on a mark, whoo-ee—I got the dot above my reticule in the center of the curl of the horn—those horns went three hundred and sixty degrees around the ear, like holding the mountain in the palm of your hand, they were receptors to hear the curve of the wind in the private cave of the mountains about, they were a coil of horn around the nerve which tunes the herb, and D. Ramses was all horned in on me, hair to the left, hair to the right went his head, we could just as well have been pulling opposite ends. I could not help it, wanting to keep that head intact for a trophy, the scope still would not leave the horn, the dot stayed on the ram brain, one inch above the eye, and feeling like the instant before the jump first time off a garage roof, D.J. pulls his trigger finger, perfect pull, perfect shot, as if all spiral of horn was funnel to pull all of the aim in and the shot went in one inch above the eye and the animal went down like a wall had fallen, best shot D.J. ever made, and Rusty rushed in his shot, cause his sheep took off at D.J.’s shot, Rusty only wounded his beast, got a second blast away too high in the shoulder, off with a third in the hoof—believe it if you want—the hoof later as splattered from the .404 as a wad of tar beaten with a hammer, and finally got him in the shoulder near the heart, the animal not moving hardly now, was Rusty mad. Four .404s for a Dall ram (he not carrying #2 gun or #3, cause who knows where grizzly might be?). If he needed four for the ram, maybe four times four for the bear.

  More skinning, more packing, two great trophy heads, and a wait for the helicopter out servicing Tex and M.A.s Pete-Bill. They all had Dall ram that day. Five sets of horns held in the arms of five shit-eating grins standing in semicircle on the banks of Dolly Ding Bat Lake as the pictures were taken, and long careful discussions with Big Luke on taxidermy and where the Moe Henry and Obungekat Safari Group recommended the preservation of the head—any fifty-year guarantee outfits around, or century mounters? “There’s no real craftsmen left,” says M.A. Pete. “Just embalmers,” said Tex.

  Going for the grizzer wasn’t nearly so good. Mr. Cop Turd, carrying Rusty, M.A. Bill, and Ollie, went flying by one pure grizzly standing out in an alpine meadow out on a flank of mountain where the spruce grew up in columns like the teeth of a comb and they had been swinging so good knocking down trophies that Rusty got Napoleonic, rode his luck all the way to Veneria and back, and made the pilot set them down two hundred meager yards away, which is to say he put Rusty out first at Rusty’s demand, Rusty going down the winch, that two hundred yards’ separation from the bear not very much when you’re waiting for the guide and your rifle buddy to follow, but no choice, the alpine meadow was small, so there was Rusty on the ground alone unslinging his Jeffrey, all alone when the bear instead of deciding to meander away from the helicopter and the man, or take a long-distance look, came bearing instead into them with a roar—hours later D.J. could still hear it echoing out of the ashy pores of Rusty’s monumentally shaken skin. Well, Mr. Cop Turd wasn’t waiting for Rusty to down that grizzer standing in an alpine meadow all alone, no, they were not going to let any bear hang a human trophy in his den, not at the expense of the Moe Henry Group. Hail the Cop jammed his whirlybird right down on a line toward the bear charging so near overhead that the bear reached up with his paws and took a mighty swipe, at which point Rusty got a shot off, a decent shot, decent enough to miss the copter by as much as it missed the bear, and sound of the shot, Old Grizzer split ass for the woods, while Cop-bird whirlybird came back and picked up Old Rust—Old Zinc White ex
Rusty Jethroe—even the shit hue in his eyes pale as junket, and back they went to the bunkhouse. Discussion that night. Rusty was sick. He had to get it up. They had to go for grizzer now. Well, he was man enough to steel his guts before necessity, he not D.J.’s father for naught tickle, D.J. was conceived in deep waters. So Rusty agreed in his own heart to get it up. Now he’s awake, man, lying in his bunk looking out a small six-pane window at moonlight on the lake, and the smell of the pine grove around the bunkhouse is strong, it speaks of Indian caverns, of forest no white man ever saw, which is to say it smells like no pine forest Rusty ever saw, for the odor goes in and in again until he is afraid to breathe all the way, aisles are opening in his brain before the incense of it which is like the odor of the long fall in a dream. Blasts of rage and gouts of fear burn like jets and flush like bile waters and he is humped in his mind on Hallie, D.J.’s own father, Rusty, married twenty years to a blond beauty he can never own for certain in the flesh of his brain.

  Intro Beep 7

  Yeah, the time is soon coming, thinks Rusty, when fornication will be professional athletics, and everybody will watch the national eliminations on TV. Will boys like D.J. and Tex be in the finals with a couple of Playboy bunnies or black ass honeys? well, shit-and-sure, fifty thousand major league fuckers will be clawing and cutting to get in the big time to present their open flower petal pussy, or hand-hewn diamond tool and testicles in happy magnification by Color Vision RCA. Only thing holding this scheme back is the problems of integration. What if the Spades run away with the jewels? Not to mention all the wet pussy in America. Think of that in Color TV—all the purple majesty, hey says Rusty, if they do, America’ll really be looking for a white hope, huh.