And Now We Shall Do Manly Things (27 page)

The smell of nitrocellulose hung heavy around me, that tangy, sweet smoke heavier than the still-crisp morning air. My heart was pounding through my chest, my eyes were wider, and every sound seemed somehow louder, more distinct. Everything I mentioned before about the calm of being in the woods? Yeah, forget all that stuff. That was nice, but I could get those feelings by going for a walk through the neighborhood or listening to a James Taylor album in a dark room. This, this jacked-up rush—a combination of awareness and vigilance, fear and focus—this was what had been missing in my life. I could get used to this. I needed this. Sometime over the last decade of routine and under the constant if relatively slight crush of financial and familial pressure, the world had become a numb and colorless drone, my life like a slight case of tinnitus persistently buzzing in my ear. This new thing—this was a rush. Not an adrenaline surge like the kind you get when you're walking down a dark staircase and miss the bottom step, but an awakening of purpose. Cliché as it may be, I felt suddenly somehow more alive than I had just a moment or two before those birds flooded out of the low bushes. I wanted more.

I popped two more shells into my gun, pausing to notice that finally, after nearly a year of having it in my possession, I had a reason to clean it, looked forward to cleaning it in fact. Obviously, I hadn't definitively killed anything. Not as far as I knew anyway. But I thought maybe I had winged the bottom of the two birds and so I walked off in the general direction they had flown to find out, stalking my prey. To my surprise, the rush held. I walked through the thick brambles and tall grass, down along the dirt road fully aware of my own awareness. I was looking for something—anything—that might indicate there was a wounded bird somewhere near me. After nearly half an hour, I hadn't found anything, though I had managed to put a ring of sweat around the inside of the blaze orange stocking cap on my head and cuts on my upper thighs from walking blithely through the thornbushes, eventually coming to the realization that if I had hit the bird, it was gone and I could not have hurt it that bad or else I would have found it. It was right about this time that those two guys pulled up in their SUV and asked how I was doing.

“Not bad,” I panted. “Flushed a few grouse a little while ago and thought I might have hit one.”

“Probably tough to do without a dog,” said the man in the passenger seat. He was younger than the one driving, and I assumed they were a father and son.

“Yes, sir, it is,” I said with a touch more enthusiasm than what would have been acceptably cool.

“Yeah,” said the younger man, who, with some further inspection, wasn't that young but probably about my age, “came all the way out here to try and work my dog.” He pointed his thumb toward a rear window where the slimy snout of a spaniel was leaving streaks on the glass.

“I'll tell you what,” I said. “I'm on my way out. Give me five minutes to get out of here and you can feel free to take this field.” It might seem like I was cowering somehow or giving in, but in truth, I wanted to go explore the woods and look for other fields. The longer my fruitless search for the phantom bird went on, the more convinced I was that I could and should shoot a rabbit. I can't explain it other than to say that it was kind of like Vegas. You go to Vegas and on the first day you have grand visions of running a poker table. But you get over to the poker tables and you realize you're not a high roller.
What the hell?,
you think.
Poker isn't really my thing; I'll go clean up at blackjack.
But the female Asian blackjack dealer separates you from most of your money over the course of a couple of days and then you're at the airport. Your flight is leaving in twenty minutes and you are dead-set convinced that you were meant to win something while you are there. So you head to the slot machines looking for something, anything to justify your trip. You have to win. You've abandoned the idea of a big score at the tables. You'll settle for five dollars in sticky nickels. Anything. That's how I was feeling. I came looking for pheasant, but there were none around. I stumbled onto some grouse and took a shot. I won a couple of hands, but ultimately gave up and moved on. Now, I needed a score, something to bring home, to slake this lust that's awoken in me. Rabbit, of which I have seen many in the wild and which are conveniently bereft of wings, would be fine with me.

“Are you sure?” asked the older man, speaking across his son. “We don't want to kick you out.”

“Not a problem,” I said. “On my way out.”

“Thanks so much,” he said.

“Yeah, thank you,” said the younger man. “And be careful. I know how hard it is to play dog.”

I nodded and headed back in the general direction of my car. I was twenty yards away and fully engrossed in the thought of shooting a rabbit before I understood his pun. Following the horse path I had noticed the previous week, I descended into the woods looking for rabbits where I had seen them. The rabbit shot was the toughest to hit and the bane of my time spent on the L.L.Bean range. To simulate the bouncing gait of a rabbit, a clay pigeon was thrown across the ground on its side. It would pick up speed and bounce every time it hit a pebble or an uneven clump of mud. Throughout the day of shooting, I think I may—maybe—have hit one. So I was trying to remember what the instructors had said about moving with the target as I came to the place where rabbits had been the previous Sunday. But the more I thought, I realized that the rabbit I had seen stayed largely still when I walked up to it. In fact, I've walked up on hundreds of the critters while hiking in the city park with Jack and Dylan and, usually, you can get pretty damned close before they scurry off into the underbrush.
I can hit a rabbit,
I thought.
This is going to be easy.

I spent another hour trudging through the woods, my boots sinking into the muck and mud as the air warmed and the ground melted into a mire of slop. My buzz was wearing off. I was coming down, and, try as I did to convince myself to remain alert, my attention was waning. I was pretty well done for the day. I climbed back out of the woods and crossed the road to where my car was parked. I don't know how I had missed it the week before or even earlier that morning, but I noticed a trail running south from the small parking lot. Or, more precisely, a wide avenue of grass cleared through the trees. It was as wide as a one-lane road and manicured as if it had been mowed fairly recently. Holding on to the notion that I might yet find something to propel lead in the general direction of, I decided to take a little stroll. This part of the park, a promenade really, felt less like hunting than it did an easy meandering. I followed the manicured path for about two-thirds of a mile until it opened on an enormous clearing. Near the end of the trail, there was a sign indicating that this was a dedicated dove hunting area and that the season was officially over. There were four or five acres of grass and about two of the frozen, dried hulls of sunflowers bent against the weight of their own decay. I followed a tree line down a gradual hill and, peering through the branches, was amazed by what I saw.

Stretching in every direction were fields of tall grasses and reeds bigger than me nicely quartered off into manageable one-acre sections. There must have been sixteen of them, all calling out to me: “Craig! Craig! Come walk through me! There are pheasant in me and I want you to shoot them!” If the decidedly smaller field I had spent the morning tromping through was Bird Valhalla, this was the Playboy Mansion, Disneyworld, and the Vatican all rolled into one. It also looked like the kind of place where deer hang out, which made me glad I hadn't strolled this way the week before on the last day of rifle season. The vegetation was dense, but not all that hard to walk through and far enough away from the woods to mean there weren't a lot of predator species—owls and hawks—around to drive the pheasant off. Low-hung grains meant food was plentiful, and the low areas held ankle-deep water that I thought might be attractive to any species choking down a diet composed of raw muesli.

I was already out of time and as badly as I wanted to tromp through there and reignite my lust for the hunt, I had to go. Walking back to the car, I promised myself that it didn't matter how many dishes I had to wash, how many diapers I had to change or
Twilight
movies I had to endure, I was coming back the next day to hunt this ground. My first bird was in there, waiting. I just knew it.

19

Karma

I
t turned out that convincing my wife to let me get up early and go hunting a second day in a row was not nearly as hard as I had imagined it would be. I had tried to convince her to be excited about my near miss when I got home the day before, but explaining to someone who is probably not that interested to begin with what a rush feels like is like trying to explain the nuances of Twitter to blind octogenarians—they may understand what you're saying, but they just don't get it. Rebecca has never been impressed by the process. She hates the drive on vacation and doesn't particularly care about the progress I've made over the last decade with regard to cleaning up after myself. She wants results. She wants to be at the beach, not on the way to the beach. She wants no crumbs on the counter after I make a sandwich. She won't be impressed by the fact that there are fewer than there used to be.

Believe it or not, this is one of the things I love most about her. She gets shit done. She makes sure I get shit done. I tend to get lost in the process, to take the long view. We may not be where we want to be yet, but we're on the way. I may not be a bestselling writer yet, but it will happen. We may not be at the beach yet, but look at the mountains, aren't they lovely? The answer, from her, is always no. If she gave a shit about the mountains, we would be going to the mountains for our vacation. She wants the sun, the sand, a drink with a little umbrella, and to be out of the damned car.

This can be tough sometimes, especially when I really am trying but just can't seem to get something done. I hate it, for instance, when I'm working on something and have to step away for a moment to do something with the kids, go to the bathroom, or take a phone call. It always seems like that's the exact moment she decides to check in on me. I'll be midway through the dishes, sink filled with bubbles, counters wet, and dishwasher open. I'll run in to the boys' room to remind them about something or another and she'll be working on the computer in our room. I won't be away for thirty seconds when I hear her call my name.

“Craig!”

“Yes, dear?”

“Um, were you planning on finishing this?”

“Yes, I just had to step away.”

“Look, I appreciate that you're trying, but if you're just going to leave a mess, I'll do it myself.”

“But I just had to step away for a minute. I am going to finish it, I swear.”

“Never mind,” she'll say without anger, but loaded with frustration. “I'll do it.”

“No,” I'll say. “Please just let me finish.”

Soon, I'm begging to finish the dishes and trying to convince her that I had a good reason to step away, even if I'm having a hard time, at the moment, remembering what it was. I think it's because Rebecca is such a focused person. People always talk about moms being multitaskers, and they are; she is. When it comes to the kids, she can be in three places at once. It's really pretty amazing. But when it comes to anything other than the kids and their immediate needs, her focus is singular. She can only pay attention to the TV or to me, not both. I annoy her when we're at restaurants and am able—in fact, am incapable of preventing myself from being able—to listen to and follow not only our conversation but the ones going on at the tables around us. I also have a bit of a wandering mind. There are times when I will be in the middle of dishes or doing laundry or any number of other household tasks and find that whole minutes have passed and I'm still wiping the same dish, ironing the same sleeve, vacuuming the same spot. Her mind is linear, mine is tangential. Yet it somehow works for us.

So when I told her that I needed to go back out for a second straight morning, missing breakfast, making beds, and, possibly, church, I was prepared to argue about the need for me to do so in order to write this book, to fulfill my publishing contract. I was ready to talk about all the nights I spend home with the kids while she goes out with friends or how many Sunday mornings I have brought her breakfast in bed just because I love her. It turned out, I didn't need to.

“Just kill something, will you?” she said as I once again kissed her on the cheek in the predawn darkness. “I mean, seriously. How long is this going to go on?”

I didn't have an answer, just gave her another quick peck and headed back up to my hunting ground.

I
t was even colder on this morning than it had been the day before, but I hardly noticed. I was too determined, too jacked up on expectations and gas station coffee to care. I swung my car into the gravel lot, tied my boots, threw on my vest, and had my gun put together, loaded, and ready to go in less than a minute. I headed straight down the grassy thoroughfare of a trail toward the bird Playboy Mansion with the kind of intensity a Notre Dame football player has when he slaps that sign hanging in the locker room,
PLAY LIKE A CHAMPION TODAY.
Hunt like a champion. Hunt like a man. Get this done.

When I returned home empty-handed the previous day—again—Jack scoffed and said, “Dad, I thought you were supposed to be bringing home the bacon.” Beneath the innocent condescension and latent Oedipal tone was, I think, genuine disappointment. This was no longer about me and my ego, my book or my career. This was about showing my little boy what it meant to be a man. This was about showing my wife that I could get things done and coming home, chest out, boots dirty, and slapping protein on the table with a caveman grunt.

It's not like I was running through the woods or angrily swinging my gun through the air. But I was walking differently. I was carrying the gun in both hands in a ready position instead of slung over a shoulder or rested in the crook of an elbow. And I scanned the horizon like weather radar, trying to pick up the tiniest movement, the slightest hint that I was not alone. By the time I reached the dead sunflower field, I was on high alert. But it was still kind of dark, the sun hinting at its presence over the horizon like foreplay to an actual day. And cold. Really cold. Like didn't-realize-I-couldn't-feel-my-legs cold. I was undeterred. I marched straight toward the frosted amber fields at the bottom of the hill, cut through the narrow row of trees, and plunged, without hesitation, into the chin-high or higher vegetation.

Now, had I been smart about it, had I been thinking at all with my head and not with my outsized sense that I had something to prove, I would have realized that there was probably no way I was going to flush a bird. It was early and cold, and they were bedded down for the night. The ground was frozen. The wind was crisp. There wasn't a dog breathing down their neck. They had little incentive in this thick cover to move at all, short of me physically stepping directly on them. I wasn't going to scare a bird into rising and trying to make its escape by air and I should have realized that, but like I said, I wasn't thinking really. So I charged headlong into quartered field section after quartered field section making my way south, not taking the time to look before I stepped, just continuing on the same determined clip I use when running into the grocery store for milk on my way home from work.

I guess that's why I didn't notice anything when I stepped into the third acre field of the morning. It was in the southwest corner, near the bottom of the field marked exclusively for hunting dove in warmer weather and the low point of the ground I was hunting. I didn't notice the tiny crunch when I first stepped in and must have been distracted by the tall, reedy grass slapping against my face and coat to notice the crunching as I continued deeper and deeper in. In fact, I didn't notice anything about the ground I was walking on until I was in the center of the acre section and found myself in a small clearing about the size of a hotel Jacuzzi, a place where there were no plants at all.

I paused and checked that I hadn't accidentally knocked the safety off on my gun, catching in my peripheral vision a glint off what should have been soil. I looked around the ground and noticed that I was standing not on rich, midwestern soil, but above it. Somehow, I had stumbled onto a patch of ice and before I could say “oh shit,” it started to crack under my girth. Spider fractures ran out from under my L.L.Bean boots and I couldn't move. In every direction and leading off into the brush was ice. If I moved, I thought, I might make things worse. I stood stock-still for a long count of ten, considering my options as the ice beneath my feet continued to crack, fracture, and shift. Because it was cloudy, I had no idea if I was standing on an inch of frozen water or the failing frozen skin of a pond. I snapped open my gun and removed the shells, stuffing them into a pocket on my vest and snapping the gun shut again. If this is some kind of pond, I thought I should try to throw the gun away from me if I went in so that it didn't end up at the bottom. That, I worried, would piss Dad off; also, the idea of walking across cracking ice with a loaded weapon just sounded like one of Arthur's cautionary tales. I didn't want future hunter's safety students to have to listen to the story about the smart-ass who aced the exam but died from acute dumbassedness before he shot anything.

Gun unloaded and ice continuing to crack, I looked around, trying to decide which way to go. I was standing in almost the exact center of the field and it was hard to tell which way to go because the grass and reeds were so tall. I decided to throw caution to the wind and make a break for it, going back the way I had come. I turned around gently and just as I took my first step, the ice under my back foot gave way and it disappeared with a splash, throwing my weight forward. My left foot lunged forward as my right knee hit the ice and broke through and I was stuck precariously in a deep lunge with my gun slung over my left knee, my right submerged in freezing cold water, and my right foot completely under. The only way out was forward.

I pushed hard with my left foot and pulled my right leg up, balancing myself with the gun pressed against my thigh. I turned to see that the water was only about a foot deep, but it was enough to soak my pants. The boots on the other hand, I must admit, kept my feet completely dry and I shuffled my way back across ice, through the vegetation and back on to solid ground, pissed off and with a cold right thigh.

I had a decision to make: continue on in my quest to bring home my son's bacon or do the smart thing, the thing that would reduce the risk of hypothermia, and head for home. I chose, of course, to forge on.

For the next two hours, I pushed through the thick cover, pausing occasionally to listen for movement and hearing none. It was one of those still mornings. Bright sun glinting off the vestigial frost. Crisp air quiet but for the muted
whoosh
of a gentle breeze through the trees a quarter mile away. I could hear myself breathe, each cloud puff of exhalation sounding like a freight train. My leg, cold at first from the moisture, warmed up with exertion and soon I barely noticed my wet pants. I might go home and find the skin blackened with frostbite and falling off in chunks, but for the time being it didn't hurt.

I
t's strange how your perspective can change when walking through thick vegetation. Come to a high point and look around and you get the sense that you are alone in a relatively vast space, a space much larger than your yard or the supermarket or your cubicle at work. But head back into the stuff and have it block your view and you can feel the world close around you pretty quickly. I tried not to think of the movie
Children of the Corn
and the scenes of those demonic kids appearing mysteriously among the tall stalks. I tried not to think of anything creepy and, really, there was no reason to. But the words
the body was found by a hunter
echoed in my head and left me with a sense that at any moment, with any given step, I would find the gruesome remains of what had once been a drifter or a hooker or a guy who took out a bad loan. That's what I mean when I tell my wife that there are times when I wander off into my own mind and allow my imagination to get the better of me. I simply can't help it. It's why it takes me a little longer to finish the dishes or put away the laundry, why sometimes I can be a little distant on the phone. I don't tune out intentionally; my brain and all its twisted gray goo simply gets the better of me, and sometimes the thing that brings me back is a reaction to my own thoughts.

I was picturing the dismembered corpse—hacked to bits and freezer-burned like a cheap gallon of ice cream—when the hair on the back of my neck stood up straight and a chill ran down my back that seemed to emanate from within. That was it. That was what I needed to bring me back from fantasy to the Bird Grotto and the realization that in two hours of exertion I hadn't seen so much as a cardinal, let alone a pheasant, grouse, or rabbit. Clearly what I had thought would be a perfect hunting ground was little more than a frozen-over swamp, and rather than run the risk of falling again through some ice in order to try and prove my instincts correct, I decided to head back to Valhalla and give it another go in the millet and tall grass. Fuck this place. At least in Valhalla anything or anyone left for dead would be easy to spot and, presumably, avoid.

It was a walk of more than a mile back to Valhalla, perhaps approaching a mile and a half. Back through the thick stuff, up the cleared field marked for dove hunting, and down the manicured path through the woods. Getting to my car was halfway, but I didn't stop. I kept walking across the road, passing the field where I went on my first solo hunt, then the one next to it where the eight guys in orange had scared the hell out of me, and across another road to my perfect little spot. I was coming up on the second road when I heard a choked roar approaching from the left and looked up to see an oversize green pickup truck chugging and spluttering toward the little turnaround at Valhalla.

Shit,
I thought to myself.
I walked all this way and someone is going to jump on in front of me.
I slowed my pace a little and watched as the truck turned around and slowly pulled down the dirt road running along the western edge of Valhalla. I rounded a narrow stand of trees and heard the engine shut off, a door open and slam shut, the yipping wail of a puppy in a lot of discomfort. I was close by now, maybe twenty-five yards away and hidden behind some trees and brush from direct view. I heard a voice, deep, twangy, and nasally muttering frustrated words.