High Hunt (22 page)

“You've got to draw the tine someplace, Stan.”

“Exactly,” he said. “She just had to realize that I was important, too.” He was rubbing his hands together, staring at the ground. “I know she'd do anything to get her own way, and I'm just afraid she might have done something stupid.”

“Oh?” I got very careful again. Damn it, I hate this walking on eggshells all the time!

“Some of the things McKlearey's been saying the last few days—I don't know.”

“I wouldn't pay too much attention to McKlearey,” I said.

“If I thought there was anything—I'd kill him—I swear it. So help me God, I'd kill him.” He meant it. I knew be meant it. Stan didn't say things like that. His hands were clenched tightly into fists, and he was still staring down at the ground. I knew that one wrong word here would blow the whole thing.

“McKlearey and Monica? Get serious. She wouldn't touch that crude bastard with a ten-foot pole. McKlearey?” I laughed as hard as I could. It may have sounded a little forced, but I had to get him backed off it. It wouldn't take too much for his mind to start ticking off the little series of items as Clydine had done in her little breakdown of the “Hubby-Wifey-Creepy-Jarhead” caper. Once he did, somebody was liable to get killed.

Stan looked off into the distance, not saying anything. I don't think I'd been very convincing. Then Jack came up, dragging a big bundle of limbs.

“Hey, you guys,” he said, puffing hard, “I hit a bonanza back in there. I got enough wood to last a month, but I'm gonna need help gettin' it out.”

“Sure, buddy,” I said with a false heartiness. “Come on, Stan, let's give him a hand.” I hoped to get Stan's mind off what he was thinking.

We spent the next half hour dragging piles of wood out from under the trees. The light faded more and more, and it was almost dark when Miller rode down to where we were working.

“I got them other piles you left farther up the line,” he said. “Looks like you got into a pretty good batch here.”

“There's plenty more back in there,” Jack said, “but it's gettin' too goddamn dark to be climbin' over all that stuff.”

“We can haul out some more tomorrow,” Miller said. ‘This'll last a while.”

He had a rope knotted around his saddle horn with a long end trailing on each side of the horse. We lashed several bundles of the limbs to each end of the rope and followed his horse back toward the campfire and the greenish glow of the Coleman lantern hanging from a tree limb in front of the storage tent. The grass and moss felt springy underfoot, the air was sharp, and the stars had started to come out.

I think we'd all figured that we'd be able to just sit around the fire now that it was dark, but Miller kept us busy. McKlearey was just finishing up a table. It was the damnedest thing I'd ever seen—crossed legs, like a picnic table and a top of five-foot poles laid side by side. The whole thing was lashed together with baling wire. At first glance it looked rickety as hell, but Lou had buried about two feet of the bottom of each leg in the ground. It was solid as a rock.

“Hey, Professor,” Lou said to Stan as we came into camp, “you want to bring that bucksaw over here and square off the ends of this thing?” Lou had immediately picked up Miller's
nicknames. Stan gritted his teeth a little, but he did as Lou asked.

“Damn!” Clint said, grinning, “this'll make things as easy as workin' in the kitchen back at the ranch.” He had pots and pans spread out on the table even before Stan had finished sawing the ends square.

Miller put Jack and me to work chopping the limbs we'd hauled in into foot-and-a-half lengths and piling them up along one side of the storage tent.

“Latrine's over there, men,” Lou said importantly, coming up to us and pointing to a trail leading off into the trees. “I dug a slit-trench and put up a kind of a stool.” He was getting a kick out of all of this.

“How's Sloane?” Jack asked him.

“Better, better,” McKlearey said. “He'll be fine by morning. It was just blowin' up that goddamn air mattress that laid him out.”

Jack grunted and went back to chopping wood. We kept at it for about another half hour, and my stomach was starting to talk to me pretty loud.

“Chow,” Clint hollered, and we all homed in on the fire and the food.

“Plates and silverware there on the table,” Clint said. “Grab 'em and line up.”

We had venison steaks from Miller's freezer at the ranch, pork and beans and corn on the cob.

“Better enjoy that corn, men,” Clint said. “That's all I brought. I figured we could spread out a little, first night out.”

We took our plates back to the logs and stumps on the far side of the fire and began to eat. Sloane was up and about now and seemed to be a little better.

“Damn good,” Jack said with his mourn full.

“Yeah, man,” Lou said, shoveling food into his mouth.

It took me a little while to get the hang of holding the plate on my knees, but as soon as I got the idea that there was nothing wrong with picking up a steak in my fingers, I had it whipped.

After we finished eating and had cleaned up the dishes, we finally got a chance to sit down and relax. We all had a drink—whiskey and that icy-cold springwater—and sat, staring into the fire.

“Sure is quiet up here,” Jack said finally. He'd be the one to notice that.

“Long ways from the roads,” Miller said.

We sat quietly again.

Then we heard the horses snort and start to stir around, and a few minutes later a kind of grumbling, muttering chatter and a funny sort of dragging noise came from the woods.

“What's that?” Stan demanded nervously.

“Damn porkypine,” Clint said. “Probably comin' over to see what we're up to.”

McKlearey stood up, his eyes and teeth glowing sort of red in the reflected light of the fire. He pulled out his pistol.

“What you figgerin' on Sarge?” Miller asked, his voice a little sharp.

“I'll go kill 'im,” McKlearey said. “Don't want ‘im gettin' into the goddamn chow, do we?”

“No need to do that,” Miller said. “He ain't gonna come in here while we're around. Long as we don't figure on eatin' ‘im, there's no point in killin' ‘im. I'm pretty sure the woods is big enough for us and one porky, more or less.” He looked steadily at McKlearey until Lou began to get a little embarrassed.

“Anything you say, Cap,” he said finally, holstering the pistol and sitting back down.

“Knew a feller sat on a porky once—” Clint chuckled suddenly.

“No kiddin'?” Jack laughed.

“Never did it again,” Clint said. “Matter of fact, he didn't sit on
nothin
' for about three weeks afterward.”

“How did he manage to sit on a porcupine?” Stan asked, amused.

“Well sir, me'n him'd been huntin', see,” Clint started, “just kinda pokin' through the woods, havin' a little look over the top of the next ridge, like a feller will, and along about ten or so we got tuckered. We found what looked to be a couple old mossy stumps and just set down on 'em. Now the one
I
set on was a real stump, but
his
stump wasn't no stump—it was a big ol' boar porky—”

The story went on, and then there were others. The fire burned lower, popping once in a while as it settled into bright red coals.

McKlearey had several more drinks; but the rest of us had hung it up after the first one.

“I'd go a little easy on that, if it was me, Sarge,” Miller said finally, after McKlearey had made his fourth trip back to
the spring for cold water. “It'll have to last you the whole time. It's a pretty fair hike back to the liquor store.”

We all laughed at that.

“Sure thing, Cap,” McKlearey said agreeably and put his bottle away.

“Well,” Sloane said finally, “I don't know about the rest of you mighty hunters, but I'm about ready to tap out. Last night was a little shallow on sleep.” He was looking a lot better now but tired. I think we all were.

“Might not be a bad idea if we was all to turn in,” Miller said. “Not really a whole lot to do in camp after dark, and we might as well get used to rollin' out before daybreak.”

We got up, feeling the stiffness already settling in our overworked muscles. We all said good night and went off to our tents. Miller and Clint were in the one right by the storage tent, Sloane and Stan in the next one, then Jack and I, and finally, in the farthest one up the line, McKlearey in one by himself—it just worked out that way.

Jack and I stripped down to our underwear and hurriedly crawled into our sleeping bags. It was damned chilly in the tent. I fumbled around and got out my flashlight and put it on the ground beside the gun belt near the top of my bed.

“You suppose we oughta close the flap?” he asked after a few minutes.

“Let's see how it works out leaving it open,” I said. I was looking out the front of the tent at the dying fire.

“Well”—he chuckled—“I sure wouldn't want to roll over on that porky.”

“I don't think that tent-flap would ready stop him,” I said.

“Probably not,” he agreed. “Man, I'm tired. I feel like I've been up for a week.”

“You and me both, buddy,” I said.

“It's great up here, huh?”

“The greatest.”

There was a long silence. The fire popped once.

“Good night, Danny,” he said drowsily.

“Night, Jack,” I said.

I lay awake staring at the fire, thinking the long thoughts a man can think alone at night when there are no noises to distract him. Once again I wished that somehow my little Bolshevik could be here to see all of this. Maybe then she'd understand. For some reason it was important to me that she did.

I guess I must have drifted off to sleep, because the fire
was completely out when the first scream brought me up fighting.

“What the goddamn hell?” Jack said.

There was another scream. It was a man—right in camp.

I grabbed up the flashlight in one hand and the .45 in the other. I was out the front of the tent when the next scream came. I stubbed my toe on a rock and swore. I could see heads popping out of all the other tents except one. The screams were coming from McKlearey's tent.

I whipped open the front flap of his tent and put the beam of the flash full on him. “Lou! What the hell is it?”

He rolled over quickly and came up, that damned .38 in his right hand.
Son of a bitch
, he moved fast! “Who's there?” he barked.

“Easy, man,” I said. “It's me—Dan.”

“Danny? What's up?”

“That's what I just asked
you
. You were yelling like somebody was castrating you with a dull knife.”

“Oh,” he said, rubbing at his face and lowering his gun, “musta been a nightmare.”

“What's wrong?” I heard Miller's voice call.

I pulled my head out of the tent. “It's OK,” I called back. “Lou just had a nightmare, that's all. He's OK.” I stuck my head back in the tent. “You
are
OK, aren't you, Lou?”

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!

W
HEN
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, “but—” 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.