Hunters (4 page)

"I'm ready anytime," Terry said.

"You are? Well, that's good, 'cause so am I.
I am
really
ready. My van's behind the building here, come
on, let's go." He put his arm on Terry's shoulder, and led him
around the back of the building.

When Terry saw that there were no vans or
cars parked there, he started to say something, but Sheldon hit him
with a sharp right jab to the face. He heard the cartilage of the
nose crunch, and felt the wetness of Terry's blood on his
knuckles.

He laughed and swung a left cross across the
man's jaw, giving a short gasp as he raked the skin of his knuckles
open on Terry's teeth. Even though Terry hadn't raised a hand
against him, it was as though he was fighting back, and the pain
enraged Sheldon so that he pummeled the smaller man in the stomach.
Terry's knees buckled and he fell moaning onto the loose
gravel.

But that wasn't enough for Sheldon. He
reached down, grabbed Terry's shirt in his right hand, pulled him
off the gravel, and smashed his left fist into the bleeding face
over and over again, until Terry couldn't even beg him to stop.
Then Sheldon let him fall back onto the ground, wiped his hands on
his jeans, and walked back to the motel, where he fell into bed
exhausted.

He woke up early the next morning, checked
out, and drove home. He never heard another thing about Terry
Whoever-He-Was. Never another thing.

Until today. Until the doctor told him he
had AIDS, and Sheldon knew all right where it had come from. From
Terry-Whoever-He-Was, that sonovabitch faggot whose filthy blood
had gotten in Sheldon's cut hands.

Terry up in Bradford.

He called Steve, his foreman, and told him
that he wouldn't be in for the rest of the day. Steve bitched that
he was the only good man he had on shift that day because everyone
else was deer hunting. "I need more medical tests, Steve," Sheldon
said.

"More tests?" Steve sounded impatient.
"Christ, what for?"

"They think maybe I got cancer." That would
shut him up. And it wasn't so far from the truth either.

"Cancer?" He heard the awe in Steve's voice.
"Shit...well, okay then, you just do whatever you have to, we'll
get along. I hope everything'll...be okay."

No sir, buddy, never again. "Thanks.
Bye."

Nothing would ever be okay again, but maybe he could
make something right. If he could just find his old pal Terry.

A
ndrew Kenton hated
the woods. He hated the cold, he hated walking on wet, dead leaves,
and he hadn't even liked deer all that much until he met Jean
Catlett. What he liked was Los Angeles and sunshine and acting,
which he was very good at.

But it was no act that he loved Jean
Catlett. He thought she was terrific the first time he met her at
the Friends of Animals fundraiser, and nothing had happened since
then to change his mind. In fact, the more he knew about her, the
better he liked her. He liked her looks, he liked the way she made
love, and he especially liked the fact that she was the only child
of Mel Catlett of Catcoll Productions.

Andrew had worked for Catcoll, playing the
gay neighbor on the recently canceled Fox sitcom, "Who's Knockin'?"
He appeared in only six of the twenty-two episodes the previous
season, and was surprised that Jean even recognized him. But she
explained that she watched the show regularly because of Ginnie
Marsh, the lead, who was also active in the animal rights group.
She also told him that she wondered if such a macho looking guy was
really gay, and that Ginnie had assured her that Andrew was
not.

He asked her out, and one thing led to
another. He was sure that if he had met her anywhere other than at
the meeting he wouldn't have gotten a smile. But Jeannie loved her
animals, man. It had rubbed off on him as well. When he sat and
listened to her talk about what they did to lab animals and animals
raised for fur, it made him want to go out and break into labs and
ranches and unlock all the cages. But what really got her hot was
hunters.

"The so-called scientists and fur butchers
are bad enough," she had said on one of their first dates. "But to
think that people actually go out into the wild, to the animals'
homes
, and hunt them down...that is totally unacceptable and
unforgivable."

"But a lot of them do it for the meat, don't
they? I mean, we both eat meat." Jean, however, didn't touch beef
or pork.

"We eat meat to live, not for pleasure. And
the chicken and turkey we eat wouldn't even exist if we didn't
raise them for food. I'm talking about invaders of their territory.
Andrew, it's like if some aliens came down to earth one week a year
and were allowed to kill as many people as they wanted, throw them
on the roof of their spaceship, and then fly away till next
year."

Jean ate seafood, and Andrew was about to
ask if fishermen didn't invade the fishes' home, but then decided
not to. He didn't think Jean would like the parallel.

Over the year that he dated her, Andrew
watched her concern become a passion, and the passion become a
mania. But it was a mania that he slowly learned to share. It
wasn't too long before they and Tim Weems and Michael Brewster
decided over drinks that it would be a good idea to set an example,
to hunt down and do to a hunter exactly what a hunter did to a
deer. It was then that the four of them became the Wildlife
Liberation Front. Then when Chuck Marriner and Sam Rogers joined
them, the violence quotient escalated, until they thought about
doing even more.

But first they had to find the right
camp.

Andrew moved through the Pennsylvania State
Game Lands 25 unconcerned with stealth. He was hunting a place, not
a deer. Most of the primitive, backwoods cabins were along creeks
to insure a good supply of water, so Andrew walked toward where the
topographical map said was a stream, but grew frustrated when he
didn't come across one.

These maps were a pain in the ass. Chuck was
the only one who really knew how to read them, but he was an
impatient teacher, and hadn't been able to pass the art along to
the others. So Andrew trudged on as the sun came up, looking for
the stream.

So where was it? Where the hell was the goddam
stream?

T
he one-room cabin
that Pete Diffenderfer shared with his two fellow hunters was next
to a stream. It had been built in the early forties, when hundreds
of cabins had been constructed on leased state land.

That morning Pete Diffenderfer had awakened
an hour before dawn, pushed in the button of the wind-up alarm
clock, and shivered with excitement and the cold. The fire he had
set the night before in the wood stove was dead, and he was glad he
had worn his insulated long underwear in his sleeping bag. He
didn't think he could have stood the chilly air against his bare
trunk and legs. He woke his friends, slid out of his bunk, and put
on two pairs of socks, one cotton, the other heavy wool. He stepped
into his thick trousers, then slipped his feet into ankle-high L.
L. Bean hunting boots.

Pete was out the front door before the
others had disentangled themselves from their sleeping bags. He
breathed in the air, reveling in the sharp crispness that stung his
throat. He walked up the hill from the cabin to the outhouse,
defecated quickly and efficiently, and walked back again. Then he
broke the ice in the basin that sat on the railing of the tiny
porch, and splashed frigid water on his face. It made him even more
wakeful than before.

Back inside, the men joked, ate donuts, and
drank the coffee they had made the night before. Then they finished
dressing, ending with the heavy coats of blaze orange, put wads of
toilet paper under their scope covers so the lenses wouldn't fog in
the colder outside air, and stepped outside to hunt.

It took Pete Diffenderfer a half hour of
walking in near darkness to reach the spot he had chosen the day
before, when they had helped each other erect their stands, the
elevated platforms in which they would perch and wait for a deer to
wander by. One of his friends was a half mile to the northwest, the
other a mile south. Pete could easily hear their shots, and if he
did he would hold still for five, ten minutes, waiting even more
silently in case of a miss or a wounding that would make a deer
run, limp, or drag itself past his stand.

By the time Pete had climbed onto his perch,
he could just make out streaks of rose through the ragged treetops
to the east. He settled himself, his Remington pump .760 resting
across his legs. His feet dangled over the edge of the stand,
fifteen feet above the ground. For comfort's sake, Pete had placed
a small, flat pillow under the spot where his knees rested against
the sharp edge of the stand.

Pete thought that it seemed colder than it
had in years gone by. He rubbed his fingers against each other
inside the heavy mittens, and wished that the orange of his jacket
was as warm to the touch as it was to the eye. The deer must really
be colorblind if that hue didn't startle them. He had heard other
hunters say that it appeared white to the deer's eyes. Well, if it
did it did. It didn't much matter, and besides, it was the law.

In his fifty years of deer hunting, Pete
Diffenderfer had always obeyed the law. His father had taught him
that when he had given him his first deer rifle at the age of
fourteen. One deer a year, no more. No shooting one for your
friend, and no shooting a doe in buck season. Pete had done none of
those things. He considered himself a good and honest hunter.

He was an effective one as well. In fifty
years he had brought home thirty-eight bucks, and had gotten one
consecutively for the past eight years. The actual kills made his
heart pound, but it was the hunt itself and all that went with it
that he relished. Every year he went through the ritual of taking
out the bullets and the rifle, cleaning it, sighting it in at the
sportsmen's club to which he belonged, and shooting at the targets
on the range until his offhand scores equaled those of men years
his junior.

Pete loved the ritual, the preparations, the
chance to be with his friends and by himself. His two companions
with whom he had come to Elk County shared his love of the
outdoors, but he seldom saw them outside of deer season, so that
when they did get together there was much to catch up on.

But the solitude was the best part, the
sense that there was no one but him in the world to see the sky
grow brighter, feel the air become less bitterly cold, behold the
dread miracle of winter. He sat and waited, and while he was alert
to the sounds of the woods, he also escaped into himself, his past,
his thoughts and memories of seasons before.

He thought of his wife, of when they had
both been young, though no happier than they were now, of the job
at the steel mill he had held for over thirty years before he had
retired four years ago, of his church where he served on the budget
committee, of his three grandchildren, of the oldest boy who wanted
to go hunting with him next year when he was old enough.

Pete Diffenderfer thought of many things as the
morning brightened, until the sun slashed bright streaks through
the latticework of branches, bathing his orange garb with fire,
making him a perfect target.

A
ndrew Kenton saw
his first dead deer at 7:00 that morning. He was coming across a
gully when he heard a shot that sounded so close to him that it
froze him for a moment. Then he realized it had been off to his
right, and he heard someone shout, and then saw a patch of blaze
orange against the brown of the trees. It was moving away from him,
and further down the gully to his right. He turned and followed and
in another minute came across two men.

No, he was wrong. The one kneeling next to
the dead animal was only a boy, no older than fourteen. He looked
like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting, bucktoothed and
freckled, with a tuft of red hair sticking out from beneath his
hunting cap. But on that cherubic face was a grin that Andrew saw
only as sadistic; sadism mirrored in the face of the man,
apparently the boy's father, who stood over the grisly sight.

"You believe this?" the man said, a
delighted chuckle in his voice. "His first time out, I haven't
walked away from him more than three minutes when bang, he gets
this
." The man gestured to the dead animal's head.
"Ten-point, gotta be an eighteen inch spread, don't you think?"

Andrew had no idea what the man was talking
about. All he could see was the deer, dead, blood still trickling
from a hole beneath its shoulder. But he nodded and said, "Yeah...I
guess so."

"He just went
down
, Dad," said the
boy. "I mean, his legs just went out and he went
down
."

"That's the way you want to do it," the
father said. "He didn't feel a thing. Now let me get a quick shot
here..." He took a pocket camera from the folds of his coat and
took a shot of the boy and the dead deer. "Say," he said to Andrew,
"would you mind taking a shot of the two of us with the buck?
Pretty special day for both of us."

Andrew nodded bleakly, laid his rifle on the
ground, and took the camera. He centered the two and the deer in
the frame, and tripped the shutter, then handed it back to the man,
who thanked him and turned back to the boy, grinning. "Now let's
get him field dressed. This is
not
the fun part."

He was right. What followed was a nightmare
of knives and blood and steam rising off of flesh, and a smoking,
multi-hued mound of entrails settling itself on the dead leaves
like a nest of lazy snakes in sunshine. Andrew could watch no more.
He turned away, picked up his gun, and walked back down the
gully.

"So long," the man called after him. "Good
luck to you!"