Some Faces in the Crowd (36 page)

That Friday after school we asked permission to go up to our clubhouse and camp out overnight. The moon was full and awfully close, like it was out there to light the meadow for us so we’d be sure not to miss him if he came down. We made up stories to tell each other to keep ourselves awake but by around one o’clock Davy was so sleepy that he’d slip off into little cat naps while he was talking. We were just about to call it a night and crawl into the clubhouse when all of a sudden I saw something that looked like branches moving out of the woods.

“Davy, look! Look over there!”

You could only see his antlers and the front of his head poking out of the woods, but there wasn’t any doubt about it—the head was white. It was our white deer all right.

Davy shouted, “Oh, boy, there he is—isn’t he a beaut!” and sort of clapped his hands without meaning to. The head of the white buck popped back into the pines and we could hear him taking off through the woods.

The next night we were all ready for him. We took some corn from the crib and made a trail of it from the pine woods to the middle of the meadow. Then we got down behind the fence and we tried not to move, even when we itched. The moon threw a path of light across the meadow and the stars looked cold and bright. The only sound in the world was the breeze blowing in from the river. We kept our eyes on the spot where we had seen him poke through the night before. Maybe two hours went by, or maybe it was only twenty minutes. It was hard to tell, out there in the moonlight with Davy and me not saying a word to each other and hardly even breathing. And then, there he was again, in the same spot where we had seen him the night before.

This time we didn’t say a word and we didn’t move a peg. We froze like hunting dogs and now we were really holding our breaths. He pushed his head out and looked around, and then we could see his neck and his haunches, and they were
white,
as white as first snow in December. He nibbled the nearest ear of corn and we held our breaths as long as we could and loved the sight of him. With another slow and careful look he moved on to the next ear of corn. Now, for the first time, we could see all of him. He was big and lean as a racehorse and you could see how proud he was of those wonderful antlers. Davy swore he was a sixteen-pointer, and he had at least twelve, anyhow, and the way they stood out in the moonlight against the black green of the pines was one of the most elegant sights we ever hope to see. He stood right out there in front of us for at least five minutes, or it could have been half an hour, and he moved with his head high, wearing those antlers as proud as a king. We stood still, so still that we ached, and then Davy couldn’t hold it any more and shifted his feet.

Snowy—that’s what we had decided to call him—jerked his head and sniffed the air and looked straight at us, right into our eyes, it seemed, and the moonlight made his eyes glow like a lit-up reindeer we had seen in the window of a big city store at Christmas time. He watched us for maybe a minute and we watched him, and then he was off, sailing over the meadow, a white streak of deer-speed that would have outrun Man o’ War.

Every night after that we left corn for Snowy and almost every night he came down from the pine woods. Each time he was a little bolder and more sure of himself. I think he knew we were there. I think he was sort of showing off for us. He would finish the corn and look over to where he had seen us the first time and lower his head two or three times as if he was bowing to us. We planned to get closer and closer to him, and one of these days, when he learned where his food came from and who his friends were, we hoped maybe we could get him to eat right out of our hands. Yes, and maybe we would have, if the darned gunning season hadn’t come along.

We hadn’t told anybody about our white deer, not even Mom or Dad or Billy, for fear the news would get back to Mr. Jeliffe and he’d get after Snowy with his rifle and try to bag him for that mantelpiece in his den. It didn’t seem right that anything as proud and handsome as Snowy’s twelve- or fourteen-point antlers should end up on the wall of a loudmouth like Mr. Jeliffe. So every time we heard a shot up on the hill we were awfully nervous, for we knew that Mr. Jeliffe and some of his friends were gunning over there near the pine woods. We asked Dad not to let Mr. Jeliffe gun on our side of the line but Dad said that was rather hard to do because after all we were neighbors and it was local custom for neighbors to gun each other’s places even when they were posted. So all we could do was hope and pray and that night when we snuck down to the meadow we felt like cheering out loud because Snowy showed up as usual. The night was a little darker now because the moon was beginning to shrink again but he was still one beautiful sight. We watched him go trotting off into the woods proud as a king and I think if Mr. Jeliffe had showed up with his gun just then and shot old Snowy down, we’d of grabbed that gun away from him and murdered him in cold blood.

Late the next afternoon we heard a shot up in the woods, from the far end of our line and we ran out with our fingers crossed and our hearts twisting up. There at the boundary line of our place and his was Mr. Jeliffe, peering into the woods.

“So you kids didn’t believe we had a white deer up here?” he said. “Well, I just got a shot at him and I think I nicked him but he ran off into the woods. You c’n come along and help me look for him if you want to. He might be dying somewhere in there. How would you like a nice venison steak to bring home to Dad?”

He thought he was so great, standing up there with his gun.

“Don’t you know it’s bad luck shooting a white deer, Mr. Jeliffe? Billy Yeager says it’s even worse’n busting a mirror.”

Mr. Jeliffe laughed. “Those silly superstitions. Don’t tell me two intelligent boys like you won’t pass under a ladder and are scared of black cats.”

As a matter of fact we weren’t a bit superstitious and we used to tease Billy because he’d turn around whenever he saw a black cat. But all of a sudden we were awfully superstitious about Snowy. We knew it was bad luck to kill Snowy. Anybody deserved bad luck if he even thought of killing anything as handsome and proud and beautiful as Snowy was when he ventured into the meadow that first evening and pointed his antlers at the moon.

So our hearts kept twisting up as we walked along with Mr. Jeliffe searching for Snowy’s body on the piny floor of the woods. His dogs kept sniffing, stopping and then running forward and any second we were afraid they would lead us to the fallen body of poor Snowy. But he wasn’t to be found. He had disappeared somewhere into the woods. Mr. Jeliffe got angry and said some bad words. “I’m going to get that S.O.B. of a buck yet,” he said. It made Davy and me feel pretty bad to hear Snowy, our beautiful white deer Snowy, called a name like that.

We worried about him all that night. We slipped out to the pasture but he wasn’t there. It was snowing a little bit, and mighty cold, but we waited as long as we could, until Davy’s teeth got to chattering so loud we had to go in.

That night I dreamt about Snowy. There was a terrible wound from a bullet in his sleek white chest and then he was gone and Davy and I were following a trail of blood across the white fields beyond the woods. I woke up half bawling and I heard Davy say, “What’s the matter, Steve?” He wasn’t in his bed. He was sitting on the window ledge staring out at the snow. I told him about my dream and he said he had woke himself up with a dream too. He dreamt that the two of us had gone hunting for Mr. Jeliffe and we had shot him right between the eyes and his head was mounted over the mantel of our fireplace with the bullet holes in his forehead making him look like a man with four eyes.

We kept leaving corn for Snowy night after night and we stayed up as late as we could on school nights in the hope of seeing him again, but it looked like he must have crawled off into the woods and died somewhere. We sure missed him. He wasn’t like our dog Toro or our cat Quaker; we had never fed him or patted him or even so much as touched him. But Snowy was a pet to us just as much as if we had ridden him or taught him to sit up and shake hands. He was the only white deer we ever had and it felt like a knife inside to think of him dead and gone or crawling off to a lonely death. Every night, with less and less hope, we kept a lookout for him, until the last day of gunning season. That was a Saturday, so Davy and I decided to take a long hike through the woods and across a stream to an old deserted, broken-down stone house we used for an emergency headquarters. At the stream we had just stopped to kick the ice in and have a drink when suddenly Davy grabbed me by the shoulder and pointed. It was Snowy all right, big as life and twice as spry, having a drink about twenty-five yards upstream. Boy, we felt so good we could have thrown our arms around him and kissed him, only by that time he was gone, flying up over the rocks and away from the stream as if he had wings on his feet.

So the last day of gunning was coming to an end and Snowy was still in one piece, kinging it over the woods. We should have known Mr. Jeliffe was just sounding off when he claimed to have hit him. Mr. Jeliffe liked to talk about his trophies, but he wasn’t much of a shot. The way Billy put it, his aim was so poor he couldn’t hit the water if he fell out of a boat.

That evening, exactly a month from the time we had first seen him, we went up to the meadow again to see if Snowy would come down to visit us again. The moon was like a big white balloon hanging over our head in the cold sky. We had stopped putting corn out because we figured it was healthier for Snowy not to be lured out of the woods. But now we reckoned it was safe again so we tried our old trick of dropping a trail of corn into the middle of the meadow. If we could get Snowy to make a habit of coming down, we would have time to train him now. After a while we could get him to eat out of our hands. He would get used to us and let us lead him around. Maybe we could tame him to the point where we could bed him down in the barn. Wouldn’t that be something to show the kids at school, a fourteen-point white buck for a pet! We’d be about the most famous kids in the county, and the luckiest, because if it’s bad luck to shoot a white deer it must be good luck to help one keep from getting shot and to turn him into a pet.

That’s what Davy and I were whispering to each other when I’ll be six kinds of a jack-rabbit if Snowy doesn’t poke his head out of the woods, just the way he did the first time; poke his head out, take a good, slow, thoughtful look around and then mosey on into the meadow to nibble the corn, just as peaceful and unconcerned as if he was Hector the ram.

We were watching him and thinking how noble and magnificent he looked when we heard a sharp whisper behind us—“Shh—quiet—and keep your heads down, boys.” Mr. Jeliffe, with his damn gun, had come creeping up like an Indian. The moon was making a regular spotlight for Snowy and we saw Mr. Jeliffe raise his gun and take aim.

I yelled, “Davy, Davy, chase him into the woods!” Davy and I started running forward and Snowy took off across the fields as if his tail was on fire. We’ll never forget how beautiful he looked racing along the fence separating our place from the Jeliffe’s, closer and closer to the dark pines. Mr. Jeliffe could never hit a target moving at that speed but somehow we couldn’t stop running and shouting and waving our hands. Now he was almost to the woods, in the far corner of our property, only a few yards from the sheltering woods where Mr. Jeliffe could never get him. His speed must have been fifty or sixty miles an hour, and then, in one terrible moment, he wasn’t moving forward at all. He was crashing down through the small-branch and tar-paper roof of our clubhouse; into the four-foot drop we had tunneled out as a secret meeting place. We ran up to the hole and looked in, feeling trembly all over, feeling sick. Snowy was thrashing around on the dirt floor of our clubhouse. We saw him struggle up nearly to a standing position on three legs and then topple over again.

“God damn it,” I said. “His leg is broke.”

When he rolled over on his side and tried to raise again you could see where his rear left leg was hanging loose. He looked up at us and we had never seen him so close, so close that we could touch him. His eyes were wild and sort of pleading and terribly angry and sad as death.

Mr. Jeliffe came up behind us and looked in. “Well, looks like you trapped him, boys.”

I said to Mr. Jeliffe, “Go ahead shoot him. His leg is broke. You better shoot him quick.”

It made an awful noise. Davy and I didn’t want to look, but finally we couldn’t help it; we had to look. Snowy was lying all white and still and terribly dead at the bottom of our clubhouse.

Mr. Jeliffe said, “Well, looks like we’ll all be eating venison for a month.”

We didn’t say anything. We just stood there thinking what kind of a man Mr. Jeliffe was and what a wonderful sight Snowy made the first time he lifted his antlers to the moon in our meadow.

Mr. Jeliffe said, “Tell your dad I’ll have my man hang him and butcher him for both of us. But if you boys don’t mind I’d still like to have that head for the wall of my den.”

Davy, who says those things faster than I do, said just one word. It was the one he has to pay fifteen cents for every time Dad hears him saying it.

Mr. Jeliffe said, “Keep your hands off that carcass, boys. I’ll send my man over to carry it back.”

Davy and I didn’t say anything. We both knew at the same time what we had to do. We went to the edge of the pines and broke off as many branches as we could carry. We covered Snowy with them and went back for another load.

We had to work fast because Jeliffe’s man would be coming back any minute. Then, while Davy went on piling fallen branches and dead wood on top of the pine, I double-timed it back to the house for some matches. By the time I got back Davy had done a good job. It was a regular funeral pyre. I held a match to some of the pine branches and they caught like paper. We stood back and watched the flames leaping up.

When Snowy was once more ash and dust and bone we would fill in our clubhouse with dirt and trample it down hard, so the dead would be safe from dogs and buzzards and Mr. Jeliffe. We would set up a cross with Snowy’s name on it. He was our white deer. Never again would Snowy come trotting into our pasture bearing his antlers like the crown of a king. But by God, neither was Mr. Jeliffe going to have Snowy’s wonderful white head mounted on his wall.