The Purification Ceremony (6 page)

    “Sounds like a promise you’ve all made to yourself,” I commented.

    “We’ve gone our separate ways, but we make it a point to do something like this every November,” Butch said.

    “Hunting’s about the only thing I have in common anymore with this aging hippie,” Phil joked and punched Butch in the arm.

    “If you don’t mind me asking,” I said, gesturing at his hair. “You know — Butch?”

    Arnie spit out his drink and guffawed. “We’ve been busting him about it for years.”

    Phil smirked. “Vinny the hunter was this real strict Italian, been in the Air Force and had this thing about keeping a military cut. Butch hated it, but didn’t do a thing about it until he was sixteen.”

    “Seventeen,” Butch said. “I went upstate for a music camp I won a scholarship to. I just refused to cut it when I came back. Vinny was pissed.”

    “Worse when you started protesting,” Arnie said.

    “He got over it,” Butch said. “But anyway, he started calling me Butch when I was eighteen. It was just to bug me about my looks. These guys picked up on it and it’s been Butch ever since.”

    “You got kids?” Arnie asked.

    “Two,” I said, hoping I could keep a cheerful expression.

    “Boy and a girl.”

    “We have two girls,” said Arnie. “They’re off to Disneyland with my wife.”

    Phil took a swig of his beer. “So what’s the deal, a woman hunting by herself?”

    “I just like to hunt,” I replied. “I grew up with it, too. Tracking, I mean.”

    “Kind of a tough way to hunt,” Phil said. “You sure you wouldn’t take a nice heated stand where you can read one of them romance novels?”

    I smiled sweetly. “I figure I’ll leave that to you city boys, Phil.”

    “Aren’t you gutsy?” He laughed.

    I stared at him. “No, Phil, just good.”

    He laughed again, but it was halfhearted and he excused himself and headed to the bar for another beer.

    Butch put his hand on my arm. “Don’t mind Phil. Deep down he’s a good guy, just macho.”

    Cantrell called for our attention then. Without his coat on, you could see the outfitter was wiry, the kind of guy you’d struggle to keep up with in the woods. Cantrell welcomed us all again and introduced the two strangers: Tim Nelson and Don Patterson, the guides. Nelson leaned against the mantelpiece of the fireplace and gave us all a hearty hello. He was past forty. Cold winds had damaged his skin. From the bulging forearms that emerged from the maroon Henley-style shirt he wore, I figured he’d spent part of his life doing construction. Cantrell said Nelson had worked three seasons for Metcalfe and knew the property and the animals well. He was the hunt strategist.

    Don Patterson had a beard but no mustache and his whiskers were wispy and blond. His features were equally fair. I had a tough time believing he could be in his late twenties with a master’s degree in wildlife biology and five years’ experience guiding in Alberta. Cantrell said Patterson had an uncanny ability to read signs and draw disparate pieces of information into a coherent pattern that could be used to decipher a big buck’s travel pattern in order to set up an ambush.

    Cantrell went on to give a brief history of the estate. Purchased by James Metcalfe in 1954, the 227,000-acre parcel had a resident deer population from the beginning. But Metcalfe was an early student of modern game management. In the early 1960s, about the same time such practices were adopted by Texas ranches, he began applying the techniques to the estate’s herds. Since then, more recordbook whitetails had been taken off the Metcalfe Estate than any other piece of property in the world. And all of them had been taken by members of Metcalfe’s family, close hunting buddies or business associates.

    The hunts had meant so much to Metcalfe that he had stipulated in his will that they continue or his heirs would forfeit the land. His son, Ronny, had returned once to hunt, but hadn’t come back in nearly two years. Metcalfe’s daughters, who feared losing the property, had offered it up for lease through their attorneys. Cantrell won the outfitting rights through a competitive bidding process.

    “You’re the first public hunters to see this magnificent property,” Cantrell said, rubbing his hands together. “The rut is upon us after three mild winters and three falls with no hunting.

    The chance to kill a world-class deer here in the next week is probably higher than anywhere else at any other time.”

    Butch and Arnie threw each other high fives. Lenore smiled. Griff raised his beer in my direction. I tipped my orange juice in return.

    Cantrell led us all to a giant topographical map and an enlarged aerial photograph of the estate mounted under glass on an oak table at the rear of the room. He explained that the way to think about the estate was as a chunk of land divided by a minor mountain range running west to east. The lodge and the lake lay in the southern zone. The Dream River flowed north out of the eastern headwaters of the lake through an interruption in the ridge line, then out the northeastern corner of the property. The Sticks, a second river, divided the northern zone and joined the Dream near the estate’s eastern border, almost to Alberta.

    I pointed to a tiny circle on the map, smack in the confluence of the rivers. “That little island: is it in British Columbia or Alberta?”

    “Alberta, technically,” Nelson said. “Never been on it myself, but you can see most of it from the river’s edge. Just a pile of rock and brush. Big, though, eh?”

    Cantrell changed the subject. Each of us, he said, would be entitled to take two deer during our stay, though he urged us to hold out for a minimum of one hundred sixty Boone & Crockett points.

    “One Boone and Crockett point equals one inch of antler, right?” Kurant asked, scribbling in a notebook.

    “Roughly,” Cantrell said.

    “And how many inches of antler to make the record book?”

    “One hundred and seventy inches as a typical,” Earl piped in. “One ninety-five as a nontypical. Typical’s a symmetrical kind of rack. Nontypicals, the antlers go in a bunch of different directions, kind of like Griff’s hair.”

    Griff chortled and made a show of smoothing his mop.

    Kurant asked, “What are the odds of making the book?”

    “A million to one back home,” Butch said.

    “And here?”

    Cantrell said, “One in five.”

    ‘That’s what I like to hear!” Arnie cried.

    The Addisons and Arnie said they wished to take stands in the woods between the clear-cuts that had been made along the base of the central ridge of mountains. Cantrell would be their guide. Nelson would work with Phil, who wanted to rattle antlers near the western clear-cuts to imitate bucks fighting; and with Butch, who was a bow hunter. Griff, of course, was bow-hunting, too. He’d take a tree stand close to a winter rye field. Because I wished to track and still-hunt, Patterson would take me toward the confluence of the Dream and Sticks rivers, drop me off and return at dusk.

    “What about me?” Kurant asked.

    “Nelson will take you here,” Cantrell said, pointing to the corner of the westernmost green field. “There’s a box blind with a good view. You want pictures, that’s where you’ll get ‘em without bugging anyone else.”

    “You act as if I’m going to thrash around in the woods, screaming, ‘Run for your lives!’ or something,” Kurant protested.

    Cantrell shot him a withering glance. “Wouldn’t surprise me.”

    A mousy-looking woman with short brown hair, glasses and an apron came through swinging doors to the left of the fireplace. “Dinner’s ready, Mike.”

    Cantrell broke away from Kurant and gestured in the woman’s direction. “Like to introduce my wife, Sheila. Also our cook. Damn good one, too.”

    Sheila smiled awkwardly. “I’m glad to meet you all. The dining room’s through here.”

    Earl went in first and gasped. “Would you look at this!”

    We all crowded in behind him. Gas lamps lit the room. Another fire burned in a hearth beyond a pedestal table. On every wall hung gigantic whitetail bucks, bucks that dwarfed the deer in my cabin. The biggest one, a twenty-two-point nontypical with matching twelve-inch drop tines, occupied the place of honor above the mantelpiece. Cedarshafted arrows in a leather quiver and a primitive longbow were attached to the wall just below the buck’s head.

    “I’ll be goddamned,” Griff whispered. “They said it would be good, but I had no idea…”

    “Now you see what I was talking at you about, Mr. Addison?” Cantrell said, slapping Earl on the back. “Makes your blood rise, don’t it?”

    Despite the conflicting emotions I had endured back in my cabin, my spine tingled; I was thirteen again, sharing a cabin with ray father the night before the season opened in Maine.

    “Whose bow is that?” Butch asked.

    “Mr. Metcalfe’s, all he used in the last years,” Nelson answered. “He shot that buck with it, the biggest nontypical taken in modern times with a longbow. Unofficial, of course. Made the bow himself. Arrows, too. He was a particular bugger, eh? But a regular shaman when it came to hunting.”

    I winced at the reference, but said nothing. As we took our seats around the dinner table, the doors to the kitchen blew open and a short, large-breasted woman with braided black hair burst into the room carrying a tray of soup. “You gotta hunt, you gotta eat!” she announced. “I’m Theresa, your table-and-scullery slave. You got praise, whisper it in my ear. You want to bitch, tell it to those dusty old stuffed heads on the wall!”

    Patterson, who had been stroking his wispy blond beard, broke into giggles at the stunned expressions at the table. He pointed at Nelson. “You got Theresa for ten days. This poor bastard’s been married to her fifteen years.”

    Theresa sniffed, “Poor bastard, eh? As Timothy will tell you, he thanks the spirits of the forest to have found such a wood nymph to keep him warm at night.”

    “Wood nymph?” Patterson cried.

    “Mmmmm,” she said. She threw back her braid, leaned down and planted a big kiss on Nelson’s forehead. “And here sits my satyr.”

    We all broke up at the expression on Nelson’s face. Theresa squinted at us. “You doubt my powers? Any of you?”

    Almost as one, we shook our heads. She cocked her chin in Patterson’s direction. “See? Thirty seconds in my presence and the animals eat from my hand.”

    Theresa placed bowls of steaming leek soup in front of us and disappeared back into the kitchen. She returned with bottles of white wine. The soup was followed by a main course of steamed salmon, carrots and new potatoes.

    Lenore Addison gulped from her wineglass. She pointed up at one of the deer heads and nudged her husband.

    “Maybe you’ll do it here.”

    Earl became red-faced. “Give it a rest, sweet thing.”

    “C’mon, little man, those are the stakes, admit it.” She waved her hand at Kurant. “Now here’s part of your story: tycoon, perpetually miffed because his wife’s a better deer hunter, spends years and tens of thousands of dollars in pursuit of a record-book whitetail. Only the two times he’s had the monster right in front of him, he shook so hard, well…”

    “Buck fever, that’s what it’s called, right?” Kurant asked.

    “Earl gets a variation of it I call Ebola Buck Fever, temperature above a hundred and five, muscles in convulsions, basic breakdown of the entire system.”

    “And you don’t get the fever, is that what you’re saying?” the writer asked.

    “Well, some would say it’s luck. But the last one I shot scored one seventy-seven clean.”

    From the other end of the table, Phil whistled. “That’s a buck! In Texas?”

    Lenore nodded. “Off the King Ranch. One of those ghost deer the locals call Muy Grande.”

    “One seventy-seven makes the book, right?” Kurant asked, scribbling.

    “The second time I’ve made it,” she answered cheerfully. She patted her husband’s arm. His attention was on the china that dinner had been served on.

    “Now, to be fair, Earl’s come close. One sixty-eight typical three years ago. One sixty-nine and a half last year in Kansas. But he never manages to cross that fine line.”

    Lenore paused for effect. “You know, I shot a book buck the first time I went hunting with him. I think that’s why Earl loves me so much.”

    “Shit luck.” The little businessman seethed.

    “Now, now, hon, some of us are just born in tune with nature.”

    “Well, that’s true, you certainly grew up in the great outdoors. Folks, don’t let the diamonds and gold fool you. Lenore here spent most of her life crapping in an outhouse before she met me. Wasn’t for yours truly, she’d still be grazing beers in the joint I found her in down in brush country.

    She speaks real pretty only because she’s spent the last two years with one of those speech pathologists who helps you try to kill your accents.”

    Lenore managed a sour smile. “You say the nicest things, little man.”

    “Only when I got one of your hundred-dollar fingernails in my back, sweet thing,” Earl replied.

    The awkward silence that followed their spat was broken finally by Theresa’s arriving with apple pie and vanilla ice cream.

    Kurant tapped his pen on his pad. “What’s this obsession you all have hunting bucks with big antlers?”

    From the far end of the table, Phil said, “You get better, you want a bigger challenge.”

    “You’re saying these big-antlered deer are more difficult to hunt?”

    Patterson laughed and gestured to Cantrell. “You were right, this guy doesn’t know squat, eh?”

    “Well, then, teach me,” Kurant said.

    Patterson said, “Once a whitetail buck survives past three years, he might as well be a different species. The older bucks have an extra sense about them. They can see you blink at a hundred yards, hear you scratch your butt at two hundred and smell you a quarter mile away. They know every inch of their terrain and they notice anything out of place. They are the craftiest game animal in North America. To harvest a book buck is a big deal.”