Tracker

CONTENTS

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

'This Side of Wild' Excerpt

To Nancy Polette,
who earned it

ONE

John Borne sat at the breakfast table and tried to see the look of death on his grandfather. He could not. If a change were there, he could not see it.

Clay Borne had ruddy cheeks, a head of white hair, clear eyes and steady hands as he buttered a great slab of fresh bread hot from the wood
stove, and humor in the corners of his eyes just as he always had.

He is life,
John thought -
not death.

He will never be death. Whenever I turn around and need him, Grandpa will be there.

But that's not what the doctors said. Two weeks ago, at the hospital in Grand Forks, the doctors had asked them to come into a small green room—or had asked his grandparents and John had gone with them because nobody said he couldn't.

“There is nothing more to do,” the doctors said. They looked sad. But it was a sadness that would go away. “We can't stop the cancer.”

And John had watched his grandmother sag. She made no sound but just sagged. A part of her went out at the words and she started down and John caught her on one side and his grandfather on the other and they put her in a chair.

“It will be all right,” Clay told her gently. “It will be all right.”

But how could it be?

The doctors had done tests and more tests and worked with chemicals and knives and finally had sent John Borne's grandfather home to die in peace on the small farm at the edge of the woods,
the farm where he had been born and lived all his life, the farm where John had lived for nine years, since he was four and his parents were killed in a plane crash in the northern woods.

Home.

“You're not eating, John.” His grandmother turned from the stove. “Cold breakfast sits hard, and a hard breakfast won't warm you on a snowy morning.”

He nodded and put food in his mouth but tasted nothing, felt only the texture of the eggs and crumbled bacon. His grandmother talked like that, as though she were just about to break into poetry. When John listened to her for a while he caught himself expecting things to rhyme but they never quite did.

She had cried for a time, for days, but she was through with that now just as John had cried but was through with it now. Crying changed nothing.

There was still the fact that the doctors said his grandfather had only a few months to live and so John had tried to see the look of death on him but could not.

He had seen it on many things. They lived close to the land and made all their own meat, and to make meat it was necessary to make death. He
had helped his grandfather slaughter cattle and seen death there, and once on a man, the farmer who had lived next door. His tractor had backed over him and John had been the one to find the body when he went to deliver eggs and there had been death on the ground.

But it wasn't here now.

There wasn't the looseness of death or the hotsweet smell of it or even the tiredness of it. There was no change in his grandfather, no change at all. He kept right on working and carving the little woodcarvings in the kitchen at night and laughing and playing small jokes and eating well and looking to the next day. Always looking to the next day.

His grandfather glanced up from his plate suddenly, his fork halfway to his mouth. “Isn't the food good enough for you?”

John had stopped eating again without knowing it. “Of course …” He took another mouthful.

“There's an inch of snow out there.” The old man chewed slowly and carefully. “Deer season starts Saturday. The snow will be good for tracking.”

They hunted deer every year and normally John would start getting excited two or three days before season. He'd clean and reclean his rifle,
look more and more to the woods and start losing sleep. This year was different. Normally they would get up at three in the morning and do chores and the milking so they could be in the woods by first gray light; and they would do that for the entire two weeks of deer season or until they got a deer. But this year that was all changed.

His grandfather wasn't going to hunt this year. “I'll stay home and do the chores,” he'd said one morning, sitting in the yellow glow of the kerosene lamp on the kitchen table, his hands folded in front of him on the oilcloth. “It's time you hunted alone.”

And John had nodded but it had been wrong, too wrong. They always hunted together, they always did everything together.

John had started hunting deer when he was ten, first without a gun, just going with his grandfather. Then when he was eleven he took a shotgun and got his first deer and he had taken deer every season since, using a rifle after the first year. He was now thirteen.

Three deer he had taken with his grandfather, hunting the cold crisp mornings in November, hunting down the long cold trails in the swamps in the new snow. Three times he had given death
to the deer, seen the new blood on the snow, seen the look of death …

He stopped thinking, concentrated on eating the pancakes his grandmother had put in front of him. But it was impossible to keep the memories out.
Things don't change,
he thought.
People don't die. They couldn't
… It was always somebody else who died, never people you were close to. Even though his parents had gone down in a plane crash and were surely dead, it had happened when he was very young and so he didn't know them. He had not seen the change brought by death—the change that was supposed to come but, for John, never did.

But for his grandfather to stay home from hunting deer—that was too much. Too much of a change. It was like admitting that death was coming.

He got the last of the pancakes down. They tasted like sticky wood. Then he took his plate to the sink and used the hand pump to rinse the syrup down the drain.

“I'll go do chores,” he said, turning from the pump, looking at his grandfather at the table but still not looking, saying but not saying.
I'll go do chores and you can't die,
he thought, a scream in his mind. “I'll go start milking.”

His grandfather nodded. “I'll be out in a minute, after I finish my coffee.”

And that wasn't a change. He always hung back and had coffee with Agatha, John's grandmother. They sat in the morning dark, in the yellow of the lamp, and sipped coffee and talked about what the day might bring and at least that hadn't changed.

John threw his chores jacket with all the holes over his shirt and pulled on the rubber barn boots and went outside into the cold, crunching in the new snow. His breath made small puffs, led the way to the warm smells of the barn.

Once he was out of the house in the dark of the morning he could use his mind to make things all right. It was still a cold clear morning, he was still going to milk the cows and clean the barn and feed and water the stock, still going to smell and feel the heat of the barn.

Those things hadn't changed and so maybe the other thing wouldn't change, maybe the doctors were wrong. They were just people. They could be wrong.

He kicked the ice from the barn door and went in, swinging the door wide and brushing the new snow back. letting his spirits come up.

It was impossible to feel bad when you entered
a barn in the winter where the cows were waiting to be fed; impossible to be sad when there was work to do.

He started chores.

TWO

His grandfather did not come out to help with chores and John did them alone.

He didn't mind. It had happened before many times and in some ways he liked it. During the week, the school bus came before chores were finished and John had to leave the farm then. He always felt as if he were missing something. Now
that it was Sunday he did not have to leave and so he could work morning chores all the way to done. That's how his grandfather always talked about work—you didn't just work so many hours or days. You worked a job to done. All the way to done. No matter how long it took.

And chores, morning chores, milking, and cleaning the barn and feeding calves and pigs and chickens was work but more, too. There was something about it that lifted it above work for John.

At school his best friend was a boy named Emil Peterson and Emil thought he was crazy to like chores.

“That's just hard work, that's all it is,” he'd told John more than once. Emil hated chores at his own place, or anyplace else for that matter. “You think it's fun to slop around in cow crap all morning? You're crazy.”

John had tried to explain but nothing had come out right. Chores was the first thing of the day, it was the new thing of each day and it was work but it touched something else in his mind, touched a place that made him think of good things, of growing and rich things.

More than once in the winter he had come into
the barn only to stop just inside the door and listen and smell and feel the richness of it. The stink of the manure was even rich, and the rumbling of the cows' stomachs in the dark, the fresh warm smell of them just after he came in from the bitter cold, the sound of their teeth as they chewed their cuds, the quiet grunts and chuckles that came from the horses in the stalls at the end …