Tracker Page 3

  John asked her one evening how she knew so much. They were sitting in the kitchen, just the two of them, and John had been asking about his parents.

  “I don’t know that much about people,” she said, flustering. But John could tell she was pleased by the question. “I just try to know as much as I can about something before I talk about it.”

  She’d gone on to tell John about his parents. Facts about them—how they looked, how they acted under certain conditions. And when she was done, John knew his parents in one way, her way, but he knew that it was honest knowledge.

  When he thought of his grandmother that’s the word that came to mind—honest. She was honest, and soft, and gentle. An honest, soft gentle person.

  He set the cream in the cool-hole by the pump, where it would stay cool, but not freeze, until they went into town later in the week to sell cream, and hung his jacket up.

  “I could eat a wolf,” he said. “Raw.”

  His grandfather had been in the privy and he came in. “Set to food. I’ll take care of the calves.”

  John nodded, glad that he had not fed the calves himself. It would have been wrong to take the work away from his grandfather—like saying he couldn’t do it, somehow.

  Clay went out and John washed at the pump and sat at the table. In the middle was a pile of fresh raw-fried potatoes and strips of venison; he loaded his plate. There was also syrup and he put some on the meat, sprinkled salt and pepper and started eating. He had learned about syrup on meat from Emil; it had looked bad at first, but when he tried it the taste was great. Especially on a cold morning.

  “I set some aside for sandwiches for you, so you don’t have to save any.”

  “What about Grandpa?”

  “He’s already had—just set to. You can’t hunt hungry, especially if you hunt long.”

  She seemed different, somehow. Almost cheerful. Something he couldn’t pin down but definitely something new had slipped into her actions.

  The depression of the night before had vanished, almost as if a mist had left the house, and he ate heartily. Meat and potatoes with syrup was the best breakfast, better than pancakes any day, and he ate until he started to feel full and then stopped. Normally he would have gone past full and had food for all day, but when you hunt you want to hunt with a little edge on your belly—that’s how his grandfather put it. Not hungry, but so the full feeling has worn off when you hit the woods—it makes it easier to see things. To shoot things.

  When he’d finished eating John took his plate to the sink and kissed his grandmother on the cheek and went to the entryway. There he put his coat on and a scarf and a wool hat and wool mittens Agatha had knitted. She brought two sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, which he slipped into his jacket pocket, and she handed him an apple with the other hand, a barrel apple from the basement, which he knew would be tangy and sweet at the same time.

  The rifle was in the rack by the door and he took it down, as well as the box of shells from the shelf on the gun rack. John knew he wouldn’t need the whole box so he just took out five cartridges, brassy and shiny with copper bullets tipped in silver, and dumped them in the top pocket of his jacket. He decided he would load in the woods.

  He waited.

  “… It’s going to be all right.”

  He thought about that and knew that she was wrong. It wasn’t going to be all right. A part of him knew that his grandfather was going to end, end and be gone. But there was that small edge of hope in her voice, hope which she held the way a drowning person holds a stick. And John would not damage that hope, so he nodded and smiled. “I know, I know. I’ll see you when I get back.”

  Outside, the cold hit him again, harder because he’d been in and his body had gotten used to the warm kitchen and the warm food. He felt it come in around his cuffs past the mittens, around the back of his neck.

  By the barn he could see the glow from the lantern and he thought of going to say goodbye to his grandfather, but he would be busy and it would bother him.

  Instead John wheeled left off the porch and walked straight north from the house across the pasture until he came to the trees that marked the edge of the woods.

  Just inside the tree line he stopped and loaded the rifle, sliding the cartridges into the side-loading gate slowly, carefully. When all five were in the tube magazine he worked the lever once and brought a shell up into the chamber. Then he let the hammer down to the safety half cock and cradled the gun in the crook of his arm and paused, getting a feel for the morning and the woods.

  It had stopped snowing and there was a gray light from false dawn coming off the snow. It still wasn’t light enough for hunting, but close, very close, and he knew that by the time he reached the edges of the great swamp there would be enough light to see the sights of the rifle.

  The woods were still. The new snow took down sound the way a blanket would, holding sound low and muffled, and with the freshness for tracking and the quiet it was nearly a perfect morning for hunting deer.

  He turned his back on the farm and headed into the woods.

  SIX

  John knew there were many ways to hunt deer. Some hunters drove them into other men who were posted with guns. Others walked around until they saw a deer and tried to shoot it. Still others picked a spot near a deer trail and stood and waited for a deer to come along.

  And now and then a hunter would use the stalking method—move quietly on fresh tracks and try to catch a deer off guard. This final method was very difficult to do successfully and demanded total concentration and complete knowledge of deer.

  John used a combination of methods—he did some stalking and some standing. He would move through the woods as quietly as possible for a distance—perhaps a quarter of a mile—and then he would stop and stand for a time, usually half an hour or so.

  He had learned it from his grandfather.

  “You have to think deer,” Clay had told him. “You have to think deer, you have to be deer inside your head. Be quiet, move quiet, and be deer.”

  The country he was hunting was very good deer country but hard to hunt. His grandfather’s farm lay on the edge of a huge peat swamp-bog that covered all of northern central Minnesota. The bog extended over two counties, and in the spring and summer it was a mucky quagmire that had defied people forever. Ducks and geese nested there by the thousands; moose and timber wolves and deer lived on spruce “islands” that stuck above the level of the swamp.

  It was not a place, in the summer, where life was easy. Even the deer and moose and small game had trouble. Deer were discovered wandering blind from the ravaging flies that chewed at their eyes, and moose had been found dead from loss of blood because of ticks.

  But in the fall life comes to the swamp; relatively easy life. The bugs are down for the winter, the peat is frozen solid and the land becomes passable.

  John’s great grandfather had made his farm along the edge of this swamp. Far enough away to avoid the worst clouds of mosquitoes, close enough to get good soil. And while Clay had trouble now and then with wolves, the farm had easy access to good deer hunting.

  The swamp was perfect cover for the raising of deer, for hiding fawns from wolves, and that was important. The wolves hunted deer, coursed through them, in the winter, like sharks hitting schools of fish.

  When he was small and came across his first wolf kill, it had bothered John. When wolves killed it was usually in brutal fashion, at least by some human standards—a slow and tearing death. A pulling down and closing off of life.

  But later John realized that there wasn’t a right or wrong way about wolves hunting and killing the deer. There was just the wolves’ way. That was the way they were and had nothing to do with what man thought was right or wrong. John still didn’t like it, but at least he thought he understood it and that helped him when he discovered the fawns the wolves had taken and torn to pieces.

  But because the wolves were so active in the fall, the deer moved away from them and that meant th
ey moved out of the swamp, which in turn meant that deer hunting became very good around the edges of the swamp. John now worked on the western edge. Or perhaps it might be best to say that he was at the edge of the edge, working in.

  Around the outside there were huge hardwood forests that had once been logged off but were now coming back and they were mixed with stands of poplar and willows. The deer browsed in the willows when the snow got too deep for them to get at low plants, and John moved quietly through the willows, stooping and weaving, taking deliberate steps, stopping often to listen.

  Deer are not silent. When they run through the willows in the fall and the willows are dry and hard it sounds like somebody tipping over a lumber cart.

  But there was no sound this gray dawn and John decided the deer hadn’t yet moved this far out of the swamp. Then, too, there were no new tracks in the fresh snow.

  He worked slowly further into the edge of the swamp, hitting the deep grass and the open areas of the bog.

  It was full light now, with the top edge of the sun slipping up over the tree line to the east. Tight cold had come down and he felt it working into his shoulders. He had just rezipped his jacket when he heard the noise.

  It was a releasing sound, as if a branch or tree which had been held had been turned loose—a kind of swoosh—in back of him, back to his right, and he froze, waiting for another sound to guide him.

  None came.

  He turned and took two steps, then two more, and so covered a distance of perhaps thirty yards through the willows until he came to a deer bed.

  It was about a yard across, where snow had melted down to bare swamp grass in a cupped little warm place under a stand of willows.

  Very cozy, he thought. It almost looked inviting. He knelt next to the bed and felt the grass and it was still warm. That had been the sound. A deer had been here in its storm bed—John knew they holed up sometimes when it snowed—and he had walked past it and it had jumped up, apparently hitting the willow on the way.

  It must have surprised the deer, his coming, because the first tracks were more than ten feet from the bed. The deer had bounded up and away. The next tracks were twenty feet from the first ones, out into a clearing and across, craters in the new snow where the deer had run.

  Well, he thought. I was close to one, anyway, even if I didn’t know it. He decided to follow the tracks, or work in the same direction as the deer.

  Better, he thought, to go after one you know is fresh than to hunt blind and hope. It wasn’t likely he’d see the deer soon, but it could happen and if it did he might get a shot and make meat early so he could get back and take care of work around the farm so his grandfather wouldn’t have to.

  It came to him suddenly that he hadn’t thought about his grandfather for nearly an hour and he didn’t know if that was good or if that was bad.

  He brought his mind back around to the tracks.

  There was a saying among the old-timers that you could either hunt deer or you could do something else. You could not do two things when it came to hunting deer—hunting required too much concentration.

  John went back to hunting.

  SEVEN

  In the clearings the snow hung on top of the matted swamp grass and it made hard going. His foot came down through the snow and then on past another eight inches to the peat beneath the grass. It was slow, stumbling work.

  And in the willows he had to weave back and forth, so while it was easier walking—the grass was not so deep in the willows—it was still slow.

  By midmorning he had only gone two miles, moving with the tracks. He had not seen the deer again but knew several things about it just the same. It was either a doe or a small buck—he could tell that by the size of the tracks, but he was not yet good enough to tell its sex. Older hunters could, but he wasn’t sure of it; it had something to do with the way the foot came down.

  He knew the deer wasn’t unduly frightened. After he had jumped it out of the bed it had bounded for two hundred yards but then it had settled down to an even pace, just walking-running ahead of him easily. It wasn’t panicking or running hard, the way deer did when the wolves got close.

  He knew this deer was healthy. The steps were even, the weight came down evenly—it didn’t limp or weave.

  And he knew the deer wasn’t a yearling, or a first-year fawn, which he wouldn’t have shot even if he’d gotten a chance. His grandfather didn’t kill first-year animals and he didn’t either. If it had been a yearling it would have been all over the place, wandering as it fed, and probably running in spurts if it felt that it was being followed.

  It wasn’t until he reached one of the pine and spruce islands in the swamp that he came close to the deer again.

  The island was about a hundred yards long, shaped in a large oval, and John worked across another clearing to get to it, wading through the snow-grass, stopping often to listen and watch.

  It was easy to follow the tracks. The snow was all new and there didn’t seem to be any other tracks in the area, except for rabbits. They had moved during the snow storm and left a patchwork of trails.

  As he entered the pines on the island he stopped once more and listened, letting his eyes work ahead through the underbrush. It was like a make-believe land, what his grandmother would have called a fairy place; a place shot with silver and beauty.

  The sun was as high as it was going to get now, an orb in the midsouth sky, and the light came down through the pines to make diamonds of the snow. Light sparkled all around, caught in the ice crystals as he stepped, showering his way with gold. He’d never seen anything like it and he looked down to see the snow move away from his legs in fire and when he looked up he saw her. A doe.

  She had been in back of a spruce, all covered with snow and looking like a picture on a Christmas card and when he looked up she stepped out and saw him and was gone, that fast, but she left an image in his mind the way the snow had. When she jumped out from in back of the spruce the snow showered out and around and caught the fire from the sun and took the light to make her something other than what she was.

  He held his breath. It had only lasted part of two seconds and yet he held his breath for half a minute, thinking of it. The rifle had come up of its own accord, settled against his shoulder, then gone down. There was no real time for a shot.

  Then he breathed. It was over, over and gone and his breath came in a burst. He’d never seen anything like it. A shower of gold around a golden doe; beauty splashed through the woods.

  After another minute he shook his head and continued. There was much beauty in the woods. His grandfather had told him the woods were all beauty. But that didn’t change the basic fact: he had to make meat. They needed the food. And a doe was the best meat.

  But something nagged at him, something he didn’t understand. There was a mixing of things in his mind, or the start of a mixing that he couldn’t quite pin down. As he walked the doe’s tracks he started thinking of other things again; of his grandfather, of the way they lived, of what was coming for his grandfather. And the lines between the thoughts got blurred; the doe mixed with his grandfather and they both mixed with him.

  He had to fight to concentrate on hunting.

  He moved on.

  As she left the spruce island, the doe had taken great bounds—twenty and thirty feet from print to print, the initial getaway jumps that all deer take when in danger, whether from man or wolf. But inside half a mile the tracks eased down and by the time John had followed another mile, through two more clearings and across two more spruce islands, she had calmed again.

  It was when she’d settled into another bed that he finally got a chance to kill her.

  EIGHT

  John had read several books about deer and deer hunting. One writer would say all deer do this, another would say all deer do that. But in truth the deer didn’t read the books and they did just as they wanted.

  Some deer slept at night and fed in the day, some bedded down during the day and fed
at night. Still others slept and fed intermittently all day and all night. There was not a normal way for deer, John knew—only the deers’ way.

  The deer that John was following bedded often during the day. In a normal twenty-four hours she might make four or five beds—some in darkness, others during the warm part of the day where the sun could get her.

  After her second near brush with John she went farther. She was not yet really alarmed, that much John could see from her tracks. They were still full of purpose, though for half a mile she stretched them out and covered distance with some speed.

  By the time John was well into the first half mile of tracks the doe was two miles away. And this distance gave her time to get out of the escape mentality—he could see the tracks settle down, get steady.

  In nature, John knew, danger came with great suddenness. A mouse could be feeding peacefully on a stem of grass one second and be in a fox’s belly the next instant. Two grouse could be performing the mating ritual and within a heartbeat come under an owl’s silent slashing attack.

  But if danger comes suddenly it also leaves quickly. If the fox misses the mouse, it seldom persists; the owl looks for another meal. It takes too much precious energy to chase food that is forewarned; it’s much easier to find prey that can be taken without so much effort, off guard.

  By the time she’d gone those two miles the doe had forgotten about John. Her tracks settled down and John followed them slowly, carefully.

  He knew he could get her, knew by her tracks. She would move ahead of him and stay there for a time but she would forget and all he had to do was stay on the tracks and he would get a shot. And if he got a shot he would get her.

  He visualized it. She would move and then stop and he would put the bullet through her shoulder and she would stagger sideways and down with the impact. The life would go out of her, out and out, leaving the gray film on her eyes and he would cut her throat and the red would flow out on the snow, warm and rich and steaming …