“Hey, man,” I said, “I’m about to freeze my ass off. If you’re OK, I’m going back to my nice warm sack.”
“Sure, man,” he said. “I’m fine now. ‘Night, Danny.”
“Good night, Lou.”
“Oh, hey, man?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for comin’ in with the light.”
“Sure, Lou.”
I closed up his tent and hustled back to my sleeping bag. Damn, it was cold out there!
18
When the gun went off I think we all came up in panic. After the screaming in the middle of the night, I for one thought McKlearey had been having another nightmare and had unloaded on whatever it was that was haunting him. It was morning or at least starting to get light outside. I could see Miller standing calmly by the fire with a coffee cup in his hand. He didn’t look particularly excited.
“What’s up?” I heard Sloane call. “Who’s shootin’?”
“Clint,” Miller said. “He took a little poke out this mornin’ to see if he couldn’t scare up some camp-meat. Sounds like he found what he wanted.”
“Jesus!” Jack exclaimed. “Sounded like he was right in camp.”
“No, he’s back down the trail about a quarter mile or so,” Miller said.
I jerked on my pants and boots, wincing slightly at their clamminess, grabbed up the rest of my clothes, and hustled on out to the warmth of the fire. I stood shivering in my T-shirt for a few minutes, staring back along the trail that poked back into the still-dark woods.
“Hey, Cap,” Clint’s voice called in from out there.
“Yeah?” Miller didn’t raise Ms voice too much.
“I got one. Send somebody out with a packhorse and a knife. I clean forgot mine.”
“Right, Clint,” Miller looked across the fire at me. “You want to go?” he asked.
“Sure.” I said. “Let me finish getting dressed.” I hauled on my shirt and sat down to lace up the boots.
“No big rush.” He grinned at me. “That deer ain’t goin’ no place. Ol’ Clint don’t miss very often. Have yourself a cup of coffee whilst I go throw a packsaddle on one of the horses.” He raised his voice again. “Be a few minutes, Clint.”
“OK, Cap,” Clint’s voice came back. “Better send along a shovel, too.”
“Right.” Miller went off toward the corral, and I poured myself a cup of coffee and finished lacing up the boots. I went back into the tent and picked up my gun belt.
Jack was struggling into his plaid shirt, trying to stay in the sleeping bag as much as possible at the same time. “You goin’ out there?” he asked me.
I nodded, buckling on the belt. “Clint wants a horse and a knife,” I said. I pulled the smaller of the pair of German knives from the double sheath that hung on the left side of the gun belt and tested the edge with my thumb. It seemed OK. I grabbed my jacket and hat and went on back through the pale light to the fire.
“I’ll be along in a little bit,” Jack called after me.
There was a bucket of water on the table, and I scooped some out with my hands and doused it in my face. The shock was sharp, and I came up gasping. I raked the hair back out of my face with my fingers and stuffed my hat on. Still shivering, I drank the cup of coffee.
There was a kind of mist or cloud hanging up on the side of the mountain, blotting out the top. I waded down toward the corral through the gray-wet grass. I could see Miller’s dark track through it and Clint’s angling off toward the woods.
“You bring a knife?” Miller asked, handing me the lead-rope to the sleepy-looking packhorse he’d saddled.
I nodded. Somehow, it didn’t seem right to talk too much.
“He’s prob’ly ’bout four-five hundred yards down that trail,” he said, pointing. “When you get out there a ways, sing out, and he’ll talk you in.”
“Right.”
I led the horse on into the woods. It was still pretty dark back in there, the silvery light filtering down through the thick spruce limbs. The horse walked very close to me — maybe they get nervous about things, too.
“Clint?” I called after about five minutes.
“Over here,” his voice came. “That you, Dan?”
“Yeah.” I followed his voice.
“I kinda figgered it might be you,” he said. “You bring a knife and a shovel?”
“Yeah,” I said. Then I saw him sitting on a log, smoking a cigarette. His .30-30 was leaning against the tree behind him.
“She’s right over there,” he said, pointing. He got up, and we walked back farther into the dun woods.
The deer, a young mule doe, had fallen on its side in a clump of heather, its sticklike legs protruding awkwardly. A dead deer always looks tiny somehow, not much bigger than a dog. They look big when they’re up and moving, but after you shoot them, they seem to kind of shrink in on themselves. A doe looks even smaller, maybe because there aren’t any horns.”
“This one ought to last us,” Clint said. “Give me a hand and we’ll drag ‘er out in the open.”
We each grabbed a hind leg and pulled the deer out of the heather-bed. Her front legs flopped limply and her large-eared head wobbled back and forth as it slid over the branches of the low-lying shrub. I didn’t see any blood.
“Ever gutted many deer?” he asked me.
“One,” I said. “I didn’t do a very good job of it.”
“Well, now,” he said, “I’ll show you how it’s done. Hold that leg up and gimme your knife.”
I handed him the smaller knife and held the hind leg up for him.
“Now, you start here —” He made a slit through the deer’s white belly-fur and continued it back toward the tail, just cutting through the skin.
“Idea is to keep as much hair out of the meat as you can,” he told me.
I watched as he sliced the skin from chin to tail.
“You going to cut her throat?” I asked him. “I thought you were supposed to do that.”
“Not much point,” he said. “We’ll have the head off in about five minutes. Carcass’ll bleed out good enough from that, I expect.” He pushed the point of the knife through the belly-muscles with a hollow, ripping sound, and started to saw up through the ribs.
“Here,” I said, handing him the big knife, “use this one.”
He grunted, laying the smaller knife aside. He hefted the big one. “Quite a frog-sticker,” he said, looking at the ten-inch blade. He bent back over the deer.
I tried not to look too closely at the way the sliced muscles twitched and quivered.
“Hey, where are you guys?” Jack called from back at the trail.
“Over here,” I said.
Clint took the big knife and chopped through the pelvis bone, making a sound a lot like somebody chopping wet wood.
“Ooops,” Jack said as he came up on us. “I’ll just wait till you guys finish up there.”
“Squeamish?” Clint asked, his arm sunk up to the elbow inside the deer’s body cavity.
“Not really,” Jack said, “but —” He shrugged and went back to where McKlearey was coming through the trees. The two of them stood back there, watching.
“Now then,” Clint told me, “you just grab hold of the windpipe here and kind of use it as a handle to pull everything right out.” He grabbed the severed windpipe and slowly pulled out and down, spilling out the deer’s steaming internal organs. Once they were clear of the carcass, he dragged them several feet away and dumped them in a heap. He came back and chopped away the lower half of each leg, the big blade grating sickeningly in the joints.
“No sense haulin’ anything back we can’t use.” he said. Then he turned to the head.
“Where’d you hit her?” I asked, looking into the body cavity. “I don’t see any hole.”
“Right here,” he said, probing a finger into the fur just under the base of the skull.
“Good shot,” I said. “What was the ranger?”
“‘Bout forty — maybe fifty yards. If you’re quiet you can get pretty close.”
He made a slice around the neck with the big knife about where he’d had his finger and then cut the head away. Bone fragments and small gleaming pieces of copper from his bullet were very bright against the dark meat.
“Let’s dump ‘er out,” he said.
We picked up the surprisingly heavy carcass and turned it over to drain.
“Hey, Slim,” Clint called to Jack, “why don’t you and the Sarge there get that shovel off the packhorse and dig a hole so’s we can bury the guts?”
“Sure,” Jack said, going over to the drowsing horse.
“Ordinarily, I’d leave ’em for the coyotes and bobcats,” Clint said, “but then I got to thinkin’ that maybe we wouldn’t want ’em comin’ in this close to camp.” He went to the steaming gut-pile and cut the liver free of the other organs. “Breakfast,” he said shortly. He fished a plastic bag out of his coat pocket and slid the dripping liver inside.