“This is as far as I go,” he said.
“I’ll be back down in a few minutes, Sarge,” Miller said.
“I’ll be here, Cap. Good luck, Danny boy.”
“Same to you, Lou,” I answered.
Then Miller and I went slowly on up the steep trail to my post.
The moon was just slipping behind the shoulder of the mountain as we came out on the knob at the top of the ridge.
“Better let my eyes settle into the dark a bit before I start back,” Miller said. “Give the horse a rest, too.” We both climbed down.
I offered him a cigarette and we squatted down in the darkness, smoking.
“Clint tells me you went to college,” Miller said after a while.
“Yeah,” I said. “Before I went in the Army.”
“Always wished I’d had the chance to go,” he said. “Maybe then I wouldn’t be finishin’ up on a broke-down horse-ranch, scratchin’ to make a livin’.”
“From the way I see it,” I said, “you’re one of the lucky ones. You’re doing something you like.”
“There’s that, too,” he admitted. “I don’t know as it all adds up to all that much though. The work’s hard and the pay’s pretty slim. A man always wonders if maybe he coulda done better.”
“I know a lot of people who’d trade even across with you, Cap,” I said.
He chuckled. “I guess there ain’t much point worryin’ about it at this stage.”
I untied my rifle and the water bag from my saddle.
“You got ever’thing, son? All your gear, I mean?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I’m all set.”
He stood up. Then he scuffed his boot in the thin dirt a couple times. Finally he blurted it out. “What’s eatin’ on old Sarge, anyway?”
“God, Cap, I don’t know. Maybe he’s just having trouble reconverting to civilian life. I met him about a month ago, and he’s been jumpy as hell all that time. I’ve about halfway got a hunch he had a pretty rough time in Vietnam — he’s out on a medical. Malaria, I think.”
“Mean stuff,” he said. “Clint gets a touch of it now and then.”
“Oh?”
“Puts him flat on his back.”
“Yeah. I’ve heard it’s no joke.”
“I sure wish ol’ Sarge would go a little easier on the liquor though. I can sure tell you that.”
“At the rate he’s going,” I said, “that bottle of his won’t last much longer.”
“He’s got more’n one,” Miller said gloomily. “That sack of his clinks and gurgles like a liquor store. I wonder he had room for spare sox.”
“Oh, brother,” I said.
“Did you talk with the Big Man on the way down yesterday?” he asked, changing the subject.
“Yeah,” I said. “He’s going to let me know if he gets really bad.”
“That’s a real good idea. Clint can take him back on down if he gets too sick. Most men start to get their wind before this.”
“I think he’ll be all right now,” I said.
“I sure hope so.” He looked around. “Well, I guess I better be gettin’ on down.”
“Yeah,” I said. I glanced at my watch. “About half an hour till shooting time.”
“Ought to work out about right, then,” he said. “Well, son, good luck.”
“Thanks, Cap.”
I watched him ride on off down the trail with Ned trailing behind him. Then I slung my rifle and walked on up to the top of the knob. I sat down and lit another cigarette. I’d meant to ask him if the smoke would spook off the deer, but I’d forgotten.
I unslung the rifle and started pulling cartridges for it out of my gun belt and pushing them one by one into the magazine. I eased the last one up the tube with the bolt and then pushed the bolt-handle down. I snapped on the safety and carefully laid the rifle down on a flat rock. Then I loaded the pistol and put it back in the holster. Now what the hell was I supposed to do for the next twenty-five minutes?
I sat down on the rock beside the rifle again and looked off toward the east. I could just make out the faintest hint of light along toward the horizon out there.
I remembered a time in Germany when I’d pulled the four-to-six shift on guard duty and had watched the sun slowly rise over one of those tiny little fanning villages with the stonewalled, red-tile-roofed houses huddled together under a church spire. It’s a good time for getting things sorted out in your mind. I wonder how many times other guys have thought the same thing — probably every guy from along about the year one.
One thing was sure — I was a helluva long way from Germany now. I started to try to figure out what time it would be in Wertheim about now, but I lost track somewhere off the east coast. I wondered what Heidi was doing right now. I still felt bad about that. If only she hadn’t been so damn trusting. No matter what I’d told her, she’d gone on hoping and believing. It was a bad deal all the way around. She’d gotten hurt, and I’d picked up big fat guilt feelings out of it.
And naturally that got me to thinking about Sue. Oddly enough, it didn’t bother me to think about her anymore. For a long time I’d deliberately forced my mind away from it. About the only time I’d thought about her was when I was in the last stages of getting crocked — and that usually wound up getting maudlin. At first, of course, I’d been pretty bitter about it. Now I could see the whole thing in a little better perspective. I’d told a lot of people that it wouldn’t have worked out between Sue and me, but that had been a cover-up really. Now I began to see that it was really true — it wouldn’t have worked out. It wasn’t just her old lady either. Sue and I had looked at the world altogether differently. She’d have probably turned into a Monica on me within the first six months.
That made me a little less certain about graduate school. Maybe I’d just gone ahead and made those plans to go back to the campus in Seattle with some vague idea in the back of my mind about possibly getting back together with her again. Or maybe I was just looking for a place to hide — or to postpone things. I was awfully good at postponing things.
The streak of light off along the eastern horizon was spreading now, and the stars were fading. A steel-gray luminosity was beginning to show in the rocks around me. It was still about fifteen minutes until it would be legal to shoot. Once again I found myself wishing my little Bolshevik could see this. Talk about an ambivalent situation, that was really it. I guess I knew she’d been right that night at Sloane’s orgy — she and I weren’t for keeps. There was no way we could be, but lately I couldn’t see anything nice or hear anything or come up with an idea without wanting to share it with her. She was a complete and absolute nut, but I couldn’t think of anybody that was more fun to be around.
A deer crossed the brow of the ridge on the far side of the ravine. I think I looked at it for about thirty seconds before I actually realized it was a deer. It was still too dark to tell if it was a buck or a doe. I began to get that tight excitement I get when I’m hunting — a sort of a double aliveness I only get then. I picked up my rifle and tried to see if I could catch the deer in the scope, but by that time it was down in the brush at the bottom of the ravine. Then I started paying attention to what I was doing. I began scoping the ravine and the ridge carefully.
It was getting lighter by the minute. I counted three more deer crossing the ridge — three does and a small buck.
I checked my watch. It was legal to shoot now.
In the next hour, thirty or forty deer crossed the ridge and another dozen or so drifted across the meadow behind me. Most of them were does, of course, and the bucks were all pretty small. I put the scope on each one and watched them carefully. Deer are funny animals, and I got a kick out of watching them. Some would come out of the brush very cautiously, looking around as if the whole world was out to get them. Others just blundered on out as if they owned the woods.
The pink sunlight was slipping down the peak above again, and it was broad daylight by now.