“Stan,” I said.
“Yes.” He didn’t look at me. He knew what I was going to say.
“Be real careful about where you place your shots from now on, OK?”
He took a quick breath but didn’t say anything. I waited a minute and then went on down the trail.
When the others got up to go to bed, Miller jerked his head very slightly to me, and he and I sat by the fire until they had all gone into their tents.
“I’ve got to go check the stock,” he said. “You want to come along, son?”
“Sure, Cap,” I said. “Stretch some of the kinks out of my legs.”
We stood up and walked on down toward the corrals. Once we got away from the fire, the stars were very bright, casting even a faint light on the looming snowfields above us.
Miller leaned his elbows across the top rail of the corral, his mustache silvery in the reflected starlight, and his big cowboy hat shading his eyes. “Them boys seem to be missin’ the whole point of what this is all about,” he said finally.
“I’m not very proud of any of them myself, about now,” I said. “They’re acting like a bunch of damn-fool kids.”
“I’ve seen this kinda stuff before, son. It always leads to hard feelin’s.”
“Maybe I should have shot that deer.”
“Not if you didn’t want to,” he said.
“I wouldn’t have felt right about it, but it’d sure be better than what’s going on right now.”
“Oh, a friendly bet’s OK. Men do it all the time, but them boys are takin’ it a little too serious.”
“Well, most of that’s just talk,” I told him. “They go at each other like that all the time. I wouldn’t worry too much about it. I just don’t like the idea of it, that’s all.”
“I don’t neither,” he said, “and I’ll tell you somethin’ else I don’t much like.”
“What’s that?”
“The feelin’ I keep gettin’ that we ain’t all gonna finish up this hunt. I’ve had it from the first day.”
I couldn’t say much to that.
“I sure wouldn’t want one of my hunters gettin’ shot on my first trip out.” He looked at me and grinned suddenly. “Wouldn’t be much of an advertisement, now would it?”
24
SLOANE was much worse the next morning. Much as he tried, he couldn’t even get out of the sack. Both Stan and I offered to stay with him, but he insisted that we go ahead on up.
Breakfast was kind of quiet, and none of us talked very much on the way up the ridge.
Miller looked down at me from his saddle after I’d dismounted at the top. “If the Big Man don’t get no better,” he said, “Clint’s gonna have to take him on down. This is the fourth day up here. He just ain’t comin’ around the way he should.”
“I know,” I said.
“I like the Big Man,” Miller said. “I don’t know when I’ve ever met a better-natured man, but I ain’t gonna be doin’ him no favors by lettin’ him the up here.”
I nodded. “I’ll talk with him when we get back down to camp,” I said.
“I’d sure appreciate it, son,” he said. “Good huntin’.” He took Ned’s reins and went on back down.
It was chilly up there in the darkness, and the stars were still out. I sat hunched up against the cold and tried not to think too much about things. Every now and then the breeze would gust up the ravine, and I could pick up the faint smell of the pine forest far down below the spruces.
The sky began to pale off to the east and the stars got dimmer.
I kind of let my mind drift back to the time before my father died. Once he and I had gone on out to fish on a rainy Sunday morning. The fish had been biting, and we were both catching them as fast as we could bait up. We both got soaked to the skin, and I think we both caught cold from it, but it was still one of the best times I could remember. Neither one of us had said very much, but it had been great. I suddenly felt something I hadn’t felt for quite a few years — a sharp, almost unbearable pang of grief for my father.
It was lighter, and that strange, cold, colorless light of early morning began to flow down the side of the mountain.
I quite suddenly remembered a guy I hadn’t thought about for years. It had been when I was knocking up and down the coast that year after I’d gotten out of high school. I’d been working on a truck farm in the Salinas Valley in California, mostly cultivating between the mile-long lettuce rows. About ten or so one cloudy morning, I’d seen a train go by. About as far as I was going to go that day was eight or ten rows over in the same field. I walked the cultivator back to the farmhouse and picked up my time. That afternoon I’d jumped into an empty boxcar as the train was pulling out of the yard headed north.
There was an old guy in the car. He wasn’t too clean, and he smelled kind of bad, but he was somebody to talk to. We sat in the open doorway looking at the open fields and the woods and the grubby houses and garbage dumps — did you know that people live in garbage dumps? Anyway, we’d talked about this and that, and I’d found out that he had a little pension of some kind, and he just moved up and down the coast, working the crops and riding trains, with those pension checks trailing him from post office to post office. He said that he guessed he could go into almost any post office of any size on the coast, and there’d be at least one of his checks there.
He’d said that he was sixty-eight and his heart and lungs were bad. Then he’d kind of looked off toward the sunset. “One of these days,” he’d said, “I’ll miss a jump on one of these boxcars and go under the wheels. Or my heart’ll give out, or I’ll take the pneumonia. They’ll find me after I been picked over by a half-dozen other bums. Not much chance there’d be anything left so they could identify me. But I got that all took care of. Look —”
He’d unbuttoned his shirt and showed me his pale, flabby, old man’s chest. He had a tattoo.
“My name was Wilmer O. Dugger,” it said. “I was born in Wichita, Kansas, on October 4, 1893. I was a Methodist.” It was like a tombstone, right on his chest.
He’d buttoned his shirt back up. “I got the same thing on both arms and both legs,” he’d said. “No matter what happens, one of them tattoos is bound to come through it. I used to worry about it — them not bein’ able to identify me, I mean. Now I don’t worry no more. It’s a damn fine thing, you know, not havin’ nothin’ to worry about.”
I think it had been about then that I’d decided to go to college. I’d caught a quick glimpse of myself fifty years later, riding up and down the coast and waiting to miss my jump on a boxcar or for my heart to quit. About the only difference would have been that I don’t think I’d have bothered with the tattoos.
The breeze dropped, and it got very still. I straightened up suddenly and picked up my rifle. It felt very smooth and comfortable. Something was going to happen. I eased the bolt back very gently and checked to make sure there was one in the tube. I closed it and slipped the safety back on. I could feel an excitement growing, a kind of quivering tension in the pit of my stomach and down my arms and legs, but my hands were steady. I wasn’t shaking or anything.
A doe came out on the far side of the ravine. Very slowly, so as not to startle her, I sprawled out across the rock and got my elbows settled in so I could be absolutely sure of my shot.
The doe sniffed a time or two, looked back once, and then went on down into the ravine.
Another doe came out of the same place. After a minute or so she went on down, too.
Then another doe.
It was absolutely quiet. I could hear the faint toc-toc-toc of their hooves moving slowly on down the rocky bottom of the ravine.
I waited. I knew he was there. A minute went by. Then another.
Then there was a very faint movement in the brush, and he stepped softly out into the open.