“He’s gotta be here,” Lou said frenziedly. “Let’s go back just one more time. He’s here. He’s gotta be here.”
Miller shook his head. “Face it, Sarge,” he said. “He’s under a rockslide.” He nudged the bank of the wash with the tow of his cowboy boot. A small avalanche resulted. “This whole gully is like this. One little bump brings it right down. There’s two dozen places in this stretch we been workin’ where the bank has give way just recently. He could be under any one of ’em. Only way you’re gonna find that deer is with a shovel — and even then you wouldn’t get him till the snow came.”
“Maybe he’s under a bush,” Lou said. “Did we look over there?” He pointed desperately toward a place we’d all checked a half dozen times.
“We ain’t gonna find ‘im,” Miller said.
“I gotta find ‘im!” Lou screamed. “I gotta!” Then his face fell apart, and he started to cry like a little kid.
Miller stepped up to him and slapped nun sharply in the face.
“Come out of that, now, Sergeant!” he barked. “That’s an order.”
Lou’s eyes snapped open. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, sir. I — I guess I lost my head.”
“Let’s get on Up to the ridge,” Miller commanded. We started climbing. McKlearey coughed now and then — or maybe he was sobbing, I’m not sure. I still didn’t let him get behind me.
32
I don’t think either Jack or Lou said more than ten words the rest of that day. Miller, Clint, and I were so busy watching them that we didn’t say much either, so it was awfully quiet in camp. Neither one of them went out that evening, and we all sat around staring at each other. At least McKlearey had quit talking to himself.
The next morning they were still pretty quiet, and I got the idea that they both wanted to finish up and get on back down the mountain.
I went up on the ridge with Jack again, and almost as soon as it was legal shooting time, we heard McKlearey’s gun bang off once, and then a minute or so later the flat, single crack of his pistol.
“Lou got one,” I said to Jack. It was pretty obvious, but the silence was beginning to bug me.
“Yeah,” Jack answered indifferently.
We saw Miller going on up, trailing Lou’s horse and a pack animal. About twenty minutes later he went on back down with Lou and what looked like a pretty damn small deer.
“Shit!” Jack snorted. “The great hunter! I’ve seen bigger cats.” Maybe he was coming out of it a little — maybe not. I couldn’t tell for sure.
It was almost lunchtime when a fair-sized buck came down the draw.
“Four-point,” I whispered to Jack, who hadn’t even been watching, I don’t think.
“Where?”
“Coming down the bottom of the gully.”
“Yeah, I see ‘im now,” he said. His voice was very flat.
“I’ll take ‘im.” He squared himself around into a sitting position, aimed, and fired. The buck dropped without a twitch.
“Good shot!” I said.
He shrugged and cranked out the empty. It clinked against a rock and rolled on down the hill.
“You going to signal?” I asked him.
“Miller’ll be up in a few minutes anyway,” he said.
“Yeah, but we’ll need a packhorse.”
“Maybe you’re right,” he said. He wearily pulled out the automatic, thumbed it, and touched it off in the general direction of the mountain above us. “Let’s go gut ‘im,” he said.
We went down and field-dressed the deer. By the time we were done, Miller was there with the horses and a rope. He tossed us one end, and with a horse pulling from up above and the two of us guiding the carcass, getting the deer up was no trick at all.
“Damn nice deer,” Miller said rather unconvincingly.
“It’s worth the price of the tag, I guess,” Jack said. He seemed pretty uninterested.
We got everything loaded up and went on back down to camp.
Clint and McKlearey had already gone on down. Miller told us that Lou had been all hot to leave, and there weren’t really enough packhorses to haul out all of our gear and the deer as well, so Clint had loaded up and they’d gone on down.
“How big a one did he get?” Jack inquired.
“Two-point,” Miller said. “Nice enough deer, but I think old Sarge musta made a mistake. He probably shoulda waited till he had a little more light.”
Jack didn’t say anything.
“Clint won’t be back till late again,” Miller said, “so we’ll go on out tomorrow mornin’. We oughta skin your deer out and let it cool anyway. I tried to tell that to Sarge, too, but he seemed to be in a helluva rush for some reason.”
“Probably got a hot date back in Tacoma,” Jack said sourly.
Miller let that one go by.
We ate lunch and skinned out Jack’s deer, and then Jack went into his tent to lie down for a while. I wandered around a bit and then went on down to the pond to molest the fish. The sun was hot and bright on the water, and the fish weren’t moving.
Miller came on down after about a half hour and stood watching me as I fished. “Any action?” he said finally.
“Pretty slow, Cap,” I said.
“Usually is this time of day.”
“Maybe if I pester ’em enough, they’ll bite just to get rid of me.”
He chuckled at that.
I made another cast.
“Trip sure turned out funny,” he said finally.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
“I got a hunch Ol’ Sarge oughta see a doctor of some kind. He sure went all to pieces yesterday.”
I nodded. “I guess something pretty bad happened to him over in Vietnam,” I said. I didn’t want to go into too many details. I’d pushed the whole business about Sullivan and Danny — the other one — into the back of my mind, and I was doing my level best not to think about it.
“I kinda thought that might have somethin’ to do with it,” Cap said. “It’s all kinda soured me on this guidin’ business though.”
“Don’t judge everybody by us, Cap,” I said. “You run a damn fine camp, and you know this country as well as any man could. None of what happened up here was your fault. This was all going on before we ever got up here.”
“I keep thinkin’ I shoulda done somethin’ to head it all off before it went as far as it did though,” he said, squinting up at the mountain. He still looked a lot like God.
“I don’t think anybody could have done anything any differently,” I told him. “You just got a bad bunch to work with, that’s all. Nobody could have known that Cal was going to get sick or that McKlearey was going off the deep end the way he did. It was just the luck of the draw, that’s all.”
“Maybe,” he said doubtfully. “Then, maybe too, I just ain’t cut out for it. I can tell you right now that you’re the only one of the whole bunch I’d care to go out with again. Maybe if a man’s goin’ into the business, he can’t afford to have them kinda likes and dislikes.”
I couldn’t say much to that really.
Finally he cleared his throat. “I’m gonna ask you somethin’ that ain’t really none of my business, so if you don’t want to answer, you can just tell me to keep my nose where it belongs, OK?”
“Shoot,” I said. I knew what he was going to ask.
“You found that freak deer yesterday, didn’t you, son?”
I nodded.
“Thought maybe you had. You’re too good a hunter not to have, and you was the closest one to the place where he dropped into that gully.”
“He was down in the wash,” I said quietly, not looking at him, “all busted up. I dumped one of those gravel banks over on him. I just didn’t think he was worth somebody getting killed over.”
“Was it really that bad between your brother and the Sarge?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, looking out over the pond. “It was getting real close. I figured that if neither one of them got the damn thing, it’d cool things down.”
“You think pretty fast when you have to, don’t you?”
“I was right in the middle,” I said. “It was the only thing I could come up with in a hurry to keep the roof from falling in on me. I’m not very proud of it really.” That was the truth, too.
“I don’t know,” he said after a minute, “from where I sit, it makes you look pretty tall.”
I didn’t understand that at all.
“A man’s more important than a deer,” he said, hunkering down and dipping his fingers in the water. “Sometimes a man’ll forget that when he gets to huntin’. You’re just like me, son. You wouldn’t never try to take another man’s deer or keep ‘im from findin’ it. It’s just somethin’ a man don’t do. So you figure that what you done was wrong — particularly since it was the Sarge who shot the damn thing, and you don’t like him very much. But you’d have done the same thing if it’d been your brother shot ‘im. A lot of men wouldn’t, but you would. Takes a pretty big man to do the right thing in a spot like that.”