I felt better. I’d been worrying about it a lot.
“You gonna reel that fish in, or let ‘im run around on the end of your line all day?” he said to me.
“What?” I looked at the pole I’d laid down across a log. The tip was whipping wildly. I grabbed the rod before the fish could drag it into the water. I brought him in close to shore, reached down into the water and carefully unhooked him. “Don’t tell Clint,” I said, shooing the exhausted trout back out into deeper water.
“Wild horses wouldn’t get it out of me.” He laughed. We went on back up to camp.
After that, things were OK again. Jack kept pretty much to his tent except for supper, and Cap and I spent the rest of the afternoon getting things squared away so we could break camp the next morning. I moved my gear back into Jack’s tent so we could strike the one I’d been sleeping in as well as McKlearey’s.
After supper, Jack had a couple of drinks and went back to his tent. Cap and I sat up telling stories and waiting for Clint to get back.
The little guy came in about ten thirty, madder than hell.
“That damn burrhead run off on me, Cap,” he growled as he rode up.
“Run off? What do you mean, run off?”
“We got about a half mite from the bottom, and he kicks ol’ Red in the slats and took off like a scared rabbit. When I got to the bottom, ol’ Red was all lathered up and blowed and wanderin’ around not tied to anything, and that burrhead and that pile of nuts and bolts he called a car was gone.”
“Didn’t he take his deer?” Cap asked.
“He didn’t take nothin’! He even left his rifle tied to the saddle.”
“He say anything at all?”
“Not a word — not a good-bye, go to hell, kiss my ass, or a damn thing. I figured maybe he’d gone on down to the place. I was gonna have some words with him about runnin’ off and leavin’ me with all the work, but there wasn’t a sign of ‘im there neither. He just clean, flat took off. I left all his stuff in the barn. I don’t know how the hell we’ll get it all back to ‘im.”
“We’ll take it back,” I said. “I’ll see that he gets it all.”
Clint grunted, still pretty steamed.
Cap shook his head. “I sure misjudged that one,” he said.
“Somebody oughta take a length of two-by-four to ‘im,” Clint said. “That was a damn-fool kid stunt, runnin’ off like that.”
“Well,” Cap said, “we can’t do anything about it tonight. Let’s unsaddle the stock and get to bed. And you better cool down a mite. You know what the doctor told you about not losin’ your temper so much.”
“Hell,” Clint said, “I’m all calm and peaceful now. ‘Bout time I started up the hill, I was mad enough to bite nails and spit rust.”
We finally got things squared away and got to bed.
The next morning I was up before the others, so I got the fire started and got coffee going and then wandered around a bit, kind of getting the last feel of things. I like to do that with the good things. The others I kind of just let slide away.
It had been a good hunt — in spite of everything — and I’d worked out whatever it was that I’d needed to work out. Some people seem to think that things like that have to be all put down in a set of neatly stated propositions, but it isn’t really that way at all. A lot of times it’s better not to get too specific. If you feel all right about yourself and the world in general where you didn’t before, then you’ve solved your problem — whatever it was. If you don’t, you haven’t. Verbalizing it isn’t going to change anything. One thing I could verbalize, though, was the fact that I had a couple of friends I hadn’t had before. Just that by itself made the whole trip worth everything it had cost.
“Who’s the damn early bird?” Clint growled, coming out of the tent all rumpled and grouchy-looking.
“Me.” I grinned at him.
“Mighta known,” he said. “You been bustin’ your butt to get your hands on the cookware ever since we got up here.”
“I figured I could ruin a pot of coffee just as well as you could,” I said.
“Oh-ho! Pretty smart-alecky for so damn early in the mornin’,” he said. “All right, boy, since you went and started it, we’ll just see how much of a camp cook you are. You fix breakfast this mornin’. Anythin’ you wanna fix. There’s the cook tent.”
“I think I’ve been had,” I said.
“I guess they don’t teach you not to volunteer in the Army no more,” he said. “Well, I’m goin’ back to bed. You just call us when you got ever-thin’ ready.” He chuckled and went on back into his tent.
“You’re a dirty old man,” I called after him.
He stuck his head back out, thumbed his nose at me, and disappeared again.
I rummaged around in the cook-tent and dragged out everything I could think of. I’d fix a breakfast like they’d never seen before.
Actually, I went a little off the deep end. A prepared biscuit-flour made biscuits and pancakes pretty easy, but I kind of bogged down in a mixture of chopped-up venison, grated potatoes and onions, and a few other odds and ends of vegetables. I wound up adding a can of corned-beef hash to give the whole mess consistency. I didn’t think I could manage a pie or anything, so I settled for canned peaches.
“All right, dammit!” I yelled. “Come and get it or I’ll feed it to porky.”
They stumbled out and we dug into it. I’d fried up a bunch of eggs and bacon to go with it all, and they ate without too many complaints — except Clint, of course.
“Biscuits are a little underdone,” he said first, mildly.
“Can’t win ’em all,” I told him.
“Bacon could be a mite crisper, too,” he said then.
Cap ducked his head over his plate to keep from laughing out loud. Even Jack grinned.
“Flapjacks seem a little chewey, wouldn’t you say?” he asked me.
I was waiting for him to get to that hash. He tried a forkful and chewed meditatively.
“Now this,” he said, pointing at it with the fork, “is the, best whatever-it-is I’ve ever had.” He looked up with a perfectly straight face. “Of course, I ain’t never had none of this whatever-it-is before, so that might account for it.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I ain’t gonna ask you what’s in it,” he said,” ’cause I don’t really wanna know till I’m done eatin’, but right after breakfast, I am gonna go count the packhorses.”
Miller suddenly roared with laughter, and pretty soon we were all doing it.
After breakfast we struck the rest of the tents and began to pack up. It didn’t really take very long to get everything all squared away.
A camp you’ve lived in for a while always looks so empty when you start to tear it down. We even buried in McKlearey’s slit-trench and covered over Clint’s garbage pit.
“Well,” Cap said, looking around. “What with that table and all, I guess we’re leavin’ the place better’n we found it.”
“You bet,” Jack said. He seemed to be getting over it all.
We loaded up the packhorses, saddled up, and rode on down the trail. I looked back once, just before we went into the trees. I didn’t do it again.
“Down there is where Cap and I got the deer for Sloane,” I told Jack as we passed the place.
“That was a nice deer,” Jack said. “You wound up shootin’ the best two deer we got, you know that?”
“I hadn’t thought of it,” I said.
“That’s because you were concentratin’ on huntin’ instead of all that other shit like the rest of us.” Coming from Jack, that was a hell of an admission really.
We didn’t say much the rest of the way down.
It was a little after noon when we got back down to where the trucks were. It took us a while to get the gear all off the horses and into the stock-truck and the pickup, but by about one we were on our way back to Miller’s ranch. Jack got me off to one side and told me he wanted to ride on down with Cap, if I didn’t mind.
“I’ve got a few things I ought to explain to him,” my brother said. “I think I screwed up pretty bad a few times up there, and I’d kinda like a chance to square things, if I can.”