I imagine some of the questions I used to ask when I was a kid must have driven him right up the wall, but he’d always try to answer them. Mom was usually too busy talking about herself or about the people who were picking on her, and Jack was too busy trying to act like a grown-up or getting people to pay attention to him to have much time for my questions. But Dad always took them seriously. I guess he figured that if they were important enough for me to ask, they were important enough for him to answer. He was like that, my Old Man.
The wood popped in the stove again, but I didn’t jump in time. I just slipped the sound on around to the campfire in the kitchen.
“Well, he sat up by his fire all night, so he wouldn’t sleep too late the next morning. He watched the moon shine down on the ice out on the lake and the shadows from his fire flickering on the big tree trunks around his camp. He was pretty tired, and he’d catch himself dozing off every now and then, but he’d just fill up that stubby old pipe and light it with a coal from the fire and think about how it would be when he got home with a wagon-load of deer meat. Maybe men his older brothers would stop treating him like a wet-behind-the-ears kid. Maybe they’d listen to what he had to say now and then. And he’d catch himself drifting off into the dream and slipping down into sleep, and he’d get up and walk around the camp, stamping his feet on the frosty ground. And he’d have another cup of coffee and sit back down between his dogs and dream some more. After a long, long time, it started to get just a little bit light way off along one edge of the sky.”
The faint, pale edge of daylight was tricky, but I finally managed it.
“Now these two hounds Dad had with him were trained to hunt a certain way. They were Pete and Old Buell. Pete was a young dog with not too much sense, but he’d hunt all day and half the night, too, if you wanted him to. Buell was an old dog, and he was as smart as they come, but he was getting to the point where he’d a whole lot rather lay by the fire and have somebody bring him his supper than go out and work for it. The idea behind deer hunting in those days was to have your dogs circle around behind the deer and then start chasing them toward you. Then when the deer ran by, you were supposed to just sort of bushwhack the ones you wanted. It’s not really very sporting, but in those days you hunted for the meat, not for the fun.
“Well, as soon as it started to get light, Dad sent them out. Pete took right off, but Old Buell hung back. Dad finally had to kick him in the tail to make him get away from the fire.”
“That’s mean,” I objected. I had the shadowy shapes of my two dogs near my reflected-pilot-light fire, and I sure didn’t want anybody mistreating my old dogs, not even my own grandfather.
“Dog had to do his share, too, in those days, Dan. People didn’t keep dogs for pets back then. They kept them to work. Anyway, pretty soon Dad could hear the dogs baying, way back in the timber, and he took the old rifle and the twenty-six bullets and went down to the edge of the lake.”
“He took his pistol, too, I’ll bet,” I said. Out in my camp in the forests of the kitchen, I took my pistol.
“I expect he did, Dan, I expect he did. Anyway, after a little bit, he caught a flicker of movement back up at camp, out of the corner of his eye. He looked back up the hill, and there was Old Buell slinking back to the fire with his tail between his legs. Dad looked real hard at him, but he didn’t dare move or make any noise for fear of scaring off the deer. Old Buell just looked right straight back at him and kept on slinking toward the fire, one step at a time. He knew Dad couldn’t do a thing about it. A dog can do that sometimes, if he’s smart enough.
“Well, it seems that Old Pete was able to get the job done by himself, because pretty soon the deer started to come out on the ice. Well, Dad just held off, waiting for more of them, you see, and pretty soon there’s near onto a hundred of them out there, all bunched up. You see, a deer can’t run very good on ice, and he sure don’t like being out in the open, so when they found themselves out there, they just kind of huddled up to see what’s gonna happen.”
I could see Jack leaning forward now, his eyes bright with excitement and his lips drawn back from his teeth a little. Of course, I couldn’t look straight at him. I had to keep everything in place out on the other side of the doorway.
“So Dad just lays that long old rifle out across the log and touches her off. Then he started loading and firing as fast as he could so’s he could get as many as possible before they got their sense back. Well, those old black-powder cartridges put out an awful cloud of smoke, and about half the time he was shooting blind, but he managed to knock down seventeen of them before the rest got themselves organized enough to run out of range.”
“Wow! That’s a lot of deer, huh, Dad?” I said.
“As soon as Old Pete heard the shooting, he knew his part of the job was over, so he went out to do a little hunting for himself. The dogs hadn’t had anything to eat since the day before, so he was plenty hungry, but then, a dog hunts better if he’s hungry — so does a man.
“Anyway, Dad got the team and skidded the deer on in to shore and commenced to gutting and skinning. Took him most of the rest of the day to finish up.”
Jack started to fidget again. He’d gone for almost a half hour without saying hardly anything, and that was always about his limit.
“Is a deer very hard to skin, Dad?” he asked.
“Not if you know what you’re doing.”
“But how come he did it right away like that?” Jack demanded. “Eddie Selvridge’s old man said you gotta leave the hide on a deer for at least a week or the meat’ll spoil.”
“I heard him say that, too, Dad,” I agreed.
“Funny they don’t leave the hide on a cow then when they butcher, isn’t it?” the Old Man asked. “At the slaughterhouse they always skin ’em right away, don’t they?”
“I never thought of that,” I admitted.
Jack scowled silently. He hated not being right. I think he hated that more than anything else in the world.
“Along about noon or so,” Dad continued, “here comes Pete back into camp with a full belly and blood on his muzzle. Old Buell went up to him and sniffed at him and then started casting back and forth until he picked up Pete’s trail. Then he lined out backtracking Pete to his kill.”
Jack howled with sudden laughter. “That sure was one smart old dog, huh, Dad?” he said. “Why work if you can get somebody else to do it for you?”
Dad ignored him. “Old Pete had probably killed a fawn and had eaten his fill. Anyway, my dad kinda watched the dogs for a few minutes and then went back to work skinning. After he got them all skinned out, he salted down the hides and rolled them in a bundle — sold the hides in town for enough to buy his own rifle that winter, and enough left over to get his mother some yard goods she’d wanted. Then he drug the carcasses back to camp through the snow and hung them all up to cool out.
“He cleaned up, washing his hands with snow, fed the team, and then boiled up another pan of coffee. He fried himself a big mess of deer liver and onions and heated up some more of the biscuits. After he ate, he sat on a log and lit his pipe.”
“I’ll bet he was tired,” Jack said, just to be saying something. “Not being in bed all the night before and all that.”
“He still had something left to tend to,” Dad said. “It was almost dark when he spotted Old Buell slinking back toward camp. He was out on the open, coming back along the trail Pete had broken though the snow. His belly looked full, and his muzzle and ears were all bloody the same way Pete’s had been.”