One Dead

Yep, it's been a long time since I've written anything here. I've been working on a book instead. But thanks to those who've said they miss reading this dribble. I'll get back to it sometime.

This is a recycled essay, first published in Bugle. Reprinted here without their permission.

There’s a man on a horse behind me.  We’re riding a high ridge that divides two sprawling watersheds.  It’s nearly midnight, and my hands and forearms and knife are all crusted with blood.  Orange blazes speckle the black lands below, individual blasts of forest fire that creep like spiders up the ridges, flashing and sparking and flaming. 

The ground beneath the horses’ hooves thuds hollow in the night silence, the sky so clear that the smoke from the fires rises in singular ribbons against the stars, and the fires themselves seem small and close but really they are neither because this ridge looks out over one hundred miles of dark mountain.

The man on the horse behind me is a hunter but not a good hunter and not a good man.  Hours earlier, in the last shreds of daylight, he watched me kill an elk; now he will return to camp and tell everyone that he shot the bull, and later he will return home and tell his wife, his family, his friends, that he shot the bull.  He’s told me this, and he’s offered to pay me a handsome sum for my services; in the solitude of the mountains, he is not embarrassed by it.   

He will do this, too.  He will go home to the mid-west, where he owns several carwashes, and he will hang the elk head on his wall and stand beneath the sprawling horns and tell the story of his great wilderness hunt, and his wife will listen and nod, and his son will listen and nod, and what friends he may or may not have will do likewise, and over a period of time he will come to believe his own story, and the past will change and he’ll forget my role, will remember only that he did hunt and kill this bull, and the guide he’d hired had in fact only helped him gut it and skin it and pack it by mule-train twenty miles out of the mountains.

I did shoot the bull.  The story ends with a dead bull elk for the hunter to take home.  The bull was what we call a rag-horn—three tines on one side of his antlers, four on the other—and he came bugling and screaming out of the woods in the last shreds of daylight, and I killed him, and I pulled his steaming guts out, and I skinned half of him in the midnight darkness as the hunter stood behind me, talking.

See the kill.  Hear the bull bugling, long haunting calls that echo up the canyon.  Hear the hunter plead with me for me to shoot it.  His voice tiny and childlike, his face red and his breaths hard as he offers me cash.  I wipe sweat from my temples.  I pray that the bull silences, disappears and takes this decision with him.

But he steps out of the trees, a shadow sliding across the land.

I tuck my head to my rifle, feel the cold plastic stock on my cheek as I follow him with my scope. 

The hunter wheezes, then his shot snaps and I see the shock of the bullet in the bull’s guts, see the bull hunch, his back arch.

Then I shoot, and the bull spins once and staggers and falls. 

“I got him,” the hunter says.   

*

It is a steep hillside where the elk falls, and as I work I keep an eye on the black line of trees at the grass edge, and I think of the night previous, the three grizzly bears I’d seen step from those same shadows—a mother and two big subadult cubs.  I glance at the hunter, who should be keeping bear-lookout while I work on the elk.  But instead he holds his rifle in front of himself and talks as if speaking into the metal barrel. 

I watch the shadows for movement, glowing eyes, anything, then resume cutting the one thousand pounds of steaming meat and bone and hide that lie at my feet, the gut cavity large enough to hide within.

I flay the skin back.  I ignore the hunter.  My fingers burn with the hot blood.  The animal steam rises, smells of iron and mountain.  I open the thick neck and shoulder meat with the length of my hunting knife, slice down to the white line of the spinal column, then sink my entire hand into the animal, feel the heat of its muscle as I spread the flesh apart to cool in the night.

The hunter holds his rifle in one hand and a flashlight in the other.  He looks like an actor in a bad soldier movie.  When I stand up, I realize that he’s explaining what just happened, and as I begin to listen, I learn that I am not a part of his account: I did not pull the trigger and kill the animal that I have now unzipped like a half-ton duffel bag, an animal who’s liver and kidneys and heart I have just held in my hands, who’s blood now covers my arms beyond the elbows, who’s gut-stink now fills the air like broth.

I don’t know what to say to the hunter, so I say nothing.  I urinate in spots around the bull.  Out across the drainage, a broken ridge line stands against the sky, a black edge of land studded by fires.  With my bone saw, I cut branches from several nearby fir trees, and I cover the dead elk with the boughs, hoping to delay the damage the circling birds will cause at first light.  I strip my jacket and vest off and peel my sweaty t-shirt off and hang it from one of the bull’s antlers like a flag, then hang my long underwear shirt from the opposite horn, hoping—as with the urine—that the smell of human will keep the bears at bay until we can return with mules.

I look upward.  At the north end of the ridge, the tail of Ursa Major—the Big Dipper—stretches along a mountain flank, two of its stars pointing me to the North Star.  Forest fires burn below: small shots of orange flame flare and dissipate along the valleys and ridges and mountains.

I gather my tools—knives and sharpening stone and bone saw and flashlights and rope and rifle—and stow all but the rifle in my backpack, then gather the hunter and begin up the meadow face. 

The grass is a sharp gray in the starlight, the trees black.  I take ten steps and wait for the hunter to catch up, then wait as he catches his breath.  His body heaves and his lungs grind; I look away, watch the fires, the individual trees that catch and burn and die.

With each set of steps, the hunter talks less, though he’s still recounting what just happened, how he’d just made a good shot at a good bull, and how this hunt brings to mind other hunts, past successes.  I try not to listen.  I hear the words, bow and arrow.  I hear the word, bison.

I hurry to the horses.  They’re tied in a stand of lodgepole pine a few hundred yards down the ridge.  In bear country, horses mean safety, and the night works moonless, and I am covered in elk blood, and I have no doubts that somewhere nearby a grizzly bear has stopped its nighttime rambling and risen on its hind legs to consider the blood scent that now floods the wind, and the fact that there persists a residual fear of humankind within these bears is all that separates us from the world they occupy.    

By the time we reach the horses, the hunter has finished talking.  I hope he has his story straight.  We slide our rifles into our saddle scabbards, and I untie his horse and check his cinch and help him on.  He grunts and sighs.  We shut-off our headlamps and ride a hidden game trail that follows the spine of a long finger ridge.  The trail is narrow and broken, disconnected, and my horse is tired and hungry so hurries toward camp.  I can differentiate land from sky—blackness from void— but that is all; we are a two and a half hour ride from our hunting camp, which itself sits ten miles from the nearest vehicle access point.

I let the horse have his head, trust him to follow the trail, to find his way home; mountain horses do this, know every path they’ve travelled even on a night so dark a man cannot find his own hands.  Several times, my horse pauses to reorient himself.  He lifts his head, snorts, resumes. 

The moon lifts from the line of mountains and white bark pines stick like bones out of the gravel and rock, gray as skin in the moonlight.  After forty-five minutes we reach the main ridge that separates the watersheds, and we circle the heads of several drainages before dropping down the drainage that leads to our camp.

I walk the last mile, the reins in my fist.  My horse nudges my shoulder with his nose, his hot breath comfortable on my neck.  It is after one in the morning by the time we reach camp—a cluster of canvas wall tents set at the foot of an avalanche chute.  The cook is asleep on the bench in the kitchen tent.  A single propane lantern glows orange on the white canvas walls.  I can hear the flow of the creek.  Our dinners are in the wood stove oven, wrapped in tinfoil, and my boss, Jack, wakes from his tent and comes out and shakes our hands then unsaddles and pellets and releases our horses to graze the avalanche chute’s grasses.

*

The hunter is proud.  The long ride home has given him even more time to refine his story, to choose his memory, and this frees both of us from any guilt; I no longer killed the bull; he did, and he did so well.

We eat, and the hunter heads off to bed; I leave for bed too, but Jack follows me out and we stand in the darkness near the hitching rack.  The moon is up there somewhere, tucked behind cloud.  Jack is well over six feet tall, a mix of cowboy and mountain man, and there is no one on this planet who knows this range of mountains better than he does.  He is the owner of the outfit, the one who hired me and taught me what I know of mountains and horses and hunting.

And he asks the question I’d dreaded: “So who shot it?”    

I didn’t shoot it for money.  I didn’t want—and didn’t accept—the hunter’s money.  I killed the bull for reasons of my own, and I let the hunter take it and keep it and call it his own.

But I don’t tell this to Jack.

Three years earlier, as an apprentice guide, I’d watched in silence as this same hunter maimed a mountain goat one shot at a time.  First a hind leg, then back in the guts, then a front leg, I think, but by then it was hard to tell where he hit or did not hit because the animal was lunging and slipping and crashing across the hillside.  Finally, the head guide stepped in and shot, but the damage was done.

At the hitch rail, Jack waits for an answer.  His question echoes in my head.  “Who shot it?”

I kick at the ground.  The creek rattles.  I’m too tired to think.  There’s a long silence between us, and the lone cloud has left the moon so the dew on the meadow now gleams atop silver curls of grass, and far up the slope we can see the shadow-shapes of the horses feeding.

I swallow.  I look away from Jack and nod, and in doing so confirm the hunter’s tale.  Jack grunts, and now we both know the truth, and both know the lie, and I am thankful that he leaves it at this, does not press me to explain myself.  I assume that Jack trusts the motivations behind my decisions, just as I trust his, though it occurs to me that I have not earned such complete trust—I am twenty two years old, new to the mountains, new to the west, new to the world of rifles and animals and death.

After a moment, he puts his hand on my shoulder, says, “See you in the morning, Bud.”

I slip off for bed, lie in my cold sleeping bag in the canvas wall tent surrounded by three other guides who sleep soundly, still eager to go hunting in the morning, their minds not haunted by decisions they wish they’d not faced.

The next day, the hunter breaks.  He is furious.  He wants out.  The cape—the skin of the elk’s face and neck that’s used by taxidermists for trophy mounts—did not cool through the night, and spoiled in the early morning sun, and so his trophy is lost; only the horns, the meat, and the memory remain.

The hunter demands an escort out.  His face is red, his lips wet; his cheeks shake.  He wants out of the camp, out of the mountains; he will not look at me, but whispers to me that I did a good job as he tries to palm a fold of cash into my hand.  I step away from him, refuse his money.  We pack the elk meat out on mules, the hunter out horseback.  We leave his elk at a butcher, and we leave the hunter at a hotel.

The hunt continues without the hunter.  The forest fires burn as the winds increase.  In the afternoons, black mushroom clouds of smoke rise at the mouth of the drainage.  The Forest Service lands a chopper at our camp and checks on us.  We’ve been in radio contact twice a day all week, and they’ve already alerted us as to the fact that if the winds change and blow the fire toward us, we will have to evacuate; by being here, Jack risks losing his entire camp to the flames; but if he cancels his hunts, he will lose his entire ranch to the bank. 

He chooses flames, and the Forest Service unloads gravity-fed sprinklers and hoses that we tap into a spring and run across the meadow to keep stray sparks from igniting the dry grasses. 

I guide another hunter, and he is a different kind of man, calm and patient, but we see no elk.  Because of the heat, we hunt the deep woods, the old spruce bogs and water holes and creek beds.  We sit in the shade and we wait.  I watch the clouds of smoke roil across the skyline.  I lean my rifle against a tree and filter the flakes of squirrel-chewed fir cones through my fingers. 

I think about the hunter, and as I watch the smoke plumes rise, I consider the possibility that the winds could change direction and rush toward our camp.  In my mind, I equate the two—the hunt, the fire—and I understand that there is a lesson here beyond that of our own insignificance, that the hunter’s actions, and my actions, are ultimately no different than that of the fire; perhaps we are all just moving across the landscape, driven by factors as uncompromising as wind and temperature, leaving some degree of carnage in our wake.