I stirred, but when Father had gone I slowly sank back into this bog of blissful sleep. It was brief, though, for the dogs started howling in the grounds, and Old David was shouting at the boys not to tarry with the saddles. Above the clangor of everything, I could distinguish the neighing of the black pony that Father had given me. The world was alive; we were going to hunt together for the first time, for I was already old enough to handle a gun. It was a time I had waited for, and looking back, all through those trying times, Father really needed not just the woman I had yet to meet but a diversion from the cares that had begun to nag and depress him.
At this time of the year, Old David said, the delta was dry again; the waters had receded from their pockets, and in the mornings shrouded with mist the quail would gather at the water holes. It was time for Father to mount his chestnut horse, gallop past the iron gate through the still-sleeping town. On mornings like this when I was not yet allowed to go with him, I would rise early, too, and wrapped in bedsheets, I would linger at the balcony and watch Old David help him mount. The face of the old man would always turn up to me in a smile as he and Father passed below. I loved his work, his closeness to the horses to whom he often spoke, and I often idled in the stables, all around me the pungent smell of urine and sawdust, while he tinkered with the leather. And in the stable, he dismantled father’s escopetas—the twelve-gauge double-barreled shotguns — and cleaned them till their bores shone and their hand-carved stocks glistened. With his permission and watchful eye, I had touched them, listening to the double click of the trigger. By the time I was ten, I could handle the guns, though I could barely lift them, and I had learned not just how to shoot but how to treat them with respect and caution.
“Do you think he would take me hunting now?” I had asked so often, it had become a ritual for us. But Old David, chewing his leaf tobacco, merely shrugged: “Next year, perhaps. Your father knows best.” At the end of the day, as the sun toppled over the foothills, I returned to the balcony, knowing they would soon come, and by dusk Father would ride in slowly, Old David cantering behind him. But many a time, however, the saddle pack did not hold even one skinny bird, and many a time, too, Father tramped to the house with thunder in his boots, banged at the doors and did not even look at me when I rushed down the stairs to kiss his hand.
There were times in the years long past, Old David said, when they did not know where to put the quail and the heron that they had shot, but now the birds hid in the fastness, driven there by men who no longer had enough rice to eat. More babies were born, they grew up, and there being no more land to farm in the plain, they moved to the foothills and razed them of their cogon grass. They tried planting in the delta, too, when the rains stopped, but the course of the river had always been erratic, and what could be a fertile field this year could be a sandy bar next year.
I prodded Old David again to go ask Father if I could go with him to hunt; he had said that my voice was changing and, yes, perhaps this time it would be all right. We went up to Father’s room, but only he entered; I tarried at the door, which was ajar, and heard Father say, “But why must he come? There is nothing there but wasteland. Here he has everything, has he not? An air rifle, a bicycle, companions …”
“He wants to hunt, Apo.”
“And if he gets lost? Or if he drowns? No one will replace him …”
“I have forgotten, Apo.”
“Can he take care of himself?”
“Yes, Apo. He knows how to handle a gun now.”
A long pause, then Old David came out, his craggy face bright with a smile. And later that day, from the open window of Father’s room, I aimed at a brown kapok pod buffeted high in the wind. This was the moment I had waited for, to load and aim a gun, and when I fired, my bones rattled, my teeth jarred, and in my ears the roar was deafening. When the acrid smoke cleared, the pod no longer swung in the tall and slender tree across the street.
Father was grinning when I turned to him. “All right, eh, David?” then to me, “But if you come, you must carry something, like the lunch bag. And you keep track behind me so you won’t get lost.”
But doubts persisted. “Tell me, am I not ready yet?” I asked. Old David shook his head. He had often watched me aim a slingshot at Father’s empty beer bottles lined up in the yard, and each brown exploding glass was like the shattered body of a bird. Then, with an air rifle and at a greater distance. Now with the gun.
“You’ll do,” Old David said simply.
So on this November morning when smoke from the kitchen stoves and yard fires of the neighbors curled up to a sky polished with sun, I finally was to see the delta. I had new rubber boots and denim overalls. I went to the dining room, where Sepa and Old David were serving Father coffee and fried rice, and sat at the other end of the long mahogany table. The chocolate the old man placed before me steamed fragrantly, but it was not enough. I motioned to Old David to pass the fried eggs, but Father warned: “A hunter must always eat light before the hunt.”
I waited till Father rose. At the door, without his seeing it, Old David slipped into my hand a white lump of native cheese wrapped in banana leaf.
Down at the stable, the boys ringed me and wished me luck, then they dispersed hurriedly when Father came. After he had mounted, Old David helped me up onto my pony. For the past few days I had studied the animal’s temper, raced it to the meadow beyond the barbed-wire fence, anticipating the time I would ride it to the delta. Now the frisky animal reared, then pawed the ground. I held its reins steadily.
Old David mounted his low-chinned mare. With Father on his castaño before us, we rode down the driveway. Through the town the dogs followed us in howling packs. The early risers, who sat haunched before yard fires warming their hands, stood up and watched us and our horses, whose breath spouted from their nostrils like blasts of steam in the morning chill. We clattered over the new wooden bridge across the creek, then turned to a weedy bull-cart road, and down to the fields where farmers were already harvesting. They paused in their work to watch.
“We will be there soon,” Father said. We were halfway, so Old David said, when Father told us not to follow him, and jabbing his stirrups into the hinds of his mount, he galloped ahead.
I turned to the old man as Father disappeared at the bend of the road. “Tell me, Old David, can I really get lost in the delta?”
Old David maneuvered his mount away from the mud pits and the deep wheel ruts that sliced the road and moved away from me. He did not answer.
“Are there many birds there?”
“You know what the delta is. There isn’t anything about it that I haven’t told you,” he said.
I brought my horse beside the old man’s mare so that as we jogged on, our legs brushed.
“Ay,” the old man sighed. “Long before your father ever went there, when your grandfather and I were still boys, we hunted there. One night we kept vigil at the edge of a brook. With a powerful gun you track just one bird. One skinny bird! We let the pagaw and the heron alone, but you can’t do that now. You know what were there once? Wild pigs and deer that cavorted in the light of the moon and stood unafraid at the edge of the clearings!”
Once, before I knew what a deer was like, in Father’s study I gazed at the mounted heads of boars that adorned the wall, their tusks sticking out of their petrified snouts like Moro daggers. Beside Father’s folding desk I touched the smooth tapering antlers that served as cane-and-hat rack. On Father’s high, carved chair, I perched myself to reach the blades of the spears, the forked arrows, and the double-barreled shotguns on the wall.