Lonny took a small pouch from his pocket, pinched some tobacco and started to roll a cigarette with papers he’d taken from the same pouch. “We got us a problem and I think you’re the guy to solve it for us.” He finished the cigarette and placed it between his lips. “You want one?”
Will declined and then walked around to the deer to undo the paracord from where he had tied it to secure the buck. He heard the flick of the lighter, then the exhale of the smoke and by the time the paracord had been taken from the haunches and underbelly of the deer, Will was smelling cigarette smoke and not much else.
“You know the Kershaw place out on two twenty-four?”
“I know the Kershaws. Their place is about twenty miles from here.” He knelt and, taking the knife from his belt, made a small hole between each of the deer’s knees and rear tendons. Next he got the hook from the gambrel and hoisted the deer up so that it was swinging, spraddle-legged, in front of him. “They still raise cattle?”
“You’d likely know this if you came to The Father’s Sunday sermons. Being there as little as you are, you think no one notices when you miss one. But I notice. And I guess now I’ll be the one to tell you the church took over the operation a few weeks ago.”
“Took over?”
“Made some improvements.” Lonny smoked. He walked off a way and looked down at the field below. When he came back, he said, “I’d like you to hunt and kill a big grizzly that took down a heifer there yesterday.”
Will stopped the careful job he was doing with the skin, working with the knife to bring it down off the haunches. He looked over at Lonny. “You’re asking me to look past a heap of laws and regulations.”
“That’s what you do, isn’t it? You think we have you set up here on church land so you can pick and choose?”
Will didn’t like being talked to that way. It was true, maybe he did have it good out here. Fighting with Lonny wasn’t going to do him any favors. “You have a plan?”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“Grizzlies are scavengers,” Will said. “They’re opportunistic. You’ll never know how to read them, how to understand them. They’ll hunt and kill their own young if they have to. They’re survivors. This bear you want me to kill, he may have just been passing through. He might just have seen the heifer and gone for it. He might be miles away by now.”
“And if he isn’t?”
“We could go to jail for this. You understand that, right?”
“What happens on our land is our business.”
Will sucked at the inside of his cheeks. The bloody knife hung in his hand and he let his eyes roll across the clearing in which his cabin sat. He could see no way out of this. “When I was over in Vietnam there was a tiger that used to hunt and kill the men stationed at my base. They tried damn near everything they could to kill it. But it always came back. No one ever saw it. The animal might as well have been a ghost. We found paw prints, we found blood trails, but we never saw it.”
“And you killed it?”
“No,” Will said. “How do you kill something you cannot see?”
Lonny finished the cigarette and flicked it away toward the firepit. “You think this bear is supernatural? You think this bear is some heavenly retribution? The Father would love that. That would be scripture to the man.”
“No,” Will said. “I’m saying I don’t know a goddamn thing. I’m saying I can’t help you.”
“Now, Will. You know that’s not something you can say.” Lonny took a small flask from his pocket, worked the top off and then drank. He never took his eyes from Will. “You need a little liquid encouragement?”
“No,” Will said.
Lonny took another swig of the flask and then he sat on one of the cut logs by the firepit and looked up at Will. “Things could be a lot worse for you,” Lonny said. “Being out here as much as you are you haven’t seen the things that I’ve seen. You don’t know what they have us doing these days.”
“The Father chose to put me here,” Will said.
“The Father says the time is approaching.”
“Is that right?”
“He tells us to read the signs. Plain as day, he says. All hell is breaking loose out East. And it’s coming, all the goddamn way across the country. I see you, Will. I see how you are. You’re not a believer like the new blood we have now, but you will be. You will be one of these days and you’re going to need to be saved like all the rest of us.”
“I see you over there keeping the faith,” Will said, looking at the flask and the man that held it.
“Old habits die hard.”
“Yes, they do.”
Lonny took another drink. He ran his eyes out to the clearing and the view of the mountains farther on. Insects were dancing in the last lowering rays of sun. “What happened to the tiger?”
“The powers that be went and talked to the local villagers. A pit was suggested. The enemy used to use them on us. Just slaughter us all to hell. Maybe you’ve heard about it? Lines of sharpened sticks, covered over by a latticework of twigs and then concealed. Gravity did the rest.” Will worked the knife across the skin again, yanking the hide down until he reached the front legs, then he worked the blade down along the backs of each, cutting and pulling.
“That’s how you got the tiger?”
“No, the tiger waited. He took one man out at a time. He waited in that jungle and he watched and he knew without a doubt that we were there to kill him and we never did.”
“What the fuck.” Lonny took another drink. “Why the fuck did you tell me that story in the first place?”
“Sometimes it’s important to understand you don’t always get what you want.”
“That goes both ways,” Lonny said. He looked Will’s work over and then he got up to leave. “You better throw that fucker in the back of the truck for me. I’ve got a lot to do before I start digging us a hole out by the Kershaw place.”
“You’re not going to catch him,” Will said.
“Yeah, well, I’m going to do everything I goddamn can. And you’re going to help me.”
WILL STOPPED AND STOOD IN THE SAME SPOT HE’D SEEN THE bear stand to meet the coming thunderstorm. He turned and looked up on his place. The slant of the roof, the tin cap of the stovepipe, the whole cabin almost part of the forest itself, so small and nondescript atop the little hill.
A day had passed since Lonny had come and Will now carried three beavers on a string. He had shot them from the shore that morning and then watched them bob to the surface. Stripping down naked, he’d gone wading into the pond until his feet lost the bottom. For a little while, after he’d gathered them up and come back to the shore, he glanced back at the lodge there and the hole in it that the bear had torn a few days before. Blood and water now dripped down his naked forearm and fell in a splatter to the mud below. He gutted each animal to preserve the meat longer and then tied the castor glands shut.
The Kershaw place was twenty miles away, but it was half that if he cut through the forest and made his way through the fields. It was getting on in the afternoon, and as he stood in the place the bear had stood he tried to think the bear’s thoughts, see the bear’s path, and know the bear’s world.
HE DREAMT AND HIS MIND WANDERED IN TIME AND HIS UNCONscious thoughts were of old stories he’d heard as a kid, passed down through his family all the way back to the pioneer days. Bears twice the height of a man, miners and loggers hunting them near to extinction. Ranch owners shooting any they saw. These bears simply hungry, simply doing what they could to survive, and doing it the only way they knew how.
He woke in the night and sat up, looked about the clearing he had chosen to make his camp. The Kershaw place was another five miles or so. The camp made when he had come up the ridge and moved into the high country gave him a vantage over the land. And while the setting sunlight spread like an orange dye through the darkening blue water of the sky, he ate mountain blueberries he’d gathered and chewed bits of smoked jerky he’d made from past kills. Fifty yards away the beavers hung from a branch on a tree and while he took his meal he watched the way the coming night breeze turned the carcasses. The flat, broad tails like some sort of sail catching the wind.