Jiří — A Sharpshooter
ST. HUBERT’S DAY
NOVEMBER 3, 1974
I WAKE WITH A start. I see my breath. There is moonlight on the wooden floor. I hear the sound again. I sit bolt upright in my cot. It is closer. I hear it brushing against the side of the hut. I see a form in the window. A stag. It stares directly in, at the antlers arranged on the wall. I am still. I watch the stag breathe on the frosted windowpane, seemingly contemplating the trophies and skullcaps of its kind. It moves off now. Other deer follow it. By the time I get to the window, they are all gone into the forest.
The iron stove is still warm. I throw more wood in it. I brew a pot of chicory coffee. I drink it barefoot now on the steps outside the forestry hut, which are cold, made of stones set down in the forest by a glacier long ago. I am unsettled. It is the saint day of Hubert, the patron of hunters and butchers, who fell prostrate before a stag, between whose antlers was a figure of Christ, fading in and out as our black-and-white television sets do. I see a badger in the half-light, punching through ferns, deeper into this forest, my forest, which surrounds the Svět. The trees creak. It is autumn. Leaves are falling, falling.
I go back inside the hut. I dress. I tuck in my woolen shirt. I pull up my suspenders. I lace my boots up to my knees. I put on my jacket. I set a feather in my cap. I push back my thick, black-framed spectacles. I throw the bloodstained satchel over my shoulder. I take up my rifle, a Mannlicher-Schoenauer 6.5.
I am a forester and a hunter. My father was too, and his father before him. I shot my first boar in 1941, not far from this hut. I was a boy then. My view on hunting is sentimental. I believe in an unspoken pact between certain men and certain beasts; by hunting animals, I give them purpose. I am a Communist. I do not disguise my intentions: I am Communist because I wish to remain in the forest. If they ask me certain questions, I will set down my ax and rifle and leave. They do not ever ask me. They trust me because I am known to them only in the trees, where there are no politics, just as Hubert was loved as a young man because he was known only in moments of fraternity in the forest, away from the disputatious, where the only quarry was a beast. I do not have the face of a functionary. There are fools in every walk of life, including the Party. I say so openly. When I go to political meetings, I speak to the point. Unlike the careerists, I do not introduce into my written reports incidental characters who might be blamed if a criticism is raised or vanished if praise is forthcoming. I take responsibility for my actions. When I fell a tree, I count the number of its rings.
I check the magazine of my rifle now. I load the five rounds. I lock it. I walk away from the forester’s hut. I step quickly into evergreen larches, white firs, silver firs, deodars, Bosnian pines, Austrian pines, Hungarian oaks, downy oaks, sessile oaks, wild service, gray poplars, black walnut, hickory, and full-moon maples. I see the sky through the division of their leaves and the patterns at the base of their cones and in the brightly colored arils about their seeds. I belong to these trees. I wish to leap between them and live in them, in their branches, like some baron. Instead, I move dutifully along the forest floor, daubing trunks with arrows as I go; upward for trimming, downward for felling. I am always in shadow, glimpsing rather than seeing, so that when I emerge from the forest, even into the flat light about the Svět, I am dazzled.
The roots of the firs are sprung tight under me. I would feel myself lifted from the ground if I broke into a run now. I do not understand captivity in the same way as the fishermen who work the Svět. They are unduly exposed, without subtleties, on the water. The forest is not a cage, as they say. It is a shelter. Startled deer bound from the fields to the forest, not from the forest to the fields; their prance into the trees that sustain them is so acute and airborne as to seem the work of an unseen puppeteer, jerking them on wires.
I consider Hubert. He dismounted. He unfurled his hands. His fingers I suppose to be snagged from thorns and tethered hawks. Christ spoke through the stag in a voice I cannot conceive, saying:
Hubert! How long will you pursue the animals of the forest?
This is a vain and selfish passion. When will you consider
the safety of your soul, the quickness of your fall. If you
do not cease hunting, you will go to hell.
It is contradictory. Hubert bowed down before a beast. He renounced slaughter, but became the saint of hunters and of butchers, who cut up the animals brought out of the forest.
I FIND A HARE KICKING hard in a trap intended for a pine marten. It is anguished, but uninjured. I pull it free. I hold it up by the back of the head. It pedals the air. It arches itself and slowly closes its eyes, awaiting a mortal blow. I let it go. The hare reminds me of a story told to me of an aristocrat who walked up from the Svět on a summer evening in 1771 and entered the forest under a large setting sun. He went deep into the forest. He set his musket up behind a rock in a clearing. He took out his snuffbox from his embroidered waistcoat. After some hours he saw the largest owl he had ever seen, larger than an eagle, carrying a live hare in its talons. The aristocrat aimed his long barrel at the owl. He fired. The ball passed through the hare but missed the bird. The hare fell dead at his feet, twice hunted, and the owl swooped off, unburdened.
I put a bullet into damp air as I put an ax to a tree. The bullet drills into the chest of a deer. The deer loosens under the blow; it slumps to the floor. It gives itself out into the fir roots, through the hole I have made in it, and is so pressed down in that moment, with no possibility of rising again, that gravity itself seems to me increased, as if there were a magnet hidden in the foliage and another in the body of the deer and they have met and snapped together at the moment of death. I let my hounds off the leash. I run behind them. The deer is always dead when I lay down my rifle beside it. It is already stiff under my gaze, the throat open like a jug.
I imagine death to come on us, on deer also, like the hand of an anesthesiologist, pulling limbs into cruciform, pushing a needle into a vein. There is a chemical closing over, a kind of drowning. The lungs fill with fluid, as in the womb. The eyes close, or glaze over. I run up to the deer. I drag the hounds off it. I regard it. My first thought is of the space between life and death, the fragment when you are neither living nor dead, which in a deer might be a flickering of a divine stag and in a man the longest purgatory.
I WALK THE RIDGE ABOVE the secret military base. I see other foresters in the distance, sawing spruce trees for Christmas. I call out to them, but they do not hear me. My father believed in Hubert and in the communion of saints. He described it as a piece of engineering, a turbine: Saints gather up prayers, convert them into love and majesty, and so power the present with hope. I do not believe in such a communion. I observe St. Hubert’s Day only out of respect for my father. He marked the day with a suspension of deer hunting and by taking his hounds to be blessed in the chapel of St. Michael, which stands between the zoo and the town. I went with him. I stood near the altar, holding the muzzled hounds tightly, while around me the music for the mass was performed on hunting horns.