I was done with shooting.
39
ONLY WHEN I WOKE NEXT MORNING IN THE CHAIR DID I know that I had slept the night before. The last few hours before dawn in deep sleep and without a cover had left me sore. I walked stiffly along the shelves of books, the dark corridor. I clapped my hands to get warm. Water for tea, the fire, more logs from the woodpile, and no footprints in the clearing, that was good. A fine crisp Saturday morning, sky blue, some cloud galvanized along a light wind, a calm before the freeze and on the day before the festival. In Fort Kent the children of the town would be bouncing out of bed and rushing to the window, seeing the same sky, same cloud. Then they run to their parents and remind them that the scarecrow festival is the next day. In seven weeks they will wake and check the pine tree on the night before Christmas, that it was still there and lit and ready for the night, and that there was space enough underneath for the night visitor who was perhaps already a speck above the continents, the eternal father holding the reins, knowing each and every chimney, and each and every name of all children. I wished them all the joy they could hold, every last one, and that he’d leave something for them. If I had a child he would be a reader of course, with all the books; still a child needs friends, even on weekends, and that would mean we’d drive to town a lot, but there was the diner for me to wait in. Such thoughts kept me warm that morning until the fire took hold.
I lit my father’s pipe and poured a glass of sherry from the closet into a crystal glass, the one we kept for special occasions. I walked then along the shelves, wondering which book to pick for reading today: the decision was easy in the end, why not? I pulled out Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Seven weeks too early but that’s why you read ahead, to get into the spirit. And perhaps there was to be a visitor for me soon, a man with a question, a man with a gun. Then I should be outside surely.
From the bedroom I dragged a blanket after me, and walking outside with the sherry on the tray of the book, I threw the bed blanket across a rock out by Hobbes and drank the glass and read for a bit, an hour or so, to give him the feeling he once had with me. It was fairly cold all the same, and eventually I went inside, missing my friend with every step. But a lightness had entered my mind, perhaps leaked gently into it through the long night before, a suggestion that he was at peace now, and that I should be. I was ready for such peace and silence again.
Not fifteen minutes later, deep in the New England chair on a Saturday mid-morning with my second sherry in hand and thirty-eight pages into Dickens, a bullet punctured the woods.
40
SOME PEOPLE WILL SHOOT ANYTHING, ANYTHING IN the world that moves, anything that flies, crawls or swims, anything of the living, furry, feathered, large, small, plump or scrawny, a grouse, woodcock, turkey, pheasant, white-tailed deer, black bear, moose, mice, rats, voles, rabbit, beaver, lynx, bobcat, raccoon, eastern coyote, muskrat, squirrel, otter, fox, mink, weasel, skunk, porcupine, they will do it on fine days, their favorite, on wet days, on days neither fine nor wet, though hunters love the chill in the air, the dank perfume of bark, the forest floor violets, the deer wandering the lakeshore in fog, it all triggers some deep delight in their blood, and if it makes them happy, then so be it, but my father often complained when the shots came five or six to a minute, saying it was hard to be reading in the middle of a broadside. We never heard the shriek of an animal, and that was at least something, but one day my father put down his book and paced the living room, hands behind him, his back slightly bent, his eyes a step ahead of his shoes on the floor.
He said, A battle sniper waits motionless for three hours for a second’s aim at a target that will shoot back or call artillery down upon him if he misses. These people out there, and he pointed out the window without looking, they shoot at targets taking a predicable course and without a return shot: you don’t have to worry about giving away your position, the flash of the gun muzzle, the steam off the barrel. The worst thing that can happen is you miss or hit but not fatally and they’ll go bleeding to find their young.
That was a lot for my father. Then he sat down and found his page again, but too late, I had heard what those shots had loosed in him. That night I dreamed of a feathery archer bending his bow to a nightingale in the branches of a cypress tree.
As a young boy of twelve or thirteen I often took walks in the woods around, though my father explained the places I could not go. One day off a trail forbidden to me I found rusted iron jaws chained to a tree and snapped shut on a leg. To the right in sunlit brush a mountain cat lay on its side. I clung to a tree in fright before seeing flies circle in the sunlight over the stump, a missing front leg. I ran home in tears. My father explained the mystery: the animal had stepped on a hidden hunter’s trap, and it chewed first through its own flesh and tendons, then the bone, and tore free. Those who did not, he said, pulled for a few days until hunger outpaced the pain, the string of convulsions, strange sights from the starvation, until they arrived at death and were calmed. He said that the cat’s ordeal was over. To the question I did not ask he added that some men must create pain in others to feel less of it themselves.
I soon came to a point in life when I watched for people who came too close to the cabin and the animals we kept. I was twenty or so when I saw a man with a 12-guage looped from his shoulder standing by the pond looking for something to shoot. We had a pet water fowl called Cinder who sometimes went down there, she’d lived on the farm for four years and her mate was somewhere about rummaging in the water basin to clean himself. I heard them calling to each other across the farm a few minutes before. So I stood at the treeline and watched this man. He looked forlorn, balding at the crown, with a tube in the middle, a flannel shirt rolled up and rough at the arms, staring still and silently at an empty pond ringed with plants. Maybe she was in there, he’d spy her and shoot, and she would not survive the blast of pellets. I made a movement and he looked up to me. I did not acknowledge him. He muttered and walked to his left along the pond and into the trees. I put water on for tea and waited for him to come back, since I suspected he was not to be happy that particular day unless he put an end to something. But I was wrong: that man did not return.
It seemed to me that the world and the people abroad in it would not be told where not to go. In summer I had a ring of flowers to stop the forest, in winter a ring of books to stop the cold, to retreat inside for the months of silence. And around me another living ring, the animals that grouped around because of the food I threw down, the birds that hoped for seed in winter and sang their hearts out in spring in return. They lived in a circle of maybe a hundred yards, and in the end they gave their bodies up in peace. I’d find a bird lying in the woods, a mouse curled up by a rock. I hoped I could die so well. Perhaps it is all instinct, men say this. But try stopping a man from doing what he wants: people will not be controlled, they will not be dissuaded, they are also chained to what is in their minds to do, that too might be called instinct. It whips us all.