I tried to read more, but another theme had inserted itself into my thinking. Mine was a minor life, no church steeple scratching at the clouds or joined to the streets of a town, no birthdays and weddings and weekends, a few flowers holding back the forest, a certain number of ducks and guinea hens crackling up in the branches at night. A life all of my own choosing. That thought brought me back to Hobbes, but I had never left him, nor he me. His loss scratched my stomach like burlap, my companion of those years, none to visit him where he lay with his small life, none to know what he was. And now these insistent shots, these reminders.
In the hour that followed, the gunfire came thick and heavy across the yard, the book in my hands. From the sound and the spacing I figured there were two shooters nearby, well within a mile, and whenever I lost myself in the novel, a pair of shots startled the words away brought me back, until my mind left the book altogether and returned to rifles. It became obvious to me that I may not have dealt with the hunter who shot Hobbes after all, that he might still be at large in the area.
Of the shots that banged relentless out of the trees, and closer now too in the last few minutes, one of the two had a familiar ring to it. Something stirred in me again, this deep measure that had the better of me. People were incapable of minding their own business, all this infernal noise they brought with them everywhere.
I feared suddenly that I had reached a time where life had taught me all it was going to or wanted to. From this point on it would be a circle for me, always the same again, and harder to bear at each turn of the wheel when it came round. If I had a child, or someone, I could have led them to what I’d seen and heard over the years, but that was not to be. Around and around, the life of Julius Winsome, day in and out.
I was being shot out of my father’s books.
Every year, more and more hunters, better equipped, venturing farther into property, not content to go home without taking something. And if I could not read with all this firing going on, then why have books? The idea caught hold of me, and perhaps because I had not eaten yet or the sherry had gripped my blood or because of the feeling in the air of an approach of some kind, visitor either of weather or man I don’t know, but I imagined myself going inside the house, grabbing a foot-length of books, as many as I could carry in one go, and bringing them out to the clearing and setting them in a stack at the edge of the flowerbeds. And again for the second foot of books, a stack every yard till I had a line of them stretched along the boundary with the forest. What use were books now.
If I did that, it would be best to burn them, not leave them for others, but no big blaze either with smoke everywhere, because in no time I’d have people running with buckets and good intentions, sirens tearing up the road. If I wanted attention, no better way to signal my name in the air than with a smoke blanket. More effective would be one small and secret burning, and then another and another, piles of incendiary words, until the entire library was gone without fuss or notice. Don Quixote? A man my father said had so much information in his head it conjured his mind outside of him. The Parliament of Fowles? Such grace was long gone, long of little use.
But lighting a fire with them was also useless. The cold flakes would wrap themselves around any small flame and snuff it out, and I wondered if I was the complete fool now if I thought I could burn the hours of my childhood and most of my life on a whim or because men had taken to shooting on a morning in early winter.
There would be no transportation of books. I should be dealing with those guns instead.
41
I WALKED INSIDE AGAIN, BRINGING OUT A THIRD GLASS of sherry and sitting by the flowerbed where a few feet down my companion lay wrapped and packed in clay.
He had gone to ground, and ground was in his name: terrier, from the Latin, always digging after quarry. No matter, I could have set a baby down in the clearing in the forest and the pit-bull terrier that was Hobbes would defend that baby from bears, from mountain lions, from anything abroad in that forest, human or otherwise, because it was his job to defend it, even with his own life. And you don’t have to starve them and chain them up to make them tough, it’s built in, they come out tough. I had treated him like a baby, that’s true, and plenty of people will object to that, treating an animal like a human when there’s so many hungry people around, why not feed the people first who need feeding. I was sure they fed those hungry people themselves when they got the chance: I didn’t know these things. Good luck to them. They could live in their world as long as they stayed out of mine. The trouble with people like that is they can’t stay in their own world. And two of them had now evidently strayed where they didn’t belong. I rose and walked to the edge of the woods and said to the woods in general,
There’s fresh snow fallen, can’t you hold off?
I ignored them as best I could for another couple of hours. I read the lists of Shakespeare, from F, Firstling and Flanker, to G, Garboil, Geck, Gallowglass, Gallimaufry, and Gulf. I liked the Gs then. But still the shots continued, the two of them and the ammunition that could have sustained a company of soldiers.
My thoughts, it is true, had turned black, the color of Hobbes’ world, turned it fast. I could not enjoy the writing and put the list away, walked to the barn and placed the sherry on the bench and lifted the Enfield out of its case, set it across my shoulder with a fresh clip in the magazine. I saw another clip handy on the bench and wanted to carry it too, but it would drag in my pocket, so I left it behind me. I also left the telescopic sight behind.
I took the white blanket off Hobbes’ grave and draped it on my other shoulder over the long coat and set off into the woods toward the sound of the shots. It was easy to follow them, they came regular, a couple a minute. Those men must have brought a garrison’s worth of cartridges with them. What were they hunting, the entire northern herds? Were they not aware that it was one deer per person per season? These I could tell were heavy-caliber rifles, auto-repeaters, also illegal for hunting as far as I knew. Well-armed men, shooting well and careless as to the law. Could easily have been one of those two then who had done the shooting. It was even likely, if that man weren’t dead already.
42
TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE WOODS AND IN THE GENTLY falling flakes I came silently upon a man. He was wearing orange and made no attempt to disguise himself.
I had not heard anything for five minutes and then there was this crack of fire in the middle distance: he stood in his orange huntsman’s vest, shooting rapidly at two deer feeding in the adjacent field. Another minute and I would have stumbled on top of him had he been quiet enough, or stumbled down dead if he had been waiting for me.
I unslung the rifle and watched him. One of the deer crumpled at the rear, he had caught it in the hind leg. The deer looked ahead to where the other ran, trying to follow, to gain a foothold on the flat grass. The hunter shot again, this time splashing a bullet into the neck and flattening the deer motionless on its right side.
I waited for another minute. The huntsman did not move from his firing position, did not walk to check on the shot, which I thought strange. Perhaps he was waiting for the mate to return to shoot it too, but he knew surely that the deer would not return, not that soon. Now where was the other shooter? Had I mistaken the sound of one rifle for two? Was he alone?
I heard myself whisper, perhaps too loudly: By your shots I deciphered two of you, and each with his rifle exhaled, expedient back and forth in the woodland.