He laughed as I faltered and told me that a gun held nothing more than bullets; it took a man to hold the gun, an eye to train it on a target, and a finger to pull the trigger and set the bullet in flight. He said a gun will shoot a tin can or a president and was no more good or bad than the people who used it.
15
I SAT WAITING IN THE WOODS AND IGNORED THE BUCK in the field. Some time passed, not much. The man who eventually came into view moved as though from out of the trees themselves, so quietly did he walk. I saw nothing, but I heard him. I lifted my eyes only and did not stir another muscle in any part of me, and even then the seconds went by and he was still invisible, and I thought he was a part of my mind coming toward me and not in the woods. In the end, the boots gave him away: he was wearing new or recently polished boots, I heard the tiny squeak, and then I saw him, dressed in fatigues, camouflaged well against the dark brown and green undergrowth, carrying his gun in both hands, angled upward and ready for a quick shot, his index finger laid across the trigger housing like a soldier trained in warfare. This was a man who liked to stalk his prey, to walk with it, shadow it, strike in a moment like a thunderbolt. I surmised his weapon to be therefore loaded, and it looked like a slug gun, lethal up to a hundred yards, a wound mortal for sure. He was moving at ninety yards from me I gauged, and he seemed taken with the big buck now feeding in the open field, and he stared at it, head down, and lifted and brought down each leg with silence and cunning, a feat for a big man wide at the shoulders and with a neck used to carrying for a living, a construction man from appearances. Red stubble uniform on his skull. He should have been wearing an orange vest: that was careless of him.
He lifted his shotgun in the brush and aimed, and that is when I darted from the two trees and swung the rifle to my shoulder, and breathed halfway out and squeezed the trigger. He dropped where he stood, like the forest falling down in his clothes. The buck was already half way across the field, covering yards a step, head first to the horizon, as if shot from the same gun.
He could not have known his luck as he ran, that deer.
I approached the man who had pitched forward onto his face and was breathing heavily, snorting against leaves and such. The bullet had found him between the shoulder blades and a foot down from the neck, and he reached for it as did the other man that morning, and to no account. There was no pulling the lead out, no undoing the havoc it spread among any soft organs going in.
What came next? I did not feel the rush of air. I only believe I did, and that is very much a different thing.
It was a knife on my neck but no knife when I turned and swung the rifle to my left as I heard the thunk in a tree trunk behind me. Well, well. The second of an unusual pair of hunters, wherever he was. And this one carrying a crossbow and walking parallel to his friend somewhere on the other side of the woods: he had heard and seen the shot and knew what was what and let loose upon me. I was cut at skin level. This man, however, would not make the same mistake twice and was no doubt already inserting another bolt in his weapon, strong enough to go through me if he found the mark. I brought the rifle up to my shoulder and grasped the bolt handle, dragging it back and forward to eject one round and chamber the next, hoping that the sight of a rifle pointed in his direction would get the man to stir. Move! Move! Anything to make him move.
What he did was not to move but breathe, and I saw the wisp of breath, targeted it, and fired.
My hand was straight away on the bolt right above the trigger and moving another round into the chamber. First came the groan, and again I saw the forest move, as this one, also in fatigues, went soft in the knees and went down on them. I walked to him then, seeing as he did not appear to have suffered a fatal wound. When I reached him he was attempting to reload as blood pumped from his right shoulder, spreading red in the fibers of the cloth.
He watched me approach, slack-jawed, eyes drooping in some degree of pain, I could tell. They swung lazy and insouciant to his friend.
You were unlucky in the shot, I said. That was a good shot. You had me almost, but you aimed for the thinnest part of me.
He fumbled with the bow and I kicked it away from the tangle of his hands. There was not much meat on this one, bony enough, though he had a wiry texture to his strength no doubt, and liable to chill easily around the joints. He developed a shake about the limbs, the shock that was, and shock is worse than any wound.
Amort, bow hunter.
You son of a bitch, he said.
No need for that, I said, and shot him back into the ground, smelled the cordite out of the second hole in him like a black flower.
I walked to the first one who had gone down and not moved since but was praying heavily or saying some fashion of words directed not at me nor himself, but at another not present with us. I slid another round into the chamber and placed the Enfield on the ground and withdrew the drawing of Hobbes from my shirt pocket, turning the man around on his back, holding the drawing to his face, observing his features directly for a reaction.
Are you the shooter of my dog, this dog?
He was saying something, but the shock took the saliva from his mouth and with it the chance to manufacture a word to say to me. Still he tried. His mouth moved in the dirt as if he were talking to the earth and not to me at all. His right eye was wet, the snot grew under his nose, I saw some purple at his kidney where the jacket was pulled up. There went his jaw again, opening and closing into the dirt, saying his secret words. Keep them to yourself, that is fine, they won’t change anything.
But he was gone already, gone from shock, he shook his head or his head shook him, and I asked him again, asked him in truth did he shoot my dog, was he a shooter of dogs, and he sank at the neck into the leaves, and when I bent to lift him up, he was a damp red rag of a man dressed in camouflage.
I said, You fired from hiding, but I saw you. And your convoy is a cullion.
I thought I observed a spark in him, a puzzlement.
Prithee, I said then, was your hiding not hidden enough? I took you, harvested you.
I waited by him while he left and said an Ave into his ear, though he was well past hearing. With everything that had happened, the man who shot my dog was most likely dead by now, I thought, and plenty who would say what I did was wrong. And they would be right, because two out of the three were not the shooter, and those two I had killed unjustly, no question of that, especially since I was of sound mind and an otherwise principled man.
All that remained was to clean up the forest, which entailed bringing the pair to their resting place. After a bit of thought I dragged them to the earlier man’s truck and placed them inside, across the bench seat, one on the other, head to toe for balance. They were friends, after all. After the leaves and branches were piled above the windshield, I was on the trail back to the cabin in no time, where I cleaned the rifle and laid it in its case in the barn.
16
A WOMAN ONCE SAID I SHOULD GET A DOG FOR COMPANY if not for hunting. She said that a man should not live alone as I did, in the woods. And we passed over lists of all God’s creatures that might keep me company and we settled on a dog, a good choice given where and how I lived.
That was four years ago.
We drove to the dog pound in Fort Kent because I wasn’t going to buy a dog and not a fancy one either, they take up your time and are better off in large houses and the like. When we got to the pound we walked the line of cages, the rows of paws and heads aching for a run somewhere, a bit of fresh air, barking for masters who had let them go in all manner of ways, lost them, let them out of cars at supermarkets and driven off, beat them away with sticks or starved them. And they were waiting for those masters to come back and find them, you could see them searching every face for a face they knew.