Gray's friend Jeff Moon, who lived in Ketchum, looked after the place with a weekly visit. In return Moon rented it to hunters during the season and kept the proceeds.
The heirloom was still in its corner. The term was Gray's father's, and it referred to a chair Gray's grandfather had made out of deer antlers in the 1930s. The seat and back were horsehair covered with tanned buckskin, but everything else on the chair — legs, arms, frame, armrests — was artfully placed whitetail and mule-deer antlers, more than two dozen of them, flowing here and there, with knotty curves and dangerous points. The result was a grotesquery so forbidding and unwelcome that Gray's mother had never been able to give it away despite earnest efforts over several decades. The heirloom was hazardous to sit in, took thirty minutes to dust, and was impossible not to stare at. As a child Gray had avoided the chair lest it snatch him up. And in all his life he had sat in it only a handful of times, simply to prove to himself he could escape. The chair still sat ominously in its corner, daring anyone to approach.
Built when wood was free and oil heating was a suspicious notion found no closer than Boise, the fireplace almost made up the entire west wall. The mantel and hearth and fireback were washed river stone. The firebox was as large as a Volkswagen. The andirons and grate were made of mule sled runners, bent into their new shape by a Ketchum blacksmith.
Antlers. It seemed his family history had been defined by antlers. The dining area was in the main room, to the rear near a passthrough to the kitchen. Above the unvarnished pine table was a moose-antler chandelier, another twisted horror lovingly fashioned by Gray's father. Three 1,400-pound moose had given their all to illuminate the Gray table, and each rack measured over fifty inches across. Six twenty-five-watt bulbs were attached to the antlers. The electric cord was skillfully hidden as it crawled up an antler to the ceiling. The slightest draft would catch the antlers' sweeping shovels, slowly swinging the chandelier. Gnarled and grasping shadows would creep across the table.
On a stand near the leather chair was a General Electric radio, a black Bakelite box with two knobs and a green frequency indicator that glowed in the dark. Gray knew from experience that the old radio could pull in stations as far away as Salt Lake City and Sacramento and Cheyenne, and Gray remembered roaming the length of the band night after night, finding dozens of faint and scratchy stations, a wondrous connection to the outside.
His parents' bedroom was off the main room, and Gray's room was behind the kitchen. He passed the kitchen's wood stove, made of cast iron and resembling the front end of a locomotive. Gray pulled the tong to open the door to his room. He had never understood why the room had bunk beds, as he had no siblings. He had always slept on the top bunk. His gray and brown Shoshone blanket still covered the thin mattress. The blanket was trimmed with purple glass beads that glinted with light. Gray's desk and chair were against a wall. The desk light was made of a miner's tin lunch growler. A 1905 reprint of The Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, all eight volumes, also lined the top of the bookshelf. These books were the most influential reading of his youth, and Gray had never fully escaped them. The rifle case next to the desk was empty.
Gray moved to the back of his room, to the double-panel doors locked with a four-inch-square Master Lock padlock. Gray had reinforced this closet with two-inch planks on all interior surfaces and with quarter-inch steel hinges. Here were those items Gray didn't want the hunters who rented the cabin to take home accidentally or otherwise. He found the small key on his key ring and opened the lock and then the door. He yanked the string of the overhead light.
The history of the Gray family in the Sawtooths could be traced by the contents of this closet. Gray's great-grandfather Mason had resigned his army commission at Fort Abraham Lincoln and had rushed into Idaho in 1878 when gold was discovered on Yankee Fork. Mason's placer pan, almost three feet across and worn to a high sheen by years of hope and backbreaking work, was on a ledge in the closet. Mason had died broke, which was the prospector's usual reward. His son George — Gray's grandfather — turned to the forests and streams for his provender. In the early years of the century George Gray would often harvest a hundred salmon or redfish a day using spears. The fish were salted, smoked, or canned, and sent to Boise. George's spear heads — wickedly barbed and with edges that would slice grass — were stacked in a corner of the closet. George had then tried sheep and then cattle. In another closet corner was his branding iron. G. George and his son Dalton — Gray's father — had supplemented their income by trapping wolves and coyotes for the government bounty. A dozen foot traps hung by their anchor chains from the closet's side wall. The traps' jaws were closed and the villainous teeth were interlaced like short fingers.
All these endeavors had busted out, and it was a hardscrabble existence until Gray's father made a discovery that to his dying day he could scarcely credit: rich Californians would travel three days on a train to the Sawtooths to shoot game. In the mid-1940s, Dalton Gray began his career as a hunting guide.
Owen Gray lifted a Remington over-under shotgun from the weapons rack on the closet's south wall. He broke it open. The chambers were empty. His father would help the outlanders kill anything they might like: chukar, Chinese pheasants, blue grouse, whitetails and mulies, moose, elk, bighorn sheep, rainbow trout and salmon, and in the early days cougars and black bears and grizzlies.
A simple trick virtually guaranteed his clients would become repeat customers. During the hunts Dalton would always come across several rattlesnakes, and while the Californians watched he would grab the snake's tail, whirl the rattler around and around, then crack it like a whip, snapping the snake's head off. He'd offer the head — inch-long fangs dripping poison — as a souvenir to the gasping Californians. Every Gray for four generations had mastered this moronic stunt — Owen was no exception — but it never failed to leave the customer slack-jawed and convinced their guide was Kit Carson reincarnated.
Owen Gray returned the shotgun to the rack, placing it next to a Winchester twelve-gauge double barrel. Hanging on the back wall were a pair of whitetail rattlers — antlers with tips blunted for safety which hunters ground and clicked together to call bucks through dense undergrowth. Along the wall were a Remington 700 under a mounted scope and a bolt-action .330 Weatherby Magnum with a muzzle brake Dalton Gray had made himself. When Owen was sixteen years old, his father had promised to purchase the Weatherby for him if Owen could spend one week in the mountains. "That all I have to do?" Owen had asked. "You ain't heard all of it." His father grinned. "One week, and you can take your bowie knife. Nothing else." Gripping his knife, Owen had left the cabin that August Sunday as naked as when he came into the world. He returned seven days later, only a few pounds lighter and wearing a mulie's hide. The Weatherby and a handshake were waiting for him.
On a small shelf on the back wall were bottles of doe-in-heat scent, the labels yellowed with age. Boxes of shotgun shells and rifle cartridges crowded the shelf. An axe and wedge, a two-man crosscut saw, and a sledgehammer leaned against a wall. Other tools were in a wood box on the floor. The room also contained more than twenty-five knives wrapped in an oilcloth bundle on the shelf.
Gray lifted the axe. As a child he would leave this axe outside for the night and wait by his bedroom window to watch porcupines lick the handle for the salt. He left the closet and passed through his room. He re-entered the kitchen and was startled not to find his mother standing at the counter, his eternal picture of her, wide and solid in her print dress, usually pounding dinner to tenderness, the fleshy thump-thump filling the house as her meat hammer rose and fell, rose and fell. His mother had died of stomach cancer six years ago. His father passed away a year later. Ruth Gray was an antidote to the wilderness, and after she went, Dalton didn't last long. His death certificate listed heart failure as the cause, but Owen Gray knew it had been loneliness and grief.