The Turtle Warrior (35 page)

BILL HAD NOT SHOWN UP for work or slept for three days straight. The sky had remained a silvery gray since the beginning of the month because the sun never showed itself. It was typical November weather, and on the third day the sun finally set in the west unseen. Bill left his house and walked to the barn in that peculiar dim light just before nightfall that his mother had always referred to as owl light because it was then that the mottled brown and white barn owls silently lifted from their perches on the barn windowsills and glided over the fields in search of mice.

Bill was tipping back the last can from his second six-pack of beer and leaning against the southwest corner of the barn when he heard a bark. Just one. He spotted the dog through the overgrowth of grass near the middle of the field and slowly lowered his arm, releasing the beer can into the grass.

“Angel!” he called, and then whistled.

The dog barked twice but did not move.

Bill whistled again. The dog responded by lifting his muzzle to sniff the air. After a few minutes the dog lowered his back haunches and sat.

“Annngel! C’mere, boy!” Bill drunkenly crooned in one last attempt to get the dog to come to him. But the black dog remained seated and continued to watch Bill.

“Fuckin’ dog,” he muttered. In a burst of rage he crushed the beer can in his hand and threw it at the dog. It fell far short of the dog’s position. Angel’s ears went up, but the dog did not move.

“What do you want from me?” Bill screamed at the dog. “Why are you following me? What the fuck did I ever do to you! You’d be dead,” he continued, shaking his fist at the dog, “if it wasn’t for me! I never hurt you! So how come you don’t come when I call you?!”

Bill picked up his shotgun, loaded it, aimed, and fired at the dog. When it became apparent seconds later that he had missed, Bill reloaded. But when he raised the gun and hooked his first finger around the trigger, there was no longer a sitting dog but a man.

Bill nearly dropped the gun. The man stood still. Bill staggered forward, straining to make out the man’s features in the diminishing light. As soon as Bill stepped forward, the figure stepped back. Bill stopped moving.

“Ernie?”

It was the only man he could think of who would have a reason to be in the middle of his field. He panted, heard the sound of his own frantic breathing.

“Hey!” Bill yelled again, fear making his voice audible this time. “Ernie, is that you?”

The man briefly turned his head as though to look at the swamp bordering the field. There was something about the slope of the man’s head and his long neck and the familiar ease the dark figure seemed to have in his surroundings. Bill stepped forward and raised his arm, realizing too late that he was still gripping the shotgun. The man immediately spun around and began to run.

“Wait!” Bill yelled. The man continued to run, and without thinking, Bill ran after him, still clutching his shotgun.

“Wait! ”

The field had not been plowed under that fall, and his legs became entangled in the thick, overgrown grass. He tripped. The loaded gun flew out of his hand, and Bill heard it go off. He was positive, even in his sleepless and beer-soaked state, that it had fired into the grass. But when he picked up the gun and scrambled to his feet, he saw a burst of flames engulf the man running ahead of him. He watched in paralyzed horror as the burning man danced and screamed in pain. Then the man fell, and the fire disappeared.

Bill spent hours desperately searching the field even when it became so dark he could not see his hands clearly, let alone anything else. There was no body, and even the dog had vanished. Although he could not be sure, the merest suggestion of what he might have done sent him into a zigzagging stride out of the field. He did not realize the direction he was taking until he hit the barbed wire fence dividing his farm from the Morriseau farm. He heard and felt the barbs puncture and rip his jeans as he rolled over the top of the fence. Felt the immediate pain of gashed skin on his thighs. He landed on the other side of the fence, the gun still in his hand and the breath knocked out of him. His boots were snagged in the lowest string of wire. He lay there for several hours terrified that if he surfaced above the grass, he would see the burning man again.

But in the early-morning hours he kicked his boots free from the barbed wire and did get up. Bill didn’t remember how he got there, just that he ran and ran, cedars slapping him in the face, his boots wet from crossing a narrowed inlet of the swamp, until he found himself at the base of the north slope of the ridge. He saw a black clump of something in the nearest red pine, and his hopes were momentarily lifted. Then he saw what it was. In the extreme pain that causes a righteous and reckless abandonment of conscience, he loaded his shotgun, pointed it up at the homemade deer stand, and fired shell after shell into it. Then he savagely ripped the ladder off the side of the red pine before throwing the hot-barreled gun to the ground next to the tree and running up the slope of the ridge.

WHEN ERNIE LEFT THE HOUSE half an hour later and stepped into the circle of light cast down by the yard lamp, he knew that Rosemary was standing by the bedroom window watching him. He was dressed in blaze orange pants and jacket with his deer tag displayed like a billboard on his back. In one hand, he carried his father’s Marlin 1895 rifle, its barrel safely pointed toward the ground. Just before he reached the edge of the illuminated barnyard, Ernie stopped and pretended to check his pockets. Then he straightened up and, turning slightly, blew a kiss to his wife before stepping out of the artificial light and into the presunrise darkness.

A layer of hunter’s snow, wet and perfect for tracking, had fallen during the night. He stopped walking after a few feet and looked down his driveway at County H, the blacktop road in front of his farm. He could walk H for about a mile to get to the red pines woods and big cedar swamp he usually hunted in, but it would take longer. It would be shorter to cross his own field. He stared into the darkness.

In the many hunting seasons before Jimmy Lucas had left for Vietnam, Ernie would wait for him in the early morning in this very spot. He would hear his young neighbor first before seeing him, hear his footsteps and heavy breathing from having run across the fields between their two farms. Then Jimmy’s face would surface under the yard light, flushed a deep red as though he had popped up from a long underwater swim. First his windburned eyes would focus on Ernie, and then Jimmy’s lips would crack into the seductive grin that made many people in Olina compare him with Elvis Presley. It had been years since an early November morning held that happy face. They had hunted together since Jimmy was twelve, and it had never occurred to Ernie then that he would not be hunting with Jimmy into his old age.

Uneasily Ernie turned and studied the outline of his barn, barely visible in the predawn darkness. The coffee in his stomach burned, and a familiar tingling sensation crept up his legs, threatening to keep him frozen in place. He kicked one leg forward like a wooden soldier, and then the other, stiffly moving toward the field just like the deer he was looking for, with his head raised and his eyes wide open, alert for any sudden movement.

Ernie was halfway through the field when the sun peeked over the eastern horizon and a raucous chorus of crows clustered in the tops of the huge white pines at the field’s edge greeted him. With great relief, Ernie stopped walking and listened to their familiar cries pierce the silence of the woods and field.

Ernie liked crows. He affectionately regarded them as he would a beloved but sinning relative. They were not as noble as geese, but they had their place. Crows were the barhoppers of the bird world, flying from tree to tree, looking for something to eat or drink, and gossiping at every stop. Their eyes missed very little. Deer season was a holiday feast for them. Ernie gazed at their black bodies perched within the pine boughs. He knew how to decipher the language of crows. Their rusty early-morning cawing was done at casual intervals and did not contain the hysterical shriek of danger. The field was safe. A sudden flush of happiness hit him. His father had taught him the lessons about crows. When Ernie gutted his deer, he left the gut pile on the forest floor as his father had always done, to appease the crows. “Because,” his father had said, “crows talk.”

On impulse, Ernie laid his rifle on the snow-dusted ground, stood up, and raised his arms into the air. He stretched his fingers to hold the sun’s warmth the way he had when he was seven, in imitation of his father. While his mother openly expressed her feelings, her eyes often twinkling with mischievous humor, his father was a man not often given to emotional displays. Although he was a mixed-blood man of Ojibwe and French ancestry, Claude Morriseau was almost stereotypically Indian, reserved and stoic about life’s pains. Ernie later understood that it was less about being Indian and more about adopting a strategy that allowed his mother and father to live peacefully outside the reservation and even succeed at farming in the cutover land of northern Wisconsin. The German fathers of Olina Township could not find an avenue on Claude Morriseau’s face that led to his emotions and therefore an opening for weakness. But Ernie knew his father’s feelings ran deep, and nowhere was this more apparent than in his great love of mornings.

Claude Morriseau believed that morning was the holiest time of the day. He told Ernie that if he could make it through a bad night, morning would reward him with his life. The first thing Claude Morriseau did every morning until he became crippled by a stroke was to walk outside to greet the sun, even on days when clouds blanketed it. If they were hunting in the thick cover of woods when sunrise began, his father would stop walking, lay down his rifle, and raise his face and arms to the rays filtering through the canopy of leaves and needles. This was a practice unique to his father. None of Ernie’s extended family on the Heron Reservation exhibited this quiet reverence for morning.

rnie tilted his head back to receive the warmth of the morning sun on his face. His bad night had lasted for years and finally, with this kiss of early-morning sun, was nearly over. He felt surprisingly very
alive,
just as his father said he would, and as if to prove it, his heart drummed loudly inside his chest. Beat with a memory of long ago.

“I carry you in my heart,” his father had written to him in an unexpected letter while Ernie lay wounded in an Army hospital in Hawaii during World War II. Those words, so uncharacteristically sentimental, wrapped themselves around Ernie and cradled him as if he were a small boy. He had tucked the letter under his belly so he could pull it out to reread it when the pain from the shrapnel in his back became unbearable.

Ernie happily waved at the sky once more before picking up his rifle. He wiped it off with a rag from his pocket and began walking again. The crows became silent as Ernie advanced toward them. When he was about to step over the sagging section of snow fence much used by the deer, the big black birds loudly announced his presence before flapping into the sky. Ernie waited until it was quiet again before crossing over the faded redwood fencing and entering the swamp.

He took a deep breath and inhaled the heavy, sweet smell of cedar. Although his clothes were previously scented with cedar boughs, Ernie reached out and stripped a nearby branch of its flat needles anyway. He crushed and rubbed them between his hands and then smeared the scent over his face and the front of his chest. He had hunted this swamp and its edges since he was very young, and it never failed him. Although he didn’t search for deer directly in the swamp, he had, in past years, surprised a few big bucks while trudging through it. It had always been risky shooting a buck in the swamp, but it was even more so now that he was an older man. He did not have the quick reflexes anymore to move with the speed and silence necessary to get a close, clean shot, nor did he have the energy to run on the spongy swamp bedding to track a wounded animal. And he did not have a younger man to help him. He was handicapped in such an environment, and Ernie was sure the deer knew it.

He sighed and looked down at the tannin-colored water pooling around the soles of his boots. They could use the venison, but they didn’t really need it. Just a few weeks before he had sent one of their heifers to the meat locker, and their two freezers were full of beef. But it felt so good to be in the woods again, felt so good to
feel
good that he didn’t want to go home either. He could not have imagined what a fall would be like without hunting, yet he had not hunted for the past five years, afraid in his deepening depression to be alone with a rifle or shotgun. It had been a mistake, he realized now, to stay away from the woods. The fall hunt was a timeless tradition in his family, and it was the time of year he felt both the closeness and the loss of his own father most intensely.

Ernie shaded his eyes from the sun with one hand and looked over his end of the swamp. In the middle of the swamp was the ridge, a dumping of glacial moraine that rose like a humped spine. It was on the north slope of the ridge that Ernie had shot his first deer when he was twelve and where his tree stand was now. He contemplated its pine-covered hump and decided that it was time to see it again after so many years. Even if it was to sit quietly in his stand among the huge red pines near its pinnacle and gaze down at the smaller of the two kettle lakes.