The Wild Marsh (50 page)

We hurry along behind the deer, as silent in the new snow as ghosts. Maybe the buck thinks we will not find his tracks. Maybe he will think that we are not going to follow him—and never mind that I followed him hard for four hours already, earlier this morning. As long as he does not hear us or scent us, maybe he will not know that he is prey.

He is not running, he is only walking, and for a while, we're excited, thinking we've got the drop on him, because he's passing through some fairly open areas—places where, if we were close enough behind him, I might be able to have a shot.

The wind is breezing from south to north, from our left to our right, and so like casters or weavers, we try to follow his tracks and yet at the same time tack northerly, to help prevent him from slipping downwind of us. We can't assume that he's just going to keep climbing straight up; and so we keep drifting to the right of his fresh tracks, trying to get out ahead of him and look back into the wind, hoping to catch a glimpse of him standing stock-still in all that timber, watching us, even if only for a couple of seconds.

That's all we need; and scanning the forest ahead for such a sight, and reading the crisp unblemished signs of his tracks—we can still be no more than two or three minutes behind him, if even that far—we are intensely alive.

The fantasy we have of possibly sneaking up on him undetected, as if coming upon him while he is merely out for a stroll in the woods, this fine stormy day, lasts for about six minutes. He must have heard a stick snap, perhaps, or the thumping of our hearts, or felt the heat of our living bodies radiating through the falling snow.

His trail soon veers directly into the gnarliest tangles of lodgepole blowdown and cedar thrash available to him—ridiculous obstacles of wind-sprung root wads, and the bristling dry spires and branches of trees long-ago dead. There are those who view our forests as but compartments of agriculture, and who believe that only a tidy, upright grove of young and quickly growing trees is of use to man and wildlife; but in trying to manage for such forests, or so-called forests, the agrarians would take away yet another of the mysteries or tools that has helped craft such rare but durable individuals as the spiny-antlered old deer that is leading us confidently on this game of cat and mouse, just a hundred yards ahead of us.

We play his game anyway. He has led us already into a black hole of blowdown where the only way out would be to turn around and go back down the mountain; and so we follow him, trying to be as quiet as we can, climbing over and under and through, but unavoidably snapping little twigs as we do so, and making little slithering leafy and brushy sounds—and yet even though we know now, beyond certainty, that he knows we're following him, we persist in the myth of the stalk, as if following some extraordinarily formal code of manners.

We continue to whisper, as if our presence—our pursuit—is still a secret; and likewise, as if obeying that same strict and formal code, up ahead of us, the deer does not panic, does not break and run but instead continues to calmly thread us deeper and deeper into the matrix of the most difficult route available to him.

Is it a waste of a sentence to say that I know we are not going to sneak up on him—that he is playing us like a yo-yo at the end of his string, even choosing the different melodies of stick-crunch and branch-snap to send us through, as if composing some kind of tune to be played on this mountainside xylophone of sticks?

It's wonderful, anyway. I want B.J. to see the inner workings of this deer's mind, incontrovertibly. The deer is smarter than we are, and stronger, and more graceful. Of course we want it.

What would it look like—perhaps seen from above, or a great distance—to see that huge deer threading his way silently over blowdown, and only fifty yards ahead of us now, but so completely in control of the situation that perhaps he is even stopping from time to time to look back and listen to our earnest but awkward pursuit?

The deer calmly evaluating the mountain around him—
knowing
the mountain around him, knowing each crevice and gully as well as if it were his own body, or his own mind, magnified a million-fold.

Our mother died when I was thirty-three, when B.J. was seventeen. I feel that I'm often aware of a breath, a pulse, of her in me, encouraging me to help keep an eye on him, to help finish the job—to help her finish the job, the job that is never finished—and though I can feel that she doesn't care in the least whether we get this deer or not—what do such things matter, anymore, if they ever did?—I can feel also that she is looking down with pleasure at the sight or knowledge of two of her boys trailing that deer through the snowy wilderness on a Thanksgiving afternoon while the entire rest of the world, perhaps, sits at the table, at the feast: two of her boys threading their way through the nearly impenetrable wilderness, as unseen to the rest of the world, in that forest jungle, as she is now to us: but again, no less real, for the not seeing.

What it is like, sometimes, is that the hunt becomes like a living thing itself, breathed into a brief life of its own there on the mountain, or in the forest, in the space between the hunter and the hunted. And that is what happens this day as we labor, to the best of our abilities, to stay up with the big deer just ahead of us—there is still no snow filling his casual, steady steps—this deer that is so clearly our physical and intellectual superior, on this mountain at least.

We hang with him nonetheless, and the hunt, or the space within the hunt, shifts and changes.

A young mountain lion slips in between us somehow, coming in from downwind—catching the scent of mule deer buck, and of the humans climbing right behind him.

The tracks suddenly before us show where the lion has come in from the north and joined in the stalk, maneuvering itself into that compressed space just behind the deer, but just ahead of us: the new tracks' heat glistening in the pressed white snow. The lion belly wriggling under the low boughs of yew and cedar and hemlock, and with its big padded feet, and the litheness of its spring-steel muscle, surely as silent as any single strand or current of water within a larger river.

For a while, the lion follows the deer directly, riding silently in that space between man and deer like an upturned leaf riding raft-like on that flowing river; but then the lion appears to make up its mind about something—as if having adjusted itself to the pace of both the pursued and the pursuers—and shifts its route out to the side, downwind, and lengthens its stride; and it seems clear to us, with the back knowledge of the tracks beneath us (as if we are reading time backwards, or even, briefly, as if time itself is moving backwards), that the lion is trying to capitalize on the deer's focus on us.

The tracks are so fresh. We strain, listening for the possible sounds of struggle just ahead. A big deer, two men, and a lion are all jammed in together, all gathered within a fifty-yard sphere on this mountain, and none of them can see one another; and three of the four parties know of the existence of all the others, though it seems certain, by the deer's casual gait, that he does not yet know of the lion.

The lion's tail twitching, perhaps, as it skulks along—being sure to stay ahead of us, whom it fears, and yet using us too as a sort of decoy or stalking horse.

Seen from above, would it look like a parade? The great deer, with his huge crown of antlers like a king, and behind him, the lion, threading the same course, and behind the lion, the two men?

And behind us, what? A single raven, perhaps, following silently, flying coal black and ragged through the falling snow?

It's easy to see when time, or the river, fractures, like placid water stretching suddenly over a span of stony riffles. The great buck never panics, but he must have finally glimpsed or scented or heard or somehow sensed the lion, for he suddenly abandons his leisurely, wandering game of cat and mouse with us and begins ascending the mountain directly, climbing straight up the steep face not like a deer now but like a mountaineer. Not lunging or running, but climbing straight up and out, traveling up a mountain face so steep that no trees grow from it; climbing through waist-deep snow, belly-deep snow; and the tracks before us indicate that, once busted, the lion follows for but a short distance before abandoning the hunt, choosing instead to conserve its calories and to try again at a later time, once it has again gathered the element of surprise.

B.J. and I, however, indulge in the luxury of not being bound by
any such limitations—of being able to be ceaseless in the pursuit of our desires—and we continue on up the steep slope, warming now in our exertions, and with hearts hammering and breath coming hard: and again, I wonder what it would look like, wonder what it
does
look like, with the immense deer now staking out across the sheer mountain face, completely exposed to the world—up above timberline now—though still unseen.

We follow the deer for the rest of the afternoon. We push hard, floundering in the deep snow, thinking always that just over the next ridge we will see him, even if only briefly; and we're all the more excited by the fact that he is out in the open now, passing across wide, steep-tilted parks and meadows. Still his tracks are new cut in the storm, still he is no more than a minute or two ahead of us; and we surge to rejoin him, to connect and coincide with him; to close the distance, like one river seeking perhaps the confluence of another.

But the land, and time, will not yet have it.

Our spirits lift at one point, when, nearing the top, the buck's ascent begins to flatten out, as if he is finally growing weary of climbing straight up—as we certainly are—and I find myself remembering all the many miles I chased him around on the mountain earlier in the day. How wonderful it would be if all that work ended up having some incremental effect of fatigue on him, which might result in B.J. and I being able to finally get up on him.

He begins side-hilling, clearly tiring; but still, like a magician, he always keeps the perfect distance between us and him. The snow is coming down harder, so that he's granted extra protection beneath that cloak, and he heads around to the southern end of the mountain and then climbs up and over the final windy ridge and travels straight down the back side, back down into the dark timber of his home, as if trying now not just to escape but to break our spirit—we cannot help but think of how hard our climb back out will be, and with a Thanksgiving dinner engagement awaiting us, shortly after dark. But still we follow him, almost as if hypnotized now, betranced by some mesmerizing braid of falling snow, and our own desire, and the strange weave of the deer's daylong path.

It's as if some obsession has come over us, to be following him
down the back side like that—into the deeper timber, and into the darkness. Back on the ridge, he had done the same thing Travis's deer had done—had headed straight into a herd of other deer, trying to mix his tracks among theirs—and it was this last act that gave us increased confidence that he was wearying and that he might soon make a mistake, or we would never have continued on.

We must have closed the distance considerably, over the course of our afternoon-long pursuit—thirty seconds behind him now?—because his tracks show where, for the first time all day, he has begun to run, bounding straight down the nearly vertical slope in the high-legged prance of his species: and we follow, like wolves, as quiet as we can, down a slope so steep that the snow barely even clings to it. To lower ourselves down it, we grip leafless alder and willow with our gloved hands, as if rappelling.

Perhaps, in so doing, we call his bluff. There is only half an hour of light left, and a dim cold blue light, at that—but finally, he ceases in his descent and begins angling to the north and side-hilling his way slowly back up to the ridge.

His tracks continue to pass through those of other deer—fresh tracks there too, even in the falling snow, so that we are tempted to follow those herd tracks—but his are so much larger than any of the others that it is easy to stay with him. To stay on message, as a businessperson might say.

We are a long way from our truck.

We're getting tired and sloppy, and losing our hunter's edge, I think, at a time when it should be growing sharper, with only a very few minutes left in the day. We're looking off into the dark canyon below, and at the snowy wild crags in the blue distance, as night slides in over the wilderness. And it seems to us, in the way that the icy spots of snow are striking our face, and in our exhaustion, that we are somehow in a much wilder place than when we started out, and it is all the more beautiful for that extra or added wilderness. We stop and rest, looking out at the horizon, pausing to admire the sight of such country before the night takes it away.

We can see where the buck has stopped to rest, also, and even where he must have sighted us, for his walking tracks will suddenly disappear, punctuated by long leaps, the only possible explanation
for which, particularly given the state of his own fatigue, can be that he waited, looking back, to see finally in blue dusk the face or name of the thing that was following him, and glimpsed it, two upright creatures moving slowly through the dimness, and through the falling snow, only fifty yards behind...

Walk and run, walk and run; we close the distance with our brute endurance, and he opens it back up again, stretches it farther once more. We never see him—only the places where, looking back, he has seen us—and finally, though it is not quite yet dark, it is time to head on back, so far are we from our truck, and home. It's been a great hunt, with every single minute of it filled with the possibility of making game—
saturated
with the possibility, and at times even the likelihood, of making game—and we have no regrets.

We pause one more time to look out at the mountains, as they sink beneath the darkness—it would take us a week, in these conditions, I think, to reach even the next mountain—and then we turn back toward home, no longer hunting but merely trudging through the deep snow, passing through a forest, and in my mind, there is a feeling like I have released the buck, as if, in my letting go, I have snipped some thread or leash that has connected us all day long.