Tracker (4 page)

“Absolutely. I'll be fine.”

John went back out to the barn with all the buckets and got to milking. It was still pitch dark but some of the chickadees around the granary were starting to make morning sounds and it spurred him a bit.

Milking went well. Nobody kicked over any buckets or was froggy—hopping around—and he got through it without problems. Also, hunting had entered his mind and it kept him from thinking about his grandfather quite so much, took his thoughts away from bad things.

When he finished separating the milk and cream he carried the cream back to the house
and left the milk in buckets for the calves. He debated about feeding the calves but his grandfather would have become angry and perhaps would have felt useless, and John didn't want that.

Outside, the morning was coming. John stopped halfway to the house and looked to the east. Not enough light yet to hunt, certainly—he couldn't see the front sight on the rifle—but it was coming.

He walked a little faster. Inside the kitchen, breakfast was on the table and he smiled. It amazed him how his grandmother always knew when he was coming in to eat. He could be out in the fields with the tractor, have a breakdown and walk in for a part and there would be food on the table when he walked in the door. She always knew.
She always knows everything,
he thought—
just quietly always knows everything there is to know.

John asked her one evening how she knew so much. They were sitting in the kitchen, just the two of them, and John had been asking about his parents.

“I don't know that much about people,” she said, flustering. But John could tell she was pleased by the question. “I just try to know as
much as I can about something before I talk about it.”

She'd gone on to tell John about his parents. Facts about them—how they looked, how they acted under certain conditions. And when she was done, John knew his parents in one way, her way, but he knew that it was honest knowledge.

When he thought of his grandmother that's the word that came to mind—honest. She was honest, and soft, and gentle. An honest, soft gentle person.

He set the cream in the cool-hole by the pump, where it would stay cool, but not freeze, until they went into town later in the week to sell cream, and hung his jacket up.

“I could eat a wolf,” he said. “Raw.”

His grandfather had been in the privy and he came in. “Set to food. I'll take care of the calves.”

John nodded, glad that he had not fed the calves himself. It would have been wrong to take the work away from his grandfather—like saying he couldn't do it, somehow.

Clay went out and John washed at the pump and sat at the table. In the middle was a pile of fresh raw-fried potatoes and strips of venison; he loaded his plate. There was also syrup and he put
some on the meat, sprinkled salt and pepper and started eating. He had learned about syrup on meat from Emil; it had looked bad at first, but when he tried it the taste was great. Especially on a cold morning.

“I set some aside for sandwiches for you, so you don't have to save any.”

“What about Grandpa?”

“He's already had—just set to. You can't hunt hungry, especially if you hunt long.”

She seemed different, somehow. Almost cheerful. Something he couldn't pin down but definitely something new had slipped into her actions.

The depression of the night before had vanished, almost as if a mist had left the house, and he ate heartily. Meat and potatoes with syrup was the best breakfast, better than pancakes any day, and he ate until he started to feel full and then stopped. Normally he would have gone past full and had food for all day, but when you hunt you want to hunt with a little edge on your belly—that's how his grandfather put it. Not hungry, but so the full feeling has worn off when you hit the woods—it makes it easier to see things. To shoot things.

When he'd finished eating John took his plate
to the sink and kissed his grandmother on the cheek and went to the entryway. There he put his coat on and a scarf and a wool hat and wool mittens Agatha had knitted. She brought two sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, which he slipped into his jacket pocket, and she handed him an apple with the other hand, a barrel apple from the basement, which he knew would be tangy and sweet at the same time.

The rifle was in the rack by the door and he took it down, as well as the box of shells from the shelf on the gun rack. John knew he wouldn't need the whole box so he just took out five cartridges, brassy and shiny with copper bullets tipped in silver, and dumped them in the top pocket of his jacket. He decided he would load in the woods.

He waited.

“… It's going to be all right.”

He thought about that and knew that she was wrong. It wasn't going to be all right. A part of him knew that his grandfather was going to end, end and be gone. But there was that small edge of hope in her voice, hope which she held the way a drowning person holds a stick. And John would not damage that hope, so he nodded and smiled. “I know, I know. I'll see you when I get back.”

Outside, the cold hit him again, harder because he'd been in and his body had gotten used to the warm kitchen and the warm food. He felt it come in around his cuffs past the mittens, around the back of his neck.

By the barn he could see the glow from the lantern and he thought of going to say goodbye to his grandfather, but he would be busy and it would bother him.

Instead John wheeled left off the porch and walked straight north from the house across the pasture until he came to the trees that marked the edge of the woods.

Just inside the tree line he stopped and loaded the rifle, sliding the cartridges into the side-loading gate slowly, carefully. When all five were in the tube magazine he worked the lever once and brought a shell up into the chamber. Then he let the hammer down to the safety half cock and cradled the gun in the crook of his arm and paused, getting a feel for the morning and the woods.

It had stopped snowing and there was a gray light from false dawn coming off the snow. It still wasn't light enough for hunting, but close, very close, and he knew that by the time he reached the edges of the great swamp there would be enough light to see the sights of the rifle.

The woods were still. The new snow took down sound the way a blanket would, holding sound low and muffled, and with the freshness for tracking and the quiet it was nearly a perfect morning for hunting deer.

He turned his back on the farm and headed into the woods.

SIX

John knew there were many ways to hunt deer. Some hunters drove them into other men who were posted with guns. Others walked around until they saw a deer and tried to shoot it. Still others picked a spot near a deer trail and stood and waited for a deer to come along.

And now and then a hunter would use the
stalking method—move quietly on fresh tracks and try to catch a deer off guard. This final method was very difficult to do successfully and demanded total concentration and complete knowledge of deer.

John used a combination of methods—he did some stalking and some standing. He would move through the woods as quietly as possible for a distance—perhaps a quarter of a mile—and then he would stop and stand for a time, usually half an hour or so.

He had learned it from his grandfather.

“You have to think deer,” Clay had told him. “You have to think deer, you have to
be
deer inside your head. Be quiet, move quiet, and be deer.”

The country he was hunting was very good deer country but hard to hunt. His grandfather's farm lay on the edge of a huge peat swamp-bog that covered all of northern central Minnesota. The bog extended over two counties, and in the spring and summer it was a mucky quagmire that had defied people forever. Ducks and geese nested there by the thousands; moose and timber wolves and deer lived on spruce “islands” that stuck above the level of the swamp.

It was not a place, in the summer, where life was easy. Even the deer and moose and small game had trouble. Deer were discovered wandering blind from the ravaging flies that chewed at their eyes, and moose had been found dead from loss of blood because of ticks.

But in the fall life comes to the swamp; relatively easy life. The bugs are down for the winter, the peat is frozen solid and the land becomes passable.

John's great grandfather had made his farm along the edge of this swamp. Far enough away to avoid the worst clouds of mosquitoes, close enough to get good soil. And while Clay had trouble now and then with wolves, the farm had easy access to good deer hunting.

The swamp was perfect cover for the raising of deer, for hiding fawns from wolves, and that was important. The wolves hunted deer, coursed through them, in the winter, like sharks hitting schools of fish.

When he was small and came across his first wolf kill, it had bothered John. When wolves killed it was usually in brutal fashion, at least by some human standards—a slow and tearing death. A pulling down and closing off of life.

But later John realized that there wasn't a
right or wrong way about wolves hunting and killing the deer. There was just the wolves' way. That was the way they were and had nothing to do with what man thought was right or wrong. John still didn't like it, but at least he thought he understood it and that helped him when he discovered the fawns the wolves had taken and torn to pieces.

But because the wolves were so active in the fall, the deer moved away from them and that meant they moved out of the swamp, which in turn meant that deer hunting became very good around the edges of the swamp. John now worked on the western edge. Or perhaps it might be best to say that he was at the edge of the edge, working in.

Around the outside there were huge hardwood forests that had once been logged off but were now coming back and they were mixed with stands of poplar and willows. The deer browsed in the willows when the snow got too deep for them to get at low plants, and John moved quietly through the willows, stooping and weaving, taking deliberate steps, stopping often to listen.

Deer are not silent. When they run through the willows in the fall and the willows are dry and
hard it sounds like somebody tipping over a lumber cart.

But there was no sound this gray dawn and John decided the deer hadn't yet moved this far out of the swamp. Then, too, there were no new tracks in the fresh snow.

He worked slowly further into the edge of the swamp, hitting the deep grass and the open areas of the bog.

It was full light now, with the top edge of the sun slipping up over the tree line to the east. Tight cold had come down and he felt it working into his shoulders. He had just rezipped his jacket when he heard the noise.

It was a releasing sound, as if a branch or tree which had been held had been turned loose—a kind of
swoosh
—in back of him, back to his right, and he froze, waiting for another sound to guide him.

None came.

He turned and took two steps, then two more, and so covered a distance of perhaps thirty yards through the willows until he came to a deer bed.

It was about a yard across, where snow had melted down to bare swamp grass in a cupped little warm place under a stand of willows.

Very cozy,
he thought. It almost looked inviting.
He knelt next to the bed and felt the grass and it was still warm. That had been the sound. A deer had been here in its storm bed—John knew they holed up sometimes when it snowed—and he had walked past it and it had jumped up, apparently hitting the willow on the way.

It must have surprised the deer, his coming, because the first tracks were more than ten feet from the bed. The deer had bounded up and away. The next tracks were twenty feet from the first ones, out into a clearing and across, craters in the new snow where the deer had run.

Well,
he thought.
I was close to one, anyway, even if I didn't know it.
He decided to follow the tracks, or work in the same direction as the deer.

Better,
he thought,
to go after one you know is fresh than to hunt blind and hope.
It wasn't likely he'd see the deer soon, but it could happen and if it did he might get a shot and make meat early so he could get back and take care of work around the farm so his grandfather wouldn't have to.

It came to him suddenly that he hadn't thought about his grandfather for nearly an hour and he didn't know if that was good or if that was bad.

He brought his mind back around to the tracks.

There was a saying among the old-timers that you could either hunt deer or you could do something else. You could not do two things when it came to hunting deer—hunting required too much concentration.

John went back to hunting.

SEVEN