Beyond the Black Stump (5 page)

Hazel lies in a shallow, fertile valley beside the mountains, at an altitude of about three thousand feet. It took them
half a day to reach the edge of the Primitive Area; they camped there at about six thousand feet, making a short day of the first one. The next day they were up at dawn and in the saddle by eight o’clock. They descended by rocky trails into the valley of the Duncan River and commenced the long climb up the side of Sugar Mountain, zig-zagging all through the hot afternoon across the grassy slopes and in and out of the fir woods.

They camped that night in a pasture with good feed for the horses by Emerald Lake at about eight thousand feet, and went on next day above the tree line across granite screes still covered in the shaded parts with patches of snow. They descended a little and camped soon after midday by the edges of Duncan’s Lake in a little grassy meadow between high screes, with the twin peaks of Saddle Mountain towering up above them, snow-clad, to about eleven thousand feet. This was their permanent camp from which they would proceed on foot after the deer.

They ate well that evening, for they would be travelling hard and eating only cold food for the next day or two. They had brought with them a five-foot spinning rod and had no difficulty in catching half a dozen eager little trout in half an hour. They made a fire and cooked a supper of hot buckwheat cakes and syrup, with bacon, trout, and a fried egg all piled together on the plate and eaten together, with hot muffins, butter, and jam as a side dish and a huge pot of hot, sweet coffee to wash it down. Replete and comatose in the dusk by the lakeside they discussed their plans.

“I guess we’d better try it up the north side, by Cooper’s Gully, as if you were going to Trout Falls,” Chuck said. “The wind’s been in the south the last two days. I reckon they’ll be there, if they’re anywhere.”

“They’ll be feeding in the sun by midday,” Stanton said. “They always get into the sun when they’re up high. You know somethin’? I think they’ll be on the far side of the gully, up by Indian Hat.”

They started on foot soon after dawn, after a breakfast cooked before the sun got up. They left the horses hobbled in the meadow and left their sleeping bags and most of their equipment; they went with packs upon their backs consisting of a little bread and tinned meat wrapped up in a blanket, and their pockets full of wrapped candies.

For three hours they climbed the northern spur of Saddle Mountain, getting up above the tree line again in the granite screes. From the ridge they could look down into the wooded, pasture cleft of Cooper’s Gully. On the sunny side facing them they saw deer feeding, in among the trees, perhaps two miles away. They had no glasses with them because of the weight, but the animals were distinct in the clear air.

Chuck said, “I guess we’ve got to get down wind from them. Get up behind, them, ’n come down from the top.”

The geologist said, “They’ll move down the valley as the shadow comes round—keep in the sun. We’ll have to cross way down below them.”

“Uh-huh. We got quite a walk.”

They made their way down into Cooper’s Gully, moving down the scree as quietly as they could go, for they were in full view of the deer. Two hours later they were in position three hundred feet above the animals and within half a mile of them, with the wind blowing gently in their faces. They studied the position and made plans for the stalk. The sloping meadow where the deer were feeding was bounded on three sides with trees; the open side led upwards to the heights. They decided that Chuck should stalk them through the trees and try to shoot a buck as they grazed. Stanton would place himself three hundred yards towards the open, to try a second shot when they were startled and made for the heights. There were fourteen animals in the herd, three of them good bucks with antlers.

They left their packs, and separated, creeping forward on their stomachs in the grass, moving cautiously from rock to tree, infinitely slow. Stanton had the shorter and the easier stalk, designed to enable him to get into position long before Chuck was in range for a shot. He reached the place that he had planned in about twenty minutes, a comfortable hide behind two fir trees and a rock at a place where the deer must pass within twenty yards of him if they made for the heights. He laid out four birch arrows on a flat rock convenient to his hand, braced his bow, and nocked a fifth arrow to the bowstring, ready to draw. Then he waited, motionless.

It was very quiet in the glade. He could hear some of the animals grazing still, but they were getting restless now,
lifting their heads and looking around. He could see nothing of Chuck, but judged that he must be near them. Then as he watched he saw the pilot rising slowly to his feet behind a tree. Stanton made ready, glanced at the arrows he had laid out on the rock, felt for the arrows in his quiver.

Then Chuck shot. The herd wheeled around, and came galloping up the glade towards Stanton, headed by an antlered buck. He drew his bow, waited till they were within fifty yards, and stepped out from behind the tree. The buck checked at the sight of him and wheeled, stationary for an instant and presenting his flank, and at that moment Stanton shot. As he shot he noted a wound already in the flank, rather low down. His arrow sped true and hit the beast just behind the shoulder, going in about six inches and lodging there. The buck leaped round and tore on past him for the open heights, followed by the herd; Stanton nocked another arrow and shot again at the same beast; the arrow hit it in the rump making a long flesh wound, and fell to the ground. Then the animals were gone over the hill.

Chuck came walking up the pasture to him. “Do any good, Stan?”

The geologist told him what had happened.

Chuck said, “I hit one a bit low, one of the bucks. The arrow went right through him. Then I shot at him again and missed.”

“That’s the one I shot at,” Stanton said. “I saw he’d been wounded. I got him just behind the shoulder, ’n a flesh wound in the rump.”

They discussed the matter as they made their way back up the hill to fetch their packs. “I guess this is where we start and take the fat off, Stan,” said Chuck.

It was then about three o’clock in the afternoon. They shouldered their packs, collected their arrows, and stood in the tracks of the departed herd. They had no idea which way the herd would run, or how far the wounded buck would go before he paused to rest. The trail up the hill was clear, however, and they set off in the hot sun to follow up the herd. Presently they noticed bloodstains on the grass and knew that the buck was seriously wounded.

The tracks led them up out of Cooper’s Gully, over the
ridge and along the side of Saddle Mountain towards Indian Hat, leading away from their camp and their horses all the time. They paused on the ridge, looking out over the wide sweep of the mountains, streaked and patched with snow upon the northern slopes. To go back to the camp and fetch the horses would delay them for a day; it might be quickest in the long run, but in that day the trail would grow cold and probably become windswept and obliterated. They decided to go on on foot while the trail was fresh.

They followed the trail on rill dark, with no sight of the animals. Once they found a patch of crushed and bloodstained grass where the buck had rested in the shelter of some scrub; the grass did not seem warm, so they judged that he was still some way ahead. When dusk came they were still following the trail on the southern slopes of the peak that they called Indian Hat, fifteen or sixteen miles away from their horses.

They dared not make a fire, for fear of stampeding the deer if they were near at hand. They ate about half the bread and meat they had brought with them and lay down to sleep, huddled together for warmth. They got little sleep, for it was bitterly cold at that high altitude and the two blankets that they had were quite inadequate. As soon as it was light enough to see, they got stiffly to their feet. They had no appetite for food and there was nothing to drink, but the trail of the deer was still clear and they went on. Presently they came upon a little cold stream running down out of the snow, and paused to drink, and ate a little of the cold meat that was left.

About two miles from where they had camped they found another bloodstained, patch of ground where the buck had rested, and now the grass and the blood were still warm. A few minutes after that they saw the herd ahead of them, about two miles away, galloping across a grassy hillside and over a shoulder, but the wounded buck was not with them.

“He’ll be lying up some place between here and there,” said Chuck. “I guess we’d better get one of us each side of him. You stay behind him here, and I’ll go around, ’n get ahead of him. Gimme an hour from now, and then come on.”

He went off up the hill and Stanton sat down upon a
rock to wait. It was warm now in the rising sun. Up on the heights there he could see snow-capped peaks tipped by a golden light, over in Idaho, maybe a hundred miles away, distinct in that clear air. This was his country and he consciously rejoiced in it; it was better for him than anything that he had seen outside America. The fact that it was under snow for nine months of the year and so quite inaccessible did not affect his pleasure; the outside world, he felt, had nothing to show him that was so good as this.

Presently his self-winding wrist watch showed him that the hour was up. He got to his feet, adjusted the aluminium-framed pack upon his back, pulled up the zip of his featherweight wind jacket, put on his scientifically designed tinted glasses, for the sun was now strong, picked up his tubular steel bow, put one of his few remaining candies in his mouth, and went on, following the trail.

Half a mile further on there was a struggling and a crashing in the scrub ahead of him and he saw the buck getting to his feet, barely two hundred yards away. It went on weakly but still faster than Stanton could run, stumbling now and then, following the trail left by the herd. Stanton followed in pursuit at a fast walk. If Chuck was in position it was now all his.

Presently, far ahead of him, he heard the twang of Chuck’s bow borne on the still air, and then another, and another, and then a crashing in the scrub, and a shout from Chuck. He quickened his pace to a run, and presently he came on Chuck sitting on the ground by the dead buck. He had shot five more arrows into it so that it looked like something out of a bull fight, and then, when it went down, he had run in rather rashly and had grappled with its antlers, and had cut its throat with his long aluminium-handled hunting knife; that was the end.

They stood resting for a time, exulting in their prowess and retrieving their steel-barbed birch arrows. They were determined to get the head and antlers back to Hazel with them and into cold storage as a preliminary to being mounted as a trophy, but they were all of twenty miles now from the horses, the sun was getting up, and they were very hungry.

“I guess we’d better make a fire and have a steak, first thing of all,” said Stanton. “It’s going to be tough meat.”

He set to work to build a fire, while Chuck commenced
the butchering, a gory business, for there was no water on the hillside. He decapitated the buck and slung the head up in the fork of a tree till they could fetch it with the packhorse; they were at too high an altitude for flies to attack it. They cut steaks from the buck and grilled them in small pieces on a sharpened stick, but they could eat little for the lack of water and the toughness of the meat. Then they set out on the long walk back to the horses and the camp, leaving their hunting gear cached near the carcase of the buck, unloading themselves of everything they could spare.

They got back to their camp by Duncan’s Lake beneath Saddle Mountain just before sunset, tired but exultant. They gave the horses a feed of oats and made a huge stew of the deer meat and a tin of beef, topping off with crackers and jam and about a gallon of coffee. Then they blew up the air beds incorporated with their sleeping bags and crept into the warm comfort of the blankets in the light of the dying fire, and lay together under the bright stars for a few minutes before sleep, discussing the events of the day and what they would do in the morning.

Presently Stanton said sleepily, “You know somethin’?”

“What’s that?”

“That boy Tony of yours. He’s getting to look the hell of a lot like me.”

The other chuckled. “Ruth and me, we don’t say nothing about that.”

“I guess you’re the only people in all Hazel that don’t.”

“So what?” said Chuck. “There’s nothing anybody can do about it now. I reckon we were all just a little bit hasty in those days.”

“Maybe we were. Anyway,” Stanton said sleepily, “it’s all come out all right.”

There was a short silence, and then Chuck said, “You never going to get married, Stan?”

“I guess I will one day. There aren’t too many girls around the places where I work.”

“Ruth and me, we get kind of worried sometimes.”

“About me?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What about?”

“I dunno. Seems like you got the smutty end of the stick in that deal of ours.”

“I made out all right,” said the geologist. “Reckon I got a long ways further than if I’d married in High School.”

Chuck said sleepily, “Maybe so. You got the book learning and turned into somebody. I got Ruth and turned into a bum. I dunno which of us got the better deal.”

Stanton laughed. “Go to sleep, you big bum.”

“Okay. G’night, Stan.”

“G’night.”

They set off next day soon after dawn and made their way on horseback to retrieve the head and antlers of the buck. On the ridge above Cooper’s Gully they met a forest ranger riding down towards his cabin, and told him about the buck. The ranger had two-way radio at his cabin, and they gave him a telegram to Stanton’s father asking to be met with a horse truck at Beaver River dude ranch next morning; this was fifty miles from Hazel but was the shortest way out of the Primitive Area for them, and would save them a couple of days on the homeward trail.

On the next day they were home, displaying their gory trophy to their slightly horrified relations before rushing it down to Portland in the Lincoln, packed in dry ice, to be mounted before the processes of death went too far. They had been away from home a week, and each of them had lost three or four pounds in weight.