High Hunt (31 page)

I went straight on down into the ravine, leaving Jack on the ridge to get himself straightened out. The brush was a little tough at first, but I got the hang of it in a couple minutes. I just bulled on through, hanging onto the limbs to keep from falling—kind of like going down hand over hand.

I could still hear McKlearey screaming and yelling up on the knob at the top of the ridge.

I'd marked the last place where I'd seen the deer, and I hit the bottom a good ways below where that had been. I was pretty sure I was below the carcass.

The wash at the bottom of the ravine was about fifteen feet wide and six to ten feet deep. I imagined that when the snow melted, it was probably a boiling river, but it was bone-dry
right now. Most of the sides were steep gravel banks with large rocks jutting out here and there.

I finally found a place where I could get down into the wash. I seemed to remember hearing some gravel sliding after the deer had stopped bouncing. I started up the ravine.

The deer was about a hundred yards from where I'd come down. He was lying huddled at the foot of a gravel bank in a place where the wash made a sharp turn. He was dead, of course.

Only one of his legs was sticking out; the others were all kind of tucked up under him. The protruding leg was at an odd angle.

His head was twisted around as if he were staring back over his shoulder, and a couple of his ribs were poked out through his skin. His fur wasn't really white but rather a cream color. It had smudges and grass stains on it—either from his normal activity or from the fall through the brush.

His antlers were shattered off close to his head, and the one red eye I could see was about half open. There was dirt in it.

A thin dribble of gravel slithered down the steep bank and spilled down across his shoulder. A heavy stick protruded from the bank just above him.

“You poor bastard,” I said softly. I nudged at his side with my toe, and I could hear broken bones grating together inside. He was like a sack full of marbles.

“Probably broke every bone in his body,” I muttered. I took hold of the leg. It was loose and flopping. I tucked it back up beside the rest of him. Folded up the way he was, he didn't take up much more room than a sack of potatoes. I squatted down beside him.

“Well,” I said, “you did it. God knows we ran you off this hill often enough. You just
had
to keep coming back, didn't you?” I reached over and brushed some of the dirt off his face. The eye with the dirt in it looked at me calmly.

“I sure wish I knew what the hell to do now, old buddy,” I said. “You're Lou's deer, and I suppose I ought to make him keep you, no matter what shape you're in. Christ only knows, though, what that'll lead to.”

How did I always get into these boxes? All I wanted to do was just look out for myself. I had enough trouble doing that without taking on responsibilities for other people as well. I had to try to figure out, very fast, what would be the consequences of about three different courses of action open to me
right now, and no matter what I decided to do, I had no guarantees that the whole damn mess wouldn't blow up in my face. I sure wished that Miller were here.

I could hear McKlearey yelling, but he sounded like he was coming down the hill now. Whatever I was going to do, I was going to have to make up my mind in a hurry.

I put my hand on the deer's shoulder. He was still warm. A kind of muscle spasm or reflex made his eyelid flutter at me.

“You're a lot of help,” I said to the deer. I stood up.

I could hear McKlearey crashing around in the brush several hundred yards up the ravine.

“Well, piss on it!” I said and pulled on the limb sticking out of the gravel bank. The whole bank gave way, and I had to jump back out of the way to keep from getting half-buried myself. The slide completely covered the carcass. I stood holding the stick for a moment, then I pitched it off into the brush. I turned around and went on back downstream.

Lou crossed the wash and came down over the rock-pile at the foot of the cliff. He stopped yelling when he started finding pieces of antler. He was there for quite awhile, gathering up all the chunks and fragments he could find. Then he came on down. I had climbed up out of the wash and was standing up on the bank when he got to where I was.

“You find 'im, Danny?” he asked me from down in the wash. His face was shiny with sweat, and his eyes were feverish.

“I came up from down that way,” I said. “He must be above here somewhere.” It wasn't exactly a lie.

“No, I came down this creek-bed. He ain't up there.”

I shrugged. “Maybe in the brush somewhere—”

“The bastard busted his horns,” he said, holding out both hands full of dark fragments.

“Damn shame,” I said.

He began stuffing the pieces into various pockets. “A good taxidermist oughta be able to glue 'em all back together, don't you think?”

“I don't know, Lou. I've never heard of anybody doing it before.”

“Sure they can,” he said. “But where the hell is the goddamn deer?”

“It's got to be up above,” I said. “Did you get any kind of blood-trail?”

“Shit! The way that fucker was bouncin'?”

“Maybe if we find one of the places where he hit—”

He'd finally finished stuffing chunks of horn in his pockets, and suddenly his eyes narrowed and he squinted up at me. His face was very cold and hard looking.

“Oh,
now
I get it,” he said. “You and your
brother
, huh? You two are tryin' to keep
my
deer.”

“You couldn't
give
me that deer after you knocked it off that cliff,” I told him flatly.

“That's
my
goddamn deer,” he said angrily.

“I never said it wasn't.”

“Where the hell is it? Where the hell have you got my deer?” His voice was getting shrill.

“Come on, Lou, get serious.”

“Don't do this to me, Danny.” His eyes were bulging now.

“Settle down, Lou. Let's go back up and check out the brush.”

“Danny? Is that you, Danny?” His face was twitching, and his voice was kind of crooning.

“Come on, Lou,” I said, “let's go back up to where he hit.”

“You know what I did to Sullivan, don't you, Danny?”

“Come on, Lou,” I said.

Now what the hell was going on?

“It wasn't my fault, Danny. It was so fuckin' dark, and Charlie was all around us.”

“Lou, snap out of it!”

“It wasn't my fault, Danny. He come sneakin' up on me. He didn't give me no password or nothin'.”

“Lou!”

“Nobody knows where he is, Danny. I hid 'im real good. Nobody'll ever know.”

I suddenly felt sick to my stomach.

“Don't tell the lieutenant, Danny. Everything will be OK if you just keep your mouth shut about it.” His eyes were wild now.

“Come on, Lou, snap out of it. That's all over now.” I was starting to get a little jumpy about this. It could get bad in a minute. And I still wasn't over the little session with Jack up on the ridge.

“I'll pay you, Danny. I got five hundred or so saved up for a big R and R. It's all yours. Just for Chrissake, don't say nothin'.”

Very slowly I eased off the hammer-thong again. How many times was this going to happen in one day?

“Please, Danny, I'm beggin' ya. They'll
hang
me for God's sake.” His rifle was slung over his left shoulder, and his right hand was on his belt, real close to that damned .38. I wondered if he'd remembered to reload it. Knowing McKlearey, he probably had.

“OK, Kid,” he said, “if that's the way you want it.” The pleading note had gone out of his voice, and his face was pale and very set.

“McKlearey,” I said as calmly as I could, “if you make one twitch toward that goddamn pistol, I'll shoot you down in your tracks and you damn well know I can do it. You know I can take you any time I feel like it. Now straighten up and let's go find that deer.” I sure hoped that I sounded more convincing than I felt. Frankly, I was scared to death.

“I been practicin',” he said, his face crafty.

“Not enough to make that much difference, Lou,” I said.

He stood there looking up at me. I guess it got through to him—even through what had happened on the Delta—that I had him cold. At least I had him cold enough to make the whole thing a bad gamble for him. Finally he shook his head as though coming out of a bad dream.

“You say you came up the creek-bed?” he asked as if nothing had happened.

“Yeah,” I said. “The deer's gotta be above us somewhere—maybe off in the brush.”

“Maybe if we each took one side,” he said. “It sure as hell ain't down in here.” He turned and clambered up out of the wash on the other side.

“Danny?” he said from the other side of the wash.

“Yeah?”

“Sullivan and the other Danny are both dead, did you know that? Charlie got 'em. They been dead a long time now.”

“Sorry to hear that, Lou.”

“Yeah. It was a bad deal. They was my buddies—but Charlie got 'em.”

I didn't want to get started on that again. “Work your way up to where you found those pieces of horn, Lou,” I said. “I'll go up this side.”

“Sure. Fuckin' deer has gotta be here someplace.”

I let him lead out. I wasn't about to let him get behind me.

“You find 'im?” Miller called from the ridge.

“Not yet, Cap,” I called back.

“Any sign?”

“Lou found some pieces of horn,” I said.

“And some fur,” Lou called to me. “Tell 'im I found some white fur, too.”

“He got some fur, too,” I relayed.

“He's gotta be down there then.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“Did he go off that bluff?”

“Yeah. I saw him fall.”

Cap shook his head disgustedly and started to come down into the ravine.

The three of us combed the bottom for about an hour and a half. We passed the collapsed gravel bank about a half dozen times, but neither of them seemed to notice anything peculiar about it.

“It's no good,” Miller said finally.

“But he's down here,” Lou said. “We all seen 'im fall. I got 'im. I got 'im from way up there.” He pointed wildly.

“I ain't doubtin' you shot him,” Cap said, “but we ain't gonna find 'im.”

“He's
gotta
be here,” Lou said frenziedly. “Let's go back just one more time. He's here. He's
gotta
be here.”

Miller shook his head. “Face it, Sarge,” he said. “He's under a rockslide.” He nudged the bank of the wash with the tow of his cowboy boot. A small avalanche resulted. “This whole gully is like this. One little bump brings it right down. There's two dozen places in this stretch we been workin' where the bank has give way just recently. He could be under any one of 'em. Only way you're gonna find that deer is with a shovel—and even then you wouldn't get him till the snow came.”

“Maybe he's under a bush,” Lou said. “Did we look over there?” He pointed desperately toward a place we'd all checked a half dozen times.

“We ain't gonna find 'im,” Miller said.

“I
gotta
find 'im!” Lou screamed. “I gotta!” Then his face fell apart, and he started to cry like a little kid.

Miller stepped up to him and slapped him sharply in the face.

“Come out of that, now, Sergeant!” he barked. “That's an order.”

Lou's eyes snapped open. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, sir. I—I guess I lost my head.”

“Let's get on up to the ridge,” Miller commanded.

We started climbing. McKlearey coughed now and then—or maybe he was sobbing, I'm not sure.

I still didn't let him get behind me.

I don't think either Jack or Lou said more than ten words the rest of that day. Miller, Clint, and I were so busy watching them that we didn't say much either, so it was awfully quiet in camp. Neither one of them went out that evening, and we all sat around staring at each other. At least McKlearey had quit talking to himself.

The next morning they were still pretty quiet, and I got the idea that they both wanted to finish up and get on back down the mountain.

I went up on the ridge with Jack again, and almost as soon as it was legal shooting time, we heard McKlearey's gun bang off once, and then a minute or so later the flat, single crack of his pistol.

“Lou got one,” I said to Jack. It was pretty obvious, but the silence was beginning to bug me.

“Yeah,” Jack answered indifferently.

We saw Miller going on up, trailing Lou's horse and a pack animal. About twenty minutes later he went on back down with Lou and what looked like a pretty damn small deer.

“Shit!” Jack snorted. “The great hunter! I've seen bigger cats.” Maybe he was coming out of it a little—maybe not. I couldn't tell for sure.

It was almost lunchtime when a fair-sized buck came down the draw.

“Four-point,” I whispered to Jack, who hadn't even been watching, I don't think.

“Where?”

“Coming down the bottom of the gully.”

“Yeah, I see 'im now,” he said. His voice was very flat.
“I'll take 'im.” He squared himself around into a sitting position, aimed, and fired. The buck dropped without a twitch.

“Good shot!” I said.

He shrugged and cranked out the empty. It clinked against a rock and rolled on down the hill.

“You going to signal?” I asked him.

“Miller'll be up in a few minutes anyway,” he said.

“Yeah, but we'll need a packhorse.”

“Maybe you're right,” he said. He wearily pulled out the automatic, thumbed it, and touched it off in the general direction of the mountain above us. “Let's go gut 'im,” he said.

We went down and field-dressed the deer. By the time we were done, Miller was there with the horses and a rope. He tossed us one end, and with a horse pulling from up above and the two of us guiding the carcass, getting the deer up was no trick at all.

“Damn nice deer,” Miller said rather unconvincingly.

“It's worth the price of the tag, I guess,” Jack said. He seemed pretty uninterested.

We got everything loaded up and went on back down to camp.

Clint and McKlearey had already gone on down. Miller told us that Lou had been all hot to leave, and there weren't really enough packhorses to haul out all of our gear and the deer as well, so Clint had loaded up and they'd gone on down.

“How big a one did he get?” Jack inquired.

“Two-point,” Miller said. “Nice enough deer, but I think old Sarge musta made a mistake. He probably shoulda waited till he had a little more light.”

Jack didn't say anything.

“Clint won't be back till late again,” Miller said, “so we'll go on out tomorrow mornin'. We oughta skin your deer out and let it cool anyway. I tried to tell that to Sarge, too, but he seemed to be in a helluva rush for some reason.”

“Probably got a hot date back in Tacoma,” Jack said sourly.

Miller let that one go by.

We ate lunch and skinned out Jack's deer, and then Jack went into his tent to lie down for a while. I wandered around a bit and then went on down to the pond to molest the fish. The sun was hot and bright on the water, and the fish weren't moving.

Miller came on down after about a half hour and stood watching me as I fished. “Any action?” he said finally.

“Pretty slow, Cap,” I said.

“Usually is this time of day.”

“Maybe if I pester 'em enough, they'll bite just to get rid of me.”

He chuckled at that.

I made another cast.

“Trip sure turned out funny,” he said finally.

“Yeah,” I agreed.

“I got a hunch Ol' Sarge oughta see a doctor of some kind. He sure went all to pieces yesterday.”

I nodded. “I guess something pretty bad happened to him over in Vietnam,” I said. I didn't want to go into too many details. I'd pushed the whole business about Sullivan and Danny—the other one—into the back of my mind, and I was doing my level best not to think about it.

“I kinda thought that might have somethin' to do with it,” Cap said. “It's all kinda soured me on this guidin' business though.”

“Don't judge everybody by us, Cap,” I said. “You run a damn fine camp, and you know this country as well as any man could. None of what happened up here was your fault. This was all going on before we ever got up here.”

“I keep thinkin' I shoulda done somethin' to head it all off before it went as far as it did though,” he said, squinting up at the mountain. He still looked a lot like God.

“I don't think anybody could have done anything any differently,” I told him. “You just got a bad bunch to work with, that's all. Nobody could have known that Cal was going to get sick or that McKlearey was going off the deep end the way he did. It was just the luck of the draw, that's all.”

“Maybe,” he said doubtfully. “Then, maybe too, I just ain't cut out for it. I can tell you right now that you're the only one of the whole bunch I'd care to go out with again. Maybe if a man's goin' into the business, he can't afford to have them kinda likes and dislikes.”

I couldn't say much to that really.

Finally he cleared his throat. “I'm gonna ask you somethin' that ain't really none of my business, so if you don't want to answer, you can just tell me to keep my nose where it belongs, OK?”

“Shoot,” I said. I knew what he was going to ask.

“You found that freak deer yesterday, didn't you, son?”

I nodded.

“Thought maybe you had. You're too good a hunter not to have, and you was the closest one to the place where he dropped into that gully.”

“He was down in the wash,” I said quietly, not looking at him, “all busted up. I dumped one of those gravel banks over on him. I just didn't think he was worth somebody getting killed over.”

“Was it really that bad between your brother and the Sarge?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said, looking out over the pond. “It was getting real close. I figured that if neither one of them got the damn thing, it'd cool things down.”

“You think pretty fast when you have to, don't you?”

“I was right in the middle,” I said. “It was the only thing I could come up with in a hurry to keep the roof from falling in on me. I'm not very proud of it really.” That was the truth, too.

“I don't know,” he said after a minute, “from where I sit, it makes you look pretty tall.”

I didn't understand that at all.

“A man's more important than a deer,” he said, hunkering down and dipping his fingers in the water. “Sometimes a man'll forget that when he gets to huntin'. You're just like me, son. You wouldn't never try to take another man's deer or keep 'im from findin' it. It's just somethin' a man don't do. So you figure that what you done was wrong—particularly since it was the Sarge who shot the damn thing, and you don't like him very much. But you'd have done the same thing if it'd been your brother shot 'im. A lot of men wouldn't, but
you
would. Takes a pretty big man to do the right thing in a spot like that.”

I felt better. I'd been worrying about it a lot.

“You gonna reel that fish in, or let 'im run around on the end of your line all day?” he said to me.

“What?” I looked at the pole I'd laid down across a log. The tip was whipping wildly. I grabbed the rod before the fish could drag it into the water. I brought him in close to shore, reached down into the water and carefully unhooked him. “Don't tell Clint,” I said, shooing the exhausted trout back out into deeper water.

“Wild horses wouldn't get it out of me.” He laughed. We went on back up to camp.

After that, things were OK again. Jack kept pretty much to
his tent except for supper, and Cap and I spent the rest of the afternoon getting things squared away so we could break camp the next morning. I moved my gear back into Jack's tent so we could strike the one I'd been sleeping in as well as McKlearey's.

After supper, Jack had a couple of drinks and went back to his tent. Cap and I sat up telling stories and waiting for Clint to get back.

The little guy came in about ten thirty, madder than hell.

“That damn burrhead run off on me, Cap,” he growled as he rode up.

“Run off? What do you mean, run off?”

“We got about a half mile from the bottom, and he kicks ol' Red in the slats and took off like a scared rabbit. When I got to the bottom, ol' Red was all lathered up and blowed and wanderin' around not tied to anything, and that burrhead and that pile of nuts and bolts he called a car was gone.”

“Didn't he take his deer?” Cap asked.

“He didn't take nothin'! He even left his rifle tied to the saddle.”

“He say anything at all?”

“Not a word—not a good-bye, go to hell, kiss my ass, or a damn thing. I figured maybe he'd gone on down to the place. I was gonna have some words with him about runnin' off and leavin' me with all the work, but there wasn't a sign of 'im there neither. He just clean, flat took off. I left all his stuff in the barn. I don't know how the hell we'll get it all back to 'im.”

“We'll take it back,” I said. “I'll see that he gets it all.”

Clint grunted, still pretty steamed.

Cap shook his head. “I sure misjudged
that
one,” he said.

“Somebody oughta take a length of two-by-four to 'im,” Clint said. “That was a damn-fool kid stunt, runnin' off like that.”

“Well,” Cap said, “we can't do anything about it tonight. Let's unsaddle the stock and get to bed. And you better cool down a mite. You know what the doctor told you about not losin' your temper so much.”

“Hell,” Clint said, “I'm all calm and peaceful
now
. 'Bout time I started up the hill, I was mad enough to bite nails and spit rust.”

We finally got things squared away and got to bed.

The next morning I was up before the others, so I got the
fire started and got coffee going and then wandered around a bit, kind of getting the last feel of things. I like to do that with the good things. The others I kind of just let slide away.

It had been a good hunt—in spite of everything—and I'd worked out whatever it was that I'd needed to work out. Some people seem to think that things like that have to be all put down in a set of neatly stated propositions, but it isn't really that way at all. A lot of times it's better not to get too specific. If you feel all right about yourself and the world in general where you didn't before, then you've solved your problem—whatever it was. If you don't, you haven't. Verbalizing it isn't going to change anything. One thing I could verbalize, though, was the fact that I had a couple of friends I hadn't had before. Just that by itself made the whole trip worth everything it had cost.

“Who's the damn early bird?” Clint growled, coming out of the tent all rumpled and grouchy-looking.

“Me.” I grinned at him.

“Mighta known,” he said. “You been bustin' your butt to get your hands on the cookware ever since we got up here.”

“I figured I could ruin a pot of coffee just as well as you could,” I said.

“Oh-ho! Pretty smart-alecky for so damn early in the mornin',” he said. “All right, boy, since you went and started it, we'll just see how much of a camp cook you are.
You
fix breakfast this mornin'. Anythin' you wanna fix. There's the cook tent.”

“I think I've been had,” I said.

“I guess they don't teach you not to volunteer in the Army no more,” he said. “Well, I'm goin' back to bed. You just call us when you got ever-thin' ready.” He chuckled and went on back into his tent.

“You're a dirty old man,” I called after him.

He stuck his head back out, thumbed his nose at me, and disappeared again.

I rummaged around in the cook-tent and dragged out everything I could think of. I'd fix a breakfast like they'd never seen before.

Actually, I went a little off the deep end. A prepared biscuit-flour made biscuits and pancakes pretty easy, but I kind of bogged down in a mixture of chopped-up venison, grated potatoes and onions, and a few other odds and ends of vegetables. I wound up adding a can of corned-beef hash to give the whole
mess consistency. I didn't think I could manage a pie or anything, so I settled for canned peaches.

“All right, dammit!” I yelled. “Come and get it or I'll feed it to porky.”

They stumbled out and we dug into it. I'd fried up a bunch of eggs and bacon to go with it all, and they ate without too many complaints—except Clint, of course.

“Biscuits are a little underdone,” he said first, mildly.

“Can't win 'em all,” I told him.

“Bacon could be a mite crisper, too,” he said then.

Cap ducked his head over his plate to keep from laughing out loud. Even Jack grinned.

“Flapjacks seem a little chewey, wouldn't you say?” he asked me.

I was waiting for him to get to that hash. He tried a forkful and chewed meditatively.

“Now
this
,” he said, pointing at it with the fork, “is the best whatever-it-is I've ever had.” He looked up with a perfectly straight face. “Of course, I ain't never
had
none of this whatever-it-is before, so that might account for it.”

I didn't say anything.

“I ain't gonna ask you what's in it,” he said, “'cause I don't really wanna know till I'm done eatin', but right after breakfast, I
am
gonna go count the packhorses.”