Home from the Hill (11 page)

“But how in the world,” said another, “are we ever going to keep the other boys—our own among them—in school after this?”

We all spoiled him, you see. Small wonder if he took to a fault what no one around him thought could be one, or that he grew narrow and proud and intolerant, in a place where even the womenfolks felt that no man was a man who was not a hunter.

12

So he stayed out of school and hunted that year, did nothing but hunt—ate, drank and slept hunting. He went with his father and without him, with other hunters and alone—more and more alone, for he was going deeper and deeper into Sulphur Bottom now, and the company of any other man than his father was a care and slowed him down.

She would watch him leave (he had his own car now, a new Ford, black like his father's—and sometimes when he passed and a man plowing in a field straightened and shaded his eyes and waved, he suspected he was mistaken for his father) and, “Get the limit,” she would call out.

That was the winter when for weeks the Captain was telling everybody high and low about the boy's hitting a quail he himself had shot at and missed. Mrs. Hannah came to resent that story. He told it too often to please her and seemed too amazed at both halves of it, at his missing the bird and at Theron's hitting it. But once he stopped telling the story, that dead bird became hers.

“Get the limit,” she would say, especially if he was going alone, and often she would add, “We're having the So-and-so's over to supper Friday night and you know they never get much wild game and would just love some—” whatever it was he was going after: quail, squirrel, duck—venison, now. She would count on it, she would say.

He would advise her to have a few steaks in the icebox, or else would simply thank her drily, whereupon she would say, “For what, dear?”

“For speaking as if all you have to do is just place your order, like with the butcher. Papa is not going with me, remember.”

“I know that,” she would say.

“Well then, don't count on it.”

“I could count on him.”

“Yes, Mama. That was my point.”

“Mine too.” And then, “Well, remember the time he missed that quail and you killed it.”

It was no use explaining to her that he had missed that bird trying to do something that few men could do and that he could do just about every time—that he had already brought down one bird on that flush, that the one he missed had been his second shot on the rise. It just happened to have flushed out his way. It irritated him, for as a matter of fact he had made much prettier shots than that.

She would stand in the driveway and wave and watch until he was out of sight, and her heart yearned after him. She was not demonstrative, though she would have liked to be, was by nature. The first time she saw him shrink from her goodbye kiss, she cried. She told herself it was a stage he was going through, the boyish embarrassment over sentiment, over being mothered; still she cried. But thereafter, though it caused her an ache of heart that no amount of usage ever remitted, she fell in with his ideal of mother-son relations—a kind of rough friendliness, good fellowship, without any “syrupy sentimentality.” First it had been a gradual ceasing ever to kiss goodbye, then good night; now he never kissed her, never put his arm around her. She never saw him now but what he was making hurried preparations to leave again. His rough life was coarsening him. She feared him and did not dare complain. Moreover, she had only to see Wade occasionally shake his head in disapproval when Theron came in late, wet, bramble-torn, only to set out afresh, to make her forget her own unspoken complaints. If she owed this to no one but herself, then she must believe she was happy with it.

And he did bring home the limit. When he handed them to her, she would smile knowingly and say nothing. And she did have the So-and-so's over and fed them off his game.

It was yellow woodlands first, for squirrels. Then with the first silvering snaps of frost, the brown uplands for birds, woodcock and quail. Every farmer in the county came to know the rapid, nearly single, double bang of his little Parker 16, and his shrill whistle, blown through his forefinger and thumb, to the dogs. Most often it was land of his father's, the farmers his tenants; but when it was not it never occurred to him to ask permission to hunt on it, any more than it occurred to the owner to think he should. With tenant or owner he always left a mess of game at the end of the day.

When the birds were gone, it was down into the flats and marshes after wildfowl, waterfowl—raw days of whistling winds black with rain, days spent huddled in a blind, a pit dug into a frozen sandbar covered with a dripping tarpaulin, or a hut above-ground wattled of cattails, his neck craned, stiff, aching, as he watched for ducks or, occasionally, a perfect V spanning the sky of great gray-brown Canada geese. You were allowed to use live decoys in those days, though he had reached the point where he probably would have if they had been outlawed, and he sat and listened all day to the whip of the wind and the splash of rain upon the tarp and, from time to time, like a chain of firecrackers going off, the traitorous quack of the decoys luring the wild birds to his gun.

When the duck flights petered out, he went back into the woods—bare now—after deer. He was a week without firing a shot, sitting dawn to dark perched in a tree, near saltlicks, near water, along trails, the rifle across his lap, rattling two sets of antlers together like two bucks fighting over a doe, and it was so cold the chattering of his teeth almost matched the racket of the horns.

He picked his buck, passing over half a dozen, as carefully as a housewife picks over all the butcher has on display for the tenderest young fryer. He had gone in for finesse. His squirrels were all shot clean through the head. His quail were hardly ruffled and had never more than three or four pellets in them to annoy the eater, for he took them upon the very edge of the shot pattern.

He hunted out of legal season now, unable to restrain himself, unable to quit when closing day was past, confident that no game warden would dare stop him, and moving too furiously, too fast, to hear the voice of his own conscience. And by degrees he had become a game hog. The crop was good that season: hunting of the kind we don't get anymore. One day late that fall he wore out three brace of dogs and came in with sixty-one quail, upon which he had expended exactly three boxes—that's three times twenty-five—of shells. Now it was his birds that Chauncey distributed through the town—only Theron, unlike his father, did not designate their recipients, didn't care who got them, just told him to get shut of them before they went bad.

Then it was the dead of winter, when even the illegal, the natural season was over and there was no game. The squirrels denned up, the birds withdrew into the thickets, the ducks migrated on south. Yet the change of season brought him none of that hunter's sense of identification with the year, of fulfillment, of rest after harvest, as it had in the past. Something drove him on, back into the barren fields, the sleeping woods, and it was not the pursuit of pleasure. It had ceased to be a pleasure to him. Formerly a day afield, the smells of the earth, the satisfaction of watching the dogs at work and the sense that he had taken part in their training, that he was now a part of the smooth, precise team they made, a good shot or two plus a few exciting, near misses, and then tired, happy, with a good bag at night, the quiet pride in his father's look—the sum of these things had been pleasure, the one pleasure. Now a kind of urgency had come over him. He was more intolerant of errors in the dogs and in himself, was furious that a single bird escaped him. Yet the old thrill throbbed less intensely when over the barrels he saw the blurred streak crumple and drop.

Was it just that he had had too much of it? Could you have too much of hunting? Obviously that was not the answer, for he wanted more, was insatiable for what had ceased to be a pleasure to him.

And even after he had begun to judge the success of his days solely by the weight of his game pockets, a heavy one still left him dissatisfied. He had a sense of never being alone, and no shot, no matter how difficult, no bag, no matter how large, could win the praise of the companion of his hunts. And perhaps he kept so restlessly on the move to outpace, and thus evade recognizing that companion, hunted all the more urgently in order not to see that hunting had ceased to be its own reward and, with his mother's help, had become a senseless competition with that bright image he carried always in his heart of his father resplendent in all his prowess and skill.

He turned furiously to gunning rabbits, the nimbler, gamier jacks first, then, when they gave out, the cottontails. Once he would have scorned to make game of them; but slaughtered in such numbers, they were not to be ashamed of. He supported whole Negro families on cottontail rabbits that winter.

At last the rabbits too holed up; and it was still two months at least before the spring season of squirrel shooting.

A new year had begun—the last of which he was to see the end—1938: his eighteenth, his father's forty-sixth, his mother's thirty-eighth.

13

That spring, early, when the first of the swampers came out of hibernation, news reached town of an invader in Sulphur Bottom. It began when one trapper and trotline-runner, who did a little farming on the side to supplement his diet of mudcat and possum, and raised a razorback hog or two by turning them loose in the Bottom to range on acorns and pignuts, asked his neighbor, whom he had not seen all winter long until that day on the square, whether or not he'd had a hog turn wild and run off on him. Well now, said the neighbor, he had been just fixing to ask him the very same. Nothing more was said, and there the matter rested until the following Saturday, when words to the same effect passed between two more of them, who then went on to compare losses. One had had a young tom turkey he was raising for Christmas dinner stolen on him. The other had indeed missed a pig, but had found him—or what was left of him. The man who had lost the turkey grunted. A few minutes later he added that he had found tracks. The man who had lost the pig nodded and, when he had licked and lit his cigarette, said that he had had his trapline robbed, too. He had found the remains of a fox and two coons. He had found tracks too, that time.

They just nodded. It was their way to go slowly towards any conclusion. So it was not until the next Saturday, the first in April, when three of the first four and three new ones from down there appeared on the square—more of them in town on one day than had been seen in years—that anything came of it. Then there were additions to the record: chicken coops busted, another pig found dead and half eaten, an entire patch of winter turnips rooted up and tracks everywhere, and this time there was a man who had seen him.

“Hit's a wile hawg, sho nuff, Cap,” he said. “I mean, one that never wuz nothin but wile. One lak that other un ye got that time. Not no barnyard pig run wile. Musta worked his way ovah f'om Loozyanner. I seen him. Hit uz Monday a week when I uz runnin mah line. I skeered im up f'om whur he uz bedded down an ef I hadn' th'owed im the two dead possums I uz totin, why I doubt he'd a et me. I doubt he'll run ye ever bit ez big ez you other un, Cap.”

“He's hangin out aroun the edges,” another volunteered. “He ain't gone in very deep. I guess he ain't much skeered of nobody comin after im. I mean, a man wouldn' have to go very fur to find im. Ef some man wuz to want to.”

“Well, if that's the case,” said the Captain, “and since I'm all taken up just now trying to get things ready for spring planting, why, my boy here will take care of him for you.”

In slow unison, like cattle turning together as they browse, and impassive as the gaze of chewing cattle, the six pairs of eyes turned to look at him, pale, steady, hard eyes, permanently squinched against the sun. He could not tell whether they even tried to judge him. They simply stopped looking after a while and turned back to his father all together. It seemed they nodded—if so, it was too slight to be sure of. But they would not dare appear to doubt that his son was man enough for the job.

“You better take somebody with you,” said his father, handing him the Winchester and a box of cartridges.

“You didn't think I was meaning to go alone?” As a matter of fact he had been, and saw that his father knew it.

“Take somebody you know you can trust, somebody that can shoot.”

He would have preferred to take somebody who he and everybody else knew could not shoot, but he said, “Pritchard?”

“He can shoot. All right, take Pritchard.”

His father told him what to expect. “When the dogs begin running him he'll head for the thicket. He'll most likely go downhill, not up, and get into a swamp if he can. If he goes in too deep call off the dogs—if you can get them to come. Just don't let him lead you in so deep you get lost. He'll come back.”

He barely heard. They were in the den and it was four a.m. and he was eager to be on his way. He was aware only of this: that he had sat at Chauncey's feet here and listened times beyond number to the tale of how his father had killed the last wild boar in East Texas. But it had not been the last; another had appeared—for him.

“The dogs won't be able to head him your direction,” said his father. “You'll just have to follow the best you can. After a while he'll stop and take the dogs on in a fight. You'll be able to tell by the difference in the sound they make, I imagine. It'll sound scared. Over in Louisiana they hunt them with fifteen or a dozen hounds—you've got three and none of them ever hunted boar. When he does make a stand I'd appreciate it if you'd try to get there before he kills all three of them. Now, he'll lead the dogs into such thick cover that most likely you won't see him until you're already close to him—that is, until he's close to you. The minute he sees you he'll charge you. He'll rip right through the dogs to get at you. From the size of him (I expect this one is pretty good sized) you'll think he's bound to be slow. Don't believe it. He's one of the fastest things that moves. Don't shoot for the head, it's too thick. He'll put his snout down to charge. Shoot for the snout and you ought to hit the heart. You've seen them stick hogs at hog-killing time—try to hit that spot. Are you listening?”