Home from the Hill (13 page)

On the dying strength of that last torch he found a spring. The water stank of sulphur, but it was fresh-flowing, and he knew he could trust it. He just wished he could find some water he could suspect. He would gladly have gone thirsty. No fear—no hope—of contamination here. Nobody had ever come bringing any.

15

Something awoke him—sore, stiff, starved—at daybreak. He opened his eyes and saw the moon in the sky, reached for his gun and froze to listen. There was no noise outstanding from the million mingled small sounds of the dawn. Then he heard it again, and heard a different sound follow it, a bellow, not far distant, from the hound, followed by a bronchitic frenzy from Deuteronomy.

To make his stand the boar had chosen a clearing where his back was covered with a wall of impenetrable bramble. When Theron got his first view of it, he was still forty yards from the fight. The mounted head of one on a wall gave you no idea. The thing looked prehistoric, bore no relation to a pig at all, to anything he had ever seen. Gray-pelted and mud-caked, it looked as if it was forged of cast-iron. There was no desperation, no fatigue, nothing in its solid stance to suggest that it felt cornered or outnumbered. It was majestic in its brutal ugliness and serene self-assurance, and it caused Theron a gasp of surprise, respect, and fear.

Yesterday had made boar dogs of those two. They held their ground, dancing constantly, fifteen feet away from those long, flashing, splayed tusks that even at forty yards looked the size of sickle blades. They had learned too, it seemed, that the boar favored his right tusk, because, working together, the two of them kept maneuvering him so Deuteronomy could come at him from the left. He would make a pass at the boar, darting in close, then make an aerial leap like a hooked fish breaking water. The boar charged, tossing his ugly, spade-shaped snout and hooking with his tusk, and then the Plott hound streaked in and nipped him in the hocks or in the flank. Meeting nothing but air where the blue-spotted dog had been the instant before, the boar would snap about, agile as a fish himself, and lunge at her, whereupon Deuteronomy would come in and nip him from the other side. Then the boar would stop, not baffled, but just figuring a better way to get them, puffing but not winded, and Theron, working his way closer along the edge of the clearing and now thirty yards away, saw red froth at the boar's mouth and caught the red glint of that right tusk, then saw where it had connected once, a long red rake down the right shoulder of the hound. The boar stood, solid as a wall, looking for an opening, the long tapered snout working in snorts that he could hear now, the murderous little flickering eyes aglow.

As his father had said it would be, the boar was not more than twenty yards away from him when he parted the brush and stepped into the clearing, and instantly it charged, the two dogs falling aside to get out of the path of its furious propulsion. It let out a squeal, like a barnyard pig, yet with a wild and fearless rage, a kind of murderous glee in it. Its speed was incredible, hurtling and huge and direct, like a guided torpedo. Theron stood dumbstruck for a second, then stood calculating what he had better do while the thing bore down on him. He waited until it was close enough that he could not miss, which was close enough that it could not miss him if he did, maybe if he did not, waited with the hammer back, looking down the little carbine barrel while the gray blur leapt into gigantic proportions over the sights. He was remotely conscious of the smell of him: hot and sour, rancid. Deuteronomy had leapt and sunk his teeth into the pig's ham as he shot past and had been lifted off his feet and carried along like the tail of a kite, the pig oblivious of him. Theron fired, and nothing happened. He felt the kick of the gun and heard the blast, and looking down the barrel saw the boar come on without faltering, but seeming actually to have gained momentum, seeming to have no legs or feet, but to be skimming a foot above ground. He kept the gun to his shoulder, but did not think to work the lever for another shot. It had all happened too suddenly; he had neither thought nor felt. Now terror hit him like a blow in the chest, like the impact of the beast hurtling at him, and his sour gorge rose into his mouth. The next second the boar stopped, emerged from the gray blur of his speed into a distinct object; legs appeared on him, only to disappear in the next instant as his huge body collapsed and sank on them. The eyes were still alive as two vermillion jets of heart blood spurted from the nostrils. Then the eyes slowly died, and a peaceful grunt, ending in a sigh, was expelled from the settling carcass.

16

No sooner had he sat—or rather, sunk to the ground—than he heard at great distance three rapid shots.

He had forgotten everything. His mind was dazed and, like his body, seemed to be panting for breath. It was only when he realized that he was found that he remembered he was lost. That was the signal for lost hunters. The three shots had not been all the same; two were and one was different. The long-drawn rumbling boom of those first two shots could have come only from his father's big 10 gauge magnum. He put the rifle to his shoulder, pointed it to the sky and fired three answering shots and heard their echoes chase after each other through the woods. The dogs leapt to life as if the boar had returned to life.

He sat down and leaned his back against a tree and closed his eyes. But returning consciousness now brought other thoughts. Thinking of his meeting with his father, he remembered his prayer: Please, God, let it be a big one, as big as Papa's, and I'll never ask you for anything more. He opened his eyes. Was it as big?

Then he knew that what he had really meant was, let it be bigger. He knew also that that would be his father's wish.

Was it bigger? Certainly, as he looked, it began to loom larger and larger. It seemed bigger than it had over the sights of the gun when it was alive and hurling itself at him. Suddenly it seemed to regain its feet and come at him again, to hurl itself at him with a force, a weight, a momentum, which even the living beast had lacked, and this time he was alone to face its charge. The two dogs lay quietly resting, the useless gun lay at his side. He stiffened himself to meet the blow and that acid taste of himself again filled his mouth. Now he knew what longing had so possessed him lately. He recognized the game he had pursued into the deep woods, into the swamp. He had hunted down, had cornered the beast of his own secret desire, and it had turned. It had shown its face to him in all its bristling ugliness. It had charged, tearing through the disguises with which he had kept it at bay as the live boar has torn through the dancing dogs. There had been no delay, no indecision. As if it recognized him, lay in wait for him, it charged, squealing with murderous glee.

Yet even as he shrank from the charge, he heard in his mind a gladdening explosion. He felt the recoil. He felt no need of a second shot. His envy of his father's prowess lay stretched out, mud of the swamp caked upon its tick-infested hide, shuddering, peacefully sighing its life away, at his feet.

He rose, went to the carcass and stood over it. Now, the necessary time having elapsed, as the event assumed its lasting reality and he saw that he had slain the actual brute, he saw too that he had slain what the brute embodied. He gave the thing a careless kick. Then, raising the gun to his shoulder again, he sent off three more claps that resounded through the woods.

“Come on, dogs!” he cried. “The shooting's over. Let's go home.”

But before leaving, he took his trophy. He stooped and with his pocketknife sliced off the corkscrew tail.

Following the direction of the shots, he met his rescue party in an hour. Pritchard was there, with his father and five of the swampers.

“I don't suppose,” said his father, the first thing said by anyone, after he had squeezed dry an orange, “I don't suppose,” he said, looking into the woods in the direction from which Theron had come, “that you missed that shot we heard, or you wouldn't be here.”

“No, sir, I didn't miss,” he said.

“And did you climb that tree like I told you?” said his father, with a look in his eye which said he knew the answer, had known it when he first made the suggestion.

“Yes, sir,” said Theron, who knew now how foolish he had been not to.

“Well,” said Pritchard, “you reckon there's enough of us to carry back the trophy?”

“I can carry it myself,” he said, looking at his father as if he, not Pritchard, had spoken. He took out the curlicue tail from his pocket and held it up.

His father approved. He grinned. But he said, “It looks like there's a lot more where that came from. And with the price of pork being what it is. That's a lot of meat.”

“Yes,” he said. “It is a lot of meat.”

It was, just a lot of meat. So let them take it back. That was all right too now. He had his trophy.

His father handed him back the tail. “You carry this,” he said. “We'll carry the rest.”

To save weight, they gutted him on the spot. Theron was too exhausted to be of much help. It took the seven men until late afternoon to get the carcass out to where it could be reached with mules and a stoneboat to haul it the rest of the way. At the edge of the woods, at dusk, they hung a block and tackle from a tree limb and hoisted the carcass and drove the pickup truck under him and eased him down. He stretched from the cab to the tailgate.

When they weighed the truck with him in it on the scales at the cotton gin in town, then took him up to the house and down to the woods behind the house and hamstrung him to a singletree hung from a limb and then drove the truck away and left him hanging there to be scalded and scraped, then went back down to the gin and weighed the empty truck and subtracted, they found he came to three hundred and forty pounds.

The tusks measured ten, and ten and three quarter inches.

Whitened by scalding and scraping, he hung like the ghost of himself for two days, during which time everybody in town and most of the county came up to look and admire. The Captain basked in their admiration, and Theron basked in his father's pride. Then for the rest of the week it hung, minus the head, in cold storage in the ice plant in town, while preparations were made for a big barbecue.

17

Not since Theron's birthday parties had ended with his twelfth had there been a party for young people at the Hunnicutts'. When the announcement was made of the barbecue and the dance to follow, there was much excitement among the town's young ladies. None was more eager than the one accustomed to being the belle of every ball, and yet she ran the risk of missing it. To seven hopefuls Libby Halstead said thanks, but she had a date already. Beginning with the fifth, the dance then only two days away, she regretted her folly. But boys number five, six, and seven did not seem worth abandoning it for. Besides, in that voice in which she spoke to no one else in the world, she told herself that Theron would ask her yet. She would have heard if he had asked another girl. It would have made news.

On the eve of the dance, though she had her mother busy on a new gown, she still had no date, and as her anxiety mounted and she began to speculate on what was keeping him, Theron Hunnicutt assumed proportions as a person in her mind. She was a trifle ashamed then to realize how small a part he himself had played in her desire to be his date on the big evening. She had never given him much thought before. She had had other boys to think about, boys who thought about her. Now she became jealous of his hunting in an abstract and impersonal way, disliking instinctively whatever had kept any boy so absorbed apart from her. She decided that he was dull, and that if he did ask her, she could just imagine her evening with him—talking about hunting.

She was becoming very angry with him. As she modeled the gown that seemed fated to go to waste for her mother that Thursday afternoon, she rehearsed in her mind the delicious gesture of turning him down, thrilled, anyway, with the sensation it would cause if she of all the girls in town made no appearance at the biggest event in years, when there came a ring at the door. It was a ring upon the telephone that she was awaiting, and so she went to the door unprepared. When she saw him, she gasped and slammed the door, an instinctive feminine unwillingness to be seen by a man unprimped combining with an impulse to preserve the new gown from his sight until the big moment.

She stood behind the closed door astonished, then angered, and finally amused at what she had just done. Finally she said, “Just a minute.” She was barefooted. She lifted her skirts and sprinted upstairs.

A mischievous thought came to her as she changed. She would just punish him a little for having waited so long, for his assumption that she would still be available this late in the day, that she would have turned down other boys, waiting for him. She had been about to slip into her favorite dress. Instead she donned her shabbiest blue jeans and an old pair of sneakers which she left unlaced. Passing the bathroom on her way back downstairs, she ducked in and gave her face a rough scrubbing and swaddled her hair in a towel.

Tugging at her shirt to give it blowsiness, she called through the door, “Just a minute. What is it?”

He said, “I've come to tell you there's going to be a dance at our house tomorrow night and I—”

“Oh, I hope you've come to ask me!” she cried.

There was no answer for a moment. She was choking with smothered laughter. “Well,” he said, “yes. As a matter of fact, that is what I came for. I hope you don't already have a date for it?”

“Oh, who would ask little old me?” she said, and flung open the door.

“Thank you,” he said. If he even saw anything more of her than her eyes into which he looked steadily, what he saw caused no feeling to register on his face. “The dance is at nine. I'll call for you a little before that. May I ask what color dress you mean to wear?” His mother had told him to ask that, so he would know what color corsage to buy, or rather, what color not to buy.