Hunters (5 page)

Andrew was sickened. He had never seen
anything like it before, a man and a boy, washed to their elbows in
an innocent animal's blood, scooping out its innards and laughing
and joking at the same time. It repulsed him and it angered
him.

As he shuffled through the dead leaves, he
thought about all the things he might have done. He could have told
them what they were, immoral killers to murder an animal that had
never offended them; but he had not spoken a word against them. He
could have taken their camera and opened the back, ruining the
film; but he had carefully framed the shot he took to preserve the
bloody moment forever. He could have even lifted his rifle and shot
them both.

That was the plan, wasn't it? Whether today
or tomorrow, killing was on the itinerary. But there had been two
of them, both armed, and he was not used to guns, and he had been
too close. If he had shot one, the other could have gotten to
him.

But maybe he could shoot somebody else. Not
tomorrow or the day after, but today. Shoot them and leave them the
way they had planned, leave them like an animal.

In another fifteen minutes, Andrew might
have calmed down enough to see the foolishness of his haste. But
when he saw Pete Diffenderfer, his mind was full of fury and
vengeance for the deer he had just seen butchered.

Andrew stepped behind a thick-boled pine
tree, and peered around it at the man in the tree stand seventy
yards away. The man gave no indication that he had been seen.
Andrew slipped the glove off his right hand, put it into his coat
pocket, and wadded small bits of wax into his ears. Then he lifted
his rifle, a Ruger Model 77, 7mm Magnum, and leaned against the
tree. He placed his right cheek against the smooth walnut stock,
and looked through the Weaver scope with his right eye.

The man in the stand did not fill the field
of vision, but Andrew could make out certain details. The man was
older, in his sixties, had a little gray moustache, and wore
glasses with black frames. His booted feet dangled over the edge of
the stand.

How many deer had he killed and gutted over
the years? Andrew wondered. Whatever the number, now it was payback
time.

Andrew flicked off the safety, breathed in
icy air, leaned against the tree so that his forehead rubbed
roughly against the bark, moved his Ruger in a series of
infinitesimal motions until the plain of blaze orange was settled
directly under the scope's cross hair. Only then did he place his
bare finger on the cold metal of the trigger, let out half his
breath in a white puff, hold the rest, and begin, very gently, to
squeeze. His last thought before the rifle fired was that Jean
would be proud of him.

When he had exerted enough pressure on the
trigger, the firing pin descended, the powder ignited, the bullet
left the barrel and flew across the seventy yards in the merest
fraction of a second, meeting the man in the tree, expanding the
instant it struck the orange jacket, widening as it tore through
flesh and muscle and bone. The man flew backwards into a red cloud,
and fell from the tree, landing on the dry leaves below like a sack
of lime.

Andrew held his pose for a moment, the sound
of the explosion reverberating like a great gong. Then he operated
the bolt and lowered the rifle so that he still looked through the
scope at the man on the ground, ready to fire a second shot at the
hint of motion.

There was none. He had died so easily.
His legs just went out and he went down, Dad.
Yeah, just
that easy.

From the corner of his eye, Andrew had seen
the spent shell fly from the ejector, and it took him only a moment
to find the gleaming brass amid the floor of dead pine needles. He
dropped it into his pocket and walked to the tree stand, pulling
the wax wads from his ears. Although he listened intently, he heard
no other sounds, neither voices nor footsteps in dead leaves.

No, no one would come. No one would leave
their stands and jeopardize their own chances of making a kill. It
would be safe, safe to do, what did they call it? Oh yes, the field
dressing.

The sight of the dead man close up made
Andrew stop and breathe deeply for a moment as the forest seemed to
shimmer about him. It was incredible, he thought, the damage a
single, small projectile could do to a human body. The man had not
moved since he had fallen, and the glassy stare told Andrew he was
dead. Heart and lungs had been ripped through, and the blood must
have ceased its pumping to the brain instantly. He hoped the man
had felt little pain, only one, short, sharp, and savage, before he
lost consciousness and his life.

Andrew stood for a long time, looking down
at the first man he had ever killed, indeed ever even harmed. He
thought he had been ready for it, but nothing had prepared him for
this moment. He struggled to stop shaking telling himself it was
only the cold and that he could not be shaking from emotion because
he had none. He couldn't allow himself that luxury. It was what
Jean had told him, and he had repeated it to the others many times.
No feeling but will, no goal but the mission.

All right then. He had killed, and now he
must continue, be strong, finish the lesson, plant the first seeds
of legend and terror.

He took a final deep breath. There. He was
all right now, ready to do what had to be done.

He propped his Ruger against the tree that
held the stand, put on both gloves, and knelt by the side of the
dead man. He unsnapped the man's jacket, grasped his neck, hauled
him to a sitting position, and removed the sodden mass of cotton
shell and goose down. The hole in the man's back was greater than
Andrew had imagined.

He let the body flop back onto the bloody
leaves, and saw that some blood on the man's small moustache had
frozen. It looked as though he had cut his lip shaving.

Andrew took a horn-handled knife with a five
inch blade from its sheath, and tried not to think of this man
shaving, talking, laughing, tried to forget that what lay before
him was a human being, tried to think of it only as a slaughtered
animal, as the other hunters would think of the deer they had
shot.

He cut open the dead man's sweater, shirt,
and thermal undershirt, exposing the pallid flesh and the entrance
wound to the freezing air. He yanked the upper clothing off the
body, then removed the boots, socks, and belt, and sliced through
the waistband of the trousers, tugging them off, along with the
long underwear, until the corpse lay naked on the frozen bed of
leaves.

Andrew had watched, helpless and astounded,
as the father and son had done their field dressing, and now he
would try and recreate the procedure. Then they would see, and
realize, and tell the tale, so that everyone would know there were
avengers in the forest.

He hurried at his grisly task, more to be
done with the unpleasantness quickly than out of fear of discovery.
Though he knew the statistics of how many thousands of hunters were
in Pennsylvania's woods that day, to a man who had never lived
outside the L.A. city limits, he felt as isolated as Daniel
Day-Lewis in that Michael Mann Indian film.

After ten minutes he was almost finished, and had
just picked up his knife again to sever a stubborn piece of bowel,
when he heard a crunch of leaves behind him, and a voice. Andrew
turned his head and saw, twenty feet away, a man dressed in blaze
orange and forest green, wearing a name plate and a badge.

N
ed Craig had heard
the single shot from the south and gauged that the hunter would be
around a quarter hour's walk away. Ned would make sure that a buck
had been taken, if it was a clean hit. If it was a miss, he had
been heading south anyway.

When Ned saw the man bent over his kill, he
nearly called out a greeting. But something looked wrong. What lay
on the ground was not a deer. It was something red and white. Ned
walked more quietly, stepping on exposed rocks and patches of pine
needles that offered no crisp, betraying resistance.

When he saw what it was, he could not
believe it, and said, "God," and stepped on dry leaves. The
kneeling man turned then, and looked at him over his right
shoulder, and Ned could see his red and glistening hands and
forearms.

"What—" Ned began to say, and the man
twisted the other way, to his left, toward the tree against which
his rifle leaned, stretched, his left hand sliding on the ground as
he tried to grasp the rifle's grip with his wet, slippery right
hand. He came around toward Ned, one knee on the ground, left leg
extended, the barrel bobbing in his efforts to grasp the gun
securely.

Jesus
, Ned thought,
he's going to
shoot me
. But before the dark eye of the barrel could look at
Ned, he had yanked his .357 from its holster, cocked it, and fired
before the rifle stopped its motion. The sound of the shot hammered
his unprotected ears, and he pressed his eyes shut, waiting to feel
the man's bullet tear into him.

The answering shot assaulted his deafened
ears, but he felt no pain, and when he opened his eyes he saw the
man lying on the ground, still gripping his rifle, blood streaming
from a hole in his torn neck like a parasitic serpent escaping its
host.

Slowly Ned lowered his pistol and looked at
the two dead men. He felt as though he were watching a movie, as
though what had happened here could not possibly have happened. He
stood for a long time, unable to fathom what the man he had killed
had been doing to the naked corpse. The sight was obscene, a man
butchered and gutted like a deer, but with none of the care that a
hunter would expend on his kill's carcass.

Ned's bacon and eggs churned in his stomach,
and he turned away from the sight and vomited. After he had coughed
up the last sour bits, he turned back to the dead men and made
himself think about what to do next. The first thing he had to do
was get some help, someone to watch the bodies while he walked the
many miles back to his Blazer to call in. So he fired his pistol
three times into the air. Someone would be near enough to hear.

Then he picked up the mutilated man's bloody
jacket and draped it over his torn body, and put the other pieces
of clothing over the piles of flesh that had been removed from the
body. He knew about the importance of not disturbing a crime scene,
but common decency told him that no one other than a doctor or a
policeman should view this man's body. He tried to read the man's
name from the license on the back of his jacket, but an exit wound
from the bullet that had killed him had ripped it apart.

Ned did not touch the body of the man he had
shot other than to feel for a pulse to ascertain that he was dead.
The killer was lying on his back, so Ned could not see the name on
his hunting license, and he had no desire to burrow into the man's
pockets for identification. He did not want the man he killed to
have a name.

In another ten minutes, Ned loaded his
revolver and fired three more shots. A moment of panic went through
him when he thought that the man who had done this might have
friends in the forest with him, but then he told himself that there
surely could not be two people capable of such a thing here
today.

Finally a hunter came trudging through the
trees. Ned didn't know the man, and his hand moved gingerly toward
his pistol. But when the stranger's eyes grew wide at the sight of
the man Ned had shot, and his legs started to tremble, Ned guessed
that he had no connection to the murderer. "Jesus Christ," said the
stranger, "what happened?"

"This man," Ned said, nodding toward the
killer, "killed the man under the coat there, then tried to kill
me. I shot him."

The stranger walked over to the butchered
man, and looked from the covered corpse to the stained shirts and
trousers covering the smaller piles. "What are...?"

"He...took him apart," Ned said. "Like an
animal."

"Oh my God...oh my God...who is he?"

"I don't know."

"My friend Pete was hunting here. Right
here," the stranger said dully.

"Look at his face if you want."

The man didn't say anything for a moment.
"That's his coat," he said, looking down at the sodden body. "Aw
Jeez, I know that's his coat."

"I'm sorry," Ned said. "I'm sorry for your
friend. Listen now, I need you to stay here while I go radio this
in, get the police here. Can you do that?" The man nodded shortly.
"What's your name?"

"Bob." He sniffed. "Bob Allen."

"All right, Bob. It might be an hour or two you'll
be alone out here. If anybody comes by, try to keep them with you.
I'll be back as soon as I can."

I
t took Ned an hour
of walking to get to his Blazer at the end of the rutted earth lane
that led into the forest. Larry Moxon, the Law Enforcement
Supervisor of Pennsylvania's north central region, was at his St.
Mary's home when Ned called in. Ned told Larry that there had been
a murder, and that he had been forced to shoot the killer. Ned
didn't give Larry any chance to respond, but went on with his
location and a request to call the police.

When Ned finally stopped talking, Larry was
quiet for a moment, then asked, "Ned, are you okay?"

"I haven't been harmed."

"I mean
okay
-okay. You
sound...funny."

"Larry, I just killed a guy. I shot him in
the neck. He's dead. No, I'm not okay, I feel like shit, this is
the ugliest thing I've ever seen. There. Happy?"

"I'm sorry, buddy. I'm calling now. I'll
come with them, I know where you mean. You want me to call
Megan?"

"No."

Ned waited another forty-five minutes until
the police and the medics came in two off-road vehicles. Ned
recognized Bill Fisher and Mark White, two St. Mary's cops, in the
front seat of the police car. Larry Moxon and Ben Sloan, a doctor
at St. Mary's Medical Center and the local M.E., were in the back.
They picked up Ned and he told them what had happened as they drove
as far as they could down the rutted lane until a fallen fir made
it impassable. Then the two medics in the second vehicle took one
stretcher and the officers took the other, and they walked deeper
into the woods, following Ned.