Poachers (2 page)

When the Wiggins brothers pedaled up on their rusty bicycles—they were stringy, sun-yellowed boys who smelled like sweat and fish and never wore shirts or shoes in summer, who lived a mile away down a dirt road in the woods—Jeff and I would toss our dolls into the bushes and pretend to be cleaning up a mess in the backyard.

“Wanna go fishin’?” Kent Wiggins would ask, stuffing his lower lip with Skoal. His father worked for the lumber mill, and Kent would get a job there when he turned eighteen. I envied them the ease with which they accepted and handled their lives, the way they spit between their teeth, flicked a rod, fired a rifle.

Jeff and I always went wherever they asked us to go—I was afraid of being laughed at and being called a mama’s boy for saying no, and Jeff enjoyed the fishing. And sitting on the trestle over the Blowout, watching the Wigginses and my little brother pull in catfish after catfish, I’d long for my G.I. Joe, and hate the longing.

Once, when I was newly
fifteen in Kmart with ten birthday

dollars to spend, Dad came up beside me.

“You could buy a hunting knife,” he whispered.

“Gerald…” my mother warned.

He let go of my shoulders, put his hands in his pockets.

“He wants to get a new outfit for his G.I. Joe,” Mom said to Dad.

I’d never felt more like a pussy.

So the hell with it, I thought, and headed for the tall line of fishing rods I could see beyond the toy aisle. Dad fell into step beside me. He let me shave the bristly hairs off his wrist in search of the sharpest knife while Mom stood with her arms folded near the stink bait, glaring into space. At the checkout counter, I watched Dad add another five to my ten dollars for the Old Timer Sharpfinger I’d picked. When we left the store, he had his arm around me.

As Dad drove us home, I asked him if he wished I didn’t play with G.I. Joes. Mom sat far across the long seat, looking out her window. At my question, her head jerked toward Dad, who

stopped whistling. He glanced at her before catching my eye in the rearview mirror.

“No,” he said. “I’m real proud of you, son. I’m glad you’ve got…imagination.”

When Jeff killed his first
buck, a spike, I was there.

Despite being younger, Jeff has always been a much better shot than I am. I’d gotten Dad’s sixteen-gauge at Christmas, but Jeff had unwrapped a Marlin thirty-thirty lever-action rifle. The fact that I was eighteen and still using a shotgun didn’t go unnoticed—the boy with the weakest aim always gets the scattergun because its spray of buckshot gives more chances for a hit than a single bullet. Never mind that my sixteen-gauge was an antique that had belonged to my grandfather, a rare Foxboro crafted of blued Sterlingworth steel, a side-by-side model that broke open behind the walnut stock. The shells slid in and the breech closed with a muffled snap, a sound more like cloth than metal. It’s a gun I can take apart—barrel, forearm, stock—and reassemble in thirty seconds. A gun worth over two thousand dollars. Yet in the woods, I was ashamed of it.

The high school closed on opening day of deer season, and on that first morning in 1980, Jeff and I sat in opposite tree stands—small seats built overlooking a wide field where deer came to graze—and from mine I watched my brother sight me with the scope of his rifle. I sat rigid, silent, ready for a deer, while a hundred yards away, Jeff waved at me. Gave me the finger. He pissed from off his stand,
twice
. He yawned. Slept. But as one hour became two, I stayed stock-still—I didn’t have Jeff’s instinct for knowing when to be ready, for being relaxed until it was time to raise your gun and aim. My limbs began to tingle, the blood

slowing in my veins like a creek icing up. I didn’t blink for so long that the woods blurred, and I began to feel that I was part of them, the trees and the leaves taking on a buzzing resonance and losing their sharp edges, the buzzing increasing like a hornet loose inside my head, and for an instant I hung there, the center of something, seeing from my ears, hearing from my eyes, the world around me a tangible glow of brindle noise. Then I blinked.

And from across the field came Jeff’s gunshot.

From then on, I insisted
on sitting in Jeff’s lucky stand. A year later, early in the 1981 season, the sixteen-gauge in my lap, I was there, waiting. Tense. It was dusk, and I was losing hope again. I’d been hunting like a fanatic—once or twice a day. I’d stopped taking books with me. I’d seen deer and even missed a doe, the fabled buck fever claiming me with violent seizures, my gun barrel shaking, teeth clacking.

Now, on the lucky stand, I didn’t see the deer when it walked into the field. You seldom do: they just appear. And if it’s a buck, like this one, you notice the antlers first, the sleekest, sharpest things in the world, not bone but blood vessels dried and hard as stone. On the stand, I lifted the jittering shotgun, slowly, thumbing the safety, the buck less than twenty yards from where I sat trembling.

I aimed, blood roaring in my ears, and fired, not feeling the kick.

The buck raised his head, still chewing. His antlers seemed to unwind as he looked around, wondering where that blast had come from. At some point, I remembered that I had another barrel, and I began pulling the trigger again, before finally realizing that I had to pull the
second
trigger. When I fired, the deer

buckled and recovered, then vanished, replaced by the noise of something tearing through the dead leaves behind me, a painful sound hacking down the gully.

From across the field, Jeff’s voice: “Kill anything?”

I descended the ladder, my hands shaking. At the bottom, I struggled to break open the gun, and shells from my pocket fell to the ground. I reloaded, and, nearly crying, slid to the bottom of the gully.

The deer—thank God—was there. Still alive, but down. His side caving in and out and a hind leg quivering. Approaching him, I counted his points—six, seven, eight—an eight-point! What I was supposed to do now, what Dad and my uncles had drilled into me, was to cautiously approach the buck, draw my knife and cut his throat, watch him bleed to death. But in my excitement, I forgot this. Instead, I moved to within three feet of the deer’s flagging side and flipped the sixteen-gauge’s safety off. I put a finger on each of the shotgun’s triggers, and, holding the gun at my hip, pulled them at the same time.

That night, my entire family admired the deer lying in the back of Dad’s pickup, its black eyes turning foggy. It’s traditional to rub blood on a boy’s face when he kills his first deer, but Dad had a lesson to teach. I’d gut-shot the buck so badly that a lot of meat had been ruined. The hole I’d blown in his side was big enough to put my head in, and Dad came up behind me and did exactly that. When he pulled me out by my neck, I was almost sick, but I managed to hold it, like a man. That was when everyone gathered around me, my uncles and Jeff clapping my back, Mom and my aunts hugging me, trying not to get blood on their blouses.

When I tell this story, I end by saying that nothing except Beth Ann accepting my marriage proposal on a warm wineand-cheese

afternoon in Paris has surpassed the feeling I had that night. As Dad guided me through cleaning the deer, peeling down its skin, trimming away the small white pockets of fat, my eight-year-old cousin approached us. When the boy saw the buck’s bloody, empty body cavity, he tumbled away, gagging. Dad rolled his eyes at me. Then we began to quarter the red meat, my face and neck still bloody, my hair stiff with gore.

Near the close of the
same season, I sat on a wooded hill in a plot of land on which my father, when he sold it, had been wise enough to retain the mineral and hunting rights. It was only two months after I’d killed my eight-point, but now things were different because Jeff had bragged about the buck at school. Whenever I told the story, I always made myself seem foolish by giving the deer both barrels at such close range. People seemed to like that. I was discovering the power of self-depreciation and didn’t mind being laughed at as long as everyone knew I’d killed the deer. And they did: Coach Horn had led me to his office behind the gym and shown me the antlers on his walls. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t a pussy. No. Sitting on the hillside that evening, I was a man who’d enjoyed his first taste of blood and who wanted more.

It was a mild January day, the leaves crisp, stirred by the wind to an almost constant rustle. Suddenly, an even bigger eight-point buck had materialized at the bottom of the ravine, stealing among the live oaks. First I saw his rack of antlers as he nosed along the ground, eating acorns. Then his shoulders. His flat tail. The color of dead leaves, he blended so well into the hillside that I only saw him when he moved. My heart began to rattle, and, as if he heard it, the buck raised his head and looked right at me. He lifted his

nose and snorted, his nostrils gleaming. For a moment he seemed to vanish, to have never been there, but before I could panic I saw him again as he took a step away from me.

Somehow, I did everything right—aimed when he put his head down, squeezed instead of jerked the trigger—and
still
damn near missed. My buckshot pellets sprayed the deer across his neck, face and antlers, chipping them, bringing bloody beads across his cheeks, putting out one eye and—we saw this later—injuring his spine so that he only had use of his front legs, the back two paralyzed. I stood and watched him drag himself through the leaves, trying to get away, pawing and stumbling down the gully-side.

From the next hollow over, Jeff called, “Kill anything?”

I half fell to the bottom of the ravine. The deer lay still, just a slight rippling of his big leathery sides, blood glistening on his black nose. While I circled him, gun ready, he watched me, his head up, turning to keep me in sight. One eye was red and bleeding, but the other remained bright and clear. From over the hill, I heard Jeff crashing through the leaves. I knew he’d heard my shot—my single shot—and I didn’t want him to hear another.

Why didn’t I cut the deer’s throat? There was no shame in that, and it was the safest way to avoid the buck’s deadly antlers. But instead I did something that shocks me to this day. I dropped the sixteen-gauge and drew my Sharpfinger. I approached the deer, watching him follow me with his good eye. Carefully, the way you’d reach to pin a snake with your foot, I stuck out my leg and put my boot on the buck’s neck, forcing his head down. I knelt on top of him, straddled his back. Now I heard his ragged breathing, felt his heat on my thighs. I took one thick tine of his antlers in my right hand and turned his good eye away so he couldn’t see. He didn’t resist. I raised the knife and began to stab

him in the shoulder where I knew his heart was. The buck barely moved beneath me, and the blade cut cleanly, as if I were sticking soft dirt. I stabbed him twelve times, in what I thought a buckshot pattern would be. Then I laid my hand on the deer’s hot shoulder, over the wounds I’d made, and felt that his heart had stopped.

By the time Jeff came running down the hill, I’d begun my first solo act of field dressing. It was—and still is—the biggest buck anyone in my family had killed, weighing over 220, seventy pounds more than I weighed at the time.

Later, as we hoisted the deer up beneath our skinning tree, Dad noticed the holes in the buck’s side. He nodded to Jeff and me. “Now boys,” he said, “
that
was a good shot.” With my knife, I made a series of cuts along the deer’s hind legs, and Jeff and Dad helped me peel down the buck’s fur—a noise like Velcro makes—to reveal the nearly purple carcass beneath.

Night had fallen, and with a flashlight Dad looked at the deer’s side. He bent, examining it more closely, working his finger into one of the knife slits. Then he stared me down.

“Son,” he said, “is that what I think it is?”

I didn’t answer.

He reached for the deer’s head and lifted it by the giant, chipped, eight-point rack, a set of antlers so big I could step into it like pants. He grabbed me by the small of my back and jammed me into my dead deer. He brought the antlers against my stomach and pushed the points in so hard they hurt.

“Do you know what ‘eviscerate’ means?” he asked me.

Now, at the Blowout, the
hunter approaches me on the trestle. I expect it’s one of the Wiggins brothers, and here I am again, as gunless and guilty and foolish as if I’m holding a doll. But as the

man draws closer, a scoped rifle in the crook of his arm, I see from his expensive camouflage, fluorescent orange hat and face paint that he’s not from around here. The men who live in these parts hunt in work clothes, old boots and faded camo jackets passed down from their fathers or grandfathers. They would never wear face paint or an orange hat. When I hunted I used to carry such a cap in my pocket in case I ran into a game warden, but most of the hunters I grew up admiring simply never ran into game wardens. These men raise their own coon and squirrel dogs. Their rifles have taped stocks. Although they often kill out of season or at night, they usually eat what they kill. I admire them, and so I feel a flicker of distaste for this outsider.

“Hello,” I say to the fellow, probably a lawyer from Mobile. “Kill anything?”

“Get out of here,” he says.