Winter Run (10 page)

Silver Hill was at the top of the hill, the home place in the center of a six-hundred-acre farm, which was almost all pasture. We lived at the foot of the hill in the house my father had converted from a corncrib and rented from Professor James.

My bonding with the land came about because Matthew Tanner was close at hand and willing to take on an impatient white kid as a disciple. I spent all the time I could with Matthew. I was a nuisance, but it was his nature to be giving, so he put up with my endless questions about the land and wildlife. He only sent me home once—when I set a pile of leaves on fire before he was ready.

Matthew and Sally lived in a cottage behind the house at Silver Hill. Matthew took care of the little home farm and the gardens. Sally took care of the big house. She churned her own butter and rolled it with wooden paddles into those little round balls like you
think you’d get at Buckingham Palace. But she didn’t like kids.

After each storm that winter, walks to the village became adventures. There were the tracks of possums and raccoons and foxes. Sometimes I saw the animals themselves making their way down the plowed road rather than floundering around in the deep snow of the fields. Nearly every day, deer stood in the lee of a huge rock up the hill from the creek that paralleled the lane. When they saw me, they leapt up the hillside on their springy legs and disappeared in a spray of snow.

Then the dogs came into our lives—apparently from nowhere. I was enormously pleased whenever I saw them on the road. There was the tingle of danger about them. Even though I always whistled and called out, they looked at me and ran, with their tails tucked and their heads raised like wild animals. There were four of them. Nothing had been done about them because the snow was so deep. It was hard enough just to get the chores done, let alone trying to kill wild dogs that disappeared whenever you looked for them.

When the first thaw set in and it was easier to get around, the dogs killed two grown sheep at the Joneses in broad daylight while the family was in the village shopping. A few days after the sheep were killed, I heard the dogs barking on the run over the ridge behind the rock. It wasn’t the long, drawn-out note of the coonhounds; this sound was sharp and hoarse and staccato. I could see Bat on the other hill,
with her big ears cocked, listening to them also. In the mist rising from the thaw, she looked all gray and weathered, like a ghost watching over the land.

The first dog, a tan longhaired bitch, came down the ridge, mute, and crouched beneath the overhang of the rock. Then a doe came into sight, panting and weaving from side to side, her tongue hanging out—exhausted. The three dogs behind her were trotting, but still a little cautious. The tan bitch shot out from beside the rock and grabbed the doe by the tongue as she went by, slamming into her sideways. Down they went and the other three piled on top. The doe let out a long bleat as the dogs growled and struggled with her.

I crossed the creek on a game trail and edged my way up the bank for a closer look. When the tan bitch raised her head and saw me, unlike most animals, she locked her yellow eyes onto mine for a second. Then she rose up a little, pulled back her lips, and snarled from down low in her chest. She scared the hell out of me, for a fact. I jumped back across the creek and ran down the lane and up the hill to Silver Hill, looking for Matthew.

He was milking. When I ran into the little barn and smelled the cow and heard her chewing and the milk swishing in the bucket, I came to my senses and blurted out what had happened. Matthew sat on the little stool, his hands on the cow’s teats. As I told the story, he gripped the teats harder and harder until the cow flinched. That was all he showed, sitting
there in his own quietness, his leather baseball cap pushed back from his broad forehead.

When he finished milking, we got into the pickup and drove down to our lane with the single-barrel 12-gauge resting on the seat and floorboards between us.

“We’ve got to kill them!” I said. “Just like they killed the doe—don’t we?”

“We’ll see,” he said. “Ain’t much chance we can get around downwind without them seeing us. And, anyway, the son-of-a-bitches probably won’t stay. Just kill and go after eating a little gut.” It was the first time I’d ever seen him really angry or heard him use bad language.

At the turn, he stopped the truck. We crossed the creeks and eased our way along in the shelter of the bank until we were close to the rock. Suddenly, he jumped up the bank, pulled back the hammer, and fired at the tan bitch before I realized that the dogs were still there, growling and tugging at the carcass. He hit her—knocked her down for a second—but she didn’t squeal like you would have thought a dog would. All she did was let out a sharp little bark, and all four were gone before he could reload.

We stood there for a moment, silent, staring at the ripped open doe. Then he said, “C’mon, Charlie, we got to skin out this deer, and I need you to help me.”

When we were finished, we loaded up the carcass and the hide and drove the half mile to the village and pulled into the parking lot, with the dirty snow piled all around. The potbelly in the store was glowing and
people were talking before they went home. Matthew told the story of me and the doe, while everyone nodded approval.

Then Fred Henry spoke up. “It’s the snow what done it, Matthew. What with not being able to get around the farm much less go hunting. But now it’s eased up, and we got to kill ’em. You know about the sheep. Now listen to what happened to me night before last.” Fred became declamatory.

“Well, there I was, sitting, looking out the window, listening to the radio, and the moon full, and me just looking into the moonlight. And all of a sudden the cow in my back pasture throwed up her head and took off with her calf just flying and me wondering what the devil’s going on.

“Then I seen the dogs. They come across from my back fence. I got the gun and headed for the pasture. But when that tan bitch seen me, she give out with that little bark you talked about and the whole bunch throwed up their heads and were gone. But they come back in the night, because the next morning that calf was laying dead in the middle of a patch of churned up snow.

“They may be just dogs, but they’ve sure God gone bad, and we got to kill ’em, Matthew. I ain’t never in my life seen anything like that tan bitch. She looks at you like she knows more than you do. And now that they can bring down a wild doe, running in a pack, Lord knows what will be next. Trouble is they ain’t scared like they was wild. They just come and kill.”

When Fred had finished, Matthew turned to Fred’s brother, Luke, who was the older of the brothers and was section foreman on the C & O Railroad. He was tall and looked like a black Paul Bunyan. He wore hunting boots with his trousers tucked in and a stocking cap and a mackinaw. The brothers dressed the same and looked the same, except Fred talked and was short. Luke was quiet and he kept hounds, hounds that would run anything you put them onto.

“Do you reckon it’s eased up enough to bring the hounds in the morning, Luke?” Matthew asked. “I know where they’re laying up.”

This revelation turned heads, mine included.

Luke nodded and Matthew continued, “I’ll get Leonard and Robert. You and Fred bring the hounds. The old summerhouse foundations is where they’re staying when they ain’t hunting. I seen them the other night and tracked them in the snow. You and Fred can walk in with the hounds, and we’ll be at the three crossings; and if you jump them, at least one of us will get a shot most likely. The wind might be wrong, but we got to chance it. Maybe they’ll run the country and not the wind.”

Then he said to me, “Reckon your daddy would come, Charlie?”

I said I was sure he would, bursting with pride once again that my Pennsylvania-born father, the virtual foreigner in that land, would be asked to help. He had an out-of-character and uncanny ability with a .22, so when precision shooting with no side effects was
required, he was asked. Like the time a bat bothered a lady at evening prayer and Daddy was commissioned to shoot it and not mess up the church. I remember him sitting in the front pew on the Epistle side, dressed in a Sunday suit, waiting while the bat flew around and finally landed under the eave on the dark pine plate. I remember him bringing up the rifle real slow and hitching his body around to make the shot less awkward, hearing his breath ease out, the little crack from the short-short, and the bat falling dead. And I remember wanting to cheer, but being afraid to because we were in church. Yes, I was sure he would come.

Matthew took me home. My father came to the door and stood there kind of skinny and awkward with the backlight making shadows across his hawk nose and deep-set eyes. He agreed that something had to be done, particularly in the light of the doe being killed. He would be glad to come, and it would be fine to meet at the store at six.

It was a restless night—probably for my father, too. From the distance of years, I remember him as always completely cool, but it is an unlikely memory.

The next morning, they were waiting for us around a fire they had built next to the hog-scalding tub at the branch. The hounds were baying in excitement in the hound boxes on the pickups. Besides Luke and Fred and Leonard, there was Robert Paine. He drank some and had done time on the road gang and, as I’ve mentioned before whenever something big happened Robert was always there. And, of course, Matthew, who knew
what to do even though he’d never seen such a winter or heard of a pack of wild dogs before. You could see in the firelight the tension etched into their shadowy faces. It had been a long winter.

Luke and Fred and the hounds headed for the burnt-out summerhouses above Silver Hill where the ridge that ran almost to the village began. Robert and Leonard went to the crossing behind the barn at our house. They put my father halfway down the ridge, above where I had seen the doe killed. Matthew and I would be at the end closest to the village. Matthew had Professor James’s old double-barrel 16-gauge. We crossed the creek and stood next to the rock out-cropping at the end of the ridge. We couldn’t actually see my father’s stand, but sound carried well so we would know what was happening if they came our way. There was a rock pile at the other end of the ridge, across the lane from where the summerhouses had been, and that was where the dogs were spending the nights. Luke said later that before the hounds were a hundred yards from the rocks, they put their noses to the ground and began waving their tails, showing that they had caught the scent of the dogs’ night lines. They could see the bloody tracks of the bitch in what was left of the snow. When the hounds started whining and pulling at the leads, the men turned them loose. Almost at once they burst into full cry. Those dogs may have just been dogs, but they sure smelled wild. Luke and Fred looked up to see the quarry crossing the lane in a tight bunch, heading south, up
the wind, straight away from us. Two things saved the situation. The first was that they were heading for unfamiliar territory. And the second was old Bat. The dogs had veered a little to the east, and just as it looked like the show was over, or would never start, there came a bellow so loud that Matthew and I heard it at the other end of the ridge. There is nothing on earth that sounds as disgruntled as a pissed-off mule. And old Bat was really pissed.

Having escaped for whatever reason, Bat had decided to go a new way and had ambled down the lane toward the lake where the pipe cattle guard was across it so trucks could cross but cows couldn’t. When she got to the cattle guard, she walked right into the thing up to her knees and hocks and was stuck. Being a sensible mule, she didn’t struggle, she bellowed. And that turned the dogs back to the northeast, heading down wind, toward us.

So with old Bat bellowing and the black and tans throwing their tongues like the end of the world as the hunt became a sight chase, my stomach jerked up into a knot that grew even tighter when we heard shots. Leonard and then Robert had let go with their single-barrel 12-gauges and killed the first two. In spite of the shots, the last two kept running hard downwind rather than risk making the turn back into unfamiliar country. So they went right past my father. The crack of the .22 long rifle hollow point sounded and another one went down.

This left the last one for Matthew and me, and him
with the double barrel. It was the tan bitch. As she rounded the end of the ridge with the hounds in hot pursuit and the winter funneling down to that moment, she looked back and hesitated as if to make sure the whole thing was for real and not just a game and maybe we could go home now. Matthew fired once and this time she didn’t get up.

As I held on to the sleeve of his old denim coat, trying not to cry and looking back and forth from the bitch to Matthew, I could feel the tension so hot in him I thought for a second he might shoot her again. But as we stood there watching the light go out of her eyes and the blood spreading around her like a snow cone, I felt him ease and saw his eyes change and soften. And when I looked again she was dead.

The wind had stopped and beneath the leaden winter sky the voice of a single crow filled the echoed silence of the morning. The hounds went over to smell the bitch’s body, to be sure of what it was they had been running. When the others came up, there wasn’t much to be said—running dogs with hounds had a bad feel to it, but at least now they were gone.

All that was left to do was free old Bat. Matthew and I agreed to meet up at the cattle guard just as soon as he finished milking. We figured she could last that long because it was not her nature to struggle, and she had gotten tired of bellowing. The rescue turned out to be quite a job. What happened was that after the affront of our not coming to get her immediately, when we finally did arrive to save her, she wouldn’t budge. It
was one of those soft winter, late mornings with the clouds low and smooth when sound carries and there is no wind and the temperature is about fifty degrees. The hillside was like an auditorium with wonderful acoustics and Matthew and Bat and me as the characters in some comic farce.