ears ringing. He only half registered the size of his smile, but he knew it was one of the most genuine things he’d experienced in a long while. He studied the kill for several seconds, allowing himself to enjoy the moment before turning to Artie, who had stood and was now at CJ’s side.
“Nice shot,” the more experienced hunter said as he looked down on the immobile form of the buck. Then he winked at CJ. “I’m glad it’s you who shot it because you’re the one who will have to drag it back up this hill.”
CJ thought he could drag the deer all the way to Canada.
“Is there another way down there?” he asked.
“If you want to walk about a mile,” Artie said. “Otherwise, the only way is straight down.”
CJ went to the edge and peered down. It looked a lot steeper than it had earlier. With a shrug he started down, only later realizing that Artie wasn’t accompanying him. When he raised an eyebrow in the other man’s direction, Artie said, “I think my knees and I will be fine right here.”
CJ could respect that, but he was not about to allow his canine friend to get off as easily.
“Let’s go,” he said, and Thor proved more than willing. He bounded to the edge of the bluff, took a leap that CJ would have thought was ill-advised, even for a creature with four legs, and hopped down the steep slope, stopping a few paces past CJ. He turned and looked back up the hill at CJ, tongue hanging, and CJ thought a few choice words in the dog’s direction.
It took a while, but he made it down, wondering the whole time how Artie was able to do this, much less drag the kill back up. The question perplexed him enough that he asked it.
“I usually come in with an ATV,” Artie called down to him.
“Now you tell me,” CJ muttered to himself.
Thor reached the buck first, but—as had CJ when he’d tried to defer the shot to Artie—the dog seemed to intuit that this was CJ’s kill and so stopped a few paces off, letting his master close the distance.
The deer, which had taken the shot in the neck, was likely dead before it hit the ground. CJ knelt beside it, away from both the antlers and its sharp hooves, and placed a hand on its back, feeling the coarse hair beneath his bare fingers. Then he set the gun down and got to work.
While it had been many years since he’d field-dressed a deer, there were skills one retained even with their long neglect. When he was finished, his hands were red with blood. He cleaned them with water from his canteen and dried them using his coat. Slinging the gun behind his back, he grabbed hold of the deer by the antlers and began dragging it toward the hill.
As he was on his way back up, he chided himself for thinking it was difficult going down. Up above, Artie stood there smiling.
Chapter 18
CJ had always believed that hunting was a teaching experience, that there was much that could be learned about life by the hours spent in solitude, pitting one’s skills and patience against nature. Sometimes, though, the teaching moment could be something wholly unexpected, and that became clear after he and Artie returned to town with their prize. After dropping the deer off at the butcher’s, and as Artie returned home to rest the legs that had finally started to give out on him during the hike back to the cabin, something the older man had said back on the bluff came back to CJ : “The only time it’s frustrating is when I know they are there and they won’t step out.”
It crystallized things for CJ, and served to chastise him for sitting so long on the thing that was his supposed reason for remaining in Adelia in the first place. Even if all of the other considerations—his impending divorce, the warrant, and the coming lawsuit from the editor of the Southern Review—had not formed a cabal to keep him in Adelia, he was still supposed to be working on the article. And as Sister Jean Marie had intimated, it was spite that had served as the impetus for the article, and the same which would now carry him through to completion.
When he walked into the library this time he noticed right away that the display that held his books had been dusted, and