Reny’s, and their ‘union suits’, the one-piece garments of underwear that would keep them warm, even when wet – had been stored overnight in sealed bags of cedar to mask their human scent, and they had eschewed bacon and sausage patties in favor of oatmeal for breakfast. They had food in sealed containers, and each carried a bottle in which to pee as well as a flask from which to drink. (‘Don’t want to go getting those two mixed up,’ Paul would always say, and Harlan would laugh dutifully.)
So they had pleaded like children for Harlan’s daughter to allow them to use her car, and she had eventually relented. She had recently returned to live with her parents following the break-up of her marriage, and spent most of her time mooning around the house, as far as Paul could tell. He had always considered her to be a good kid, though, and thought her an even better one after she handed over her car keys to them.
It was already after three when they parked the car and entered the woods.
They spent the first hour or so just jawing and giving each other the pickle, heading for some old clearcut that they knew which now had second growth timbers beloved of deer: alders, birches, and ‘popples’, as men of their age tended to call poplar trees. They each carried a Winchester 30-06, and moved softly on their rubber-soled LL Bean boots. Harlan had a compass, but he barely glanced at it. They knew where they were going. Paul carried matches, a rope to drag the carcass, and two pairs of household gloves to wear while dressing the animal and to protect against ticks. Harlan had the knives and shears in his pack.
Harlan and Paul practiced what was known as ‘still hunting’: not for them the use of stands, or canoes, or groups of men to drive the deer onto their guns. They relied solely on their eyes and their experience, seeking traces of buck sign: the rubs where the bucks were drawn to smooth-barked aromatic trees like pine and balsam and spruce; the deer beds where they lay down; and the desire lines that the deer used to traverse the shortest distance between two points in the woods, thereby conserving their energy. As it was now afternoon, they knew the deer would be moving to low ground where the cold air would drive scents down, so they walked parallel to the ridge lines, Harlan seeking trace on the ground while Paul kept an eye on the surrounding woods for movement.
After Harlan came upon red hairs caught on some blades of grass, and signs of big deer rub on a mature balsam, both men grew silent. The hunt drew on, the urgency of it growing as the light dimmed, but it was Paul who caught first sight of the deer: a big nine-point buck, probably weighing close on two hundred pounds. By the time Paul spotted him the buck’s tail was already raised high in alarm, and it was preparing to run, but it was only thirty feet away from him, if that.
Paul went for the shot, but he rushed it. He saw the deer falter and stumble as the bullet struck, and then it turned and fled.
It was such a spectacular miss that he would scarcely have believed it if he hadn’t witnessed it with his own eyes, the kind of misfire he usually associated with neophyte hunters from away who fancied themselves as wilderness men even while their fingers still bore the inkstains of their office jobs. He’d known more than one guide who’d been forced to finish off a wounded animal after his client, or ‘sport’, had failed to find the mark, the sport lacking the energy, the guts, or the decency to follow the trail of the wounded animal in order to put it out of its misery. Back in the day, they’d kept a blacklist of such sports, and guides were discreetly warned of the risks of accompanying them into the woods. Hell, Paul Scollay himself had been among those who’d been forced to track a wounded deer and finish it off, hating the suffering of the beast, the waste of its life force, and the stain that the slow manner of its dying was destined to leave upon his soul.
But now he had become just such a man, and as he watched the agonized buck vanish into the dark woods, he could barely speak.
‘Jesus,’ he said