“Yes, they had a little cabin up there. Lived off raccoons and weeds. Then old Jane had this baby, only one they ever had. Thought a lot of it, couldn’t do enough for it, but it didn’t survive their care and when it was only a few months old it died.”
Stong, like a petulant tenor, turned away then and arranged the dimes in the cash register. The hunters rubbed their soft hands along the counter and begged for the rest of the story. Hawkheel himself wondered how it would come out.
“Well, sir, they couldn’t bear to lay that baby away in the ground, so they put it in a five-gallon jar of pure alcohol. My own grandfather—used to stand right here behind the counter where I’m standing now—sold ’em the jar. We used to carry them big jars. Can’t get ’em any more. They set that jar with the baby on a stump in front of their cabin the way we might set out a plaster duck on the lawn.” He would pause a moment for good effect, then say, “The stump’s still there.”
They asked him to draw maps on the back of paper bags and went up onto the Antler to stare at the stump as if the impression of the jar had been burned into it by holy fire. Stong, with a laugh like a broken cream separator, told Hawkheel that every stick from that cut maple was in his woodshed. For each lie he heard, Hawkheel took three extra books.
All winter long Hawkheel kept digging away at the book mine in the barn, putting good ones at the bottom of the deepest pile so no one else would find them, cautiously buying only a few each week.
“Why, you’re getting to be my best customer, Leverd,” said Stong, looking through the narrow, handmade Dutch pages of John Beever’s Practical Fly-fishing, which Hawkheel guessed was worth $200 on the collector’s market, but for which Stong wanted only fifty cents. Hawkheel was afraid Stong would feel the quality of paper, notice that it was a numbered copy, somehow sense its rarity and value. He tried a diversion.
“Bill! You’ll be interested that last week I seen the heaviest buck I seen in many years. He was pawing through the leaves about thirty yards from My Place.”
In Chopping County “My Place” meant the speaker’s private deer stand. It was a county of still hunting, and good stands were passed from father to son. Hawkheel’s Place on the Antler regularly gave him big deer, usually the biggest deer in Feather River. Stong’s old Place in the comfortable pine was useless, discovered by weekend hunters from out of state who shot his bucks and left beer cans under the tree while he tended the store. They brought the deer to be weighed on Stong’s reporting scales, bragging, not knowing they’d usurped his stand, while he smiled and nodded. Stong had not even had a small doe in five years.
“Your Place up on the Antler, Leverd?” said Stong, letting the cover of the Beever fall closed. “Wasn’t that over on the south slope?”
“No, it’s in that beech stand on the shoulder. Too steep for flatlanders to climb so I do pretty good there. A big buck. I’d say he’d run close to one-eighty, dressed.”
Stong raked the two quarters toward him and commenced a long lie about a herd of white deer that used to live in the swamp in the old days, but his eyes went back to the book in Hawkheel’s hands.
The long fine fishing days began a few weeks later, and Hawkheel decided to walk the high northeast corner of the county looking for new water. In late summer he found it.
At the head of a rough mountain pass a waterfall poured into a large trout pool like champagne into a wine glass. Images of clouds and leaves lay on the slowly revolving surface. Dew, like crystal insect eggs, shone in the untrodden moss along the stream. The kingfisher screamed and clattered his wings as Hawkheel played a heavy rainbow into the shallows. In a few weeks he came to think that since the time of the St. Francis Indians, only he had ever found the way there.
As August waned Hawkheel grew possessive of the pool and arranged stones and twigs when he could not come for several days, searching later for signs of their disarray from trespassing feet. Nothing was ever changed, except when a cloudburst washed his twigs into a huddle.
One afternoon the wind came up too strong to cast from below the pool, and Hawkheel took off his shoes and stockings and crept cautiously onto the steep rock slab above the waterfall. He gripped his bare white toes into the granite fissures, climbing the rough face. The wind blew his hair up the wrong way and he felt he must look like the kingfisher.
From above the pool he could see the trout swimming smoothly in the direction of the current. The whole perspective of the place was new; it was as if he were seeing it for the first time. There was the back of the dead spruce and the kingfisher’s hidden entrance revealed. There, too, swinging from an invisible length of line wound around a branch stub, was a faded red and white plastic bobber that the Indians had not left.
“Isn’t anything safe any more?” shouted Hawkheel, coming across the rock too fast. He went down hard and heard his knee crack. He cursed the trout, the spruce, the rock, the invader of his private peace, and made a bad trip home leaning on a forked stick.
Urna brought over hot suppers until he could get around and do for himself again. The inside of the trailer was packed with books and furniture and the cramped space made him listless. He got in the habit of cooking only every three or four days, making up big pots of venison stew or pea soup and picking at it until it was used up or went bad.
He saw in the mirror that he looked old. He glared at his reflection and asked, “Where’s your medicine bottle and sweater?” He thought of his mother who sat for years in the rocker, her thick, ginger-shellacked cane hooked over the arm, and fled into his books, reading until his eyes stung and his favorites were too familiar to open. The heavy autumnal rain hammered on the trailer and stripped the leaves from the trees. Not until the day before deer season was he well enough to drive up to Stong’s feed store for more books.
He went through the familiar stacks gloomily, keeping his weight off the bad leg and hoping to find something he’d overlooked among the stacks of fine-printed agricultural reports and ink-stained geographies.
He picked up a big dark album that he’d passed over a dozen times. The old-fashioned leather cover was stamped with a design of flowing feathers in gold, and tortured gothic letters spelled “Family Album.” Inside he saw photographs, snapshots, ocher newspaper clippings whose paste had disintegrated, postcards, prize ribbons. The snapshots showed scores of curd-faced Stongs squinting into the sun, Stong children with fat knees holding wooden pull-along ducks, and a black and white dog Hawkheel dimly remembered.
He looked closer at one snapshot, drawn by something familiar. A heavy boy stood on a slab of rock, grinning up into the sky. In his hand a fishing rod pointed at the upper branches of a spruce where a bobber was hopelessly entangled in the dark needles. A blur of moving water rushed past the boy into a black pool.
“You bastard,” said Hawkheel, closing the album on the picture of Stong, Bill Stong of years ago, trespassing at Hawkheel’s secret pool.
He pushed the album up under the back of his shirt so it lay against his skin. It felt the size of a Sears’ catalogue and made him throw out his shoulders stiffly. He took a musty book at random—The Boy’s Companion—and went out to the treacherous Stong.
“Haven’t seen you for quite a while, Leverd. Hear you been laid up,” said Stong.
“Bruised my knee.” Hawkheel put the book on the counter.
“Got to expect to be laid up now and then at our age,” said Stong. “I had trouble with my hip off and on since April. I got something here that’ll fix you up.” He took a squat, foreign bottle out from under the counter.
“Mr. Rose give me this for checking his place last winter. Apple brandy, and about as strong as anything you ever tasted. Too strong for me, Leverd. I get dizzy just smelling the cork.” He poured a little into a paper cup and pushed it at Hawkheel.
The fragrance of apple wood and autumn spread out as