From a box in the back of the truck he took one of his books and opened it. It was Haw-Ho-Noo. He leaned over a page as if he could read the faint print in the moonlight, then gripped it and tore it out. One after another he seized the books, ripped the pages and cracked their spines. He hurled them at the black, swaying deer and they fell to the bloodied ground beneath it.
“Fool with me, will you?” shouted Hawkheel, tearing soft paper with both hands, tossing books up at the moon, and his blaring sob rose over the sound of the boulders cracking in the river below.
THE dark-colored fox trotted along the field edge with his nose down, following the woodsline of his property—his by right of use. His smoky pelt was still dull from molting and had not yet begun to take on its winter lustre. A stalk of panic grass shivered and he pounced, then crunched the grasshopper.
He skirted the silver ruins of abandoned farm buildings and spent some time in the orchard eating windfalls. Then he left the apple trees, crossed the brook at the back of the field, pausing to lap the water, and moved into the woods. He want familiarly into the poplars, black ears pricked to the turn of a leaf, nose taking up the rich streams of scent that flowed into the larger river of rotted leaf mold and earth.
At the time I moved into Chopping County, Banger was about fifty, a heavy man, all suet and mouth. At first I thought he was that stock character who remembered everybody’s first name, shouting “Har ya! How the hell ya doin’?” to people he’d seen only an hour before, giving them a slap on the back or a punch on the arm—swaggering gestures in school, but obnoxious in a middle-aged man. I saw him downtown, talking to anybody who would listen, while he left his hardware store to the attentions of a slouchy kid who could never find anything on the jumbled shelves.
I made the mistake of saying what I thought about Banger one night at the Bear Trap Grill. The bar was a slab of varnished pine; the atmosphere came from a plastic moose on top of the cash register and a mason jar half-filled with pennies.
I wanted to find somebody to go bird shooting with, somebody who knew the good coverts in the slash-littered mountainous country. I’d always hunted alone, self-taught, doing what I guessed was right, but still believing that companionship increased the pleasure of hunting, just as “layin’ up” with somebody, as they said locally, was better than sleeping alone.
I was sitting next to Tukey. His liver-spotted hands shook; hard to get a straight answer from him or anyone else. They said he was a pretty good man for grouse. They said he might take company. I’d been courting him, hoping for an invitation to go out when the season opened. I thought I had him ready to say, “Hell yes, come on along.”
Banger was at the end of the bar talking nonstop to deaf Fance who had hearing-aid switches all over the front of his shirt. Tukey said Fance had a gun collection in his spare bedroom and was afraid to sleep at night, afraid thieves would break in when the hearing aids lay disconnected on the bedside table.
“God, that Banger. He’s always here, always yapping. Doesn’t he ever go home?” I asked Tukey. In ten seconds I scratched weeks of softening the old man up. All that beer for nothing. His face pleated like a closing concertina.
“Well, now, as a matter of fact, he don’t, much. His place burned down and the wife and kid was fried right up in it. He got nothing left but his dog and the goddamn hardware store his old man left him and which he was never suited to.
“And my advice to you,” Tukey said, “if you want to go out bird shootin’ like you been hintin’ around, or deer or ’coon or rabbit or bear huntin’, or,” and his dried-leaf voice rose to a mincing falsetto, “just enjoyin’ the rare beauties of our woodlands …” He broke off to grin maliciously, exposing flawless plastic teeth, to let me know they had seen me walking in the woods with neither rod nor gun in my hands.
His voice dropped again, weighted with sarcasm. “My advice to you if you want to know where the birds is, is to get real friendly with that Banger you think is so tiresome. What he don’t know about this country is less than that.” He raised the dirty stub of an amputated forefinger, the local badge of maimedness that set those who worked with chain saws apart from lesser men.
“Him?” I glanced at Banger punctuating his torrent of words with intricate gestures. He pointed with his chin and his hands flew up into the air like birds.
“Yes, him. And if you go huntin’ with him I’d like to hear about it, because Banger keeps to himself. Nobody, not me, not Fance, has went out huntin’ with him for years.” He turned away from me. I finished my drink and left. There was nothing else to do.
I didn’t bother with the locals again, except Noreen Pineaud: thirties, russet hair, powder-blue stretch pants and golden eyes in a sharp little fox face. On Fridays she cleaned the house.
She stayed for a cup of coffee and smoked a cigarette one Friday, after I wrote her check. We sat at the kitchen table. She told me she was separated from her husband. That old question hung there. The check lay on the table between us.
I didn’t say anything, I didn’t move, and after a minute she tapped out the cigarette in the aluminum frozen-pie pan that was all I could find for an ashtray. She did it gently to show there weren’t any hard feelings.
I had retreated from other people in other places like a man backing fearfully out of a quicksand bog he has stumbled into unknowingly. This place in Chopping County was my retreat from high, muddy water.
Noreen looked a lot like the kid in Banger’s hardware store. I asked her.
“Yeah, he’s one of my nephews, Raymie. My brother, Raymon’, he don’t want the kid to work for Banger. He’s real strict, Raymon’. Says it’s a fag job. See, he wants the kid to trap or get a job cuttin’ wood.” She turned her sharp face to follow the trail of drifting headlights outside the window.
“Raymon’ made a lot of money with a trapline when he was a kid, and now the prices for furs are real good again. Foxes and stuff. So he got Raymie these twenty-five traps a coupla weeks ago. Now he says Raymie’s gotta set’em out and run the trapline before he goes down to the hardware store in the mornin’. You know how long that takes? Raymie takes after his mother. He like things easy.”
She talked on, uncoiling intricate ropes of blood relationship, telling me who was married to whom, the favorite small-town subject. I listened, out of the swamp now and onto dry ground.
That fall I went alone for the birds as I always had. No dog, alone, and with my mother’s gun, a 28-gauge Parker. Thank you kindly, ma’am, it’s the only thing you ever gave me except a strong inclination toward mistrust. She wrote her own epitaph, a true doubter to the last.
Although I sleep in dust awhile
Beneath the barren clod, Ere long I hope to rise and smile To meet my Saviour God If He exists.
The first morning of the season was cold, the frosted clumps of tussock grass like spiral nebulae. I went up the hardwood slopes, the trees growing out of a cascade of shattered rock spilled by the last glacier. No birds in this grey monotony of beech and maple, and I kept climbing for the ridges where stands of spruce knotted dark shelter in their branches.
The slope leveled off; in a rain-filled hollow a rind of ice imprisoned the leaves, soot-black, brown, umber, grey-tan like the coats of deer, in its glassy clasp. No birds.
I walked up into the conifers, my panting the only sound. Fox tracks in the hoarfrost. The weight of the somber sky pressed down with the heaviness of a coming storm. No birds in the spruce. Under the trees the hollows between the roots were bowls filled with ice crystals like moth antennae.