Something streaked past me and disappeared into the grass—one of the barn cats? Or a raccoon? My heart thumped in immediate reaction, though I wasn’t scared. The night was so alive.
I was a little worried my parents might notice me out here. The floodlights might come on, illuminating the upper drive. Dad’s voice yelling, “Who’s out there?” And the dogs barking.
But no. I waited, and nothing happened.
It’s like I was invisible.
The house looked larger now in night than it did in day. A solid looming mass confused with the big oaks around it, immense as a mountain. The barns too were dark, heavy, hulking except where moonlight rippled over their tin roofs with a look like water because of the cloud shreds blowing through the sky. No horizon, solid dark dense-wooded ridges like the rim of a deep bowl, and me in the center of the bowl. The mountains were only visible by day. The tree lines. By night our white-painted fences gleamed faintly like something seen underwater but the unpainted fences and the barbed wire fences were invisible. In the barnyard, the humped haystack, the manure pile, I wouldn’t have been able to identify if I didn’t know what they were. Glazed-brick silo shining with moonlight. Barns, chicken coop, the sheds for the storage of machinery, much of it old, broken-down and rusted machinery, the garage, carports—silent and mysterious in the night. On the far side of the driveway the orchard, mostly Winesap apples, massed in the dark and the leaves quavering with wind and it came to me maybe I’m dead? a ghost? maybe I’m not here, at all?
But I didn’t turn back, kept on, following the deer, now passing the strawberry patch (my sister Marianne had taken over, since I’d done only a mediocre job fertilizing, weeding the summer before) and there was Mom’s garden we all helped her with, anyway Patrick, Marianne and me, sweet corn, butternut squash, a half dozen pumpkins still remaining, and marigolds beginning to fade, for we’d had a frost or two already. That look as Mom characterized it of an autumn garden—“So melancholy, you want to cry.” Along the fence, the sunflowers crowding one another, most of them beginning to droop, going ragged, heads bowed, swaying in the wind like drunken figures. Birds had pecked out most of the seeds and the flowers were left torn and blind-looking yet still it was strange to me to pass by them—sunflowers seem like people!
I was following the deer though I couldn’t see them. The earth was puddled and the puddles glittered like mirrors. Smells are sharper by night—I smelled a rich mud-smell, wet-rotted leaves and manure. I wasn’t much aware of my feet, cold now, and going numb, so if they were being scratched, cut by stones or spiky thorns, I didn’t know. I was scared, but happy! Not-Judd, now. Not-known.
I crept up to the pond, which was only about three feet deep at this end. Draining out of the meandering brook that connected with Alder Creek. Every few years the pond choked up with sediment, tree debris and animal droppings, and Dad had to dredge it out with a borrowed bulldozer.
A single doe was drinking at the pond! I crouched in the grasses, watching from about fifteen feet away. I could see her long slender neck outstretched. Her muzzle, lowered to the water. By moonlight the doe was drained of color and on the pond’s surface light moved in agitated ripples from where she drank. Where were the other deer? It was unusual to see only one. They must have continued on, into the woods. The doe lingered, lifting her head alert and poised for flight. Her ears twitched—did she hear me? Maybe she could smell me. Her eyes were like a horse’s eyes, protuberant and shiny, black. Tension quivered in her slender legs.
I loved the wild creatures. I could never hunt them. They had no names the way the animals of High Point Farm had names. You could not call them, nor identify them. As soon as you sighted them, by day, they would vanish. As if to refute the very authority of your eyes. Theirs was the power to appear and to disappear. It was meant to be so: not as in Genesis, where Adam names the creatures of the earth, sea, and is granted dominion over them by God. Not like that.
Next month was deer-hunting season in the Chautauqua Valley and from dawn to dusk we’d hear the damned hunters’ guns going off in the woods and open fields, see their pickups parked by the side of the road and often on our own property. Every year (this was county law, favoring “hunters’ rights”) Dad had to post new bright orange NO HUNTING NO FISHING signs on our property if we wanted to keep hunters off, but the signs, every fifty yards, made little difference—hunters did what they wanted to, what they could get away with. Through the winter we’d see almost no deer near the house, and rarely bucks. Bucks were killed for their “points” and their handsome antlered heads stuffed as trophies. Ugly glass eyes in the sockets where living eyes had been. Mom wept angrily seeing killed deer slung as dead meat across the fenders of hunters’ vehicles and sometimes she spoke to the hunters, bravely, you might say recklessly. To kill for sport Mom said was unconscionable. She was of a farm family where all men and boys hunted, out in Ransomville, and she could not abide it—none of the women could, she said. Once, long ago, Dad himself had hunted—but no longer. There were bad memories (though I did not know what these were) having to do with Dad’s hunting and the men he went hunting with, in the area of Wolf’s Head Lake. Now, Dad belonged to the Chautauqua Sportsmen’s Club—for “business” reasons—but he didn’t hunt or fish. It was Dad’s position he called “neutral” that since human beings had driven away the wolves and coyotes that were natural predators of deer in this part of the state there was an imbalance of nature and the deer population had swollen so that they were malnourished, always on the verge of starvation, not to mention what predators they’d become, themselves—what damage they caused to crops. (Including ours.) Yet, Dad did not believe in hunting—animals hunted animals, Dad said, but mankind is superior to Nature. Mankind is made in the image of God, not Nature. Yet he didn’t seriously object when Mike wanted to buy a .22-caliber rifle at the age of fifteen, for “target practice,” and he still had his old guns, untouched now for years.
The doe was staring toward me across the pond. Forelegs bent, head lowered.
Then I heard what she must have been hearing—something trotting, trampling through the meadow. I heard the dogs’ panting before I saw them. A pack of dogs! In an instant the doe turned, leapt, and was running, her tail, white beneath, lifted like a flag of distress. Why do deer lift their tails, running for their lives? A signal to predators, glimmering white in the dark? The dogs rushed into the pond, splashing through it, growling deep inside their throats, not yet barking. If they were aware of me they gave no sign, they had no interest in me but only in the doe, five or six of them, ferocious in the chase, ears laid back and hackles raised. I thought I recognized one or two of our neighbor’s dogs. I shouted after them, sick with horror, but they were already gone. There was the sound of panicked flight and pursuit, growing fainter with distance. I’d stumbled into the pond and something stabbed into my foot. I was panting, half sobbing. I could not believe what had happened—it had happened so quickly.
If only I’d had a gun.
The does, fawns, their carcasses we found sometimes in the woods, in our cornfields and sometimes as close as the orchard. Once, a part-devoured doe, near Mom’s antique sleigh. Throats and bellies ripped out where they’d fallen. Usually they were only partly devoured.
If only I had a gun. One of Dad’s guns, locked in a closet, or a cabinet, in a back room somewhere. The Browning shotgun, the two rifles. There was Mike’s rifle, too. Mike had lost interest in target shooting pretty quickly and Patrick hated guns and Dad hadn’t taught me to use either the shotgun or the rifles, hadn’t allowed me even to touch them. (Though I’m not sure, maybe I never asked.) Still, I believed I would know how to use the guns.
How to aim, pull the trigger, and kill.
Instead, I ran back to the house crying.
Helpless little kid! eleven years old! Babyface, Dimple!
Ranger, roaming the night. Wiping tears, snot from his face.
In the downstairs bathroom, trembling, I ran hot water in the sink. I was trying not to think what had happened to the doe—what the dogs