The Night of Trees Page 3

  He was the first in the bathroom, and he had coffee going by the time Shim came down to the kitchen. Later, in ski season, Shim would have extra help, but now, as he had written, “It’s get what you want and stack your own dishes.” Zach came in and washed at the sink. He had been to his outhouse; he wouldn’t use an inside toilet, even on the coldest winter day. “I never took to shittin’ in the house,” he had once explained. Shim, who in some atavistic way was highly pleased by this, kept his father’s little house in good repair. As a further indication of his good humor about it, he’d hung a little sign on the door: MAN—since only Zach used it. Or, Richard wondered, he might have—witness his grin—meant some comment upon mankind in general. With Shim, one could never tell.

  Opal didn’t come down for breakfast. As he ate Shim’s good, greasy, country-fried eggs, he told them about the buck he’d seen the night before. Shim immediately began to glow, looked straight into Richard’s eyes with his hunter’s yellow ones, and questioned him carefully: “Which way was he going? At what time? How many points?”

  Richard couldn’t tell how many points—eight or ten. Shim nodded, and kept nodding for a while as he ate. Deer season would begin in a week, on the 1st of November, and such information was valuable in Leah, where it would be carefully collected. Zach nodded too, but Richard, watching the old man’s speculating eyes, knew that the maps he saw in his mind were long obsolete; what had been fields and crossings where the deer ran or skulked were now grown back into woods.

  After breakfast Shim walked with him to the base of the rope tow. Shim complained about the porcupines, and how every year they ate up his ski tow and he had to build it over again. He’d tried putting hot pepper in the stain he used on the supporting logs, hanging a block of salt nearby over some old boards—but they preferred his scaffolding. He’d shot eighteen already that year, and had received fifty cents for each, from the state. But now the money the state had appropriated for that purpose had run out. “You shoot any of them quillpigs you see,” he said to Richard. “I’ll give you a twelve-gauge shell, any size shot—what d’you use, sixes? Sevens-and-a-half? You just blast the bastards, and I’ll give you a shell for each. Just tell me how many. You don’t have to bring in no noses.”

  He left Shim at the bottom of the tow. He had in mind that he would do his own preseason scouting for deer, and he would watch for sign: ruffled leaves beneath the beeches where the deer had pawed and nosed for the little nuts, saplings rubbed by antlers where the bucks had removed the last of their itchy velvet, the pressed grass and leaves where the deer had curled up to bed. There were many old apple trees on the mountain, craggy, arthritic-looking trees, with dead limbs fallen crookedly to the trunks. But they still gave sweet, dwarfed fruit, and he would look around their bases for sign, or for the revealing absence of it.

  Feeling light and strong in his new clothes, his red cap jaunty as a cock’s feather, his shotgun balanced nicely on his forearm, he climbed the hill. At any moment a bird might explode into the air—behind, at the side, in front—and he felt himself to be precisely ready, and deadly, ready to move smoothly into the pattern of the swing of flight. As he came to the top of the open ski slope, the first bird flushed unexpectedly from the upper branches of a spruce. He had time to see its nervous jumping as it made up its mind, but when it flew it seemed to lose any of the panic its foolish chirping and jerking had indicated. On short, whistling wings it beat its way directly through twigs and needles, straight away from him, keeping the tree between. He could not see which way it turned, but moved slowly along the tangled path the bird’s noise had seemed to follow. He circled for half an hour and never flushed it again, but as he sat down on the warm needles beneath a balsam fir he heard, from below, the soft rush of wings and the stiff whistle of the bird’s glide away. There were more partridge in the woods above, and he would let that clever one alone today.

  As he lay back on the needles, he saw, through the chinks between the radiating green branches of the fir, the fresh blue sky. Not a cloud in the high, cool blue. On a maple sapling as thin as his wrist one single red leaf twirled in the light wind, and untwirled, and wound up again. As he watched, it wound itself too tight, and airily let go to swoop lightly down, like a child’s unbalanced airplane. He heard the tick as it came to rest, and it seemed to him that he had been allowed to hear one beat of the season’s clock in that leaf’s final, graceful flight.

  Before he left that spot, a tiny white-footed mouse came crashing through the dry leaves and stopped in front of him. Its myopic little eyes popping like black pearls from its head, it seemed to listen with its whiskers. The barrels of his shotgun lay across his toe, and he raised them slowly with his foot until they pointed straight at the mouse, who peered into those long black holes with nervous interest. Richard wondered why his first reaction was to point huge death at the humming little creature; he would never shoot, never.

  “Bang,” he said, and the mouse ran straight out for ten yards before he got his wits together and dived under a bush. Richard smiled, and stopped—it seemed a bit of a dirty trick. He hadn’t expected to frighten the little mouse quite so much.

  He climbed, when he left the place beneath the fir, and as he climbed he came to familiar places, those hollows, aged trees, tangles in the middle of the woods that had no name but a haunted, familiar greeting for the returning hunter. Because they were nameless, and changed only according to the slow movements of growth and rot, they presented the hunter with his other self: time was woods time, and he remembered with shock the woodsman he once was, and his eagerness or fatigue, or perhaps his desire to run, which was the constant submerged feeling of a civilized man in the irritating, mindless irregularity of the trees—their lack of order and geometry that could seem wickedly deliberate.

  He had intended to go in a nearly straight line, and even though he knew this was not always practical in the woods, he had made up his mind to reach a ledge he remembered on the shoulder of the mountain, where he could see across the valleys. Having this goal in mind, he took pains to cross blowdown, to duck under low branches he would ordinarily avoid. And so it was a familiar frustration when he came, after crawling beneath the progressively lower branches of spruce in a grove he did not remember to be so deep, to a wall of striated granite, too high and mossy to climb. He should have known that it was there, and the sudden presence of it, adamant, massive, seemed a gesture of the earth itself. He had to turn away, and he did not want to. He impatiently pushed the leathery branches of a pin cherry sapling aside and forced his way through them: again he was reminded of his awkwardness, his alienness, his tenderness in the woods. One branch came back and flicked his cheek with such force that he was blinded for an agonizing second by tears, and he doubled over to rub his face.

  He would get better at it. It took days, even with his health and strength, to master his energy and impatience in this dark country. Most difficult was to be aware all at once of all parts of his body and their proximity to each stub, twig, thorn, rock, trunk—to see beneath his feet as if with his feet, to feel the sharp, potential whips before they struck, even to fall and, while falling, to think.

  And so he stopped and waited until his rhythms slowed, until he once again realized with all his body that the trees themselves would grant him his proper speed. A partridge burst up at his feet and flew hissing, spiraling up, and he shot and got it. He didn’t know how his gun came up, how the safety was taken off, how his eyes and arms could have joined in the proper pattern. He went forward to get the bird, which had fallen fifteen yards away. A few soft, gray-brown feathers drifted against the trees. The bird was hot in his hand, and through the insubstantial feathers on its breast the huge flying muscles pulsed against his fingers and were still. The little head swung lightly against his wrist, a drop of blood like a ruby at its eye.

  He put the plump bird in his game pocket, and then ran his hand along a branch to wipe away the few feathers that had stuck to his fingers. The wild thing
was in his pocket. In his pocket rested this wild thing of the woods, and later he would draw his knife through the deep white breast meat, an inch thick, that had been wild muscle. The ruffed grouse was a bird of the woods, and could not be domesticated, could not be raised in any kind of captivity. This one, at dinner, he would assimilate.

  He loved to climb, to go to those few places that were like islands above the forest where he could rise to the surface and see back down the hills, green upon red upon brown upon blue, where the rolling state was open to him. He had reached the ledges, and as he looked out and down, the low mountains seemed at any moment as if they might begin to move like slow, gigantic waves. Up here he came out of the dark woods, and was for a moment precariously above them. Still surrounded, as he wanted to be, he breathed slowly and deeply before he descended again into their luminous twilight.

  A hundred yards below he came to a long-abandoned orchard, and found that the deer had been there. They had circled each tree in order to see if the apples had fallen. Some had, but it would take a good frost before the apples would turn to pulp and the deer, with their one set of browsing teeth, could eat them easily. He went through the brush from tree to tree, tasting the hard, cold fruit until he found one ancient tree whose light yellow apples were as pure as springwater to taste, delicately flavored and just a little puckery. With a pocketful of these he looked for a place to eat the bologna sandwich and the can of sardines he had brought for his lunch. He found the place he wanted beside a recently used tote road—used in the last year or two, to judge by the bruised alder and the weedy brush in it. Shim must have done some logging, maybe to get timbers for his ski tow.

  He could see some distance down the road, and he had learned in the woods to find a place where, when he was not noisily moving, he could watch. If he saw an animal, any wild thing, without being seen, then he seemed really to be in the woods, and part of them. To be quiet, and watch—it made him part of the trees, and for a moment he would have the illusion of not being an alien. As he sat eating, he did look carefully, but all he saw was a furious red squirrel, who had seen him first, and who screamed and jumped up and down, tail snapping in miniature anger as he broadcast what seemed to be the complete description of a dangerous man. Trying to ignore this barrage, Richard ate his lunch. Once, when he was much younger, on a deer stand, he did shoot a red squirrel—theoretically to keep him from spooking the deer, partly because the squirrel said some unforgivable things (who wants to be called a foreigner?), partly because the squirrel made such a terrible racket. That time a bullet almost as big as the squirrel’s head had taken his head right off. This time Richard humbly took the calumny, ate his lunch, wiped his mustache, and moved on to quieter places.

  By three o’clock (on his gold Omega wrist watch—another of his recent purchases of predictability) he had flushed two more partridge. He had a shot at one and missed clean when a fingersized sapling had maliciously reached out and stopped his swing. The other bird flushed just out of sight and flew back up the hill, where he didn’t want to go. He followed the one he had missed, jumped it twice more and finally, on an easy straight-away shot, looked down the black barrels at the bird, fired, and saw it spin down into a blackberry patch. It took him a few minutes to find the bird, but he finally did, and emerged from the blackberries with only a few scratches on the backs of his hands.

  As he straightened up, he realized for the first time that he was tired. In the wilderness each step was a calculation, full of possible surprise, and though he had walked only a mile or two his bones seemed to slide wearily under his flesh. It was lovely to be weary: he had taken two birds with three shots—a highly respectable score—and the most bothersome things he had to look forward to before he could have a long drink—a drink both long and tall, he thought—were a short downhill walk and the business of cleaning the birds, which, with grouse, was not hard. For a moment he lay back on the clean leaves and looked up to the sky. What he saw, ten feet above him in the white birch at his head, was the black face of a porcupine.

  When Richard got up, the porcupine knew it had been discovered, but there was nowhere to go. First it backed up and started down the other side of the tree, but when Richard merely stepped around the tree the animal gave that up and sat in the crotch, head out, his sullen black face watching, waiting.

  “Tough luck,” Richard said, and then wished he hadn’t spoken. The black marbles that were the animal’s eyes moved as Richard moved. It was a big old one, fatted up for the winter he would never see. Richard raised his gun and looked over the barrels at the face. The quills lay flat upon its shoulders. Black, with white sheaths, they could not stop an ounce of Number Six shot which, at that range, would skin the face and blow the backs out of the eyes.

  Richard lowered the gun. The black eyes watched.

  “At least I’m alone,” he said, and again wished that he hadn’t uttered words. The animal should, probably, be executed—but there, again, the wrong word came. There should be no words, just the shot and the declaration of death. Again the wrong words: execution, post-mortem, certificate of death. The porcupine (quillpig, hedgehog, he thought) was, according to man, harmful. Now it moved its head slowly from side to side, as if it were impatient. One of its long yellow teeth showed through the black lips. An ounce of Number Six shot would grind those lips right off the bone, and shatter the yellow tooth. The animal started to climb higher, then thought better of it. Richard remembered that John James Audubon once had a pet porcupine who would never raise its quills to someone it knew.

  So? Well, he would shoot, and look upon the corpse. Wrong word again.

  Rachel’s sister, Ruth, had said once, “You’re teaching the boy to be a killer?” Safe in her city apartment, with her standard enlightened philosophy, she could be quite nasty.

  Saul Weitzner, Rachel’s father, had been there too. His ugly, patient face was a little perplexed, of course, but he said, “Now, Ruth, this is an experience we know nothing.”

  “How can you deliberately kill a gentle thing?” Ruth cried.

  “Sometimes I can’t,” Richard said mildly.

  Somewhere in that discussion (Rachel was silent all through it, and Murray was away at school), Ruth had called him a cold beast, and implied that precisely such monsters had run the furnaces at Bergen-Belsen.

  No answer had come to Richard’s mind. Saul had come furiously to his defense, charging ignorance on Ruth’s part, but in Saul’s gentle, perplexed mind, which would not conceive of giving pain, he found no way to justify Richard and Murray’s hunting. Richard could understand why, to a man who had seen so much cruelty and agony, any death at all might take on the color of murder. Irrational, but the surprising thing about Saul was that he had any rationality left. That he was at all tolerant, to Richard, seemed almost supernatural; but he did not judge Saul as he did other men. When he thought of Saul his emotions ruled that ragged area where grand abstractions accompanied pains in the back of the throat, and eyes that threatened to shed tears. Such goodness either made Richard want to weep, or, more often, want to turn into a deadly, berserk protector. Enough of Saul, he said to himself.

  Later he did think of words he might have said to Ruth, and he would find himself mouthing things like: “Why? Because I’m a man, animal and instinct both, and I have my eyes in the front of my head—predator’s eyes, and nothing’s very simple. I admire your heroes too—Gandhi and Schweitzer and all—very much. But I’m none of them. Another thing is that I was brought up by hunters, and they were kind and humane. As long as I remember them I won’t turn, like you“—here, he chose and arranged and re-chose his adjectives—“into a treacly glob of sentimental clichés, ready to pulse at a word.” But of course the words hadn’t come in time, and even if they had he would not have said them.

  The porcupine looked down and harshly ground its teeth, for a moment looking as though the effort had made him cross-eyed: he was making the most horrible face he could, and Richard knew that it was all sh
am. Those long teeth were good only for taking the bark off trees, or for gnawing shallow grooves in wood. Again Richard raised his gun, and the dim eyes looked into the two big holes, waiting. Richard saw the column of shot as it would fly, hardly spread, as if it were a ray of light arrowing from the barrel, and knew the mayhem it would do to the beast’s flesh. It would not be painful, and this was simply an animal (who wasn’t? he could not help thinking) whose natural enemies had been reduced by man. Pain he knew, having been wounded himself, was somewhat overrated—most of it came later, and there would be no later here. The argument about the porcupine’s place in the balance of nature was highly debatable, because every expert had his own balance of nature in mind. If it were a question of porcupines in general, however, the choice would be simple: he would shoot. Unfortunately the real defendant in the case was this porcupine, whose life, for him, must have a certain value. Think: no more of the succulent cambium layer of bark; no more of that excruciatingly touchy copulation; no more of the thick heat of the sun on a fat, satisfied belly. The small joys of a congenital dullard, perhaps, but ones Richard himself could appreciate.

  The barrels of his shotgun had been lowering, and now he held the gun across his forearm. He could give the animal a Mexican trial—walk away and then shoot him as he tried to escape—but that was not his style. If he shot he would bear the vision to the end, and certify to his conscience that death had occurred. He raised the gun again, rested his finger upon the trigger of the choked barrel, and aimed down that barrel, sure of his point of aim—the black nose between the black eyes. The porcupine ground his teeth again, and made a fearful face. Richard waited until the grinding had finished. He would see what an ounce of Number Six shot would do to the composition of that head, how disarrange it. The pressure of his finger grew, and in his blood a pressure, warm, powerfully pleasurable, also grew. There would be an end to this, and it would be the only end, and he would be the agent of it, the doer of it, the ruler of it, and it would be destruction.