Well before noon he waits in a dry alcove behind the water for the last of it to sluice down. It sluices then trickles then drips into the scatter of fresh-washed rocks just this last hour flushed from the reef above. Early he rode his horse and led the mule hours below 144, an hour at least below the reef where the fireroad ends. From where he tied the horse and mule he walked a half hour, contouring mostly, to this perfect blind: a soft floor under big pines and behind a fallen tree still thick with brown needles and above a falling open meadow. A stream meanders below inside willow and chokecherry. Lupine, geranium, then black sedges low by the streambank. The opposite hill climbs to yellow aspen. He shrugs out of his blaze vest and stuffs it in his pack. He hears his wife make him promise to wear it but she is not here. He moves low and quiet and sets up his chair behind the fallen tree. His view of the meadow is wide and free through a sort of window he had pruned in the thick boughs. He sits and levers the bolt up and back one smooth movement at a time to chamber a round and he checks the safety before leaning the barrel into a crook with the stock to the right of his feet. With the binoculars he scans the whole far edge of the meadow, taking his time. He picks up the rifle and scopes a tree he knows to be 250 yards away. He had zeroed the scope at 200. He drinks water then sits silent.
The trees drip around him and steam rises from the meadow. A rock shifts in the reef above and a skitter of pebbles follows. It's still after the rain. He unfocuses his eyes and listens to the sounds: dripping, rattling of cobbles in the stream, distant woodpecker, jay, wheezing chatter of flocking siskins. He sits and sits. He pisses in a ziplock bag and pinches it shut. Later, breeze starts and he notes the scent of the meadow. He remembers his father the day he first showed Fielding this meadow, and he recites the names from that distant afternoon: pennyroyal, monkeyflower, paintbrush. Parry's and pale primrose. Fireweed, aster, bluebell, speedwell. Joseph Fielding Smith knew all the flowers , the birds, the trees, everything, it seemed, the world is made of. His mind, to young Fielding, was lists of lists, a whole taxonomy of the mountain and the desert verge. All the workdays of his life keeping the tractors of Youngville running, and all the other days and his Septembers horseback on the mountain. The garage, hot and cold, greasy, slag-gray, full to the high rafters of gray objects for which Fielding at first had no names, but for which he learned the uses and then the names.
A customer, an old rancher whose name Fielding can't remember: I seen that bird book at my grandkids' up to Salt Lake. There's a thousand birds in there. I'll be danged if you know them all, Joe.
His father: Only if they's on the mountain.
How many birds we got up there?
Fair number.
An you know them all?
I think so.
How come you learned em all?
When I was this ole of my hands and go up there I pay attention. His back was to the customer. He was intent on a stuck part.
It is just paying attention you saying? Seems you'd have to study, too. Yet how you'd do that I don't know.
I just learned it.
Well, who teach you?
I don't know. I know some from my mother.
You have the bird book when you was a boy?
We had only the scriptures.
Well it's a miracle how a boy could learn all the birds on the mountain without nobody to teach him.
Who teach Adam then?
He named em hisself.
Well.
So you call em by your own naming? Not like in the bird book?
I don't know what's in the bird book. But if it calls em by the same names I do then that would be a miracle. I jus calls em by the names I thought up when I first learned em.
Well, that explains it.
Look, I just fix tractors. I don't know what that bird book calls em or what they calls em in Viet Nam or Mexico. How you going to keep em straight if you got no bird names? If you want to keep em straight with Mexicans you got to use Mexican bird names. If you want to sell more than one bird book you got to use the names everybody agrees on. But until right now nobody ever been interested in birds in this town but me, so the names I use for the birds on the mountain are my own names, and I know this is no use to nobody so I'll use the damn bird book when I take Fielding up to hunt. I will see a bird and find it in the bird book and read the book-name and tell it to Fielding and if he cares to learn it, why, he will have means to converse about birds with others.
What about the Mexicans?
What about I finish this p.t.o. an you ask the boy what he's going to do about talking about birds with Mexicans. I got a lot full of broke tractors and it's haying.
Well. Fielding? Looks I made your daddy grumpy asking about birds.
Fielding knows the names in the books. His father didn't tell him his own names. He sits and sits and wonders what his father called them, and under what system of description or relatedness or other taxonomic basis his father had named them. Color, or the trees they rested in, or the food they ate, or the calls they made. Like cardinal or maybe raven. And dipper and swift. And like hummingbird and chickadee and warbler. But not like goose or swallow or sparrow. These had names either arbitrary or from an earlier language, maybe Adam himself's.
He sits and sits. From time to time he uses the binoculars, always moving slowly and shading the lenses to avoid reflecting sunlight. In the mid afternoon the creek rises abruptly, then goes back down. Above this draw not a cloud visible. Thunder at the very edge of hearing.
Fielding, buddy, keep that barrel down.
Sorry.
Don't be sorry, son, jus do it right an keep quiet.
Okay. His arms have cramped and he's very tired, but Fielding doesn't show it.
They walked half the day and Fielding didn't know what they were doing except when his father led them into a stand of oaks and squatted by a round depression in last year's leaves, and held up a tuft of yellow hair. Tawny. Then Fielding followed him out of the oaks and parallel to a narrow bare path. After a while they reached a small beaver pond but kept back in the aspens. They sat on a beaver-downed tree and watched til dusk and finally the buck came down halting with his handsome head up testing, testing and at last to the sedges where he bowed to drink. His father held a hand out to say wait. Fielding waited. His left hand shook on the foregrip. That was the .257 Roberts. The buck stood and stepped and stopped. He faced them dead square and the world, all its sound and color, drew into the buck's amber eye and his father turned his hand then palm up so gentle Fielding shifted the rifle behind a trunk and knelt off the fallen tree silent into duff. His left hand he steadied on the trunk and extended his thumb and rested the rifle there and his father withdrew his hand as if to say You are on your own, son, and he thumbed the safety and sighted. The buck stamped a fly twitched an ear licked his nose. Fielding sighted at the shoulder. The buck drank again then stood and turned. Fielding held his breath. His father blew quiet behind him and he remembered to breathe. He waited. The buck stepped and presented his flank but a branch was in the way. He waited. The buck stepped again and he followed the flat behind his shoulder until the buck stepped clear of the branches. His hands shook and his breath caught and the sound came too soon, a shock and almost a whiteness in his head. He knew it was wrong, felt it in him after all that practice shooting the cutout. He racked the lever [LEVER ACTION .257? Yes Browning BLR 1969] and jerked the rifle back back up and looked across at the still pondbank that seemed to never have seen nor heard mention of buck. He sat back. In the still air the pale smoke still hung like a stain after the rifle's shameful early report. He sat back ashamed, small, childish and eager. His father stood and gripped his shoulder for a moment. It's okay. Next time.
The sun has lowered to the top of the spruces across the meadow and their shadows comb toward him against the nap of the grass. A cold breeze comes up. He bends low behind the fallen trunk to put on his wool coat and hat. He can't see into the shadows. A marmot moves in some tumbled boulders. He sits and sits. His right hand is cold on the trigger guard.
He has added to the map over several years, black for routes he's scouted and red for kill sites paired to his shooting positions. He has gradually outlined the vast area close enough to 144 but not too close. The map shows what he believes to be the swath of land from which he can haul meat hoseback, but which is inaccessible enough that the geared-up ATV-lazy suburban hunters won't come within hearing. The area shrinks year by year. There are more hunters, and they are stupider. Their machines are more capable. The fireroads reach deeper into the forest, and they are better-graded. Their rifles shoot flatter. And his own strength is waning and the sweetness of the hunt is dilute with years. And he has no son of his own to teach, who would give new purpose to what he feels is an old and obsolete practice. What was once necessity is now, to be honest, just a game or entertainment, something that men of a particular race and politics do to show their allegiances. Just this morning he rode down a raw recent extension of the fireroad past a parked gleaming new F-350 hitched to a trailer of six ATVs. Across the rear window a decal: TAKE MY CARBON FOOTPRINT AND SHOVE IT UP YOUR LIBERAL ASS. The reek of gasoline. The scattered brass. The grotesque calibers: .340 Weatherby, .300 WinMag, [ ], the overkill ammo of amateurs with puerile military fantasies hunting what? Cape buffalo? Black rhinos? Tyrannosaurus Rex? Terrorists? His own worn .308 has for several years felt antiquated and shabby and he has longed to replace it, but now it feels like a craftsman's tool, sufficient, perfect for the job, an unflaunted indication of experience and superior skill and quiet masculine competence. The horse and mule, too. And the wool and leather. Shut up, now, he tells himself. You are getting smug. You do this for the meat and for the quiet and in memory of your father. Then he rode on, picking a route away from the plume of bacon stench that came from their camp in the trees.
That evening with a black line he excluded another valley from his map. The good hunting areas succumbed to a rising sea of noise and heedlessness and stupidity. The vast swaths broke into archipelagoes of harder and harder land. He hopes that the deer gather in these places, too, driven out of the easier land by bacon and gasoline and 1,000-yard target practice and abandoned gutshot carcasses.
For years he has been on the verge of discerning a pattern in deer movements. A finer set of movements within the coarse seasonal migrations up and down the mountain. This discernment could allow him to break free of the long cramped waiting in blinds within sight of streams and from the long days of looking in rough terrain. There must be some faint but inviolable patterns, and he would discern them if he worked at it long enough. He would pay attention the same as his father had. But the deer kept humbling him. Last summer he had scouted a promising area. He had found a hidden way down into a valley that he had thought entirely enclosed within a battlement of vertical Navajo. For years he had looked down on grassy meadows and streambanks unsullied by cattle and had seen the complacent deer. Then he found the way through the rocks, so narrow he had to take the panniers off the mule and lead his horse. Once in the valley he set up and watched, and for three days hadn't seen a single deer. He had to go home, so he packed up and was headed out when a buck stepped into the meadow ahead of him and just watched, unalarmed. He took out the rifle and shot him. What had kept the deer away while he watched? And why had that instinct failed this buck? He didn't know. Heat made them go upmountain, and cold made them go down. Water governed their daily circuit. But all their other movements appeared random. After all this hunting.
The sun seemed to get hung up in the tops of the spruces. It stayed there for some time. He expects it to move but it doe not, and he considers that his expectation must derive from clocks and rest in some habitual conception of time that it always move forward in measured increments. Our ancestors and the indians must have seen time as starting and stopping, and slowing and speeding, he thinks. Bullshit. In the shadows dew forms on seedheads that now cast their own lunar light. Day and night at once in this same meadow, and summer and winter, and the falling away of years.
He listens to the stream and thinks lonely thoughts of all the many days he's patterened deer alone on the mountain. This last June when the deer had gone about as high as they would he had marked his map with question marks showing his guesses about where the deer would be in September on their way back down to the winter hay stubble of Kolob. He was riding a familiar slope above 144, checking for sign in the deep-cut trails that meandered up the mountain according to no logic but the inscrutable hunches, interests, daydreams and ambitions of deer. As he rode he pondered their fecklessness and supposed it to be neither intelligence nor stupidity, and neither could it be simple instinct, because wouldn't instinct have produced by now a more decisive and efficient behavior? Would instinct alone guide so many deer for so many years to climb an arbitrary arc across the hillside, reach the summit, then bend back and loop around an outcropping and through a copse, only to wander, single-file, back to where they'd started? It must be a kind of distractibility or maybe an aesthetic sense, or some set of preferences unattached to mere survival, he had concluded. Or the seemingly arbitrary path is the map of unperceived forces. Or subtleties for which he has no sense. Maybe deer are like children, who eat and drink when they must, and have more or less predictable and sensible fears, but who otherwise follow only momentary enthusiasms without regard for reason. So he rode and thought and stopped now and then to add to the map on his pommel. And late in the day he cut below a stand of aspen and followed a trail into dense willows and reined at a bright movement ahead. He stood in the stirrups expecting a deer and saw instead the girl step out of the pond on the far bank. The water was silver on her. She stood in the sun and towelled her hair with her shirt, then turned and turned in the sun until she finally dresses and disappeared into the willows. The world closes and condenses to a point of soundless attention when you sight a buck and it did identically when he saw her that day.
He sits. Cramps and tremors started some time ago. The meadow is now all in shadow. He scans the streambank, but in the dark all is disordered and depthless. He sets the binoculars aside and brings up the rifle. After some time he hears them down there. It is evening. The dark comes and the deer hang back. He waits as atill as he can. Then one and another move into the meadow, heads up. They stand all straight to him. The lengths of their bodies arrayed radially from him, the centerpoint. Aware of him there he thinks though he has not moved. One by one they step forward up out of the sedges into the meadow itself and the sky holds a washed-out whiteness only as scrim to the black spruces. He levels the rifle and thumbs the safety. The sound of a twig snapping brings their heads up and ears forward. Then another snap and a third, these anomalous sounds suddenly in pattern, an iamb that is only human, the beat of a man coming down a hill sidelong, and as the several deer bound all in an instant back over the stream as man crashes through the treeline. Charlie Cowary, all in new blaze orange swinging a big rifle with an oversized scope stamps into the meadow verge and looks around. Looks right past Fielding as he sits, then at the sky. He shrugs out of his pack and fumbles, then clicks on a headlamp and pans it over the meadow, though the prick of light makes no difference in the diffuse evening light. Fielding notes, as though with one ear the racket Charlie is making, and as though with the other the crashing departure of the deer down the streambed and angry sets the safety as Charlie cinches his pack and leaves the empty meadow the way he arrived. A sudden malicious urge fills Fielding, and he fills his lungs and makes of his voice the most contorted and violent shriek he can, which he lets taper to a long howl and he is gratified to hear, after a moment's silence, Charlie begin to sprint up in the trees. Fielding's voice comes back to him from the cliff-face above Upper Lost-a-Cow. It was the call of no known creature as though his throat had opened onto another world from which nightmares take shape and leap into this one to terrorize and kill, and to send back to the order and safety of the highway those who stray too far into the wilderness only a more cautious and skillful hunter deserves.
