BORDER PATROL

SOMETIMES I’LL BE FLYING SOMEWHERE, LOOKING DOWN on the same snowy mountains where, perhaps forty-eight hours earlier, I was hot on the trail of an elk, or hunkered down in blue dusk, watching a white-tailed buck come creeping in, made curious by the sounds of my grunt tube. On the plane, I’ll be dressed up (silent protest against those of my species who wear sweatpants on an airplane or, far worse, shorts—and, worst of all, a wifebeater T-shirt . . . Why?)

—I’m not judging them, I’m just saying it’s gross—

—And I’ll be amazed by how slender the difference between then and now can be, and of the borders that can exist between any two things: the lines almost always invisible, but somehow significant.

Would my seatmate be discomfited to know that, as recently as the day before—yesterday!—I had opened the deer’s belly and pulled out the heart, liver, kidneys, stomach—all of it, with bright red fresh blood up to my wrists? Probably.

I might even find myself judged.

Are we not all innocent, are we not all guilty?

I look out the window and down at those same mountains and feel like an imposter, a pretender, because I rarely feel more real than when I am hunting and gathering—no matter whether I’m successful, only that I’m searching—and on the plane, then, it will seem to me that my life above those mountains—at, say, thirty-nine thousand feet—is therefore somehow less real, and tinged with something artificial if not fully fraudulent. Another invisible border.

It’s funny, which deer you remember, in those years when you are fortunate enough to secure one. It’s fun to hunt the big ones, particularly during the rut. I like very much, appreciate very much, and remember well those deer that have presented themselves to me late in the season, close to or even upon the last day. In such instances, you don’t care anything about the antlers, or the weight of the deer—in fact, it’s a good feeling to be pleased with so modest a gift—and this had been the case for me this year, with a nice young three-by-four I met way back near the Canadian border, halfway up a long sloping ridge that led to the top of the mountain and the international boundary. A roadless area. I don’t know what I was doing back there. I mean, there are other places to find deer, closer to home, down lower in the valley. I think I might have been scouting for next year’s elk, seeing if there were any back there, so high, and so late in the season. I’d already been fortunate enough to secure an elk and might have been doing some research for next year.

He was with does, but wasn’t really running them, not seriously. The rut was over. The does saw me and ran—I wouldn’t see them again—and he followed them.

I followed their tracks in the deep snow, up over a little rise, down an aldered draw, up another rise, and there he was, just looking around, like a present. Winter sunlight on his hardened little basket of antlers.

Blood in the snow.

I had to head back down to Missoula that night. I cleaned him, hung him up, packed out a load, but left the quarters behind—I couldn’t fit them in my little daypack. I would come back for him the next weekend. In theory, the bears were already hibernating; it was the first of December. I hoped. I love what Jim Bridger said about such matters, and how long one can let meat, good wild meat, age: “Meat don’t spoil in the mountains.”

It’s a busy life, outside of the slow time spent carefully and quietly following tracks. I was due to entertain a French documentary crew the next weekend, who were filming a special on conservation measures I’m involved with in the valley where I live. They arrived dressed in black—two from France, one from Belgium—and, like some young urban professionals with too many irons in the fire—how to entertain my European guests, and how to be their artistic tour guide?—I asked if they would like to help pack out.

“It won’t be very heavy at all,” I said—“we can each bring out a quarter—but it’s a pretty good ways back there.”

Yes, they said. How far?

Shit, I can never answer these questions satisfactorily. The only true answer, of course, is It depends on how fast you walk.

“A couple of hours,” I said. Hell, you could do it in a buck forty-five, or you could lollygag and do it in six or eight; I didn’t know. Who ever walks in a straight line, when they’re hunting? Or for that matter, when they’re walking anywhere, in the woods?

Rather than taking my ragged-ass Subaru, with its license plates three years expired, the windshield shattered from a deer collision (good eating, that one)—we threw the old bloodstained backpacks in the trunk of the shiny new rental car with its out-of-state license plates and motored up valley, turned onto the lonely logging road that led north to the trailhead, and powered through the night before’s snow, wheels churning.

On our way up, we passed, improbably, another car coming down the logging road: the county sheriff in his shiny new navy SUV. There wasn’t really a lot of room to pull over and our traction wasn’t very good anyway, so I advised the Frenchmen to just wave and keep on keeping on.

It wasn’t exactly like we ran him off the road, but he did study us pretty hard as we plowed past, and he kind of had that look on his face like the Man does sometimes when he wants to pull you over but knows he really doesn’t have any probable cause. You’re white. You’re home free, innocent until proven guilty.

We waved merrily, berets and all—stylish black mufflers, black leather gloves, designer sunglasses—and motored resolutely forward, appearing for all the world to be in a tear-ass hurry, rather than simply unwilling to stop and lose our momentum.

“I think we’ll be hearing from that gentleman again, and I don’t mean in a postcard,” I said.

We parked at the trailhead and left before he could turn around and come interrogate us. You know how it is: you don’t want anyone, particularly a local, knowing precisely where you hunt.

It took longer than I’d expected. They weren’t wearing the best footgear for the ankle-deep wet new snow, and they kept stopping to take photographs of the strangest things: a piece of bark, the day-struck crescent moon. A wolf turd. How unusual the world must look to them, I thought, how immense and overwhelming. They’re going to go into a tizzy, I thought, when they see the snowed-upon deer carcass; the little prince, the little king, crumpled and hollowed out. Nature red in tooth and claw.

Except we—I—couldn’t find him! So much snow had fallen over the week that my trail was filled in. I knew I was close, very close, but I couldn’t quite zero in on it. The good news was that other predators hadn’t gotten it—there would have been a busy radial of the tracks of coyote, wolf, bear, marten, lion, etc., converging on the sun-center of what I had once and briefly thought of as my meat—but the bad news was that I was tromping in circles, embarrassing myself before my guests. I know I wasn’t presenting the American sportsman in the best possible light: Yeah, I killed this deer, I think it’s around here somewhere. As if I were looking for a set of dropped car keys. So much for the heap-big spirituality of using all of the meat.

Thus motivated by shame, I somehow found the little deer—he was much farther downslope than I’d remembered, and in more of a thicket than I recalled, though if something had dragged him down there, those tracks, too, were covered up—and the camera crew began recording the disassembly with all sorts of lenses and goofy avant-garde angles. They said nothing the whole time, not in French, not in English, not in Dutch.

We loaded the packs and started down, into the bluing dusk. Why is it always dusk, up here, in the winter? There’s barely ever time for anything. It was interesting, watching the pleasure the visitors took in executing the ancient act of bringing meat to camp. I could see them changing, almost step by step. There was less banter and more of a quiet pride; a new steadiness. It was interesting, and I imagined they would talk about it a bit, when they got back home.

What I know they must have talked about was the reception all four of us received when we got back down to the trailhead. Flashing blue and red lights in the gloom: not just our friend the sheriff, but two different Border Patrol vehicles, and the four of us burdened with packs that were clearly filled with something: a veritable packtrain, an entire string of mules.

Oh, you are so busted, the agents had to be thinking, and when they asked us for our identification, they probably couldn’t believe their luck: France, France, Belgium. Maybe they’d receive a promotion; maybe they’d get a trip to the White House. There was no telling who—or what—they had captured. (I didn’t have any ID on me, but claimed to be a local: the oldest story in the book. I was terrified they would run a check on me, find out my various overdue bail bonds, criminal trespass mischief in various state and national capitals, and thought seriously about making up some bogus name.)

We chatted calmly. My foreign visitors could tell this was not quite normal for the hunting experience, but I stayed cool. There were German shepherds in the backs of the Border Patrols—I could see them in there, and could hear them whining—wanting, I guess, fresh meat—and I thought, Oh, you fuckers, shut up.

We visited for five minutes or so—it felt like thirty—with the incredible leisure of the just-busted, until finally, one of the agents just had to ask, pretending that it was almost an afterthought—Oh, say, so what’s in all the packs?—and I had to tell them, Meat, real good meat, man.

I don’t wish to get those kind and affable agents in trouble, but boy were they friendly. They didn’t even blink, didn’t ask us to show them the meat! Have you ever heard of such a thing? They said they’d been down on the U.S.–Mexico border, in Texas, training for a couple of years, but then had gotten rotated up here.

Oh so carefully, and oh so gradually—I was certain, absolutely certain, that they were baiting me, and that at any second, the cuffs were going to come out—we bid them goodbye. We didn’t ask if we were free to leave, but just kind of pretended that we thought, assumed, hoped, took as our due, the God-given fact that in these big mountains, we were.

They didn’t try to stop us! Five steps to our car. We heaved the heavy packs into the back. Disbelieving, we got inside. We buckled up. We turned around. We drove down off of the mountain and out of the woods. What alternate reality was this?

How did they know we were telling the truth? There was no blood on our hands. It continued to puzzle me. Part of me wants to believe that they were such skilled observers of the human condition that they were able to tell, with almost 100 percent accuracy, the truth-telling within us—and yet, with so much at stake, wouldn’t you just be dying to take even the smallest peek inside the pack?

I thought about this a lot.

And after several months of studying on it, the answer came to me, and I was embarrassed by how long it had taken me to figure it out. They didn’t need to look in the packs because they had already seen it all, like the Wicked Witch gazing into her crystal ball: drones, unnoticed by us and silent as harriers, had hovered overhead, filmed all—our innocence, and our captivity, here in the borderlands. Free at last, maybe, but not as much as before.