DEER CAMP

Some years we need the woodstove, other years the air conditioner. In the old days the season started in mid–November, around the peak of the rut, but for a long time now opening day has been moved back to the first Saturday in November. The lore from the old days is that of hunts amid ice storms and even flurries of snow: tales befitting those from a century ago. They used to sleep in wall tents, then a shabby old bunkhouse they threw together and shared with snakes and wrens and scorpions. Not until 1987 did we build a new and more hospitable bunkhouse.

The tin roof of it gets pounded by marbled hail, and, for those of us sleeping on the upper bunks, our faces grow chilled by each night’s frost, and our hair stands on end during the electrical storms that cause the tin roof to crackle. On balmier nights the branches of overhanging oaks scrape and scratch against the roof like the soundtrack for an old horror movie. It’s comforting, ancient, familiar.

Relatives of Davy Crockett had once owned this place, and before that, the Comanches. I like to think that the place was as special to them as it is to us, and from the incredible density of arrowheads scattered here and there—shards, points, spearheads, ax blades, awls—I believe it was. On one mesa I found ancient lichen-spattered sandstone rocks arranged in a perfect circle, the size of a teepee ring, with a view that looked over the entire Hill Country. Lower down, at the mouth of one of the canyons, there are fantastic granite monoliths, eroded into visages eerily reminiscent of the giant heads at Easter Island, and other boulders loom in the shapes of elephants, rhinos, clenched fists.

Every strong rain exposes a new sheet of shards and chips and still, all these years later, a perfect arrowhead. Now and again you encounter an old blue-tarnished bullet casing. The dozen or so of us who have hunted here every year have fired a lot of shells. If each of us shoots but once or twice a year, the math suggests there would be close to two thousand bullet casings breech-jacked into the brush, cartwheeling gold-glinting through the sun, to be lost for a while, until encountered by another, perhaps decades later, sitting in the same location, or passing through.

Some of us have shot more than once or twice a year. Over time, the deer tend to be drawn to the same shapes of the land—passing through the same slots and ravines and trails, often at the same crepuscular hours. By learning so well the shape of the land and the timing of the deer as they pass across it, we have found a curious way of slowing time down, or at least bending time, like a blacksmith forging an iron wagon wheel, into something less linear, something with an arc and, for all we know yet, ultimately a full circle.

The slow motion melt of our faces in the mirror, and our yearly photograph, picking up more and more lines in our faces: it’s as if Granddaddy’s coming back. It’s as if we’re all stepping forward. We’re the same, yet we’re different. Time is erasing the overburden of our destinies like the thunderstorms eroding the present to summon once more the past.

How can nature not develop in us a poetic sensibility? How can the specificity of the woods not spread through the canyons of our minds, bringing light and fuller understanding to all manner of broader truths, abstractions, similes, and metaphors?

As some of time’s advancement reveals to each of us our previously concealed futures, our youth dissolving into the past that has preceded us, so too do we see pathways of disassembly being halted by time, held loosely together by a kind of time-in-balance. The beautiful pink granite with the fantastic cubic crystals of feldspar and mica (the larger and more developed the crystals, the slower the cooling) is going to eventually disassemble. The frozen fire cannot hold together forever, but for a little while longer, it appears that the rain-moistened lichens—brilliant turquoise, russet, blood red, and cornflower blue—are clutching the boulders so fiercely that they will never let them crumble.

The scientist in me understands that indeed there are processes in the lichen that, by extracting faint nutrition in the interchange between roots and stones, create a kind of acid that eventually decomposes the rock further. But the poet in me sees no acid, only the wildly intricate floral patterns of lichens growing broader each year and appearing to hold the boulders together.

In the morning after a storm the webs of garden spiders glint like necklaces in the spaces between the cedars, holding together the white spaces through which, soon, the world will begin moving once more, piercing the day, piercing the diamonds.

The more deeply we come to know this Hill Country place, the more we come to understand that there is a reassuring sameness everywhere. The green translucence of each sunfish in the little creek casts a delicate fish-shaped shadow when sun-struck, so much so that the shadow seems more real, more visible, than the fish themselves.

A hike through the high boulders on the east side of the lease—boots scritching on the pink wash of gravel that is the detritus of the decomposing granite—takes me past the tooth-shaped crystals of quartz that lie next to the bleached skull of a wild hog; teeth and savage tusks, loosened from his jaw, appear in their repose no different from the bed of ivory crystals in which he now rests.

Elsewhere on the same hike, far back in the brush, I encounter the skull of a bobcat, with its formidable rabbit-killing canines still intact, resting amidst a mound of dried rabbit pellets. Who controls whom, predator or prey?

I suppose we should be more intent upon finding and killing deer, but we have killed so many, across the decades, that it’s not so much like there’s a truce, nor is it a fatigue, as instead a desire, I think, for everything to move more slowly—to move as slowly as possible—and, as we all know, when you kill a deer, the hunt is over. At this stage of our lives, we are all less eager for the hunt to be over.

A close observation of nature cannot help but yield a poetic sensibility, and who observes nature more closely than a hunter? Not all hunters, however, devolve, or evolve, into poets. Certainly Old Granddaddy did not yield or change in this regard, but remained instead a resolute slayer of deer all the way to the end, chain-smoking cigarettes around the dry cedar all day. An eater of fried foods, particularly pork—“I never see a pig I don’t tip my hat”—he probably would have lived to be about 120, had he had even remotely better habits. He’s gone now, though steadfastly, we each and all follow him.

Like little else in the world, hunting demands presence and attentiveness, summons an imagination electric with possibility. Even as we age and lose the fire for killing and procuring—as if made weary by our relentless success—the habit of noticing nature continues. We watch how things in nature strive to hold together, even in the midst of massive disassembly, and we are comforted. We are comforted by the steadfast regularity of patterns—from the four seasons to the phases of the moon to the cycles of the deer in the fall breeding period, and everything in-between—even as our hunter’s eye stays watchful always for the anomaly, the one interesting thing outside the cycle.

This ability to be two things in the world—pattern-viewer but anomaly-seeker—has sharpened who we are as a species and as a family and as individuals, and it occurs to me that stories serve the same purpose.

Each year we re-tell so many of the old ones—are reassured, re-knit together, by them—even as we seek new ones as well. Assembly, reassembly, disassembly: each year, we step through and between all of these stages. We keep moving forward.

Sometimes as we grow older we just want to sit around the fire and rest, but we keep moving forward, even knowing full well that it leads us right back to where we started.

Where once Comanches raided the settlers who sought to eradicate their way of life, we now raid each other. Again and again we re-tell the old stories of gone-by pranks, while remaining vigilant for opportunities for new ones. Long ago, in his snake-fearing youth, a cousin who shall remain nameless killed a big rattlesnake—old-school Texas, back before people knew better—and he decided to bring it back to camp to skin and fry, curious as to whether it really did taste like chicken.

The snake was rendered headless before being tossed into the back of the truck and onto a pile of firewood that was being gathered for the campfire that evening. It was dark by the time he got back, and this nameless cousin straightaway asked his brother, Randy, for help unloading the vast scramble of limbs and branches.

Always an enthusiastic worker, Randy seized a big armful of wood, branches splaying every which-way, and as he was walking over to the fire, his face so close to the branches that he could barely see where he was going, I inquired, “Say, is that a rattlesnake in there with all that wood?”

Randy refocused upon the immense snake that was in the midst of his double-armful grip and threw the wood into the sky with a most satisfying scream.

Another time, I found myself walking back to camp alone, well after dark, without a flashlight. There was no need for one—we know every inch of the tangled thousand acres better, I think, than we know the canyons and corridors of our own minds—and walking in the darkness, still far from camp, I began to smell propane. I was walking along the creek beneath the high canopy of live oaks that formed a long eerie tunnel along the trail, and a short distance farther, I saw the spot of light that was the source of the scent: Randy with his hissing gas lantern. He’s too old-school to use a flashlight; he likes the more democratic throw of the lantern for his night walking, and as I watched his lantern drifting through the all-else darkness like a firefly, a plan came to mind, one too good to pass up.

Knowing that he could hear nothing over the dull roar of the lantern, I ran down the dark corridor after him and drew right up behind him. Spanish moss hung in ghostly looping tendrils from the canopy. I took in as much air as I could and then let loose with the loudest panther scream I could muster, inches behind him, then jumped back out of the sphere of light as he dropped the lantern. The globe glass cracked and the mantles crumpled, but the twin burners kept jetting orange firelight.

Randy sat down promptly—in that tiny sphere of light, he looked pale and sick—and he peered wild-eyed into the darkness. “Richard?” he said, and I did not have the heart to scream again.

That was twenty years ago, and those days are gone now, all our hearts are too frail and worn-out for such shenanigans.

It’s not just Randy who’s the target of pranks; we all are. No one escapes. One year Russell shot a nice eight-point down in the creek. I heard his single shot, and knew he’d been successful. A few moments later, I saw a nice little forkhorn slipping through an opening on the other side of the creek, illuminated by the mid-morning sun on the side of Buck Hill.

It was a long shot but I had a good brace and was confident; I made the shot, and the buck dropped instantly. I climbed down out of the rocks, crossed the creek, ascended Buck Hill, cleaned the little buck, and then, feeling strong, began dragging him out, back toward camp, as had been done in the old days, rather than going to get a truck.

I had dragged it for only about fifteen minutes before coming through a clearing and seeing Russell’s much larger buck, also gutted, hanging in a tree; Russell had already gone back to camp for a truck. His was a very nice buck, and I had no qualms about untying it from its limb, hiding it in the bushes, and replacing it with mine.

I then continued on to camp, where Russell was regaling everyone with the tale of his big deer. We were all excited to hear about it, and he was proud to show us, so after lunch we all drove out there in a caravan.

It pleases me to recall the confusion with which Russell slowly approached the deer—the disbelief in his face—and the way he turned to us slowly and said “This is not my deer.”

“Oh Russell,” my father said, “they always look bigger when they’re in the woods.”

Other times we’re less brutal. As we age, we take midmorning naps more and more often, and our hearing is no longer keen. It’s easy to sneak up on one another. We’ll spy a hunter dozing against the trunk of a tree, camouflaged within the ground shrubbery of agarita or shin oak, and will slip right in and place a wildflower—a late-season aster—in the gun barrel, then pass on, unaccounted.

We used to kill deer like crazy. They were drawn to us as if by our desire alone. There were times known to each of us when we knew the day beforehand—the night beforehand—where we would see the deer. It was not with confidence that such certainty impressed itself upon us but instead a kind of wonder. The incandescence of our yearning for the hunter’s contract—the way the world had lathed us, for at least the last 180,000 years—was at times a kind of brilliance within us, and we never took such dreams or foreknowledge for granted, but instead marveled at them, and the next day, moved toward those places—those appointments, those rendezvous—with the surety of faith.

And when the deer appeared, in much the time and manner as we had imagined, we were grateful, never arrogant. We understood that the success of such ventures never depended on our skill but was always instead the decision of some larger thing, some larger force—something a little like the electricity created by the confluence of our desire, the landscape, and the deer, as well as the world’s desire to keep on moving.

To be hunters, we had to hunt—and to hunt, we had to be willing to gather our own meat. And back then, we were enthused about it.

Those kinds of dreams no longer occur. A central strand of the electrical current—our desire to find deer—has gone silent. Instead, now we sit quietly among the oaks and cedars. Sometimes the deer pass by us anyway, and sometimes—unless it is only my imagination—they almost look confused, as if wondering why their world has tipped, and where the hunters have gone. We admire the morning sunlight in their eyes.

We admire the smooth grace of their muscles. They have been here far longer than we have. They may or may not outlast us. Watching them pass by, it is very hard to imagine that any of it ever ends, but that instead it all goes on forever; that it, that current in which we once so enthusiastically participated, will last even longer than the stone itself.