THIS YEAR’S HUNT

There is nowhere where we have not killed deer. The dimensions of our history on and love of this place are beginning to become significant, from either a deer’s or a man’s perspective, though not, I am sure, from a mountain’s.

But it is an old story that time has a way of breaking things down (building other things just behind you, even as you are staring at the breaking-down), and eventually each of the hunters in our family dissolves the one mystery, topography (even while assembling new ones), and we learn each inch, each stone, of the deer pasture.

What are the cubic dimensions of a family’s spirit? Nine men times seventy-six years times one week per year—days spent fully in the heightened sense of awareness that hunting brings—well, the cubic dimensions of things felt, land learned, senses touched accumulate to create within us, or impress upon us, like a stamp or a brand, something as new and deeply organic as a just-born, living thing.

It’s like learning a foreign language. In the beginning, you seize upon a word or two, one whose shape or sound or translation has meaning for you. The great rounded granite boulder perched above the old camp on the lip of the bluff on the east side—visible almost from anywhere on the pasture. (I’ll never know or understand why Old Granddaddy called it a pasture, the deer pasture, as if it were a damn croquet lawn or something, instead of hardscrabble rattlesnake and buck country.)

The flattop hulk of Hudson Mountain also in the east—shaped exactly like the lonely old buttes and mesas of our Hollywood cowboy movie youth.

The Water Gap, on the north end, where the big creek, Willow Creek, flows under the fence as it “leaves”—though it never leaves, the creek is still always there.

Turkey Hollow, once called Panther Hollow (my grandfather and sometimes even my father and his brother pronounced it “Holler,” but my brothers and cousins cannot or will not, and so in that manner we are bending the language slightly, altering the story even more slightly, like rivulets of rain streaming down a mountain . . .).

You learn the outlines of the place—the fencelines, the roads, the rough shape—and then, over the years, you begin to explore the interiors, following the creeks and ridgelines at first—getting lost, finding yourself; getting lost, finding yourself—stumbling often. But then you begin to cherish getting lost—you seek out the deeper interiors, the really wild places—and out of that lost and groping stumbling, a fluency emerges.

They say that in learning a new language, one of the surest signs of fluency being achieved is when you begin to dream in that new language, and certainly, it is that way for us now, and has been for a long time.

There is nowhere on the pasture where we have not killed deer. They have always been there for the nine of us, now eight, across the years, and each year we kill a few, as if eating our way through the years on deer, or as if eating, gnawing at incessantly, the mountain, the thousand acres, itself; but the deer keep coming back, as if springing up out of the mountain, while it is we who fade and sink and erode and submerge, eventually, back beneath the surface.

Howard, the old man who owned the place so long ago, gone. Old Granddaddy, gone. And suddenly Uncle Jimmy’s no spring chicken; nor is my father.

Hell, we’re all getting old. Is it belaboring an obvious fact that when we first came to this place, we were young, and strong, strong as the rocks themselves?

And surely that is one of the finer or sharper ways in which we have each and all learned this landscape, have made our own interior maps of it. If you follow this creek quietly up to its headwaters, you’ll find the little mesquite flat where the ten-point was killed last year, grunted in shortly after dawn.

This ledge is where you sat motionless for hours, a long time ago—you couldn’t have been more than twenty-five—and where the eight-point emerged, materialized, at dusk.

The stories, the micro-sites of where a deer fell, assemble like the patches of a quilt. You learn intently, deeply. You remember wind directions, soil type, pockets of dampness, species of underbrush. The land lives deeper in your mind after you walk away, whether you have killed or not—but I’ve found that the places where I’ve dropped a deer, then cleaned it and hung it, act in my mind as anchors or islands for the rest of the matrix.

Those places where the deer or turkey fell aren’t necessarily more important to me than other places on the pasture. They just possess a depth, a resonance, that seem more lasting, even unforgettable, in my memory. I pass by them, again and again, wandering, each year. Sometimes I will kill a deer not ten or twenty yards away from where I killed one in earlier years. I’m sure that when such analytical tools are available, it will be figured out that such happenings consisted of a perfectly equal mix of chance and destiny. It’s really not even worth worrying over or grappling with. That’s just how it goes: a forced move in a designed space with “closed” borders—only a thousand acres, but a lifetime, several lifetimes.

The senses are inflamed and connected during the hunt; after the kill, in the stillness, as you sit there for a moment with the thing you have taken, the thing you have been given, the world seems truly frozen in time; and it remains stopped as you begin to clean the deer.

After a little while the world (glittering in its beauty, and you, amazed at your luck) begins to move again, though so slowly—and you become aware for the first time, though only dimly, as you drag or tote the deer (gripping him by the mahogany antlers), that had you not killed the deer, he might be across the creek by this time, further into the day, browsing oak leaves or nibbling at grapevine. But that is not how it turned out, and you continue hauling the deer, dragging it out to a road so that you can drive it back to camp and hang it from the bar from which all the years’ previous deer have hung, to age in the night breezes and day shadows for a day or two before being rendered by your hands and the steel blade: backstrap, rib skirt, tenderloin, neck loin, neck roast, shoulder, ham, butt steak. Ribs like a bird’s ribs. You know the workings of a deer’s muscles, a deer’s body, as well as your own.

All afternoon, the world moves for you at that slower pace. Maybe biology can explain it all by “causing” that lovely, wondrous feeling of completion to be a desired state for the hunter-gatherer so as to give positive reinforcement for replication in all the years or hunts to come. Whatever it is, and whatever its reason, it’s strong and strange, and the shape of it fits a space in me, as I bend and flex to learn the shape of this land, those thousand acres, draping myself across it.

This year, midway up the backside of the Burned-Off Hill, moving through the cedars, I spooked two does, who bounded away. A buck was following them, walking as if drunk on their scent, and I fired, but missed; when I went over to look for hair or blood, to be sure I had indeed missed, I found the branch the bullet had hit, sparing that deer’s life for a bit longer.

I looked long and hard anyway, to be sure. In the end all I found was an ancient gray cartridge, a spent 25.20, which is the caliber my father and uncle used to hunt with when they were young, more than fifty years ago. There was just the one cartridge, indicating in all likelihood that they’d made a kill. (My grandfather used to listen to the shots in the distant hills and count the number of times a hunter fired, telling us, “One shot, good shot, two shots, maybe, three shots, bullshit,” the principle being, back then, when you could see farther—before the cedar crept in all over the hills like Einstein’s wild hair—that if you shot only once, it meant you’d dropped the buck.

The second shot, following the miss, might be a hit. Sometimes the buck would be so surprised by the noise that he would pause, not wanting to run until he could figure out where the shot came from—maybe—but by the time a hunter had fired a third shot, if he did, that buck would most surely be up and running, wide-open, and if the hunter had missed the one or two standing shots, there was no way he was going to connect on a running third. Bullshit.

Now, however, the cedar has clotted almost all of the spaces between the oaks, so that the land, despite its aridity, is a jungle, a miasma of interlocked limb-and-branch. You see the deer but once, a wraith, as you yourself must be a wraith, trying to move through that clotted jungle, or sitting very still, waiting for the all-but-silent approach of the deer. One shot is all you get now, hit or miss.

The reason, or the main reason, the hills are becoming overrun with cedar—or so it seems to us, who first learned the land when there was not so much cedar—is that our white culture, ever since we arrived here in force, has been putting out fires of any size or shape. Fire is the enemy of cedar, which has thin bark, and cannot withstand the fire’s heat. The oak trees, which bear the mast so favored by deer and turkeys, has a thick, “corky” bark and does well with fire, traditionally surviving the frequent low-intensity fires that once washed across this land like summer rainstorms, keeping the cedar at bay.

Now, in the long absence of fire, the encroachment of the cedar has become like its own kind of fire, spreading rapidly and at wind’s whim: crawling, leaping, climbing, growing. It is not a new story or lesson—that in attempting overmuch to hold a thing back, you nurture the forces required to release it—but it is new to us, and sometimes now it seems that I can hear the crackling of the cedar as it grows from one year to the next, ever taller and thicker, obscuring—as if already to ash—the places where I walked and hunted as a child, and then a young man.

Other borders, boundaries, relationships, are shifting, too. Uncle Jimmy had a stroke at his home in Houston, a big stroke, and spent the year recovering the use of his right arm (not to worry, he’s a left-handed shooter), as well as the mysteries of speech. He still goes into work for a few hours every day, but the only words he can really master at present are “yes” and “no.”

It made a graceful kind of sense—not overly pleasant, but acceptable, in a rough way—to watch Old Granddaddy get old, near the end; to care for him, on those last hunts of his, driving him out to an easy crossing where deer were likely to be active, and setting him up, and tending to him. (Some of those years, even after his stroke—including his eighty-seventh year, his last—he would get a deer, bracing the little .222, the lightweight flat-shooting gun in the crook of his elbow, and with his unblinking eye made briefly young again through the scope’s optics, squeezing the trigger once more, and the deer would leap, then fall.)

He and Howard were the ones who taught Uncle Jimmy and my father, Charlie, how to hunt; and then there at the end, my father and Jimmy helped Old Granddaddy to keep hunting. It made full-circle sense.

But now, already, to see the men who taught my cousins and me how to hunt becoming so much older—to see my father, five years younger, assisting Uncle Jimmy, buttoning his sleeve for him, or tying a boot lace—I’m not ready for it. I’d like time—long time, not just the short time that transpires in the hours and days after you’ve killed a deer—to slow down a little. But it won’t.

You would think that dealing more directly with death, as a hunter does—acknowledging actively that we live at the expense of the space and sometimes lives of others—that it would be easy to watch one’s elders fade away, settling slowly back down into their beloved land, near the end of full and intensely lived lives.

But it really doesn’t work that way. You might be one or two steps closer to accepting it—that place in the cycle. But here is still a gap in the witnessing of and participation in the unraveling of a family and a time. Only the place remains.

When I speak of the hunting of deer, I don’t mean at all to be wading toward an attempt to defend that way of life. Better men than I have tried to explain it and, in my opinion, have come up wanting. (The older I get, such an effort—defense—seems more and more like trying to defend the sky, or the weather.)

I’m only trying to explain how I came to learn a landscape.

The mountains are crumbling before our eyes. It’s an amazing privilege, to see this speeded-up view of the geologic process framed and compressed within the blink of a human lifetime. Not all of the mountains are crumbling; some, like the Burned-Off Hill (which last burned in 1907), are composed of some of the oldest exposed rock in the world, the early Cambrian sandstones. They’ve been here for more than a billion years and will probably be around a little longer. The earth’s yawnings and stretchings have fractured them in places along the lines of their initial calm-water deposition, square to rectangular, so that they are perfect for building stone walls.

I would go so far as to say they are alluring in this regard; that the beauty of their shape gives rise to the idea of a stone wall, and for many years in my spare time I have been playing with these exquisite stones, making walkways around the cabin, and low stone walls. I like particularly the leaden density of these flat and square rocks—the enduring stoutness of them—and I like too the peculiar odor that arises from them when I accidentally drop one against another. A sift of dust-powder will arise from the point of fracture, and I’ll smell an odor that’s been trapped in that hundred-pound stone for ten thousand millennia.

But the land here is no one thing; the eastern boundary of it possesses one of the rarer geologic events in the state, a system of exposed granitic batholiths: places where the earth’s guts roiled in her fire-belly, seeking and searching their way along seams of fracture of weakness in the stony earth far below—boiling, following those underground cracks and crevices like, I imagine, a hunter—wolf, lion, cat, coyote—following indefatigably the track or scent of some quarry.

The fire-guts were stalled, at some point, never reaching the surface, where they finally gave up the hunt and cooled, very slowly; and as the magma cooled, the elemental minerals within began to settle, establishing certain and careful geometric arrangements that they had heretofore been unable to assume, dominated as they were earlier by the relentless force of the magma’s search for the surface.

The magma, trapped beneath some ancient lid, cooled very slowly. The minerals—plagioclase, feldspar, zinc, silica—had all the time in the world. They floated, drifted, and spun around one another, according to ionic differentials, attractions and repulsions, as if in a waltz to some distant tinkling subterranean (or perhaps celestial) melody.

They stacked and ordered themselves into crystalline palaces that would have glittered beyond the imagination, had any light been present to reflect upon them.

There was, of course, none: only intense, total darkness, and a heat, a fire, cooling through the centuries.

Up above—and how far above? Five hundred feet? A thousand? Five thousand? We have no way of knowing, will never know, it has all been swept away and redistributed to the sea and the wind—the world continued gnawing, in its achingly slow and steady fashion, at the breastplate of stone, the lid, covering these gigantic palace domes that were being built below. Rain, frost, fire, wind, time. Rain, frost, fire, wind, time.

And slowly, so slowly—like the head of some colossus, some gargantuan thing emerging from beneath the waves—the tops of the buried palace domes crested, breached, the rubble overlying them in that manner.

That which they had not been able to reach all the way on their own—the surface—was brought down eventually some distance to accommodate them. As if the earth truly desired that beauty to be exposed. It would have taken millions of years, perhaps hundreds of millions, for the steady forces of the world, working without thumbs and fingers—no pry bars or other tools—to carve away that dense overburden.

And now, only now, the pink glittering world of granite, friable and delicate, exposed fully, resting frozen on the shoal of the old bank, the fissure-line along which it once surged.

The granite—rearranged now as it is mostly into wads and chunks of crystal—isn’t long for the world. It’s as if that’s always been one of the laws of the world: a thing can invest itself in style or substance, but that to do so overmuch in one area often comes at the expense of the other.

So it is with the beautiful crystalline pink domes and pyramids and svelte hourglasses of granite that crowd the east side as if set there like giant play-toys or modern art. Without the stony overburden to protect them, and consisting of more crystal than matrix, the giant shapes are crumbling. The pink clay-rich minerals that held them together—plagioclase and orthoclase feldspars, mostly—are dissolving like sugar beneath the force of the real world; no longer supple with the life of their underground fire, they crumble and are carried in streams and runnels across the hills, as are the fantastic crystals the matrix once supported.

The boulders will still be here, strange and round and weather-sculpted into the shapes of the heads of elephants and men, long after we are gone. But they are diminishing so fast that each year it’s possible to find a new trail of crystals leading away from one of the monoliths. It’s possible to watch smaller chunks—those the size of a fist, or even a human head, perched out in the open, unprotected—vanish completely over the course of only two or three decades, leaving behind only a loose pile of pink and black and gold crystals, and then, following another decade of wind and rain, nothing.

The creeks glitter with the talus of these abrupt leavings. Sometimes when a crawfish scuttles across the pink graveled bottom of a clearwater creek, or a frog plunges deep to escape your approach, their impetus stirs the finer, flatter flakes of pyrite, so that left in these small creatures’ wake is a vaporous, sifting trail of fine-ground gold, shining and glittering in aqueous columns of green sunlight, like wisps of smoke.

There are leavings of another kind, too, scattered across the hills and mountains here. Along the western fenceline, on the backside, back in the rugged red ridges of sandstone country, in one certain gully, lie the scattered fossilized leavings of what seems to me to surely be fossilized deer antlers. They are the precise shape and symmetry of the antlers of today’s deer, though slightly smaller.

This might indicate a smaller-bodied animal, which might suggest a larger population, and/or a warmer climate, since a smaller mammal is more effective at shedding body heat, per unit of surface area, than is a larger one. Rest assured, though, that if the climate here was once warmer, it would also have been at another time cooler. Charles Darwin could just as easily have been speaking of climates and vegetative patterns when he wrote, “Daily it is forced home on the mind of the geologist, that nothing, not even the wind that blows, is so unstable as the level of the crust of the earth.”

These stone antlers rest now atop the bone-white sheets and folds of caliche, a clayey mixture of weathering limestone that is itself the remnant, the skeleton, of where a shallow sea once lay—the same sea that has retreated now two hundred miles southward, but that will, when the world warms further, come rising, creeping, swelling back in, like tongues of flames, lapping and flickering.

Other leavings, in some ways less ancient, yet in others, more: the chips and flakes of Paleolithic men and women, fractures of arrowheads, stone knives, spear points.

The best time to find the flint and chert arrowheads is following a heavy rain, when the running water will have sifted away some of the chat to reveal new arrowheads buried years earlier. How strange it is to think of the arrowheads, stone echoes from the work of men’s hands, rising and falling in this manner like the notes of music, or, more crudely, like the lift-and-fall synchrony of piston-and-valve—restless burial, emergence; burial, emergence.

My mother, who did not hunt deer but who nonetheless enjoyed this land, used to be far and away the best at finding the arrowheads. I’ve found a few, but nothing like her finds. She rarely went out for a walk without coming back with one. It wasn’t so much that I was watching the forest for deer or the sky for birds and the direction of the wind, while she kept her eyes on the ground, for I studied the ground too, searching for the tracks and leavings of things. It was more that she knew what she was looking for, to the exclusion of all else. Again, it is one of our oldest lessons, that you can look right at a thing without seeing it.

The way things repeat themselves, across time—not just in the replications and recombinations of family and place (“He favors his momma, she favors her daddy”), but in the accretion of like patterns—as if somewhere far below (or high above), there is one and only one rule—though heaven knows what that rule might be.

A geologist sees it in the shapes and folds of the land; dust blown or washed away tends to be laid upon other parts of the land somewhat as a blanket is laid over the body of a person in a bed, retaining and perpetuating the sleeping shape below. But you can see it in other forms, too, on any walk in the woods. Searching for arrowheads in the fresh-washed streamside chat on the morning after a night thunderstorm, you’ll bend down to pick up what you’re certain is an arrowhead—a dark one, perfectly shaped, with concoidal flutings and rib-ridges reflecting the morning sunlight with a wet glint—only to realize, at the last moment—the moment of touch—that it is a small dried brown oak leaf.

What joke, or grace or beauty, of the world called for the weapon that hunted the birds—the little stone arrowheads that were called “bird points”—to be shaped exactly like the foliage in which the birds hid? As if always, in the shape of our protection and nourishment lies also the shape of our undoing. Hints that the world is either far more vast, or infinitely smaller, than we have previously considered.

I remember one morning at deer camp when my grandfather took me up into the round granite boulders above the old camp to show me what he said was a cache of “Indian jewelry.” Central to that astounding, massive stonework, so suggestive of a civilization that had lived before ours (and, truth be told, suggestive too, by both the scale and beauty of the stone shapes, of a civilization somehow more grand and noble), is a broad vein of quartz pegmatite—a mysterious zone within the granite where pure silica—sand—settled in the cooling, once-fiery suspicion and then grew, as if in some garden, quartz crystals of the most amazing size and delicate complexion.

That line of white quartz hardened, then, like some salty artery, and the granite covering that encased it began to disintegrate. And in its decomposition, the granite released those quartz boulders, cobbles, and nuggets, which did not disintegrate, but instead lay stranded more or less where they fell, stranded now by the ghosts of the gone-away granite that once housed them.

There is one place on the pasture, above all others, that is flooded with these specimens; the forest floor is coated with nothing but beautiful shards of brilliant quartz, whiter than snow.

My grandfather was born in 1903, not yet a full generation removed from the time when the last of the Comanches and other tribes had been killed from the state. As a young man I remember being amused by the way, or so it seemed to me, he was suggesting that the Indians, bless their savage hearts, didn’t know any better: that, lacking the superlative accouterments of our present culture, the quartz was all they’d had to make do with. As if these exquisite shards of quartz were less amazing than “true” diamonds, jade, and opal. Like children who didn’t know any better, assigning outlandish value to things clearly of no value.

(I was a young man, in my early twenties, when he took me up there to show me the place of the Indian jewelry—which I had seen in my wanderings before, but had never considered to be the leavings of humans, but rather, the traces of some faraway geologic event: cold, beautiful, but impersonal. What interested me as much about my grandfather’s revelation was not so much the subtle satire he seemed to be aiming at the Indians, for believing quartz was a kind of jewelry, but rather the way he explained and showed the place to me—The Secret Treasure House of Indian Jewelry. I think in his mind then I was still a teenager, or even younger, and that I would have a child’s interest in such stories; that I was frozen in his mind from some earlier time—the age of ten or twelve, perhaps—as he is now frozen in time in my mind.)

At the time, I disbelieved him, though I did not argue; what harm was there in an old man’s vision of naked red men gathering and exclaiming over crude crystals, which would never be seen by a jeweler’s appraising eye?

Only recently have I begun to believe my grandfather’s story and have likewise pictured the residents of a place picking up any quartz crystal they found in the area and bringing it—for whatever reasons: homage, respect, tithing—to this one central place, beneath and within the overarching granite monoliths, not far from the creek’s edge, where surely they would have camped, as we do now.

Why else would all the quartz pieces be gathered in one place? Surely so rich a pegmatite would not have been confined to one spot, not much larger than a backyard garden. I believe they were worshipped, or at least celebrated (as my mother and I celebrated the arrowheads we’d find, or crystals, or stones, by placing them on the table or windowsill of camp).

Certainly, whatever positions in which they were arranged back then, if any, have been restructured by time’s passage—by the effluvia of a thousand, or ten thousand, rainstorms, with quick bursts of runoff tumbling the smaller quartz pieces like rolled dice down the slopes of the granite mountain, so that in their altered and changing arrangements it is as if you are viewing the cursive script of some sentence still being written.

(In the milder oak flatland just above the creek, and above the civilization of granite, the animals often spend their winters—deer, wild pigs, bobcats, coyotes—and it is there on the shelf-land above that you will often find the loosened bones from the skeletons of the animals that did not survive the winter, with the sun-brightened curls of ribs and the spurs of vertebrae and the bowls of skulls disintegrating their brief hold on order, form, and integrity, and sliding downward, white as quartz, in sentences very similar to those of the stones’ marking . . .)

A thing I’ve noticed we’ll often do, as my cousins and father and uncle and I wander these thousand acres, is to pick up certain fragments of arrowhead or crystal or bone or antler pleasing to the eye, when we happen across them randomly in the field, and place them, as if on display—or again, as if in celebration, and admiration—atop some larger, more permanent stone.

Down along the creek, particularly in the area of the Indian jewelry, where it is damp and shady, rich velvet green moss grows on some of these rough boulders, though it can find no purchase on the slab-smooth crystal faces of the quartz. In particularly wet years, the moss flourishes verdant, and the luxuriant growth of it—an inch or two thick, and again, soft as velvet forest green-colored—lifts the single gleaming, tiny crystal, rain-washed and brilliant, placed there aloft on that bed of moss, atop that great table of a stone, so that it looks for all the world like the one specimen, the one gemstone, most desired of any jewelry, and on a display made more beautiful by the exclusion of any others.

Almost anywhere on the deer pasture, one can come across seemingly improbable structures, so curious in their isolation out here in the backcountry. Lattices of dry cedar, cairns, stone walls . . . . Some I know were built by my ancestors (including the strangely Gothic pig traps, wire corrals that were built far back in the woods in an attempt to lure in and then capture the sometimes savage giant wild hogs that would occasionally terrorize the hunters at night; the corrals, the traps, are now enmeshed with vine and brush, and forty- and fifty-year-old trees are growing within the cages now, as if captured).

Other structures I do not know. The mysterious, wandering stone wall at the south end of the property is perhaps the most baffling. The stones that have been stacked there hint vaguely of the ceremonial, of the amphitheater—they face the magnificent hill of gleaming round granite boulders—but beyond what our impulses tell us, we have no clue; no record exists.

The work is somehow reminiscent of Europe, of white men’s work. I don’t mean this in a negative way, unless it is negative to whites—the near-lunatic mindlessness of stacking rocks—only that it seems, well, extravagant. By all accounts, there was not an overabundance of leisure time for the native peoples living here before us, and I’ve never heard of any stone wall builders in this region: only hunters, moving around here and there, following game.

My father is of the opinion that it was a corral for the Comanches’ horses, but I’m not so sure: the wall is only knee-high. Even if it had once been chest-high, but the upper half had fallen over, you’d still see the scattered flat rocks at the fence’s base, especially after only such a short time ago—a hundred and fifty years.

I don’t think the wall was ever much higher than it is now.

We’ve never been able to find any artifacts: no rusting cans or nails, detritus of the white man era, nor any artifacts of stone, from the time before.

But the rocks are definitely human-stacked, and the effort involved implies a large number of people, as does the area bounded by the knee-wall: about five acres.

It’s possible to imagine a long-ago time of druids, a forgotten or never-known time to us—a mysterious time, washed away and vanished, never-seen. The size of the stones in the wall are larger than those of any other rock wall I’ve ever seen. I wouldn’t guess that a dozen strong men could have even budged any one of those huge square stones, much less hauled them whatever distance and fitted them into place.

And yet, they are fitted; they are erratic enough, stacked and platy enough in places, to erase any ideas that perhaps the earth just weathered in this location to erode and reveal the shape of a rock wall. It was definitely put here by someone before us, and my hunch, my gut, tells me that it was someone long before us, far before even the idea of us.

This year my youngest cousin Russell shot a small buck on the back side of Buck Hill an hour or so after sunrise; he had been walking, then sat down for a while, and the buck came walking past, feeding. Any hunter knows that there are cycles in the woods that tell you, and the other animals, when to get up and walk, and when to lie down and be quiet for a while—you can feel these waves or cycles moving in gentle pulses—and often I like to just sit there and be made slowly aware of them, in a way that I usually have not felt since the last hunting season.

The transition is often preceded by a long stillness. Something will shift, then—something silent and invisible, but as real as the mechanics of a cog—and you’ll feel something, the world, lift; you won’t be imagining it because a moment later, birds will begin singing and fluttering, and you’ll suddenly feel an increased focus, and a slowing of your heart, a pounding. Your hearing will become sharper—the animals are moving—and sometimes, a few moments later, a deer will step into view, and perhaps it will be your deer, the one you intend to take that year.

I heard the shot—one shot—and knew where it came from, knew who it was.

That evening, with not fifteen minutes of light left, my middle brother, Frank, shot a spike on the east side. (I’d spent the morning not far from there with my youngest brother, B. J., rattling antlers and giving deer calls, trying to lure a deer in for him, but with no luck.)

Frank left his deer for me to clean and take back to Montana—he’s a journalist in New York and has a very small freezer—and B. J. went back to school the next day.

The day after that, walking quietly on a sunny morning after the fog had lifted, I happened upon a big spike who was browsing cedar. He had his neck outstretched like a giraffe—does the cedar at canopy level taste better than that below?—and the branch shaking was what caught my eye. He had long antlers and I could see the tips of them shining in the sunlight. I was very close to him but he couldn’t see me because the cedar bough was over his face like a mask, and when I shot, he crumpled without another movement.

I cleaned him, dragged him out to the road, then went and got the Jeep to take him back to camp. In the old days, I used to carry the deer out on my back, believing it had something to do with responsibility and respect, until my father pointed out to me that it was a good way to get shot, were I to pass by a fenceline and some other eager hunter who didn’t know who and what I was.

The deer hang vertical from the same metal pole they’ve always hung from. There is art to the stripping, the paring down, no matter how familiar the act has become, over the years. We peel the neck cape back a bit to let the carcass cool and age in the mild November breeze, and then, a couple of days later, the deer is skinned, revealing every perfect muscle, every whitened strand of fascia. Creatures wrapped in muscle, red muscle sheathed within more muscle, sheathed then within more muscle.

I like some of it in chili. I like certain cuts of it in the iron skillet. I like certain cuts roasted, others breaded lightly in flour.

Taking them apart—first the long backstrap, which powers their sinuosity, then the shoulders, folding back like wings, with no joint to hold them to the body, only more muscle, and then the big hams, heavier than sacks of grain and fastened firmly with ball-and-socket, whose connective tissue must be cut; then the smaller pieces, butt steak and shanks and neck roasts. Neck loins, tenderloins, and then the delicate strips of meat between the narrow ribs. Then the flank steaks, the sheets of muscle transversing the ribs.

Now the deer is beginning to look more like a wingless bird or a reptile—all the vertebrae and ribs gleam. It’s become such a shadow of its former self, and so light.

You cut and wrap, over at the butchering table, beneath the great oak. You toss the ligaments into the cedars, for the jays and coyotes to eat. For the soil, the cedar and oaks, to eat with their roots.

You might have a hundred pounds in your ice chest when you are done. Rendering the deer, you understand physically in a way you could not understand by reading or listening about it, that you are eating the mountain: that fruit trees grow fruit and that mountains grow deer.

The shape of those muscles you learned, in the disassembly, held silent discourse for you about the shape of the land that accommodated them: the gullies descended, the ravines climbed, the side hills traveled. Cleaning the deer, handling each muscle, you would stop and think how each muscle must have worked to travel across a certain feature on the landscape. And would again, in another.

Coming back apart the way we were assembled. Like the rocks, like us. As with the gone-away granite that formed and then laid down the crystals and then left, abandoning the crystals, so too are there ghosts of my family’s deer all around. I see them, I taste them, and remember them across the years, and the places they were found. They are in the muscles of my arms, my back. They’re in the cells of that part of the brain that holds memory.

What has Uncle Jimmy forgotten, with his stroke? Nothing, it seems; he just has great difficulty speaking or writing. He seems to remember everything. The little rifle that he and my father used to hunt with. The pig that chased him up the tree, gashing his calf muscle with its tusks.

This year at supper one night my father asks him if he remembers the big catfish that lived in the deep watering hole beneath the waterfall, below the old camp. I’d forgotten that fish myself—had forgotten it with a cleanliness and severity; there was a strange and not altogether unpleasant depthfulness to my forgetting, so that when my father’s storytelling dredged it back up, I understood immediately that I would never, ever have thought of that fish again in my life, without his having mentioned it.

I was probably only six or seven, during the reign of that fish; it was long before I began hunting, though sometimes in the summer my mother and father would bring me up to the deer pasture just to walk around and to go on a picnic.

The catfish was a black bullhead, weighing probably more than ten pounds, and had lived in the clear deep pool below the falls since before I was born. The plunge pool was eight to ten feet deep, round and crystal clear, about the size of a large garage, and it was where my father and uncle and grandfather had bathed, no matter what the weather, in the old days, before electricity came to the Hill Country. The pellucid waters seemed to magnify both the brilliance of his skin as well as his size—this jet-black fish with whiskers like a dragon cruising slowly around and around, dark amidst the mossy green of the submerged boulders, and so visible in that clear water—and he was half-tame, so that you could swim next to him and around him in those clear waters, though he would shy away if you tried to touch him.

Then one year he was gone—any guess would be as good as another—and I was still a young boy, with a world to see and remember, and the memory of that fish escaped too, until it was brought back on this year’s hunt, summoned by the memory not of my own doing, but of another connected to me.

“Yes,” Uncle Jimmy says, when my father is done telling us, re-telling us, the story of that fish, “yes.” Meaning: yes, he remembers. How strange it is that he is the one who has had the stroke but I am the one who has forgotten.

I have been taking photographs every year, and it’s really starting to get fun now, as we knew, I suppose, it eventually would; I’ve been doing it for a long enough period of time, roughly thirty years, that the photographs are finally—after a long period of seeming timelessness—showing progression: aging, repetition, pattern. I have photos, unposed, of my father and uncle working on deer at the butchering table, and then, thirty years later, ourselves, doing the same work, and looking so much alike. As the photos of my father and uncle are now, like a dissolving magic trick, beginning to look so much like those of Old Granddaddy, thirty years earlier.

What’s equally amazing is the realization that these patterns of repetition have probably been present all along; that it’s only now, decades later, becoming evident, revealed to all, stripped by time.

It’s amazing to me how meaningful some of those old photos are to me. Nearly indiscriminate snapshots—my father pondering a move in a dominoes game; Uncle Jimmy at the stove, spatula in hand, back at the old camp . . . . Things you never dreamed would be gone, things you never really considered one way or the other—like the existence of a big black catfish—but that now exist only in those pages.

The sight of them—like some familiar topographic relief—helps hold them firm in the memory.

Often now I find myself consciously taking indiscriminate photos of our surroundings, and our way of life at the deer camp, and of the landscape itself. Perhaps that’s a code for the times: document the familiar. Even the mundane, the common, the secure, and the comfortable, will not endure. Sometimes you can’t help but think that it’s all already been decided: that there is no escaping, even if one wanted, the eternal relationship between a thing and the shadow cast by that thing.

This year, more than any other, I was struck by how worn the paths are before us. The deer use the same trails; they scrape and rub the same trees with their antlers and, in the winter, shed their antlers in the same places.

Even the geometry of the world seems extraordinarily decided, some days. The curved, smooth-weathered silhouettes of the stones at dawn look like the curved backs of animals, haunch and hip, flank and shoulder, as do the rounded curves of cactus pads. Certain twists of branches look exactly like the branches of antlers. The similarity does not in any way diminish one’s wonder at the reasons for and presence of life on this earth—if anything, it causes one to marvel even more. How easy it would be for our shapes to remain static, unanimated, even inorganic.

Just as visions, corners, flashes of grass in the wind swirl like the flagging of the bright tails of fleeing deer, but upon whirling to face that glimpse of sight, you see that there is no deer, was no deer, only wind.

Not all the granite boulders come apart so quickly. A few are actually held together by thick mats of the bright hieroglyphic-patterned lichens that feed on the faces of the boulders—though they feed much more slowly than does the wind and rain. Perhaps this is what family is. We cannot stop each other’s aging, and at times it must surely seem that the youth feeds on the parents, and the family on its past, wearing down a thing that once was. But the only thing more disintegrating would be to have none at all. And the lichens are like nothing so much as a depiction, with their strange roseate swirls and curlicues, of the vapors and currents of time’s breath, but colored with such vivid hues—crimson, periwinkle, magenta, aquamarine, chartreuse—to be sure that we don’t miss them.

Or perhaps if the lichens are not time, or family, they are stories and memory. Something’s holding certain things together, while letting others fall apart.

On this year’s hunt, a little miracle occurred, or so it seems to us. Uncle Jimmy shot a deer, a nice deer, an eight-point, over on the east side. It was to be the last and nicest buck we’d kill, on this year’s hunt. He sat beneath an oak tree that afternoon of the next-to-last day, thinking and remembering God knows what—while my father parked about a quarter mile away, and waited, and watched the afternoon shadows lengthen.

About an hour before dark, says my father, the buck jumped the fence onto our property. My father watched the deer wander off into the woods in Uncle Jimmy’s direction.

Uncle Jimmy can’t tell the story. We really don’t know what it was like for him when he saw the deer coming his way. How long he might have watched it before raising his rifle. Whether it spotted him at the last second. We know none of that: only that it was a good shot, a clean kill.

My father heard the single shot and went over to find Uncle Jimmy and his nice buck. My father drove Uncle Jimmy back to camp, then went back out to clean the deer for his older brother, as he and Jimmy had once cleaned deer for Old Granddaddy, in his waning years.

When I came into camp and saw Uncle Jimmy wearing his sweatsuit and sipping a drink, I wasn’t sure what to think. I’d heard the shot and knew it had come from Jimmy’s vicinity, but didn’t want to just out and out ask the miraculous, Did you get a deer? With one arm all but paralyzed, did you get a deer?

Instead, I asked around the edges of it.

I heard a shot. Did someone shoot over there?

Yes.

Is there a deer down? Is that where my father is?

Yes.

Is he looking for the deer? (I imagined one hurt, wounded, leaving a blood trail.)

No.

Is the deer dead and down?

Yes.

Did you shoot the deer?

Yes.

Many hunters believe—have always believed—that it is not the skill of the hunter that brings game to the hunter—no human could ever be as wary or cunning as a wild animal—but rather, that the animal comes as a gift of the land: that it is an act of good luck, grace—a presentation. And that the good hunter always remembers this, and is always grateful, amazed by and marveling at his luck—at the beautiful, intricate specificities of it. And I’d have to agree: with every deer I’ve ever killed, that’s always how it’s been.

The mountain delivers a deer to you. Like something eroding slowly, the mountain shed itself of one deer, but sends it not randomly downslope, but in your direction.

It’s easy to say thank you. It’s the easiest part about hunting.