AOUDADS

Six days pass fast when you’re building a myth—or living in one, sinking ever deeper in the years of accretion. Even if each accruing year brings only one or two new stories, then over the course of a lifetime, or half a lifetime, an incredible architecture can and will be constructed nonetheless, an architecture of family and self, of place and time, and even consequence and meaning.

Even the dramatically incorrect mistakes are preserved and put to good use in the erection of such an edifice, and the good or lucky or even just plain interesting events are highlighted and revered brightest of all. I’m not sure what the cultural or evolutionary advantage of such internal, personal architecture is, but I suspect that it is something as complex and wonderful and ultimately valuable—perhaps even necessary—as the construction of the intricate mazes of honeycombs in bee colonies or the underground multi-chambered warrens of prairie dogs. And I sometimes wonder if the Biblical descriptions of the gold-lined streets of heaven, and the ornate mansions with all those many rooms, are both allegory and reality and that there are times when we are already living in the midst of such treasures, certainly not through any earned efforts, but glimpsing such dwellings anyway—and that the many rooms in the father’s mansion are but the stories—the useful stories of love, compassion, and courage, and even sheer undeserving luck that we’re able to lay in during the mortal years, each of us accumulating such stories—bright myths—for the afterlife, as a stonemason might hoard the finest self-selected, hand-picked stones for the one great creation of his life, the dwelling place in which he will spend all of his afterlife.

I might be wrong. There might be no connection at all between heaven and earth. And the world and its great religions might all be completely literal, as fundamental and nonnegotiable in the long run as the tangible blocks of stones that I am trying to make abstract, vaporous things of spirit and memory rather than the dense-packed residue of the ages: silica, carbon, feldspar, iron, potassium, phosphorous. Pyrite.

At the deer pasture, it seems to me sometimes that it is not so much that we have constructed our own little myths and legends over the years, or constructed any certain edifice, but that instead have wandered into a mythological dwelling place that was already made, replete with all the many chambers and rooms and caverns of creek and canyon ridge and ravine, hollow and swale, syncline and anticline, trough and depression, knob and peak. That the architecture was made long ago and has always been waiting, and that to claim it, we have only to learn how to fit it—indeed, how to revere and worship it, as well as the stunning force that made it.

And yet, within those chambers, and out and about on these thousand acres (and from that lodestone, on out into the rest of our lives), we continue to make, or observe, our own little myths. Perhaps these smaller constructs even mimic, in some fashion, the larger arrangement of the ages before us. Perhaps, if we are allowed to consider the richness of metaphor and allegory, that might even be one of the lessons that some larger force, for whatever reason—call it love, or compassion—desired, and desires, to impress upon us.

In any event, I have noticed here a proclivity for storytelling, mythmaking, tale-building. The affinity is in us for some reason, was instilled there for some purpose, and again, it has to me the same pleasant, comforting feeling as hefting a nice big square-cut stone, dense and durable—and our mortal lives, are the quarry from which the stones derive.

I’m not sure when I heard some of the stories the second time or, certainly, the hundredth. Nor can I quite trace, in the looking-back, the continuum between the joy of hearing one of the stories for the first time, with the imagination of the first-time listener fully engaged, and the feeling of pride of familiarity, then, upon hearing one of the stories of place for the fifth or sixth time—my cousins and brothers and I knowing it so well by that point that we could fill in any of the gaps or skips and could anticipate each forthcoming image, if not quite yet knowing precisely each telling’s choice of language or cadence.

I would have guessed the continuum would have ended there and that our task as children, even grown children, was to continue listening to the old stories, which, in their hundredth-or-more telling, were now more of a comfort to the tellers than to the listeners: the tellers resurrecting memories so vibrant that they would never vanish, never be buried or plowed asunder. The tellers reassuring themselves of this fact with each telling.

I would not have been able to foresee that across that continuum there might be another phase, as the stories took root in us and became somehow our responsibilities, as listeners, even though we had never lived those stories.

Having heard the stories on each and every hunt—sometimes at lunch, sometimes in the evenings—certainly, we possess the ability, if not the authority, to tell them almost as well as the tellers. To tell them well enough to keep them alive—though in our own second-telling, there will surely be somewhat the absence of the strange shine or luster that accompanied the original tellers’ tellings, as they polished bright once more their memories.

Our own second-tellings will be polishing only the memories of memories, and will be like shadows, rather than the things themselves.

But somewhere, it occurred to us that that would be required of us one day—that we would be in charge of deciding which stories to keep alive, in telling, and which ones would vanish with the men who had once told them.

Someday, we would be required to cull and select, to weed and prune, to caretake in some strange fashion, the memory of those who could no longer remember.

Do we keep the story about the night the wild pigs chased Uncle Jimmy up a tree, even though we were not there—were still nearly twenty years away from being there with the river of time already sweeping past that spot? Yes, certainly. But what about the time their friend, Newt, who sometimes hunted with them in those early years, caught all the baby pigs with his belt, made into a lasso, and stored them in a little dollhouse of a corral, on a cliff way back in the middle of nowhere, so that for a day or so, his fellow hunters were puzzled by the little grunts and squeals, until they discovered his “pigpen”—a crude structure that still stands, weathered and rotting, the pigpen itself more shadow of story, forty years later?

Yes. But others tumble, disintegrate, are washed away.

There is this one spot, this one tilted rock along a trail, where, my father informs me every time we pass, he killed a deer when he was a young man: fired a long shot with his open-sight 30–30 from up on that cliff, nearly two hundred yards distant. He points to it. The cedar has grown in over what was once open country, so that it’s hard to imagine being able to see so far.

The deer fell instantly and lay kicking, briefly, just as his father came walking around the corner, so that it was almost as if the buck had landed in his lap. My grandfather had not been hunting that deer, had not even known it was on the trail such a short distance in front of him—but here it was now suddenly, as if having fallen from the sky.

Every time we pass that place, my father tells me that story, so that it is almost—almost—mine, and I am never able to pass that stone (the blood has long since been washed clean) without remembering that telling and that image, so that now the landscape is an intermediary in the story.

The landscape initiated the original story, and now it acts as the liaison between the teller and the listener—as close a conduit to memory as is perhaps possible, closer even than the written word, or the recorded word—for to stand next to that rock in the autumn, and to look up at that cliff from which the shot was fired, is quite a different thing from reading about it or looking at a photograph of it, and in some comforting and positive way deflects back toward the source, the story: though still, it is an echo, and the main river, the one river of each person’s life, is moving past, is long past.

So the old guys have a lifetime of stories, which serve as their own foundation, as well as in some immeasurable and unknowable way our own foundation—my cousins’ and brothers’ and mine. As the old guys themselves, Dad, Uncle Jimmy, and gone-away Granddad—composed of stories—serve, of course, as our foundation, too, in a tangible, measurable, knowable way. Excuse me for belaboring the obvious then, but while it’s certain we’d be here without the old-timers’ stories, it’s far less certain that we’d have any foundation, without their stories, even if for us they are echoes of stories.

We would go on to witness and experience our own stories, surely, with or without that foundation of the past, but in our hands, then, our own stories would be like loose rubble: fine quarrystone, perhaps, but without the foundation of the old stories against which to compare and contrast, and replicate or alter, our own stacked stories would possess less structure—and in that formlessness, I suspect, less power and meaning.

So it’s important, I understand, to not get up and leave the room when my father—Grandpa Charlie, the kids are calling him now, a moniker that would once have seemed so alien to me, but that now sounds right, and natural—begins one of the old stories as if for the thousandth time. He knows we’ve all heard it before—often he’ll be telling it to Uncle Jimmy, who likely as not experienced the story with him, fifty or sixty years ago.

It’s important, I realize, for me to hang in there and hear it again, for that thousandth time, listening to the story this time as one would listen to the rain falling on the tin roof, or to the clinking sound of stones being stacked outside on some ongoing masonry project, two upon one, one upon two—like overlaying unlike, unlike overlaying like, so that even in the stories’ differences, the wall being constructed is pleasing in its uniformity, and strong, and imminently durable.

Nothing much happened to me on this year’s hunt. As the land ties us together, linking us and our stories to our elder relatives and their stories, so too does our quarry. And yet as we age, the chemical within us that once made us want so badly to shoot a deer or turkey has waned considerably.

Uncle Jimmy and Dad still go out into the hills, carrying a rifle, as if waiting for the inspiration, the need, the desire, to return—like a retired farmer going out and looking up at the sky for rain, is how I think of it, even though the farmer no longer has any crops planted—habit—but the urge never returns, for they observe the deer, watch antlered bucks slipping through the cedar, but never fire any more.

Perhaps we imagine that it, the missing desire, is like the deer used to be, and it is that desire we are searching for, rather than deer, when we go out on their walks, still carrying a rifle.

I notice it in myself more each year. More and more, I do not shoot deer that in the old days I would have shot. I have killed dozens of deer, but now it seems as if they are almost all slipping away from me, escaping like sand through my outstretched fingers, flowing away, and I do not mind. I too am content only to wander the hills with my rifle in hand—Old Granddad’s ancient .270, rebored after the First World War—and to walk quietly, and take in the world’s scent, and to listen, and to just see what happens.

It rained like stink this year: not the frequent hill country fog and mist, nor one of the brief yet powerful thunderstorms that accompany cold fronts from the north smashing into the humid southeast Gulf weather systems, but instead, a cold and steady toadstrangler, for day upon day and night upon night.

Still, we had come to hunt, and so on opening morning we each departed for our favorite places, our nooks and niches, where we might or might not be able to stay dry. Curious to see what the land would bring us, this year. Seven of us, this year. (Frank was sick in Vermont, stomach virus and high fever, unable to travel; a disappointment to us all, and a feeling as unsettling to me as if the stone wall were to have one of its middle emplacements pulled out.)

Nothing happened, all that first morning. No one shot any deer, no one saw any deer. I sat for hours in my camouflage rainsuit beneath a big oak, rain dripping hypnotically onto my head and shoulders, lulling me into a motionless trance. I waited and waited, believing as a hunter believes that at any moment, a nice buck was going to come walking past.

The only thing remotely like that occurred just before I was about to stand up and stretch and walk squish-booty back to camp for lunch. A thoroughly drenched raccoon (we were to see several, that year) came trundling through the tall grass, head down and rump tipped in that car-up-on-jacks way the big ones have of walking.

He was heading straight for me, heading straight for my tree, and it was easy to see that he had but one idea on his mind, to get out of that miserable rain.

I was perfectly still and perfectly camouflaged. He kept coming on, thirty feet, twenty feet, ten feet—stopping now and again briefly to snuffle at some rich scent, some delicacy beneath the rotting autumn leaves.

Finally he was right at the tip of my boots—I could have nudged him if I wanted—and, not knowing what etiquette demanded—clearing my throat seemed like too human of a thing to do—I instead merely wiggled my toes, which were less than a foot away from him.

He was so cool. He didn’t blow up like a ball of dynamite, all heart-stricken and wall-eyed, the way I would have.

Instead, he froze, reared up on his hind legs (his front paws clasped in front of him as if begging my pardon for some ill-considered intrusion), peered at me only briefly, as if to be absolutely certain of what he was seeing, but not looking too long—as if believing that staring, too, would be rude—and seemingly without regret, he dropped back down to all fours and ambled back off into the steady rain.

Nothing else happened all day. And I doubt that I can carry that image, that little story, beyond my own life—it is no one’s foundation—but it was a quarrystone in my accretion, and a fine way to spend a rainy morning, and a fine thing to see. And to remember. Handling the image in my memory as if it was a stone, trying to decide which way to stack it.

On day two, I almost made a kill. Once again I had sat quietly, watching and waiting, but had seen nothing; and growing chilled and miserable, I rose and began walking, not really hunting but just slogging, moving through the dripping cedar as if in a dream. From time to time I would remember that I was supposed to be hunting and would resume skulking and scouting, paying attention to shadows and wind direction, faint noises near and far—but somehow it was mortally tiring in the steady rain like that, and soon enough I would slip back into the straight-ahead plod, the slog-o-rama.

Until I heard the turkeys, that is. They gobbled only once, sounding very far away, and, though I had never heard turkeys gobble in a driving rain before, they sounded very wet and very unhappy, feeble and dispirited: ass-whipped, dejected with the world. I could see them in my mind’s eye, marching single file, feathers sodden, trudging as if on the way back from some country funeral, their once-iridescent shimmering feathers now drooping and rain-blacked.

So familiar am I with the lay of this land that it seemed to me that even from that one little distant outburst of squabble-gobble—one lone gobbler lifting his voice, perhaps, to protest the steady drenching—I was pretty sure where they were.

In my mind, I was exactly sure where they were—I imagined I could see the tree they were marching past, half a mile away—and with all the previous rain-torpor vanished from me immediately, and the full blood of the hunt returned (this, perhaps, was the thing I and the older guys had been out wandering in the fields in search of), I galloped through the woods, wet cedar fronds swatting me in the face and knotty oak limbs smacking my forehead as I rushed toward the place where I thought I could best lay in wait to ambush them, if they came wandering my way, taking the path I had assigned to them in my imagination, and that, with every bit of my hunter’s fire, hunter’s force, I was now trying to will them to take. And all this energy was being dispensed while at the same time I was trying to balance the negative capability of not thinking about them at all in order to reduce the risk of alerting their keen senses to the mere resonance of my being.

I was down in Panther Hollow, also sometimes called Turkey Hollow, near where the fence divides our property from the next: cleaving the creek in two, in places, as the ancient rusting barbed wire and drill-blasted metal fenceposts zigzag back and forth across the meander of the shallow, narrow creek, down in that dark hollow of hickory and oak, where nobody ever goes, and where certainly, if you went across that line, nobody would ever know.

I could hear the turkeys coming right down the fenceline, as I’d hoped they would. I was wearing camo, was hunkered behind a cedar, motionless, and it was raining hard on all of us. Surely with their bedraggled, down-tipped heads, they would not notice me, but would pass right by me, close enough for me to almost reach out and grab one by the neck if I desired.

I didn’t move a muscle—I emptied my mind of desire and became the rain itself—but somehow they sensed or saw me, for I heard the first telltale putt!, the sound of me being busted, and then a quick scrabbling, followed by a thumpy, screechy, bass cello or guitar sound, as that lead bird hopped nimbly over the fence and detoured onto the other land, traveling away from me now at a ninety-degree angle.

No problem. They had to be walking single-file—the trail through the dense cedar and along that old fence was too narrow for them to do anything but that—and if the lead one scooched away, well, not to worry, I’d take the number two bird, or even number three or four or five. I remained motionless, confident in my hiding spot, and waited.

But once more, I heard the little alarm peep, from not fifteen yards away, just on the other side of a big cedar, followed by that same guitar-twanging sound of a turkey vaulting the fence.

Again, I remained squint-eyed and motionless—they couldn’t possibly see me—but this time, through the dense screening of cedar, I thought I saw the airborne head of a gobbler, bright blue in the rain, as he fluttered over that low fence like a gymnast mounting the parallel bars, or even taking low preliminary leaps on a trampoline—a little three- or four-foot leap in which he ascended, wings still tucked to his side and legs paddling the air heroically, just enough of a bound to clear that fence—and then descended on the other side, the safe side, and watching the place where I was hiding all the while.

The third turkey vaulted the fence in the same spot, in this same manner, as did the fourth and the fifth. I continued to refuse to believe they were seeing me, even though as each one floated over that top strand of fence, I could see the beady eye of each lone jumper fixed on me with an eerie intensity, scowling stern as a judge.

Maybe the number six bird will be different, I told myself, trying to pretend that with all their fretsome and concurrent gobbling and purring and putting and fussing, they weren’t broadcasting the word to each and all, 5'7" Caucasian male/blue eyes/balding/gap-toothed/kind of lecherous-looking/twelve o’clock sharp, fifteen yards out; at the same place, the number six bird made his little vault, and I thought, Maybe number seven will keep on coming on, but there was no number seven, only absence, after that.

I could see them, scattered here and there, wandering confused and nervous, unsure of what to do next, and trying to regroup: a blue head here, a long beard behind a cedar there, drumstick legs, the scuttling silhouette of a body, a snakelike head peering out from behind an oak tree before putting! and ducking back behind the tree.

I could have taken almost any one of them, a fairly simple twenty- or thirty-yard shot, climbed the fence, taken a few strides, lifted the old tom up, and walked back onto my property—no one would ever have known, and hell, maybe even the other turkeys wouldn’t have known—but I wasn’t even remotely tempted. They had been on our property, but now they had beaten me, fair and square.

In the old days, I would have been tempted sorely, but this day I just sat there in the rain and watched them and smiled at how close it had been, and at the waning of desire, though not pleasure.

And after they had hurried off into the woods, and I rose to leave, I looked down at my soggy boots and saw then what surely each of them had been seeing: the solid band of duct tape, as brilliant as the gleaming aluminum fuselage of an airplane, from where I had repaired my old sole-flapping boots that morning; and I laughed, marveling at how it must have leapt out at them, back there in the dark hollow, shiny as a new beer can on that gloomy day, and at the luck of those turkeys, and how they just weren’t meant to be gotten that day.

I was just pleased to have wanted one. To have wanted one pretty badly.

Evenings spent fixing big old artery-clogging stroke-summoning steak-and-potato dinners, or jambalaya, or fried ham and red-eye gravy, or fried doves and biscuits and cream gravy. Song of the South: Old Granddaddy underground, Uncle Jimmy still fighting his way back from his stroke, my father and I unscathed for now.

It’s not like we eat like this all the time. Maybe just once a year.

Telling stories—that rain still drumming the tin roof—and mixing, now, some of the newer ones—my cousins’ and mine—with the braid of some of the really old ones.

Hardly ever are the evening stories about deer. About the only time a deer story gets told is when someone brings a new deer into camp, and we are standing around admiring it, and are reminded of other deer, sometimes from that same locale, other times not, and sometimes appearing similar to the new deer, though other times, different. Memories unfolding upon memories, like dominoes.

Nothing, then. A raccoon by my boot and a flock of turkeys spooked by my boot. Two little things to add like keepsakes into a small bag or pouch, a life.

Day three: more slog-hiking, walking all over the place, trying to burn off some calories from all the heavy feeding. By this time I was not only accustomed to the steady rain, but was also kind of enjoying it. It made everything quiet, and I was kind of getting into the routine of coming back to camp each evening, drenched, and drying my boots by the fire, getting them dry just barely in time to put on the next day, and start all over again. In such inclement weather, there can be a solace and comfort in the repetition of small things.

I went way over onto the back side. Randy had shot a deer on the east side the day before, a nice buck with dark mahogany antlers, and cousin Rick had shot a nice one at dusk that same day. I still didn’t have the fire of old desire that’s often required to take a deer—as if that desire must reach a certain depth or temperature within the heart of the hunter in order to kindle the hunter’s luck—in order for the deer to present itself to the hunter, almost as if summoned—giving the hunter a chance, at least.

I just wasn’t to that point. I was enjoying walking around, but I just didn’t really want a deer. I don’t know why, and I don’t know what I would have done if I’d seen one. I was just walking.

I believe completely what hunters the world over have counseled since time immemorial: that to truly have success in catching up with one’s quarry unawares, it is best for the hunter to empty the mind of his or her desires, while simultaneously and seemingly paradoxically remaining intensely aware of all the tiny necessary steps required of the hunter’s rendezvous—faint sounds, tracks, wind direction, hiding cover, forage, water, escape routes.

So my mind’s eye was empty; I was doing everything right, even if I wasn’t all excited about happening upon a deer. I was in the perfect state of mind to stumble onto something, and passing through a lane of oaks, through the old sandstone cliff country—ancient Aeolian ridges of cross-bedded dunes from a time when the highest known form of life was invertebrates—I happened but to glance up and see that a pack of young coyotes was watching me, each one drenched, as if they’d been out hunting all morning. Each one was camouflaged almost perfectly against the reddish-gray cliffs.

It wasn’t even the coyotes themselves I saw, at first, but instead a faintly different line in the crossbedding—the cant of an ear running at a forty-five degree angle against the strike of the bedding plane, and then a wet black button of a nose, and then another nose, and another; more ears, and then a pair of sentient eyes set back in the stone: eyes everywhere, I saw suddenly, until I counted five young coyotes watching me, all frozen in various positions of watchfulness.

I stopped and stood there in the falling rain, amazed at their naivete—did they not know, even if only by the instinct of their much-persecuted kind, that there were others of my kind, vertical human beings, looking not all that different from me, who would just as lief begin firing into their midst, as look at them? People who might believe that one more dead coyote might equal one more living deer, or that one more dead coyote might somehow equal a better day?

After what seemed like a long time, but was probably only seconds, they turned and broke and ran, scattering into the brush. And I kept on walking home, through the brush and through the steady rain, trying to hunt, but beginning to daydream—as if by seeing all those coyotes, something inside me had been filled, and I no longer wanted a deer, or anything, but was content with the world and my place in it, precisely the way things were. Boots squishing, hair drenched, fingers wet and cold. It was all just right, just perfect; one more day.

Russell’s only a few years younger than I am, but he hasn’t hit the midlife wall yet: like any of us, he’s happy just to be out on the landscape, but unlike the old graybeards we’re so quickly becoming, he really, really wants a deer. Already, he’s passed up an easy shot at a decent six-point buck on the first day, waiting for something larger, and already, in retrospect, he’s been ruing his choice. If we’ve heard him say it once, we’ve heard him say it a hundred times, with a shake of his head, on this hunt, “Dang, I shouldn’t have passed that buck up.” And, of course, his older brothers, Rick and Randy, are merciless, responding not with any tender words of support or understanding and affirmation, but instead bobbing their heads gleefully and agreeing with his misery wholeheartedly, chorusing “Thass right! Thass right!” And when Russell glowers at them, totally abandoned, totally deer-less, they’ll leap up from their seats on the couch and walk back outside to go examine their deer, which are hanging from the meat pole, and they’ll make a big point of trying to out-brag each other on the other’s deer—Rick complimenting Randy on the long brow tines over his deer, for instance, and the body size, while Randy pretends not to hear any of it and instead declaims loudly, for all to hear, about the beautiful mahogany color and impressive width of the antlers on Rick’s deer. Brothers!

Each day since that first day, Russell has gone out with an increasing sense of mission and commitment, and, to his credit, he hasn’t been shy about camouflaging it. I really want a deer, he says each morning; and throughout the pasture, we listen for a single shot from his .270, but hear nothing—and each evening, back in camp, sitting around the woodstove inside, sipping a vodka-and-tonic while the rain drums ever harder on the roof, he seems glummer and glummer, though to his credit again, always he wrestles with his frustration, remembers his priority, and shrugs and says, “Well, anyway, it’s great to be here with everyone together again, that’s all that really matters”—a statement with which the two Asshole Brothers will enthusiastically agree, just before jumping up and running back outside to comment loudly and favorably once more on each other’s deer.

Late on the third day—the next-to-last day—Russell finally gets a deer, and that night he is utterly radiant with a beatific mix of joy and relief. It’s a nice big fat deer, a fine, gnarly eight-point, and after supper, while sitting around the woodstove later in the evening, he tells us again how the hunt went. He’s been reliving it all afternoon, thrilled by his good fortune, and even though I know exactly what he’s feeling—I felt that way as recently as a year or two ago—there’s still a bit of an odd feeling for me, like being on a boat, I think, that is pulling away from shore: like looking back at others who are not on the boat, but who have remained behind, still standing on the dock from which you departed, and with a distance accruing even as you look back.

I can see and know his pleasure, joy, excitement, happiness, pride, relief, but I can no longer quite grasp it. I do not feel any older than I did last year physically, but the boat is pulling away and that distance is widening, even if painlessly.

“I was already heading in to lunch,” Russell said. “I had my gun slung over my shoulder and was packing it in, when this nice buck with really dark antlers ran right in front of me and then stopped about fifty yards out and turned back and looked at me. I knelt down and put the scope on him, but he was turned around and looking right at me, so that all I could see was his neck, and I didn’t have a brace. My gun was wavering a little bit. Maybe I should have shot, but I kept waiting for him to turn broadside.

“Then I heard Uncle Charlie coming up the road in the jeep. The deer bolted and went over the hill. I was kicking myself, thinking maybe I should have taken the shot, that I’d blown the only other chance I’d get the whole hunt.

“I could hear the jeep coming. I figured that deer was long gone, but I decided to hurry on up over the hill before the jeep got to me, to see if the buck might have stopped on the other side of the hill.

“I didn’t think I had a chance in a million, but when I got over the hill, there he was, standing in the rain, back in the mesquite, about seventy-five yards away. I didn’t waste any time, but braced against the crotch of a tree—the jeep was really close now—and squeezed. He dropped like a rock,” Russell said, with that relief and happiness and wonder—that completeness—filling his voice again: the utter improbability of having wanted something badly, and having gone out after it, against the odds, and being successful. Mostly luck; almost all luck. Any hunter knows that. And yet, that’s the best part: as if in the end it was the sharpness of your desire—your need—that delivered the animal to you. That allowed the animal to be delivered to you.

It’s an awful lot like prayer. It’s not a prayer exactly, or precisely, I don’t think, but then again, maybe it is. You don’t really come right out and ask for it—well, almost never—but you come right to the edge of that ask. And then you hold that desire, and hold it, as if carrying a great iron weight; and then it is as if a door or gate opens, and what you desired is delivered to you, often in seemingly miraculous fashion, as if to underscore your undeservingness, and the strange wild mercy of the gift.

I remember it. And I remember how it feels back in camp, or back home, after such a day: that first night back from the land of miracles.

That same day, Randy has secured something maybe even finer, in my mind, and after Russell finishes his story, Randy, in the quiet way that he has, shows us the handful of arrowheads he’s found, the points exposed from beneath the thin soil due to the erosion from the sustained and heavy rains, the past re-made and resurrected. Any one of the arrowheads is enough to make us exclaim, enough to make me jump up and shout my admiration with an enthusiasm that might be summoned by me now for only the most amazing buck, and Randy smiles and shrugs.

I remember a deer I wanted badly, a long time ago; could it have been fifteen years, maybe more? It was the second or third morning, we did not yet have any deer in camp, and there had been a hard frost that night. The woods were glittering, autumn-dead grass spangled with diamonds, and as I sat crouched within a mot of old oaks, I saw a nice buck come walking through the oaks, his nose wet and bright black in the cold, his eyes glistening dark in the morning sun, his breath leaving him in twin plumes. He stopped, sensing something, and just stood there, breathing. His coat was acorn fat, and I could not remember having ever seen a more beautiful deer. He wasn’t a trophy, just a big handsome deer on the most beautiful morning of the year.

I eased the rifle up and placed him in the scope. It was the same scope through which my grandfather had squinted at countless deer. I squeezed the trigger, breaking the frozen morning, and the deer jumped, hunchbacked, as they will sometimes do when hit. He didn’t fall, however, nor did he run. Instead, he just stood there, between me and the rising ball of the sun, stock-still, and I could see a third plume rising from him, not the twin-pulse of his nostrils’ breath, but a steady steaming, like smoke from a chimney. I had creased the top of his back, a flesh wound. With the sun in his eyes and the report of the rifle so loud, he was not sure what had happened.

It was just the faintest paper-cut of a wound.

I raised the rifle, disbelieving at my good fortune to have a second chance, braced more firmly, took a breath, exhaled as I squeezed the trigger, and he collapsed. I have never cared for the phrase “never knew what hit him”—a graceless way of acknowledging every hunter’s goal—but while other, more eloquent phrases might be crafted, the goal does remain the same, and when I walked up to examine the deer, he was already over on the other side, while I was still here, and gifted with bounty.

There’s a slight break in the rain, finally, the next-to-last night, and we’re able to have a campfire, another long-standing tradition—sitting out on the porch, or around the campfire ring, watching the stars and telling the old stories and trying out new ones.

When my cousins and I were all children, Randy, who was hell-on-wheels with his Havahart live trap, was forever capturing wild things and attempting to domesticate them. I seem to recall him almost always in one state of bandaging or another, swathed like a mummy sometimes, from where he had been bitten: by rabbits, snakes both poisonous and non, raccoons, owls, skunks—he caught it all, and it all bit him.

This evening, we’re reminiscing about some of the raccoons of our childhood: Randy’s raccoons. Weecha. Ajax. Miss Phyllis.

“That Ajax was the mean one,” Russell says, his voice dreamy. “My God, I hadn’t thought about that sonofabitch in over thirty years. That was the one that would chase me down when I was little and start chewing on me, with me too little to fight back, and you just standing there laughing, like some Dark Lord or something, right? What was I, five, six, maybe seven years old?”

Randy smiles. “He was a mean one,” he says.

“Who named him?” I ask. “Who was he named for?” Randy and Russell look at each other with puzzlement. They once knew, but now can’t remember; and the surprise on their faces, that they could possibly have forgotten such a vital fact, is interesting to me, bittersweet.

Even as it’s a bit of a bummer to see how quickly my cousins and I are marching into the years, one of the real pleasures of this year’s hunt is to see how much responsibility the youngest among us, B. J., is assuming. His birthday is the first of November—the first week of deer season—and he’s fifteen years younger than I am. We used to joke about how one day he’d be the one running the camp, taking care of a bunch of old folks—cooking, cleaning, and toting our deer, patching leaks in the cabin, repairing broken water pumps—but darned if he’s not already there, and enjoying it. It’s strange and nice to be content to just lean back in the lawn chair and sip a drink at the end of a long and physical day and listen to the rustling sounds of B. J. down in the brush, foraging for firewood and then hauling it up the hill.

He gathers great funeral-pyre quantities of it, and then—like Old Granddaddy, from whose block he is chipped—a sonic-boom whoosh turns the night briefly to day.

And every morning, he’s the first one up, padding cold-footed across the floor to get the coffee going—the hissing, percolating sounds of it awakening us with the reminder that everything’s all right, B. J. is here—and each morning, even in this incredible spell of rain, he somehow has a cheery fire blazing in our little woodstove, having pirated away tiny damp twigs and kindling from the day before, which he dried all evening in front of our one-watt electrical heater (whose range is confined exclusively to the bathroom), in front of which are also stacked, each evening, our charred and smoldering socks and steaming boots, like burnt offerings at an altar, the boots never quite drying out in time for the next day’s use, but warming and contracting slightly, the leather tongues twisting like the carcasses of roadstruck creatures along a desert highway, so that we must grunt and struggle each next-morning, laboring to pull them on.

It’s so awesome to be proud of one’s younger family members. It’s such powerful antidote against the sometimes haunting tally or inventory of the fading or rounding of one’s own enthusiasms. Sometimes I feel like an old person in a rest home, staring slack-jawed at and spellbound by the vitality of youth, remembering, I was there—just last year, I was there, I can see how much joy the world brings you, andI used to be there every minute of every day. . .

It is not that the world no longer brings joy, or wonder—it still does, and with even more of the latter than ever.

I’m not quite sure what it is I’m trying to say. Something about the force of that joy, I think, or maybe the randomness of it: being made joyful and alive by getting up early on a cold morning and getting a crackling fire going before anyone else is up.

I remember that kind of wild and random force of joy, and what is sweetest and most hopeful of all, I think, is the realization that I can still get there—that it is still within reach, on any given day, as long as I remember not to take the world, or anything else, for granted.

Bert, who lives on the property adjacent to ours, and who helps look after ours too, during the many long months of absence, comes by at lunch on the fourth and last full day of hunting. It’s a beautiful crisp blue day, with the rain finally breaking, and we saw some animals, even a few small bucks, though nothing anyone wanted to shoot.

Bert always comes on the last day during lunch, to sip a Coke and check out the deer we’ve been fortunate enough to find, and, in essence, to say hello and good-bye at the same time. He’s friendly, but respects our privacy. He understands what the hunt is about for us these days. And although he’s only in his late fifties, it seems he’s been here forever. Certainly he’s been here long enough to have known us back when we really used to like to kill deer, and he has watched that transformation come over us, one by one, wherein the importance of the deer has receded (as it has for him) ever further. He has a sharp eye for such things, and he knows, can tell just in a glance, who among us the shadow has not yet crossed over: in this year’s case, the two youngest, Russell and B. J.

Before coming inside, he walks over to the deer-skinning pole and looks at our paltry take: remembering, doubtless, the old days, when eight hunters would surely have hanging at least eight nice bucks, and maybe more. (The limit is two bucks per hunter.)

Three this year; all nice deer, it’s true, but three deer for seven hunters?

Bert’s got the worst kind of a sense of humor—or rather, that best and most difficult kind, where he’s so damned serious and earnest almost all of the time that when he truly does happen onto a piece of humor, he guards it deliciously, frugal as a Scot, and only gives it out to you in tiny pieces, so that often it might be ten or fifteen minutes after he’s finished talking before you even begin to understand that humor’s been delivered. And this is how it is this last day at lunch, as he stands there admiring the deer. He spends a lot of time out on the pasture and it’s always of interest to us to see if he recognizes the deer we’ve been fortunate enough to take.

Usually, with most of the deer, he recognizes them—nods at each of them, as if they were near-strangers of only passing acquaintance—though sometimes there will be a deer he’s never seen before, and he’ll stand before that one a little longer, studying it, and wondering, always, if it was just some shy and totally nocturnal deer, one that had kept successfully out of sight for years, not even showing itself in the headlights when Bert would come driving back in from town at night, or if the unknown mystery deer was some unfortunate wayfarer, merely passing through, who simply found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This year, Bert is standing before Russell’s buck in that manner, or so it seems to us, even though Russell’s buck is not the largest of the three. It’s a pretty deer, all right, but it seems to me that Bert’s spending a disproportionate, perhaps even inordinate amount of time before that deer—though finally, after staring at it just a little longer, he grunts, and then comes on in through the screen door. He doesn’t know who shot which deer: that part comes later, after he’s caught us up on all the year’s doings, and we likewise, and when there are fewer things to talk about. That’s when he might gesture toward Rick’s nice big fat deer and say, “Who got that eight-point? I’ve been seeing him running does on the east side for the last week,” or something like that.

And that’s how it goes this year—antlered-deer chitchat—and then, after the briefest of Bert-pauses—you would have to have known him for a lifetime to know that some sort of bedevilment is up, and of the best sort—the true, the found, the unmanipulated.

“You know that seven-point hanging out there?” Bert begins, tentatively—and like the wariest, wildest of creatures, Russell tenses, understanding somehow intuitively that he does not want to hear what it is that Bert has to say, and that furthermore, he, Russell, does not want the rest of us to hear whatever it is that Bert, clarion-caller of the truth, has to say.

As Bert begins with his own intuitions and observations to understand that it’s Russell’s deer (tipped off, perhaps, by the paleness of Russell’s face), he proceeds cautiously. And is it my imagination, or does a deeper flicker of amusement cross Bert’s almost sorrowful or at least straightforward-reporting expression? A jumble of emotions, and all so carefully moderated. In the end, he decides to put Russell out of his misery quickly. “I used to feed that little deer,” he says. Bert’s not a harsh man, but he’s a countryman, a good hand: he’s birthed and buried as many animals as anyone and lives daily in the life-and-death cycle of nature. “Two years ago, he was sort of my pet,” Bert says. And again, there’s the strange mix of sorrow and yet devilment: knowing, of course, that it is the nature of male deer to be shot—if not this November, then the next, or surely the next. “Last year he went over to some other folks’ property, where there weren’t any hunters,” he said. Away from the likes of you, he might as well have said. Not angry: just matter-of-fact. Life on the farm.

What’s worst of all, perhaps, is that Bert’s not trying to drive the knife in further. He’s just spilling the truth: compelled to testify, it seems, upon this most sorrowful of reunions.

“I used to feed him grain from a bucket,” Bert says. “I don’t know why he was so tame. He’d hear my truck and come running from halfway across the pasture to meet me.” Bert shakes his head dolefully and then, worst of all, seems to truly reach deep, as if trying to buck up and be a rancher about all this. “I guess those days are gone now,” he says, trying to make a little wry rancher joke. He smiles ruefully, as if to tell us Don’t feel bad, fellas, some other hunter would have gotten him anyway—and with that, he nods, shakes our hands, and we trade our good-byes, telling him that we’ll see him next season.

On the way out to his truck, he glances only briefly once more at the nice buck.

Later that afternoon, we can’t help ourselves. Cousin Rick is the first to approach the subject, which all day long has been lingering just beneath the surface, like the shadow of a fish, barely seen.

“When Charlie and Jimmy came driving up the hill,” he speculates—addressing Russell—“and your deer went running over the hill—he must have stopped and let you catch up because he thought the truck, the jeep, was Daddy Bert, after all those years, coming back with another bucket of grain. Their jeep sounds just like his old truck,” Rick says, and Russell just shakes his head, having known the shit was coming, and seeming almost relieved, perhaps, that it is finally beginning. Still, he looks a little glum, and I feel compelled to speak the obvious.

“Aww, Russell, he was a wild buck. That was a long time ago . . .”

“Don’t patronize him,” Randy snaps, mock wild-eyed, and we all laugh, even Russell, though still, it is a head-shaking, disbelieving laugh, an Aw-shit-I-can’t-believe-what-I-stepped-in laugh—and yet, as any of us would be the first to admit, he was a very fine deer, a fine handsome specimen of a buck, and there is always luck involved, luck and the desires of the world always trump skill, and we find ourselves in possession of still another story to trade back and forth with each other, sanding and polishing and refining, across the coming decades, and I think we’re each more than a little grateful that it’s Russell’s, and not our own.

I know already that in future years we will be passing this story back and forth, passing it around like another arrowhead, with the sight but also the touch of each flaked edge pleasing, each of us touching and handling and even slightly altering, in each re-telling, the worked ridges of the artifact itself, until it is shaped just right, and some more elegant version of the truth—if not entirely the original facts—might emerge.

We finish our lunch with the awe of having been given—handed—a story—all of us except Russell, that is—and I don’t know what it is, but something about the incredible blue sky, and the quality of crisp dry November light, and the familiar sounds and scents of midday camp, and the unexpected arrival of story, conspire to reconnect me to older memories, and to this place, and to my own place among my family. And while each year’s November hunt is no longer about making game, about securing meat, I finally feel, for the first time of the entire trip, like a deer hunter, instead of a vacationer—and I am aware of keenly desiring to hunt one.

The fact that it is so late in the hunt—the last day—seems only to sweeten the desire. Better for it to return late than not at all; and who knows, I tell myself, this might be the last time. Maybe there comes a point where the desire never comes back, but passes on to other, younger hunters. Who knows what contract, what negotiation, exists in the world between the spirits of the hunters and the hunted?

I’m so pleased with the return of desire that I announce it to my cousins, father, uncle, brothers. “I’d love to find an animal,” I say, being cautious, in my backwoods way, not to say the animal’s name, deer—much less the specificity of “a nice buck”—in order to keep from presuming arrogance. Understanding, eventually, how much luck is involved with every animal. A seeming paradox: the more “successful” a hunter becomes, the more he or she realizes it is all built upon a scaffolding of luck, or chance, or some other third thing, that invisible and inaudible contract of spirit wherein, if your desire is sustained and intense and pure enough, the animal will sometimes appear for a moment as if summoned, or even as if offering itself—or at least the chance, the opportunity—to the subject of that desire: the desire.

You might have heard such things before, and dismissed them at first as New Age mumbo jumbo, but ultimately, if you take enough animals, you come to a point where you can’t deny it, and where instead you come to know it. The improbability of Russell catching back up with that deer after it ran off the first time; the improbability of a young hunter being presented with a shot at a magnificent animal, and making it, even as the other older, more veteran hunters receive no such presentation; the improbability of a hunter who, deeply desiring an animal and having hunted hard all season long, is occasionally presented with an opportunity at dusk on the last day of the season . . .

There’s something up, out there in the woods, a thing that our scientists and atom-chasers and neutron-smashers will likely never be able to prove or discover—a braided spirit, is what it seems like to me—and sometimes a hunter finds him- or herself inside it, and other times, outside it. It exists, though what to make of such knowledge, I am not quite sure, other than to try to remember, always, to say please and thank you.

I set off up the hill with my grandfather’s old rifle, after everyone—cousins, brothers, father, uncle—had wished me good luck. The whole hunt, I had not really been wanting an animal (which may be why I had not seen one), but now, on this last afternoon, the desire had returned. For seventy-five-plus years, our family’s been hunting this land—it was my twenty-fifth year to hunt it—and these days, often, I prefer to just hike around instead of hunt.

So it was a joy to feel so sharply that yearning, and that pressure: to be forced, by the last-chance nature of my schedule, to stalk so quietly, so carefully—to be so alive—through the dense dark shade of the cedar, which was where the deer would be bedded down, this hot dry sunny windy afternoon. Creeping through the thickest tangles, moving slowly and almost silently.

And in my stalk, I began to see the deer that I had not been seeing earlier. Or rather, I was seeing them before they saw me this time, and beneath the low tangled dark canopy of the cedar, with the boughs above whipping and waving in the wind, I was seeing them at extremely close range: a liquid brown eye widening at fifteen yards, also alive; the incandescent illumination of whiskers, light-filled from a thin beam of sun that made it somehow down into the canopy; the lower jaw of a doe, grinding something, chewing . . .

They were all does. I was searching for the drama of antlers. The does were all beautiful, and I knew the meat would be delicious, but I was looking for those bone-hardened antlers of mahogany, the crown or candelabra.

And in part, it wasn’t even as if I was looking for a deer, but instead, as if I was just walking carefully, stalking, more intent upon preserving that desire, rather than desiring the deer, if that makes any sense.

Time seemed to double in density, slowing and then vanishing. In my mind, there was only the next step, and each step was more vital than any of the previous, for it would do no good to be silent with all the other steps only to then crack a twig or dislodge a clattering pebble, ruining with that one act all of the earlier investment of silence. I forgot to look at my watch, and even forgot that this was the last afternoon of the last day of the hunt. Instead, I was aware only of timelessness. The landscape before me was as familiar as it had ever been, across the decades, but it seemed also as if I’d entered a new territory—the same land, but in a different era, and whether that era might be the past or the future, I couldn’t say.

This day, I was just looking for antlers: for a hidden animal that won’t see me.

I’d been walking even slower, being so cautious not to ruin the afternoon’s stalk. My wanting continued to escalate, until I found myself doing something I rarely do, and never gratuitously: asking the hills for an animal. I hesitated to call it a prayer, but truth be told, that’s pretty close to what it’s like. It’s kind of a semi-urgent, yet utterly respectful asking—a Come on, please, I really want this animal. Not a negotiation—not, If I get this animal, I’ll share it with other folks who aren’t fortunate enough to have procured meat; no If I get this animal, I’ll promise to work harder on behalf of the woods.

Instead, rather than prayer or plea bargain, it’s more like a submission and a demand both: a submission to the understanding that the animal will not be delivered to the hunter without some intervention, and a demand, an insistence, that the world (and perhaps the animal itself) hear and understand more clearly the fuller weight of the hunter’s desire.

And yet, how can the animal hear such a demand, for has not the hunter—up until this point—been extraordinarily cautious to avoid alerting the animal to the hunter’s desire, and the hunter’s presence? How can a thing be two things at once, aware and unaware? Or is it in that transition of prayer—if we agree to call it such—that the animal lifts its head and turns and stares back as if into infinity, and decides, or is compelled by other forces, to agree to such a contract?

A part of you wants to reject completely such an idea. And yet, if you have gone after such animals—into the brush, into the forest—you know that this is often how it is, and that it happens too often, it cannot possibly be coincidence. Something else is happening, even if you do not quite know what.

And maybe it’s more like a yearning than a true prayer—an imploring, a heartfelt request—sometimes even a beseeching. Whatever it is, you can’t just go around doing it all the time. The moment has to be right, so much so that perhaps the asking is not even your idea, but rather, is initiated from outside forces.

Key to part of it also, I believe, is that you have to have put in the miles, and be tired, even weary, and near the end of your limits, before you even consider making such an outlandish ask—the life of another animal. You have to be absolutely certain you want it; you have to have been tested. And I don’t know what the other part of it is.

That morning, I had awakened around three, had arisen and fixed coffee, and sat at the table in the kitchen and worked by flashlight on my novel. In it, I had come to a scene, a passage, in which some sojourners are traveling over a high mountain pass in the Himalayas. They’re starving, on their way down into Burma to try to capture an elephant, and one of the travelers sets out to look for a blue sheep, which is the only game to be found that high in the mountains. And in the novel, the hunter made his little prayer, and a blue sheep was delivered to him, encountered at dusk.

If this seems like an indulgent digression, forgive me. It was a part of my 3:00 a.m. dream-life and certainly was no longer on my mind. And yet surely it must also have still been within me, for as I was creeping down a dark shady narrow canyon, the pitch and plunge of the creek so steep that it formed a laddered series of waterfalls, I paused behind a tree for some unknown reason, and a few seconds later an animal came sneaking up the creek, its muscles and sandstone-colored coat and horns glinting in the light.

The animal was deer-sized, as it passed through a beam of gold sunlight that filtered down through the cool shady canopy, and yet it was not a deer; and after my first initial surge of joy and excitement—Thank you, I was already whispering, thrilled by the wildness of the gift—the animal was very close, and yet was still unaware of me—I felt a moment of slight letdown, and felt off-balance. Is it a yearling bull-calf, I wondered, a feral escapee from some other ranch?

Then the rest of the herd shifted into focus, giant aoudads, or Barbary sheep, with full-curled horns, and each looking as large as an elk—utter, secret wildness—and I decided that the hunt was back on again.

I had seen aoudads back in the cliffs before. The first ones escaped from Hill Country game farms more than two decades ago, and found the rocky, arid region similar enough to their native African home that they survived and, said some, even prospered, sometimes displacing white-tailed deer.

On two occasions when I’d seen them, I’d had no interest in shooting one, even though I knew that a purer hunter might not have given such a thought a second’s pause. They were not native to the landscape and in that regard could be said to be like weeds or pests—and yet, they seemed to me also to be like strangers, even guests, rather than prey, and because they had not even been remotely in my search-image—only deer and turkey—it would have been as unthinkable for me to take one, then, as to shoot a dog or a cat, a parakeet or flamingo, a crane or coyote, simply because I saw them.

Both times, I watched them clatter away, deft-hoofed, disappearing into slots between boulders—vanishing, as if in a dream. Was I still in Texas, or now the Moorish Coast?

What makes a native? And how much of such a definition rests in the contract of fit negotiated between species and landscape, and how much in the eye of beholder? And how much in the eye of time?

I had not gone out hunting for wild sheep—they had not even been in my consciousness—but here, moments after asking for an animal, came an entire herd, so stealthy and wild that my desire did not wane, but was sharpened, and as the entire herd moved one by one through that column of sun and then back into the shadow, with the music of the laddered waterfall filling that tight little canyon, I did my choosing and decided to pass on the larger animals, which I recognized as certain trophies, and to instead take the younger animal, which would surely taste good. I had not asked for a three hundred-pound animal and was not going to take one.

The smaller animal—a two-year-old?—had long horns that were only beginning to curl. He was very close—I could see the sunlight wet-like in his brown eyes, could see his strange beard—and when I shot, he fell instantly, landing in the shallow little creek.

The rest of the herd froze for a second, not knowing where the shot had come from. Then they saw or scented me and whirled and crashed off through the brush, cracking limbs and branches like a herd of frightened elk, and again I said thank you, not just for the gift of wild meat, but for such a wonderful hunt—and then I walked down the creek to where the sheep lay, some blood trickling into the clear stone creek like a sacrifice, and I said thank you again, and pulled him out of the water and up the slope into the dense forest, where I examined him then like a scientist, astounded by such a specimen—such uniqueness, after all my life having hunted only deer and turkey on this land. And once again I felt as if I was in the midst of timelessness, and yet also as if I had ridden on the back of some great passage of time—centuries, perhaps—for the animals at the deer pasture to have changed so.

And as with some of the stories told often by my father and grandfather and uncle, so familiar that sometimes it seemed, in the listening, as if I had lived them myself, I could not be sure if what I felt was that I had traveled forward, or backward. But I felt somehow that I had traveled.

The sun was setting red against a shoal of clouds. The music of the waterfall was still beautiful. I had been given an animal and a story. I cleaned the animal with care, washed my hands in the cold water of the creek, then rose and hiked back to camp in the red dusk, thinking things over.

The animal had been killed a long way from a road—in the farthest, deepest canyon possible—so that hauling him out at night was going to be an adventure for a bunch of middle-aged guys, and one I looked forward to. The stars were out, and the night was cold enough that he would have been fine where he was, but I kept thinking about the five coyotes I’d seen in the area, the day before. And it was a sweet feeling, walking back to camp with my hands washed, my knife clean in its sheath, and with meat for the coming year, and having received the animal in such strange, wild fashion. One of the best hunts ever.

It felt good to be hiking out, climbing the steep rocky hills, and feeling the same strength in my legs that had always been there, and feeling my lungs reach deep to fill with air. Forty-five’s not old. There are good days and bad days—a good day reminding you of how you felt when you were, say, twenty-five, and a bad day seeming like a harbinger, perhaps, of what the body might be like at fifty-five, or even sixty-five, compromised, and reduced—but today was a good day, and my relationship with the steep hills seemed as secure as it always had been, for one more evening at least. And I was old enough now to know to treasure that sensation, and at the top of the last hill I paused for a moment not to catch my breath, but to simply admire the evening’s first stars.

Back in camp, they could tell something was up. Supper was already cooking, and when someone comes in late like that, it’s usually because they were out later than expected, cleaning an animal. They inspected my hands and knife for blood, but found none. They had not heard the shot from down in the slot canyon, but somehow, they knew: and when they asked if I’d gotten anything, I said that yes I had, that it was just a spike—that his antlers “had no tines”—but that he was a big one and that I was very happy with him, very fortunate and lucky to have encountered him.

I don’t know how they could tell something was up, but they could. After all the years of jokes and stories, the successes and failures, we can read each other like the blood kin we are—as if the shared blood still communicates, despite being housed in separate vessels. It was my cousins’ opinion that I had shot a huge buck and was only pretending it was a spike, so that they would be surprised when they saw it. They refused to believe I’d shoot a spike, even as I insisted that this was a fine animal, a really big one.

Cousin Rick—well-versed in the ways of pranks and larceny himself—was working hard to get to the heart of the matter. He knew I wouldn’t lie to them, but they all knew somehow that I was holding a secret, a surprise.

“Okay, Richard,” he said, attempting to wade to the bottom of it. “Look at my hand.” He held it up vertically like the needle on some calibrated scale. “This is the bullshit meter. Now: Did you shoot a spike?”

Yes. Said firmly. The hand wavered but did not tilt.

“You bushwhacked way to the back side and that’s where the animal is still lying?”

Yes. No wobble.

“The animal is not a trophy buck.”

No. Again, no waver.

“Is there any bullshit associated with this story?”

Pause. Yes.

Rick laughed and shook his head. “You see?” he told his brothers. “The bullshit meter works.”

They frowned, then protested. “You didn’t get anything out of him that he hadn’t already told us.”

Rick shrugged. “But now you know it’s the truth.”

“But your last question—he himself admitted it was bullshit . . .”

Rick just shrugged, laughed again. “But true bullshit,” he explained.

“The worst kind,” I said.

We sat down to our big blow-out dinner, the kind that will likely be outlawed by heart surgeons in twenty years—big grilled steaks, big baked potatoes with real butter, real sour cream, real bacon, real cheese. Where did the hunt go, how can another one be over so fast?

After dinner, Rick and my father were the only ones sporting enough to sally out in search of the animal. I had drawn on a napkin a map of the general place where the animal lay, though my understanding of where the looping, grassed-over dirt roads wandered in relation to that canyon was admittedly inaccurate, and there seemed to be no one place any closer to the animal than another.

The plan we settled upon in the end was for my father to stay with the jeep, with the headlights burning, and Rick and I would bushwhack up the creek, find the animal, and then triangulate out in the shortest, most direct route toward those headlights, dragging and carrying the animal through the brush.

We had not gone more than two minutes into the brush before the glow of the jeep headlights disappeared completely.

Still, we pushed on, climbing small cliffs and descending little canyons—half a dozen or more little creeks and canyons, over on the back side—thrashing and struggling through eye-level cedar boughs, spitting out bark and berries, dropping our flashlights and stumbling and tripping, veering north then south, east then west, as I tried to recognize in the darkness individual trees and rocks.

After about half an hour, I seemed to recognize a change in the melody of the creek, a familiar tune now, and shining my light on the ground, I saw a spot of blood where the animal had fallen and a few loose hairs from where I had dragged him up on the hill away from the creek.

Rick was sweating and stumbling too, about to give up the faith, but when I called him over to look at the animal and he saw what it was, he was properly excited, and understood too, I think, that it was as if we were witnessing some strange cleaving, a Part One and Part Two in our family’s relationship to this place, and the hunt. We’d killed hundreds of deer—maybe a thousand—across all the decades, but never anything like this, and he, too, knelt and gave, with the curiosity of his examination, the animal his own respect.

An hour later, we had the animal out to a road, though it was not the road we had left from, and we could see on the next mountain over the headlights of my father’s jeep. Having understandably given up on the possibility that we would be coming out at the same spot where we had entered the woods, he had begun driving up and down the sand roads looking for us, certain that we were lost, and we shone our flashlights over toward the little mountain he was on, unsure whether he would even see their firefly-blinkings; though after a while, he turned the jeep around and answered our lights with blinks of his own and circled around to find the grassy road that would take him to where we sat with our strange quarry, visiting, reliving the hunt, and marveling at how even a world that seems more familiar to you than anything is always capable of delivering a surprise.

Not frequently, perhaps, but always, such possibility exists. Sometimes for the asking, and other times, whether you ask or not.

Back in camp, there was, to my way of thinking, appropriate marveling at the appearance of such a strange creature—an ambassador from the future—and, in the story-telling that accompanied his arrival, a foundation that would one day—next year, already—become the past, our past. We understood that fifty or sixty years from now our own sons and daughters and nieces and nephews—if they still cared about such things, and about this place, with even remotely the same intensity as we do—might be curious as to when and how, roughly, the first animal was taken. It seemed significant to us, a reflector of the natural history of the place—an artifact, already, and a story, already, which we were sure we would pass back and forth, shaping and re-shaping.

A hundred years ago, even the juniper upon which the animal browsed had not been here, save for a few smatterings. Everything changes, even the shape of the hills themselves, beneath the millennia of wind and fire and running water. The aoudad was not a huge animal, hanging there next to the deer in camp, with the strange dark stripe down its back, its long crenulated horns, its odd tail and its strange circus-beard. But it felt huge, in a way we could not quite place.

I think each of us suspected that one day, looking back, we would be able to come closer to explaining that feeling. But that night, and the next morning, as we cleaned our animals and packed up to leave, all we knew to do was to make it and the rest of the hunt into another story, or stories, and to pass them back and forth, shaping them already, even as we knew also it was more the tellers than the stories themselves who were being shaped.