Old man Paine, sitting on the Lantry stoop with Piety and Lant, waved his catfish whiskers over his chew of tobacco. "Sun's jest fixin' to set over Simms' ledge," he said.
Lant said, "Moon-rise 'bout a hour after sun tonight."
The old man nodded.
"Finest kind o' time for the deer."
"Moon-down's jest as good," Lant said.
Paine gave him a push with his foot.
"You leetle ol' shirt-tail boy, you, settin' there tellin' me the time to hunt. How old you now, anyway?"
"He's fourteen," Piety answered defiantly. "You'd think he were a growed man. I declare I never knowed a young un so biggety."
The old hunter swerved to the boy's defense. They had become cronies, as close as the distance between them allowed. They visited back and forth several times a year. Paine had passed on to the boy his lore of scrub and hammock. Much was only corroboration of what Lant had guessed.
"Why, the boy's right," he said. "He knows the deer feeds on the moon, like most ary wild creeter. Four times the deer feeds. Stirs or feeds. Moon-rise and moon-down, and south-moon-over and south-moon-under. Come moon-rise, say, the deer's done been sleepin', ain't they? They comes out about a hour 'fore the moon. They feeds a while and frolics a while."
"And blows," Lant interrupted.
"And blows. Or sets lullin' around. Or walks around nibblin'. They fools around a good whiles." He spat from the stoop. "Hit's jest my idee," he added, "favourin' moon-rise. Seem to me the deer's hongrier and more keerless. Jest like I enjoys my breakfast afore sun-up the most of ary meal."
"The best time for deer," Lant said, "is after two-three days' rain."
"You mighty right."
"Why's that?" Piety asked.
"Why, the deer won't sleep in the rain. Time the rain stops, they beds down to sleep and you kin walk right up on 'em. Many's the time I could of drug off a deer by the scut, he'd be sleepin' that sound."
"I never knowed that," Piety said.
"Reckon not." Paine winked at Lant. "You ain't never lived here in the scrub, Miss Py-tee. You jest done been here."
They laughed. The old man clasped his hands behind his head.
"What I love the most," he said, "is fire-huntin'. Slippin' along in the dark, with my ol' fire-pan at the end of a pole over my shoulder, and the fat-wood splinters blazin' away—and then the light shinin' sudden in the ol' buck's eyes—"
The boy hunched closer, breathless.
"—and me balancin' the fire-pole under my right arm and h'istin' my rifle and takin' aim betwixt them two shinin' eyes—"
The boy rubbed his bony knees. The old man spat indifferently.
"—jest a pity," he finished, "the moon'll be too bright to fire-hunt tonight."
The boy's face fell. He gathered his lanky legs into his long arms, twitching in his eagerness.
"Le's go jest at moon-rise, then," he pled earnestly, "and kill us a deer in the Shanghai."
The old man, tormenting him, seemed to ruminate.
He said at last, "Iffen you'll guarantee to kill him."
"I'll kill him."
"Mind you do now. You got it to do, now you got your promise out."
The boy ran for his gun and shells. He shot a 12-gauge double-barrelled hammer gun. It was a heavy Belgian piece that must be cocked separately for the two barrels, but he handled it well. He was a better shot than any of his uncles. The dogs Red and Black sensed his excitement and jumped about him. He pulled their ears. Red growled when the old man laid a hand on him. Piety apologised for the dog.
"Black's right friendly," she said, "but Red won't even let me tech him. That Red's a wild un. Cain't nobody but Lant tech him."
They ate supper of cornbread, cold baked sweet potatoes, white bacon and coffee. Piety had an iron cook stove, but she still used over its open flame the Dutch ovens and kettles in which she and her mother had long done their cooking on the hearth. She offered white sugar and a bottle of Abner's cane syrup to Paine.
"Will you have long or short sweetenin'?" she inquired politely.
"I'll take the long, Ma'am," he said, pouring syrup in his coffee cup. "What a man's raised on, seem to taste better right on."
Piety said, "Don't ask Lant here which un he want—jest give him one whopped on top of 'tother."
The sun had set. The kitchen in which they ate grew black. The stove and table and kitchen safe loomed monstrous. The faces were large and white. The boy seemed to have only cheeks and eyes, for his hair was one with the ruddy dusk. He and Paine rose to go. He chained the dogs so they could not follow. Piety watched after them a moment. She would have liked to go with them through the soft night. She turned into the house. Before the man and boy reached the sweet potato field they heard the plaintive wheeze of her accordion making its faltering music.
Paine led the way. The boy felt proudly that he was following a master. The old man had killed many hundreds of deer in his day; trailing and stalking; fire-hunting by night; "tiling" a gun on a trail that led to a water-hole, gauging the proper height by the size of the tracks, so that the deer, tripping a line connected with the trigger of the concealed gun, fired the shot that killed it.
They climbed the high slat-fence at the south-east corner of the clearing, lifting their legs carefully to make no noise. Crossing the scrub road that skirted an abandoned field, Paine nudged the boy and pointed in the twilight to deer tracks. A large buck had fed twelve hours ago and had come out this way.
"He's likely layin' up right around here some'eres," Paine whispered.
They advanced slowly. The old man was sure-footed, putting his toe first to earth, so that if he stepped on a branch or twig that gave signs of crackling, he was ready-poised to withdraw his foot. The boy was inherently awkward. His body moved in spasms under his impassioned control. Once, laying down his foot on a dry palmetto frond, he threw out his long arms to balance himself against the halted step. He struck the boughs of a live-oak. They made the sound of a squirrel jumping. Lant held his breath until the blood pounded against his ears. There was no answering leap of startled game. He let out his breath in a puff and moved forward again. A prickly pear jabbed its barbs through his overalls. He made no sound.
The scrub lay behind them. The buck would come from the scrub tonight. The moon rose as they reached the potato field. Lant pointed to the vines, trampled and eaten. The man and boy moved an inch at a time. The buck had not come in.
Paine looked about him appraisingly. In the centre of the field stood a tall slash pine. The lowest branches were twelve feet from the ground. The boy had built a scaffold among them. Paine spoke aloud, but lightly. His voice was no more than the stir of one pine-bough rubbing against another.
"We'll climb the tree, son, and wait for the scoundrel up in your Shanghai."
He hunched up the rough tree trunk, agile as an old 'possum. The boy on tiptoe reached the guns up to him and hunched after him. They sat in the Shanghai, their legs dangling. The moon swung up over the scrub. The hammock was black velvet, but the field at their feet was silver. The sweet potato vines were silver-grey. There was no wind. Suddenly the hammock around the field seemed to be falling down. There was a crashing in the underbrush, then a thud-thud where the buck had leaped the fence. He was among the potato vines.
For a few moments he made no sound. He may have scented them faintly for he indulged in a deer's mysterious trick of standing still and striking his hooves to make a deceptive sound of running. Then there came, when he was satisfied as to his surroundings, a soft rustling. The boy could not credit his senses. The buck was here, almost under his feet, and he could not see him. He had heard of the things moonlight did to the bodies, but he could not have believed that a deer within twenty feet of him could elude his eyes. Paine eased his gun higher.
The rustling moved farther away. There was a break in the hammock to the north, where the field joined the rest of the Lantry clearing. The boy saw a black outline of antlers lifted an instant against the bright night. He fired blindly. A snort sounded by the fence, there was again the thud of the fence-leap, the buck's heels pounded three or four times and he was gone. Paine spoke in his normal voice.
"We jest as good to go home, son. You won't see no more deer tonight."
Lant was sick with his chagrin.
"Dog take it, I seed his ol' horns agin the fence-top."
"Yes, and you fired too quick and too high." Paine spoke mildly. "I seed him when you shot, and your fire plumb cleared his head. You got that to learn, shootin' up above this-a-way. You got to figger the same way shootin' on top of a rise towards a valley. You been used to shootin' on a level. Hit's the most natchel thing in the world, over-shootin'. Ne' mind, son, you'll git the hang of it." He chuckled. "I mean, the buck crashed thu like a lumber-cart."
Lant considered himself a good shot. It made him ugly to find there was still much he did not know. He did not want to go home with Paine. He lagged behind.
Paine said, "This time o' yare, a buck's a right dark grey color. You'd of done better to of waited. You'd of got used to him stirrin' in the moonlight, and first thing, you'd of seed him clare."
The boy stopped short. His heart beat violently. If that were true, he could see the deer playing tonight in Twin Sinks. He had only been able to account for the multitude of tracks there by deciding that the deer came in to frolic. He had intended to take old man Paine with him the next time he went, but he was ashamed and wanted now to go alone.
He said, "You go on, Uncle Frank. I aim to lay for a rabbit 'fore I comes in."
Paine thought he hoped to get another shot at a deer. He smiled to himself, nodded and went to the cabin. The boy watched him disappear and turned into the mottled half-light of the hammock.
A bright night made little change in the hammock. Where the sunlight was tawny, the moonlight was silver-grey. Sunlight or moonlight or the incandescence of sub-tropical stars no more than washed thinly through the live-oaks and magnolias. A pillared canopy kept the earth black and moist and cool. The boy smelled the spice of crushed fern as he walked. Over its aroma lay the lighter odour of palmetto bloom. He divided them in his nostrils, the one from the other. The trail sometimes turned up the sloping bluff; sometimes dipped without reason close to the swamp. The cypress men had perhaps made it so, deviating this way or that to avoid a fallen tree. It was familiar by reason of a certain hickory here, a clump of ash there, or a mere conjunction of tree and shrub and slope, the sum making something recognisable, as an assortment of features makes a face.
Lant kept to the lower trail along the swamp until he was directly below the Twin Sinks. Then he turned sharply and climbed the steep bluff. The trees grew larger, the hammock more open, as he reached the top. The deer might have come already; he approached the sink-holes cautiously. There was no evidence a short distance away of the great cavities. They yawned suddenly at his feet. Limestone underlay the section, honeycombed by subterranean springs and rivers. Every so often a shell of surface soil, eaten away from underneath, weakened by rain, gave way. What seemed solid earth one day was a gaping hole the next. Sometimes spring water filled it for a foot or two in depth; sometimes, as here, the hidden river having dropped insidiously to a lower level, the sink-hole was perpetually dry.
The deer had not yet come. Lant peered over the edge of the Sinks. When the earth had caved in here, some forty years before, a firm ledge a few feet wide had remained standing in the middle. On either side of the ridge lay a deep bowl, fifty feet deep, the almost perpendicular sides sparsely grown up with tall hickories and magnolias and sweet-gums. By daylight the boy had seen these walls so spotted with deer-tracks that it seemed as if a triangular hoe had worked the soil. At the bottom of the east sink were a gopher shell and a rattlesnake skeleton. The gopher had fallen in and had never been able to climb the slippery sanded slopes to the top again. The rattlesnake, if the stories told were true, had been killed by a deer. The skull of the snake was split neatly down the middle.
There was no wind. If he picked a proper position the deer would not scent him. At the brim of the west sink grew a magnolia tree. He climbed it, hoping that he would not leave too strong a taint behind him. He settled himself well above the lower branches. Through the broad varnished leaves the Twin Sinks showed plain. The moon, almost full and a quarter high, turned the gopher shell below to ivory. With the firm trunk of the magnolia at his back, the boy dozed.
He was wakened by the throaty cries of hoot-owls. The birds were sobbing in the trees around him. He had not heard them so close before. Their voices beat on him like the deep string of the banjo when he tore at it to make a fierce bass music. He heard the sweep of wings across the hammock, striking on the still air. The moon rode at its zenith, swimming through high clouds.
"Jest south-moon-over," Lant thought, "Feed time for them hootin' scapers."
He could only guess that the deer would come here to play. He could only pray profanely, clenching his square tanned fists, that the taint of him would not filter down to frighten them away.
He breathed deeply. "I hopes I don't stink to where them creeters kin smell me."
He could see nothing. The shadow of the magnolia lay on the earth. But there was motion. He sensed it, rather than heard.
"—slippin' in, the way they does," he thought.
Deer could move more silently than any bird. Quail could not stir among the brambles without a rustling, nor turtle doves fly from a pine without a whistling of wings, but deer, with hooves sharp enough to crack a snake-skull, could move without sound. The grey bodies were there in the bright moonlight. Perhaps they stood at the edge of the sink-hole, heads lifted, nostrils wide, as he had often seen them. He scarcely breathed. Then he heard a light thumping. The familiar snap of the cradled leap sounded below him. There was a jostling and a multitudinous thudding. He strained his eyes, daring to lean an inch or two to one side.
As though a rifle sight had been brought down accurately on an elusive mark, he saw them. An old buck was there, leading the play, with a doe and a yearling. The buck ran down the far wall of the east sink-hole, then bounded up the near side, stretching his legs in the joy of the climbing. The yearling followed. Sometimes they ran at once down the side of the same sink; sometimes they kicked up their heels a moment on the dividing ledge and plunged out of sight into the other. They raced and crowded one another. They blew and snorted. Once the doe stood at the bottom with wary lifted head while the buck and yearling frolicked. They were more like moonlit shadows than blood-filled animals. The boy could no more than discern them, nebulous as the ghosts of deer.
He longed for his shotgun. He had left it in a clump of palmettos. He wanted to kill. Yet the deer stirred him. If he had had his gun, he decided he would not have shot. They were strangely dear to him. They were a part of him, closer than his mother or his dogs or his bed.
The yearling butted at the doe. Lant drew in his breath and let it out again with the sharp "Hah!" he used in swinging an axe. The sound struck ominously on the hushed night. The deer threw up their heads in a moment of alarm and were gone in three directions as noiselessly as they had come. Far off he heard the buck blow, calling to the others. He heard them answer.
Lant slid down the magnolia trunk. He retraced his steps, the light so bright about him that he could see the shine of new green sparkleberries. His gun barrel glinted under the palmettos. He swung the gun over his shoulder and trudged home. It was not far from daylight.
On the way home he considered the deer and the moon. He considered the fish and the owls. The deer and the rabbits, the fish and the owls, stirred at moon-rise and at moon-down; at south-moon-over and at south-moon-under. The moon swung around the earth, or the earth swung around the moon, he was not sure. The moon rose in the east and that was moon-rise. Six hours later it hung at its zenith between east and west, and that was south-moon-over. It set in the west and that was moon-down. Then it passed from sight and swung under the earth, between west and east. And when it was directly under the earth, that was south-moon-under.
He could understand that the creatures, the fish and the owls, should feed and frolic at moon-rise, at moon-down and at south-moon-over, for these were all plain marks to go by, direct and visible. He marvelled, padding on bare feet past the slat-fence of the clearing, that the moon was so strong that when it lay the other side of the earth, the creatures felt it and stirred by the hour it struck. The moon was far away, unseen, and it had power to move them.