C Box: Blood Trail

I drop to my knees and elbows and baby-crawl the rest of the way. Elk have a special ability to note movement of any kind on the horizon, and if they see me pop over the crest it will likely spook them. I make sure to have the crown of a pine from the slope I just climbed up behind me, so my silhouette is not framed against the blue-white sky. As I crawl, I smell the damp soil and the slight rotten odor of decomposing leaves and pine needles.

There are three park-like meadows below me on the saddle slope and the elk are there. The closest bunch, three cows, two calves, and a spike, are no more than 150 yards away. The sun lights their red-brown hides and tan rumps. They are close enough that I can see the highlights of their black eyes as they graze and hear the click of their hooves against stones as they move. To their right, in another park, is a group of eight including the five-by-five. He looks up and his antlers catch the sun and for a moment I hold my breath for fear I’ve been detected. But the big bull lowers his head and continues to chew, stalks of grass bouncing up and down out of the sides of his mouth like cigarettes .

I let my breath out.

The big seven-point is at the edge of the third park, at least three hundred yards away. He is half in the sun and half in shadow from the pine trees that border the meadow. His rack of antlers is so big and wide I wonder, as I always do, how it is possible for him even to raise his head, much less run through tight, dark timber. The big bull seems aware of the rest of the herd without actually looking at them. When a calf moves too close to him he woofs without even stopping his meal and the little one wheels and runs back as if stung by a bee.

The breeze is in my face, so I doubt the elk can smell me. The stalk has been perfect. I revel in the hunt itself, knowing this feeling of silent and pagan celebration is as ancient as man himself but simply not knownto anyone who doesn’t hunt. Is there any kind of feeling similar in the world of cities and streets? In movies or the Internet or video games? I don’t think so, because this is real.

Before pulling the stock of the rifle to my cheek and fitting my eye to the scope, I inch forward and look down the slope just below me that has been previously out of my field of vision. The sensation is like that of sliding the cover off a steaming pot to see what is inside. I can feel my insides clench and my heart beat faster.

There he is. I see the broad back of his coat clearly, as well as his blaze-orange hat. He is sighting the elk through his rifle scope. He is hidden behind a stand of thick red buckbrush so the elk can’t see him. He’s been tracking the big bull since an hour before dawn through the meadow, up the slope, over the ridge. Those were his tracks I’ve been following. He is crouched behind the brush, a dark green nylon daypack near his feet. He is fifty yards away.

I settle to the ground, wriggling my legs and groin so I am in full contact. The coldness of the ground seeps through my clothes and I can feel it steady me, comfort me, cool me down. I thumb the safety off my rifle and pull the hard varnished stock against my cheek and lean into the scope with both eyes open.

The side of his face fills the scope, the crosshairs on his graying temple. He still has the remains of what were once mutton-chop sideburns. His face and hands are older than I recall, wrinkled some, mottled with age spots. The wedding band he once wore is no longer there, but I see where it has created a permanent trough in the skin around his finger. He is still big, tall, and wide. If he laughs I would see, once again, the oversized teeth with the glint of gold crowns in the back of his mouth and the way his eyes narrow into slits, as if he couldn’t look and laugh at the same time.

I keep the crosshairs on his temple. He seems to sense that something is wrong. His face twitches, and for a moment he sits back and looks tohis right and left to see if he can see what, or who, is watching him. This has happened before with the others. They seem to know but at the same time they won’t concede. When he sits back I lower the crosshairs to his heart. He never looks directly at me, so I don’t have to fire.

I wait until he apparently concludes that it was just a strange feeling, and leans forward into his scope again, waiting for the seven-point bull to turn just right so he offers a clean, full-body shot. My aim moves with him.

I raise the crosshairs from his heart to his neck just below his jawbone and squeeze the trigger.

There is a moment when a shot is fired by a high-powered hunting rifle when the view through the scope is nothing more than a flash of deep orange and the barrel kicks up. For that moment, you don’t know if you hit what you were aiming at or what you will see when you look back down the rifle at your target. The gunpowder smell is sharp and pungent and the boom of the shot itself rockets through the timber and finally rolls back in echo form like a clap of thunder. There is the woofing and startled grunts of a herd of elk as they panic as one and run toward the trees. The seven-by-seven is simply gone. From the blanket of trees, birds fly out like shooting sparks.

Here’s what I know:

I am a hunter, a bestower of dignity.

JOE PICKET T was stranded on the roof of his new home. It was the first Saturday in October, and he was up there to fix dozens of T-Lock shingles that had blown loose during a seventy-five-mile-per-hour windstorm that had also knocked down most of his back fence and sandblasted the paint off his shutters. The windstorm had come rocketing down the eastern slope of the mountains during the middle of the night and hit town like an airborne tsunami, snapping off the branches of hoary cottonwoods onto power lines and rolling cattle semitrucks off the highway and across the sagebrush flats like empty beer cans. For the past month since the night of the windstorm, the edges of loosened shingles flapped on the top of his house with a sound like a deck of playing cards being shuffled. Or that’s how his wife, Marybeth, described it since Joe had rarely been home to hear it and hadn’t had a day off to repair the damage since it happened. Until today.

He had awakened his sixteen-year-old daughter, Sheridan, a sophomore at Saddlestring High, and asked her to hold the rickety wooden ladder steady while he ascended to the roof. It had bent and shivered as he climbed, and he feared his trip down. Since it was just nine in the morning, Sheridan hadn’t been fully awake and his last glimpse of her when he looked down was of her yawning with tangles of blond hair in her eyes. She stayed below while he went up and he couldn’t see her. He assumed she’d gone back inside.

There had been a time when Sheridan was his constant companion, his assistant, his tool-pusher, when it came to chores and repairs. She was his little buddy, and she knew the difference between a socket and a crescent wrench. She kept up a constant patter of questions and observations while he worked, even though she sometimes distracted him. It was silent now. He’d foolishly thought she’d be eager to help him since he’d been gone so much, forgetting she was a teenager with her own interests and a priority list where “helping Dad” had dropped very low. That she’d come outside to hold the ladder was a conscious acknowledgment of those old days, and that she’d gone back into the house was a statement of how it was now. It made him feel sad, made him miss how it once had been.

It was a crisp, cool, windless fall day. A dusting of snow above the tree line on Bighorns in the distance made the mountains and the sky seem even bluer, and even as he tacked the galvanized nails through the battered shingles into the plywood sheeting he kept stealing glances at the horizon as if sneaking looks at a lifeguard in her bikini at the municipal pool. He couldn’t help himself-he wished he were up there.