James Dickey - Deliverance

He was broadside to me; I had shot a thousand targets one-quarter his size at the same distance, and when I recalled this—when my eyes and hands got together on it—I knew I could kill him just as easily as I could hit his outline on cardboard. I raised the bow.

He brought his head a little higher and lowered it again. I pulled the string back to the right side of my face and began to steady down. For a moment I braced there at the fullest tension of the bow, which brought out of me and into the bow about three fourths of my own strength, with the arrow pointing directly into his heart. It was a slight upshot, and I allowed for this, though at the range it wouldn’t matter much.

I let go, but as I released I knew it was a wrong shot, not very wrong but wrong enough. I had done the same thing on key shots in archery tournaments: lifted my bow hand just as the shot went. At the sound of the bowstring the deer jumped and wheeled at about the time the arrow should have gone through him. I thought I might have hit him high, but actually I had seen the orange feathers flick and disappear over his shoulder. I may even have touched him, but I was fairly sure I had not drawn blood. He ran a few steps and turned, looking back around his side at me. I jerked loose another arrow and strung it, but my heart was gone. I was shaking, and I had trouble getting the arrow nocked. I had it only about halfway back when he took off for good. I turned loose anyway and saw the arrow whip badly and disappear somewhere above where he had been.

I was heaving and sweating as I drew in the fog and let it back out, a sick, steaming gas. Like that, I went downhill, part of the time with my band at arm’s length in front of my face. I saw the tents—one of them, then another thing like it—as low dark patches with something structured about them, clearly out of place here.

Lewis was up, trying to make a fire with wet twigs and branches. As I unstrung the bow, the others came out too.

“What about it, buddy?” Lewis said, looking at the two empty slots in the quiver.

“I got a shot.”

“You did?” Lewis said, straightening.

“I did. A spectacular miss at fifteen yards.”

“What happened? We could’a had meat.”

“I boosted my bow hand, I think. I psyched out. I’ll be damned if I know how. I had him. He was getting bigger all the time. It was like shooting at the wall of a room. But I missed, all right. It was just that little second, right when I turned loose. Something said raise your hand, and before I could do anything about it, I did it.”

“Damn,” Bobby said. “Psychology. The delicate art of the forest.”

“You’ll get another chance,” Drew said. “We got a long ways to go yet.”

“What the hell,” I said. “If I’d hit him I’d be back in the woods now, tracking. He’d be hard to find in this fog. So would I.”

“You could’ve marked the place you shot from and come back and got us,” Lewis said. “We could’ve found him.”

“You’d have a time finding him now,” I said. “He’s probably in the next county.”

“I guess so,” Lewis said. “But it’s a shame. Where’s my old steady buddy?”

“Your old steady buddy exploded,” I said. “High and wide.” Lewis looked at me.

“I know you wouldn’t have, Lewis,” I said. “You don’t need to tell me. We’d have meat. We’d all live forever. And you know something? I wish you’d been up there and I’d been with you. I would’a just unstrung my bow and watched you put it right into the heart-lung area. Right into the boiler room. The pinwheel, at fifteen yards. What I was really thinking about up there was you.”

“Well, next time don’t think about me. Think about the deer.”

I let that ride and went to drag the stuff out of the tents. Lewis finally got a kind of fire started. When the sun began to take on height and force, the mist burned off in a few minutes. Through it the river, which we could hardly make out at first, showed itself more and more until we could see not only the flat of it and the stitches of the current but down through it into the pebbles of the stream-bed near the bank.

We had pancakes with butter and sorghum. After we finished, Lewis went over to the stream to wash out the cooking stuff. I pulled all the air mattresses out on the ground, unscrewed their caps and lay on each in turn until the ground came up to me through it and I was lying on the last sigh of air I had pumped into it the night before. We rolled the tents, wet and covered with leaves and pieces of bark, and lashed them into the canoes. I asked the others if they thought we might team up differently this time, for I was afraid that Lewis in his impatience might say something unpleasant to Bobby, and, since Bobby suddenly seemed to me on the edge of exasperation with himself for coming, I thought it would probably be best if I took him on. Drew would not have laughed, or laughed in the right way, at the cracks that were Bobby’s only means of salvaging his civility, and I figured I would.

“How about it, tiger?” I said to Bobby.

“OK,” he said. “How far can we get today, do you reckon?”

“Beats me,” I said. “Well get as far as we can. Depends on the water, and how many places we have to walk through. Everybody including the map says there’s a gorge down below here, and that sort of bothers me. But there’s nothing we can do about it now.”

Bobby and I got in and shoved off, and right away I could tell I was in for a hard time. I was not in awfully good shape myself, but Bobby was wheezing and panting after the first hundred yards. He had no coordination at all, and changed the canoe from what it had been with Drew’s steady, serious weight in front to a nervous, unstable craft that seemed bound and determined to do everything wrong, to get rid of us. I was sure that Lewis was disgusted with Bobby, and just as sure that I would be, also, before much longer.

“Easy,” I said. “Easy. You’re trying too hard. All we want to do is bold this thing straight. we don’t need to be pulling our guts out to get there. Just let the river do it. Let George do it.”

“George ain’t doing it fast enough. I want to get the hell and gone out of this goddamned place.”

“Ah, now. It’s not all that bad.”

“It’s not? Mosquitoes ate me up last night. My bites have got bites. I’m catching a fucking cold from sleeping on the fucking ground. I’m hungry as hell for something that tastes good. And I don’t mean sorghum.”

“Just steady down a little, and well get there … when we get there. It’s not going to do your cold any good to dump in this river, you can bloody well bet.”

“Fuck it,” he said. “Let’s get on with it. I’m tired of this woods scene; I’m tired of shitting in a hole in the ground. This is for the Indians.”

After a while he settled down a little, and the back of his neck lightened its red. We dug a couple of strokes for every twenty-five yards, and the river moved us along. But I thought that the chances were pretty good, with my high center of gravity and his nerves, that we would spill before the day was out, especially if there were any fast stretches with lots of rocks. With the equipment and with Bobby and me, who were at least fifty pounds heavier than the other two, we were riding far too low in the water. We had too much stuff with us for the way we were teamed, and I signaled back to Lewis to pull over to the bank. He did, and we wallowed alongside the other canoe and tied up.

“Getting hot,” Lewis said.

“Hot as the hinges,” I said.

“Did you see that big snake back yonder?”

“No. Where?”

“He was lying up in the limbs of that old oak tree you went under about a mile and a half back. I didn’t see him till you were right under him, and he lifted his head. I didn’t want to make any fuss; thought it might make him nervous. I’m pretty sure it was a moccasin. I’ve heard of them dropping in boats.”