Jack McDevitt - Ancient Shores

Curt was alone now. His kids had long since gone to live in California and Arizona. Jeannie, who had been his wife for thirty-seven years, had died in the spring.

The wind blew through the twilight. It lifted the tags on the lumber loads and peppered the boxes with dust. And it sighed his name.

Curt .

He stopped and looked at the gray sky.

His companions trudged resolutely ahead. A blue jay perched atop a tanker, watching him.

Curt .

Clearer that time. A cold breeze touched his face.

Out on Route 75, a tractor-trailer roared past, headed south, changing gears. Other than the customs inspector and the dispatcher, there was no one in sight. The cars were squat and heavy and rusting in the dying light.

“Is someone there?” he asked.

The blue jay leaped away at the sound and tracked through the sky, headed southeast. He watched until it disappeared.

Curt .

It was a whisper, a distant sigh.

Puzzled, almost frightened, he stopped. Ahead, the customs inspector had also stopped and was looking back at him.

There was no one hiding on the other side of the train. No one in the empty boxcar beside him. No one anywhere other than the two people with whom he’d been working.

His heart pumped.

His vision shifted, blurred, cleared. He looked down on the boxcar from above .

And on himself .

If he had been afraid, the fear subsided, drained away. He felt the calmness and indifference of the sky. He saw without emotion his own image, lying on the ground.

And he felt Jeannie’s presence. Young and laughing and fearless, as she had been before the long winters and the money problems had beaten much of it out of her. Her eyes were bright and she leaned toward him.

Then the light changed, dimmed, and he saw it was Bender kneeling beside him. The old sense of loss returned.

“Curt? What happened?”

He didn’t know. “Got sick,” he said. And then: “I heard my name.”

“What? Listen, just lie quiet. I’ll call the depot. Get a car out here.”

“There’s something here,” Curt said, struggling with Bender.

“He’s right,” said the customs inspector, her eyes wide. “I heard it, too.”

The deer had begun to bleed.

Jack McGuigan eased his snowmobile past a screen of heavy shrubbery and looked down the trail. Bright red drops glistened on the light snow.

He could, of course, have killed the animal hours ago, but Jack enjoyed tracking. Run it down by inches. Give the beast a fair chance. But it wasn’t running anymore. The prints were no longer clean and precise. The front edges were scuffed, and there were marks in the snow indicating uncertainty and, occasionally, that it had stumbled.

He caught glimpses of the animal frequently now. It was getting weaker, approaching exhaustion. He stopped and took off his ski mask and pulled a sandwich out of his utility pouch. Give it time. It didn’t really matter at this stage. No need to hurry.

He poured coffee from his thermos.

The woods were full of birds today. Jack loved the creatures of the forest. He loved the smell of the woods and the sky wrapped over the trees and the wind moving through the branches and the clean oiled clack of a rifle bolt being slid home to remind you how alone you were. It was easy to lose yourself out here, to forget the concrete and the kids.

At home in God’s woods. That was how a man was supposed to live.

Sometimes, toward the end of a hunt, he almost came to feel guilty. The prints looked pitiful. He wondered, as he had many times before, about the almost mystical connection between hunter and prey. No anger. No animosity. The buck is resigned, will accept the final round while trying to scramble from its knees, but it will know who he is, and it also will feel the bond, the ineffable connection tracking back to the other side of the ice age.

Jack did not pretend to understand it. Like the buck, he simply accepted it. In his compassion, he drank slowly. When he was done, he folded the cellophane bag in which his sandwich had been wrapped and pushed it carefully into his pouch. (He had seen people drop trash in the woods from time to time, and nothing enraged Jack like litterers. Last year, about this time, he had come upon one, a guy leaving a trail of beer cans, and he’d left him bleeding by his campfire.)

Time to end it.

The moment had come, and Jack would finish it, as he always did, with a single shot.

“I’m coming,” he said, his ritualistic response to the final phase. He climbed onto the snowmobile, turned the ignition key, and felt the surge of power through his loins. Startled birds launched themselves into the wind.

He rolled back onto the trail, running behind the prints. Here the animal had paused and slipped into the underbrush. There it had scrambled down a steep slope. He had to go almost a mile out of his way to get to the bottom. Minutes later he followed it across a frozen stream.

It was an eight-point buck, and when he finally came upon it, the creature was trying to hide in thick snow-covered vegetation. But of course it could not conceal its tracks. He unsnapped his rifle and inserted a cartridge. Their eyes locked, a final moment of mutual recognition, and it tried weakly to back away.

Jack raised his weapon, put the animal’s heart in his sight, and squeezed the trigger. The shot ricocheted through the woods. Surprise flickered in the buck’s eyes. The trees came alive, and a storm of birds fled into the sky. Blood appeared on the buck’s breast.

The animal’s front legs sagged. It went down, spasmed and relaxed.

He stood enjoying the primal beauty of the scene, waiting for the quivering to stop. When it did, and the deer lay still, he turned back to the snowmobile for the sheet of plastic in which he would wrap the carcass. In that moment something dark passed across the sun.

He looked up, expecting to see a cloud. But the sky between the tangle of branches was hard and white. He retrieved his plastic, and the snow crunched under his boots while he spread it out beside the carcass and smoothed it down. The animal had got tangled up in a bush, and he had to break off a few branches to get hold of the front legs.

The temperature began to drop.

He glanced nervously back along the trail to the point at which it curved out of sight, roughly thirty yards away. And ahead almost as far, where it topped a low hill.

A gust of wind shook the trees. Deep in his psyche, far back in the emotional tangles among which the real Jack McGuigan lived, something stirred. Some thing that was not part of him.

And he felt waves of anger.

Crazy.

Birds and small game were everywhere. A warm air current touched him. The distant rumble of traffic, out on the highway, merged with the pristine silence. He grew disconnected, detached. And he was watching with sudden rage the deer and the snowmobile and a standing figure that could only have been himself.

He felt the treetops, warm and alive, under his hand. They shook. Snow and broken twigs rained down.

Something moved among the branches. The sunlight changed, shifted, coruscated. Someone was here with him. He lifted his weapon and turned to look behind him. The air was getting warmer, and the deer’s blood was bright on the snow.

“It’s a nightmare,” Taylor said. He muted the sound and pushed back in his chair.

Tony Peters massaged the place over his left eye where his migraines always started.

The television images were from the UN, where a demand for international access to the Roundhouse was about to be presented to the Security Council. “Where,” the president said gloomily, “we will have to veto the damned thing.”

Peters thought they could ride out the storm, and he knew his role now was to reassure the president, to prevent precipitate action. “They all know,” he said, “that you can’t just give away sovereign territory. We couldn’t do it if we wanted to. It’s private property.”