David Vann: Goat Mountain

My hand tightened on the stock, and I held my breath. The crosshairs floating just between those lenses. Locked in time with this man, locked in this moment held still.

A slow exhale, careful, as I’d been taught, and I tightened slowly on the trigger. There was no thought. I’m sure of that. There was only my own nature, who I am, beyond understanding.

The world itself detonated from some core and I was flung through the air, landing in the dirt. The aftersound in my ears and pumping of blood. My heart jackhammering. The rifle beside me in the dirt, my right hand still on the grip.

My father lifted me by my shirtfront and threw me backward and I did not hit ground where ground was supposed to be. I’d been lofted past the edge of the road and the earth fell away and I kept falling, hit from behind by a tree trunk or branch and another and another, still falling through air, twisting, and a rush of shadow from the right was all I saw before my right shoulder hit hard in dirt and leaves and I cartwheeled and slammed a trunk with my left leg and was spun around to hit ground with my head and neck and then upright, seeing straight ahead as if I were running down this slope, and I threw my arms out from instinct and flinched sideways to catch the next trunk on a shoulder and was flung beyond bearing until I skittered through leaves and finally lay still, not knowing how I was possible or what would be.

IT’S RARE THE WORLD IS EVER TRULY NEW. RARE, ALSO, THAT we find ourselves at the center. But all had realigned at that moment. When we kill, all that is orients itself to us.

Cain was the first son. The first born of Adam and Eve. Cain is how we began, all who didn’t get to start in paradise.

Everything hurt, but it seemed I was only sore, nothing broken. Dark dirt and leaves damp and decaying. Dry on the surface, but I had disrupted the surface. My head was downhill, so I pulled my legs around until I was sitting, and all seemed to work. Legs and back and arms. My right shoulder and legs battered, neck stiff.

A new forest, all trunks very small, nothing old, and that was why I wasn’t broken.

Got lucky, I said.

The canopy forming a parallel slope above, just as steep. I was caught between these two planes, the ground that was and the slope above that. A shaftway heading down, a place always in shadow, the sun only a rumored brightness beyond.

The power of that rifle. My legs not braced well enough. It had blown me flat. I wouldn’t let that happen again. That was the way I was thinking. A child’s brain is a different thing entirely. What I can’t recover is how that brain created a sense of the inevitable, how it connected each thought and movement smoothly, as if they all fit together.

I hiked back up that slope, stiff and sore but still functional. Climbing my way through the trees, each one a handhold and every step of my boots leaving a dark scar in the hillside, the slope that steep that no step held. And when I reached the lip, I found my father and Tom aiming their rifles up at where the poacher had been. My father’s elbows on the hood, Tom braced in the passenger door. My grandfather held his rifle, also, standing at the tailgate, guarding the road behind.

What are you doing? I asked.

Waiting to see if someone comes looking, my father said.

You piece of shit, Tom said. You fucking piece of shit. He sounded like he was going to cry. He sounded weak.

I had no scope, no binoculars, so I couldn’t see anything up the ridge. It was quiet. Only insects, nothing else. No birds, no wind. The air hot even in shade. My father’s white T-shirt wet all down his back and sides and sticking to him.

I saw my rifle on the driver’s seat. I was reaching in when my father kicked the door closed. I yanked my hand away just in time.

You’ll never touch a gun again, my father said.

Yeah I will. I’m killing my first buck this weekend.

My father was very fast. The butt of his.300 magnum heading straight for my chest, but I jumped back out of reach.

What are you, he said.

We have to get out of here, Tom said. Just back out right now and find a turnaround and report what’s happened.

He could still be alive, my father said. We have to go check on him.

He’s not still alive.

You don’t know that.

I saw the shot hit. I was looking right at him in the scope. He’s not still alive.

Well we have to go up there.

No we don’t. We need to leave.

We’re not leaving, my grandfather said. My father and Tom both looked at him, but he didn’t say anything more.

Here’s what we’re doing, my father said. We’re driving in around the first bend, out of sight. And we’re locking the gate. Then we’re going up to check on him.

I’m not going, Tom said.

You’re going, my father said. We’re all sticking together.

Tom shaking his head, mumbling to himself. He lowered his rifle and walked back along the road, but he stopped after fifty feet and just sat down in the dirt.

My father drove through and came back to swing the gate closed, lay down on the ground to reach up through the lockbox. The tendons in his neck making a trough of his throat. His concentration complete, as if the only task in this world was getting that padlock closed.

My grandfather sitting in the cab, waiting, a thing of flesh with no thought. My father joined him, drove ahead slowly down a road transformed from dry yellowish dirt and spined platelets of live oak to pine needles. A stand of pines on either side, the road more shaded, falling toward a crease in the mountain where a creek ran only in winter. The road red-brown, carpeted in pine straw, the sound of the tires shushed.

I followed, and when I looked back, Tom was following behind me. A figure transformed in a single moment, in that one pull of a trigger. Slack shoulders, head down, rifle held loosely in one hand, a figure refusing to be who he was, where he was, a figure refusing time, also, still holding on to the belief that time could be turned back. Even at eleven years old, I despised him, found him weak, but I was a kind of monster, a person not yet become a person, and so it was possible to think that way.

Somewhere above us, the poacher, and I was eager to see. I wanted time to hurry forward, but every movement was slow, the air itself stagnant. The fall of my boots on this road muffled, the slope on either side indeterminate, shifting, impossible to gauge the axis because some current in my head surged on its own counter-axis.

The truck eased around the bend to the left, riding the shoulder of what would become another ridge, the form of the land generating from itself, and my father rolled to a stop, out of sight now from the gate. He and my grandfather stepped from the cab with their rifles and we met at the crease in the mountain, at the dry streambed.

No conference and no pause but only my father stepping forward into that bed, sound of his boots rolling smooth rocks beneath, and he was carried as if in an updraft, a thing meant to rise and slide along mountains.

My grandfather far slower, a shifting of that bulk at the beginning of every step, a weight that could fall in any direction at any time, no step secure. His.308 over his shoulder on a wide leather strap, his right hand hooked under this strap and pushing at it for balance and steerage.

Tom and I rose past him, up that streambed and then along a slope shielded by pine with only sparse growth beneath, easy to see and move beneath the trees. But then the pines ended and we had to push through brush, Tom raising his rifle over his head, twisting and turning through all that clung and tore. The sound of that isolating us, my father and grandfather gone.