Gerard Donovan - Julius Winsome

He lifted his shotgun in the brush and aimed, and that is when I darted from the two trees and swung the rifle to my shoulder, and breathed halfway out and squeezed the trigger. He dropped where he stood, like the forest falling down in his clothes. The buck was already half way across the field, covering yards a step, head first to the horizon, as if shot from the same gun.

He could not have known his luck as he ran, that deer.

I approached the man who had pitched forward onto his face and was breathing heavily, snorting against leaves and such. The bullet had found him between the shoulder blades and a foot down from the neck, and he reached for it as did the other man that morning, and to no account. There was no pulling the lead out, no undoing the havoc it spread among any soft organs going in.

What came next? I did not feel the rush of air. I only believe I did, and that is very much a different thing.

It was a knife on my neck but no knife when I turned and swung the rifle to my left as I heard the thunk in a tree trunk behind me. Well, well. The second of an unusual pair of hunters, wherever he was. And this one carrying a crossbow and walking parallel to his friend somewhere on the other side of the woods: he had heard and seen the shot and knew what was what and let loose upon me. I was cut at skin level. This man, however, would not make the same mistake twice and was no doubt already inserting another bolt in his weapon, strong enough to go through me if he found the mark. I brought the rifle up to my shoulder and grasped the bolt handle, dragging it back and forward to eject one round and chamber the next, hoping that the sight of a rifle pointed in his direction would get the man to stir. Move! Move! Anything to make him move.

What he did was not to move but breathe, and I saw the wisp of breath, targeted it, and fired.

My hand was straight away on the bolt right above the trigger and moving another round into the chamber. First came the groan, and again I saw the forest move, as this one, also in fatigues, went soft in the knees and went down on them. I walked to him then, seeing as he did not appear to have suffered a fatal wound. When I reached him he was attempting to reload as blood pumped from his right shoulder, spreading red in the fibers of the cloth.

He watched me approach, slack-jawed, eyes drooping in some degree of pain, I could tell. They swung lazy and insouciant to his friend.

You were unlucky in the shot, I said. That was a good shot. You had me almost, but you aimed for the thinnest part of me.

He fumbled with the bow and I kicked it away from the tangle of his hands. There was not much meat on this one, bony enough, though he had a wiry texture to his strength no doubt, and liable to chill easily around the joints. He developed a shake about the limbs, the shock that was, and shock is worse than any wound.

Amort, bow hunter.

You son of a bitch, he said.

No need for that, I said, and shot him back into the ground, smelled the cordite out of the second hole in him like a black flower.

I walked to the first one who had gone down and not moved since but was praying heavily or saying some fashion of words directed not at me nor himself, but at another not present with us. I slid another round into the chamber and placed the Enfield on the ground and withdrew the drawing of Hobbes from my shirt pocket, turning the man around on his back, holding the drawing to his face, observing his features directly for a reaction.

Are you the shooter of my dog, this dog?

He was saying something, but the shock took the saliva from his mouth and with it the chance to manufacture a word to say to me. Still he tried. His mouth moved in the dirt as if he were talking to the earth and not to me at all. His right eye was wet, the snot grew under his nose, I saw some purple at his kidney where the jacket was pulled up. There went his jaw again, opening and closing into the dirt, saying his secret words. Keep them to yourself, that is fine, they won’t change anything.

But he was gone already, gone from shock, he shook his head or his head shook him, and I asked him again, asked him in truth did he shoot my dog, was he a shooter of dogs, and he sank at the neck into the leaves, and when I bent to lift him up, he was a damp red rag of a man dressed in camouflage.

I said, You fired from hiding, but I saw you. And your convoy is a cullion.

I thought I observed a spark in him, a puzzlement.

Prithee, I said then, was your hiding not hidden enough? I took you, harvested you.

I waited by him while he left and said an Ave into his ear, though he was well past hearing. With everything that had happened, the man who shot my dog was most likely dead by now, I thought, and plenty who would say what I did was wrong. And they would be right, because two out of the three were not the shooter, and those two I had killed unjustly, no question of that, especially since I was of sound mind and an otherwise principled man.

All that remained was to clean up the forest, which entailed bringing the pair to their resting place. After a bit of thought I dragged them to the earlier man’s truck and placed them inside, across the bench seat, one on the other, head to toe for balance. They were friends, after all. After the leaves and branches were piled above the windshield, I was on the trail back to the cabin in no time, where I cleaned the rifle and laid it in its case in the barn.

A WOMAN ONCE SAID I SHOULD GET A DOG FOR COMPANY if not for hunting. She said that a man should not live alone as I did, in the woods. And we passed over lists of all God’s creatures that might keep me company and we settled on a dog, a good choice given where and how I lived.

That was four years ago.

We drove to the dog pound in Fort Kent because I wasn’t going to buy a dog and not a fancy one either, they take up your time and are better off in large houses and the like. When we got to the pound we walked the line of cages, the rows of paws and heads aching for a run somewhere, a bit of fresh air, barking for masters who had let them go in all manner of ways, lost them, let them out of cars at supermarkets and driven off, beat them away with sticks or starved them. And they were waiting for those masters to come back and find them, you could see them searching every face for a face they knew.

Here, she said, and we stopped at a cage where a dog the size of my hand was pacing in a circle.

The boy who worked there nodded sadly as if he knew this fellow’s time was soon up; the breed and his size would win no one’s heart or a home to him. He would be put to sleep.

The boy said, He was brought in by a couple who had baby twins and couldn’t have him around the house, they were afraid. We’ve had him a week already.

Can you take him out a second, I said.

The boy opened the cage and hauled the brindle-colored fellow out by the neck, mostly terrier but with some pit bull about the mouth and chest. I held and bent to him, and didn’t the little bastard nip me in the nose.

I’ll take that one, I said, pointing to him, even though he was the only one out of his cage, the only one in my hand. That’s how definite I was. We took him back home that same day. He got out of the truck and ran around the clearing, stretching his legs, busy taking possession of the place, figuring what he owned, all the space he had suddenly and out of nowhere.

It is true that was a happy time for me, not then so much because of the dog as the woman who asked me to find one for myself. One day a few weeks before that, she had walked out of the woods and across the clearing around the cabin, and when I came out to greet her, she told me she got lost when out for a walk on a late spring day, that her car was parked a ways off somewhere, and she said it without a trace of fear. To walk in these woods meant she was local. She pointed to the flowers, now just appearing.