I was not allowed my rifle. Weaponless, an outsider on the hunt that should have been my initiation. I was so angry about this I could not have found a way to speak. I climbed into the back of the pickup and waited.
The bed of the pickup cleared out now, and I could stand, my shoulders above that cab. We should have been hiking into the forest, stepping quietly, hidden by trees and looking for antlers or a twitch of ears or a patch of brown lighter than the background. Stopping to listen. But my grandfather had become something modern, an obesity pumped full of insulin and pills and unable to walk through a forest for miles. A thousand generations, tens of thousands of years, ended by him. Having to sit in a pickup and hunt with an engine, loud enough for every buck for miles around to hear we were coming. Unconnected to the ground, rolling on tires that snapped and popped and left a track that was foreign and unimaginable.
I watched my grandfather as he gathered and shuffled, and it did not seem possible that I had come from him. All features fading from his face, receding, leaving only expanses of blotched flesh and wattle.
My father sliding toward that same face, chin and cheeks loose. No word among the men, moving as silently as possible, all absurd since we were about to start the engine. They climbed into the cab with their rifles between their knees and pulled the doors shut carefully, no more than a click for each.
Then the engine, and backing and turning around and we rumbled on down that road, and who cared what the road held. I couldn’t even look at it. Pointless hunt. I was the spotter, but I looked instead at the trees. The older forest and then the newer one, the open section of land that had been logged a few years after my birth, all the trees thin and individual, planted, the areas between filled with wreckage. Grasses and ferns and poison oak gone red with fall, looking like bunches of flowers, a junked landscape waiting to burn, all smaller limbs left behind by the loggers and decaying still, choking every pathway, making a false floor.
I pounded the top of the cab with my fist and we lurched to a halt. The doors flew open and Tom was out the right side first, raising his rifle to his shoulder. Then my father out the left side, raising his rifle.
Where is it? Tom said. Trying to whisper but hoarse and loud. Where’s the buck?
I pointed to where the new forest rolled downward into brush and a lost part of the ranch we never hunted. We never found bucks this close to camp.
What was he? my father asked.
A big buck, I said. A three-point, I think, but he was leaping and moving fast into the brush.
My father took off across that wasteland at a run. Tom on his right flank and me following. No foothold secure. Small limbs and sawed-off stumps and holes everywhere, but the top of my father floated as if on springs, facing forward exactly to where I’d pointed, looking for that buck. His legs and boots laboring beneath, unconnected.
I looked back and saw my grandfather mired far behind, lost to the chase, and I smiled and tripped and went down hard into poison oak, greasy curse that would puff up along my face and neck and arms within a day, but I didn’t care. That was part of every hunt anyway. I was back on my feet and running hard, trying to catch up to the men. I wanted to whoop out loud, because I loved this. If they weren’t going to let me hunt, we’d chase phantom bucks into the worst hell this land could offer.
Running straight into the sun, low on the horizon. Tom holding his rifle in both hands, leaping over every obstacle, looking like a jackrabbit. My father lower and smoother, his rifle in just one hand, pulling ahead.
Shape had been transformed into color. My feet looking for the light brown of dirt, flat, avoiding darker shades of fallen branches and the white-gray of trunk tops or dark red rot. The yellow only an illusion, a screen, the same as air, insubstantial. Dry grasses were what we swam through, up to my waist in some places, veering to avoid thistle, milky green and white spines.
The trick was to look farther ahead. You could trip only if you looked too close, if you worried about what was happening right now. If you kept a wider view, staring into that sun, you could never fall.
My father and Tom shadows in that light, half-presences, becoming insubstantial, becoming movement without weight. An arm back, midstride, might catch the sun and the body would become a body again, but then return to shadow that stretched all the way to me and far beyond.
They were moving faster and faster, and I was losing them, falling behind, but then Tom would leap, and the height of his shadow would fling past and over me and the gap between us would collapse. He could expand or collapse and every part of him would remain to scale, and all the while, in every moment, everything around him grew, every long shadow of every thin tree, the world stretching toward me as I ran.
My father a more constant shape, held low, a different gravity. It didn’t matter that the buck was imaginary. I knew he would find it anyway. He would make a buck appear. He’d shoot on the run, that big boom rolling out across ridge after ridge and slapping back from the mountaintops.
What we wanted was to run like this, to chase our prey. That was the point. What made us run was the joy and promise of killing.
I could feel my lungs, my legs, but this was only because I knew there was no buck. The men would not feel a thing, all pain washed away in adrenaline. There was no joy as complete and immediate as killing. Even the bare thought of it was better than anything else.
My boots heavy as I lost sight of the men and focused only on the branches and trunks and brush and grass before me, trying not to fall. Fear of snake, fear of twisting an ankle or breaking a leg. I had been knocked out of the dream, but my father and Tom were still there.
I stopped and bent over, my hands on my knees, and tried to catch my breath. Looking back, this seems strange, that a kid could ever tire, but I remember my chest and head pumping and dizzy and everything overwhelmed. I remember walking after that, stepping over all the deadfall, and coming to poison oak so thick there was nothing to do but wade through it. Glossy, waxy green, the edges turned red, as if the plant had poisoned itself, rotting away and dying even as it secreted more poison. You have to wonder why it exists in this world.
Where the forest has been cut, all the most vicious plants grow, each one struggling to choke out every other. Thistle and nettle, live oak and poison oak, burrs and spines and thorns. And this is where I had sent my father and Tom, and this is where I followed.
We pushed our way into this oblivion and just kept going, the land falling down in a slow curve. The sun failing, winking along the farthest ridge and then gone, the sky still bright, the planet turning beneath us. Each of us alone now, separate on that hillside, hearing our own footsteps and blood against the rise of a breeze, the hot air from low in the valley making its way upward.
I did not call out for my father or Tom, and they did not call out for me. We continued, each of us, until that point when the sky had faded enough that we would return at the pickup in darkness, each of us knowing exactly when that would be, and though we took separate paths, we knew we would arrive at the same time.
Walking in a void. The truth of every landscape. When the promise of killing is taken away, the brush is without name, a dozen varieties but all of it dry and reaching upward and compact and unforgiving, grown too close and shortening all escape. The sky new and old and nothing, and the earth insubstantial. We walk on because that’s all that’s left.
My hands were empty, no rifle. What’s good is to hold the grip of a rifle and let the barrel go over a shoulder. The weight of that cutting a crease along your neck. The swing of it as you step, the burden and the heat still in that barrel. And in higher brush, to hook your other hand over the barrel and carry that rifle on both shoulders. You become a giant when you hold a rifle like that. The distance from your shoulders down to the ground increases, and you can wade through any brush and never be held back. And you’re still watching for movement to both sides. In an instant, you could bring that rifle down and fire. One foot would be back for balance, but you’d never have thought to put it there. And even if you never find movement and never bring the rifle to bear, still it’s the two of you walking in that void, and the night as it closes in feels companionable.