“Good to see you, Leverd,” said Stong in a creamy voice. He gossiped and joked as if Hawkheel were one of the summer people, winked and said, “Don’t spend your whole social security check on books, Leverd. Save a little out for a good time. You seen the new Ruger shotguns?” Mellowed and ripened Stong, improved by admiration, thought Hawkheel.
The books had belonged to Stong’s grandfather, a hero of the waters whose name had once been in the Boston papers for his record trout. The stuffed and mounted trout still hung on the store wall beside the old man’s enlarged photograph showing his tilted face and milky eyes behind the oval curve of glass.
“Bill, what will you take for your grandpa today?” cried the summer people who jammed the store on Saturdays, and Stong always answered, “Take what I can get,” making a country virtue out of avarice.
Stong was ready to jump into his grandfather stories with a turn of the listener’s eye. “The old fool was so slack-brained he got himself killed with crow bait.”
Hawkheel, coming in from the barn with book dust on him, saw that Stong still lied as easily as he breathed. The summer people stood around him like grinning dogs waiting for the warm hearts and livers of slain hares.
Stong’s best customers were the autumn hunters. They reopened their summer camps, free now from wives and children, burned the wood they had bought in August from Bucky Pincoke and let the bottle of bourbon stand out on the kitchen table with the deck of cards.
“Roughin’ it, are you?” Stong would cry jovially to Mr. Rose, splendid in his new red L.L. Bean suspenders. The hunters bought Stong’s knives and ammunition and went away with rusted traps, worn horseshoes and bent pokers pulled from the bins labeled ‘Collector’s Items.’ In their game pockets were bottles of Stong’s cheap Spanish wine, faded orange from standing in the sun. Stong filled their ears to overflowing with his inventions.
“Yes,” he would say, “that’s what Antler Mountain is named for, not because there’s any big bucks up there, which there is not”—with a half wink for Hawkheel who stood in the doorway holding rare books like hot bricks—“but because this couple named Antler, Jane and Anton Antler, lived up there years ago. Kind of simple, like some old families hereabouts get.”
A sly look. Did he mean Hawkheel’s father who was carted away with wet chin and shaking hands to the state asylum believing pitchfork handles were adders?
“Yes, they had a little cabin up there. Lived off raccoons and weeds. Then old Jane had this baby, only one they ever had. Thought a lot of it, couldn’t do enough for it, but it didn’t survive their care and when it was only a few months old it died.”
Stong, like a petulant tenor, turned away then and arranged the dimes in the cash register. The hunters rubbed their soft hands along the counter and begged for the rest of the story. Hawkheel himself wondered how it would come out.
“Well, sir, they couldn’t bear to lay that baby away in the ground, so they put it in a five-gallon jar of pure alcohol. My own grandfather—used to stand right here behind the counter where I’m standing now—sold ’em the jar. We used to carry them big jars. Can’t get ’em any more. They set that jar with the baby on a stump in front of their cabin the way we might set out a plaster duck on the lawn.” He would pause a moment for good effect, then say, “The stump’s still there.”
They asked him to draw maps on the back of paper bags and went up onto the Antler to stare at the stump as if the impression of the jar had been burned into it by holy fire. Stong, with a laugh like a broken cream separator, told Hawkheel that every stick from that cut maple was in his woodshed. For each lie he heard, Hawkheel took three extra books.
All winter long Hawkheel kept digging away at the book mine in the barn, putting good ones at the bottom of the deepest pile so no one else would find them, cautiously buying only a few each week.
“Why, you’re getting to be my best customer, Leverd,” said Stong, looking through the narrow, handmade Dutch pages of John Beever’s Practical Fly-fishing, which Hawkheel guessed was worth $200 on the collector’s market, but for which Stong wanted only fifty cents. Hawkheel was afraid Stong would feel the quality of paper, notice that it was a numbered copy, somehow sense its rarity and value. He tried a diversion.
“Bill! You’ll be interested that last week I seen the heaviest buck I seen in many years. He was pawing through the leaves about thirty yards from My Place.”
In Chopping County “My Place” meant the speaker’s private deer stand. It was a county of still hunting, and good stands were passed from father to son. Hawkheel’s Place on the Antler regularly gave him big deer, usually the biggest deer in Feather River. Stong’s old Place in the comfortable pine was useless, discovered by weekend hunters from out of state who shot his bucks and left beer cans under the tree while he tended the store. They brought the deer to be weighed on Stong’s reporting scales, bragging, not knowing they’d usurped his stand, while he smiled and nodded. Stong had not even had a small doe in five years.
“Your Place up on the Antler, Leverd?” said Stong, letting the cover of the Beever fall closed. “Wasn’t that over on the south slope?”
“No, it’s in that beech stand on the shoulder. Too steep for flatlanders to climb so I do pretty good there. A big buck. I’d say he’d run close to one-eighty, dressed.”
Stong raked the two quarters toward him and commenced a long lie about a herd of white deer that used to live in the swamp in the old days, but his eyes went back to the book in Hawkheel’s hands.
The long fine fishing days began a few weeks later, and Hawkheel decided to walk the high northeast corner of the county looking for new water. In late summer he found it.
At the head of a rough mountain pass a waterfall poured into a large trout pool like champagne into a wine glass. Images of clouds and leaves lay on the slowly revolving surface. Dew, like crystal insect eggs, shone in the untrodden moss along the stream. The kingfisher screamed and clattered his wings as Hawkheel played a heavy rainbow into the shallows. In a few weeks he came to think that since the time of the St. Francis Indians, only he had ever found the way there.
As August waned Hawkheel grew possessive of the pool and arranged stones and twigs when he could not come for several days, searching later for signs of their disarray from trespassing feet. Nothing was ever changed, except when a cloudburst washed his twigs into a huddle.
One afternoon the wind came up too strong to cast from below the pool, and Hawkheel took off his shoes and stockings and crept cautiously onto the steep rock slab above the waterfall. He gripped his bare white toes into the granite fissures, climbing the rough face. The wind blew his hair up the wrong way and he felt he must look like the kingfisher.
From above the pool he could see the trout swimming smoothly in the direction of the current. The whole perspective of the place was new; it was as if he were seeing it for the first time. There was the back of the dead spruce and the kingfisher’s hidden entrance revealed. There, too, swinging from an invisible length of line wound around a branch stub, was a faded red and white plastic bobber that the Indians had not left.
“Isn’t anything safe any more?” shouted Hawkheel, coming across the rock too fast. He went down hard and heard his knee crack. He cursed the trout, the spruce, the rock, the invader of his private peace, and made a bad trip home leaning on a forked stick.
Urna brought over hot suppers until he could get around and do for himself again. The inside of the trailer was packed with books and
