with neither rod nor gun in my hands.
His voice dropped again, weighted with sarcasm. “My advice to you if you want to know where the birds is, is to get real friendly with that Banger you think is so tiresome. What he don’t know about this country is less than that.” He raised the dirty stub of an amputated forefinger, the local badge of maimedness that set those who worked with chain saws apart from lesser men.
“Him?” I glanced at Banger punctuating his torrent of words with intricate gestures. He pointed with his chin and his hands flew up into the air like birds.
“Yes, him. And if you go huntin’ with him I’d like to hear about it, because Banger keeps to himself. Nobody, not me, not Fance, has went out huntin’ with him for years.” He turned away from me. I finished my drink and left. There was nothing else to do.
I didn’t bother with the locals again, except Noreen Pineaud: thirties, russet hair, powder-blue stretch pants and golden eyes in a sharp little fox face. On Fridays she cleaned the house.
She stayed for a cup of coffee and smoked a cigarette one Friday, after I wrote her check. We sat at the kitchen table. She told me she was separated from her husband. That old question hung there. The check lay on the table between us.
I didn’t say anything, I didn’t move, and after a minute she tapped out the cigarette in the aluminum frozen-pie pan that was all I could find for an ashtray. She did it gently to show there weren’t any hard feelings.
I had retreated from other people in other places like a man backing fearfully out of a quicksand bog he has stumbled into unknowingly. This place in Chopping County was my retreat from high, muddy water.
Noreen looked a lot like the kid in Banger’s hardware store. I asked her.
“Yeah, he’s one of my nephews, Raymie. My brother, Raymon’, he don’t want the kid to work for Banger. He’s real strict, Raymon’. Says it’s a fag job. See, he wants the kid to trap or get a job cuttin’ wood.” She turned her sharp face to follow the trail of drifting headlights outside the window.
“Raymon’ made a lot of money with a trapline when he was a kid, and now the prices for furs are real good again. Foxes and stuff. So he got Raymie these twenty-five traps a coupla weeks ago. Now he says Raymie’s gotta set’em out and run the trapline before he goes down to the hardware store in the mornin’. You know how long that takes? Raymie takes after his mother. He like things easy.”
She talked on, uncoiling intricate ropes of blood relationship, telling me who was married to whom, the favorite small-town subject. I listened, out of the swamp now and onto dry ground.
That fall I went alone for the birds as I always had. No dog, alone, and with my mother’s gun, a 28-gauge Parker. Thank you kindly, ma’am, it’s the only thing you ever gave me except a strong inclination toward mistrust. She wrote her own epitaph, a true doubter to the last.
Although I sleep in dust awhile
Beneath the barren clod, Ere long I hope to rise and smile To meet my Saviour God If He exists.
The first morning of the season was cold, the frosted clumps of tussock grass like spiral nebulae. I went up the hardwood slopes, the trees growing out of a cascade of shattered rock spilled by the last glacier. No birds in this grey monotony of beech and maple, and I kept climbing for the ridges where stands of spruce knotted dark shelter in their branches.
The slope leveled off; in a rain-filled hollow a rind of ice imprisoned the leaves, soot-black, brown, umber, grey-tan like the coats of deer, in its glassy clasp. No birds.
I walked up into the conifers, my panting the only sound. Fox tracks in the hoarfrost. The weight of the somber sky pressed down with the heaviness of a coming storm. No birds in the spruce. Under the trees the hollows between the roots were bowls filled with ice crystals like moth antennae. The birds were somewhere else, close hugging other trees while they waited for the foul weather to hit, or even now above me, rigidly stretched out to imitate broken branch stubs in the web of interlacing conifers, invisible and silent, watching the fool who wandered below, a passing hat and a useless tube of steel tied to the ground by earth’s inertia.
What, I thought, like every grouse hunter has thought, what if I could fly, could glide through the spruce leaders and smile down into the smug, feathery faces like an old ogre confronting the darling princess. The view from the ground was green bottlebrushes, impenetrable, confusing, secretive, against a sky the color of an old galvanized pail. No birds.
The dull afternoon smothered a faraway shotgun blast from some distant ridge, quickly followed by another. He missed the first time, I thought. It was less a sound than a feeling in the bone, muted strokes like a maul driving fence posts. I wondered if it were Banger. Banger would not have missed the first shot. It must have been a double.
Even now, as I stood listening to the locked silence, he was probably taking the second bird from his dog’s mouth, fanning the tail, smoothing down the broken feathers and opening the crop to see the torn leaves of mitrewort and wood sorrel spill out. I could imagine him talking to the dog, to the fallen bird, to his shotgun. I felt an affinity to that distant grouse hunter that I could never feel for the downtown talker.
In the weeks that followed I often hunted that ridge where the beech spread into the spruce like outstretched fingers. I heard the increasingly familiar shotgun from the second ridge beyond mine. I put up birds and I took some down.
Too many times I had to crawl on hands and knees through slash where a wounded bird had dropped, praying it hadn’t crept into a stump where I could never find it, where it would die. One I did lose. Five hours of beating back and forth in a swamp, poking into rotted logs, kicking heaps of slash and damning the lack of a dog and my atrophied sense of smell. Again that maul stroke from the second ridge, a single shot, and I envied Banger his dog. I had to leave my bird unfound.
The loss of the bird spoiled that place for me, and I decided to work over to the lean spine of rock where Banger and his dog hunted. I was sure by now that my distant hunting companion was Banger, mythical friend, sprung from the echoes of a firing mechanism, the unknown Banger imprisoned in the loudmouth’s shell.
The first early snows came and melted and we were into Indian summer. The sky was an intense enamel blue, but the afternoon light had a dying, year’s-end quality, a rich apricot color as though it fell through a cordial glass onto an oak table, the kind of day hunters remember falsely as October.
It was a day for birds. They would be lounging in favorite dust bowls, feeding languidly on thorn apples like oriental princes sucking sugared dates. A late patch of jewelweed with a few ragged blossoms in a wet swale caught my eye halfway up the ridge. There was a thick stand of balsam at the far end. The jewelweed had a picked-over look, and the balsams had good ground openings for walking birds. It felt birdy.
I breathed shallowly to keep my heartbeat from vibrating the air. I knew the birds saw me, knew that I knew they were there, and I waited for the wave of adrenaline to pass, for the hot blows of blood to subside. I slid the safety off.
The birds were invisible in the runways under the firs, resting after a morning of snapping off the jewelweed flowers that burst halfway down their throats. Young birds, I thought, into the jewelweed. They would fly up as soon as I took a step forward.
I stayed still, never quite ready, the moment taking me. I waited too long, and a delicate pattering in the leaves of the hardwoods beyond the balsams like the first tentative drops of rain told me the birds had walked away, young tender
