Do your best at what you can, Frank. There’s better and more important learning to be had out here on the land. That’s one thing for sure. But some things you just gotta learn to stand.”
“What I figure,” the kid would say, “there ain’t one of those little towheads would know how to square a half-hitch or get a hackamore on a green broke colt. But they make fun of me cuz I won’t do the math or read out loud.”
“How come you won’t do none of that?”
“I don’t know. I can get the numbers sorted around in my head without scratching around on paper, and I guess if a guy’s to read he oughta be able to do it alone and quiet. Works best for me, least ways.”
“Sounds right sensible to me,” the old man said. “But the law says you gotta go until you’re sixteen. Least ways, you got this place and we get out to where it’s real as much as can, don’t we?”
“Yeah,” the kid said. “That’s what saves my bacon.”
When he could shoot as dependably with the carbine as with the .22 the old man let him start to hunt. They’d take horses and cross the field and plod up the ridge and by the time they were down the other side the land became what the old man called “real.” To the kid, real meant quiet, open, and free before he learned to call it predictable and knowable. To him, it meant losing schools and rules and distractions and being able to focus and learn and see. To say he loved it was a word beyond him then but he came to know the feeling. It was opening your eyes on a misty early summer morning to see the sun as a smudge of pale orange above the teeth of the trees with the taste of coming rain in his mouth and the smell of camp coffee, rope, gun powder, and horses. It was the feel of the land at his back when he slept and the hearty, moist promise of it rising from everything. It was the feeling of the hackles rising slowly on the back of your neck when there was a bear yards away in the bush and the catch in the throat at the sudden explosion of an eagle from a tree. It was also the feel of water from a mountain spring. Ice like light splashed over your face. The old man brought him to all of that.
He taught him to track before he let him do anything else. “Any idiot can shoot a gun,” he’d tell him. “But you track an animal long enough you get to know their thinkin’, what they like, when they like it, and such. You don’t hunt the animal. You hunt their sign.”
He had to learn to walk all over again. The old man showed him how to move in a half-crouch that played pure hell on the top of his thighs. They burned after half a mile and the agony was fierce but he could feel stealth building in his stride. He learned how to curl his foot from the outside in when he planted it to avoid snapping twigs or crunching gravel. It meant that he walked pigeon-toed. The motion was difficult to master and he worked deliberately at it. He’d go out alone to the ridge and practise through the evenings until he could navigate the length of it and back soundlessly. He learned upwind from downwind and came to know how sound was amplified in the still, half-lit world of the forest. He learned caution. He learned patience. He learned guile. Together, he and the old man would creep along behind deer, keeping a parallel tack, and follow them in that half-crouch for miles.
Furtive was a word he learned then. The old man showed him how to slip between trees like a shadow. He taught him to move with exquisite slowness, almost not like moving at all, so that every inch of forward motion seemed to take a year. He learned to wrap himself in shadow, how to stoop and crawl between rocks and logs, how to hide himself in plain sight. He learned to stand or sit or lay in one position for hours. He could slow his breathing so that even in the chill air of winter the exhalations could be barely seen. He learned how to go inward, how to become whole in his stillness and forget the very nature of time.
Then he learned to read sign. Tracks were a story. That was the old man’s thinking. Every movement left the story of a creature’s passing when you learned to see it. The kid spent hours on his hands and knees touching the edges of paw prints with his finger to test the dryness of the earth. He learned their smell. He could determine how the spread of the print told exactly how the animal was moving. He knew a trot, a lope, a walk, the creeping, inching of a predator on the hunt, and the hunched and gathered fold of prey in shadow.
“See this trail,” the old man said one day.
There was a dim line through the bracken.
“Yeah.”
“See sign?”
“No.”
“Are ya sure? Look closer.”
He walked to a stump and sat and watched the kid study the ground. There was nothing discernible. When he closed his eyes and breathed the kid got a sense of something. He knelt. He pressed his face close to the earth and reached out with one finger and laid the nub of it on the moist surface of leaves turning to rot. Then he turned them over slowly. In the mud was a coyote print, barely visible but there nonetheless. He looked up at the old man.
“Coyote,” he said.
“How old’s the sign?”
“A day. But it rained last night. Could be two.”
“Male or female?”
The kid squinted at the track. “Female,” he said. “Not so heavy as a male. And the dirt’s pushed forward some at the front. She was trotting. Likely on the hunt or coming back with something for the kits. The den’ll be close.”
“What colour you figure her to be?”
The kid looked shocked and the old man cackled and slapped at his thigh. They followed the dim sign to a hillock and spent a few hours watching the coyote kits play outside their den.
He shot his first deer when he was nine. He tracked the buck out of a marsh and upward through the talus onto a high ridge. There were times when the rock made it impossible to follow sign.
“You know him well enough,” the old man said. “Go where you figure he’d go.”
He found a slip of hoof in lichen at the edge of a table of rock leading into thin juniper. They wound through strewn boulders. He crept slowly with the rifle cradled across his chest. Finally, he turned his back to a rock and sat hunkered down on his haunches. He bolted a shell into the breech of the gun. Slowly. Silently. He looked across at the old man and nodded. Then he rose to a crouch and made his way around the boulder. They were at the edge of an alpine meadow. Nothing moved. The kid sat with a stump at his back, staring out across the wide expanse. Nothing stirred. Finally, a shadow eked out of the cover of a small copse of stunted pine. The buck was a juvenile but large. The kid didn’t move. He barely breathed. When the buck turned into the wind and showed his flank he raised the rifle off his knees and pressed the butt into his shoulder. The shot clapped and echoed off the surrounding ridges and slopes. The buck dropped where he’d stood and the kid and the old man walked slowly across the meadow without speaking. For years he would recall the crackle of their footsteps through the dry underbrush and moss and the feel of the old man’s hand between his shoulder blades.
It was a clean heart shot. The buck died instantly. The kid stood looking down at it and there were tears suddenly. He wept quietly and the old man stood by and waited. When he wiped at his nose with his sleeve the old man handed him a knife.
“Cut the throat, Frank,” he said.
When the slash was made the old
