“I’ve always hunted, since I was a boy,” said Clayton, “anything you could hunt, any time of the year you could hunt it. I didn’t do any deer hunting until I came to this part of the country, and I guess I tried to make up for all the years I hadn’t hunted deer.
“It was last spring when Joe Coppard, down at the post office, told me about the old Reese place north of town. The deer were so thick in there, he said, that they kept the grass mowed like a lawn, I went out there, and he was right. The place looks like something the world forgot.” He broke off. “Have you ever seen it?”
The old man nodded.
“Well, then, you know how it looks, the house falling in, briar thickets and wild fruit trees in the yard, and the orchard, with all of those gnarled, ancient apple trees in a sea of bluegrass. The place chilled my blood, sort of. It’s so completely abandoned and lonely, with the empty windows of the house looking over those barren fields, and the quiet over everything. As if everything there were waiting.”
“It didn’t always look like that,” said the other man.
“Yes, I know that now,” said Clayton. “I saw it first in the late afternoon, with the evening light on it. The trunks of the trees we: e gray and weathered, and the boards of the house were the same way, and all through the yard and orchard the growing things were that odd, lifeless color that very old things take on, waiting for spring. I knew just what the house looked like inside, the way the rooms were laid out, and the placement of the furniture. I didn’t go in, though, because somehow the place was so lonely and silent I didn’t want to disturb its quiet. I made a circle out through the orchard and found more deer signs than I’d ever seen in one place and I decided that the deer came in at night and fed on the bluegrass.”
Clayton watched as the old man opened the breech of his rifle and, placing a finger in it to reflect the light, peered down the barrel.
“I made up my mind,” he continued, “to come back one night when the moon was shining and hide in a tree in the orchard. There was something about the old place that fascinated me. Does that make sense to you?”
The old man shrugged and spat in the fire.
“Night huntin’s the best they are,” he said laconically. “When I was a young man, I spent many a night under the stars, listenin’ to the dogs run mostly in the dark woods.”
“Then you know the attraction of it,” said Clayton, “the mystery of not being able to see very far, and not knowing what it is that’s coming through the leaves toward you. I got started hunting with a wounded rabbit call, and that’s the weirdest kind of thrill I know, realizing that after you’ve called, and you’re waiting there in the dark, you’re being hunted by something you don’t know about. Have you ever hunted like that?”
“I have been the hunter and the hunted at the same time,” answered the old man.
“Game wardens?” Clayton surmised briefly, and the old fellow chuckled as he squatted in the firelight, wiping each of his cartridges with an oily rag and inserting them one at a time in the rifle. “Go on with your tale,” he said.
Clayton stared into the fire a moment. “It was April before I got back there,” he said, “and it was amazing how the place had changed. I left my car on an old woods road, so no one would wonder about it, and walked through the woods. I came up in back of the house, just about dusk, and stood there in a little cedar grove looking over the orchard. Every single tree was in bloom, and it was like looking down on a bank of clouds, nearly, to look over the tops of those trees. Up in the house yard the firebush was blooming too, and a big cherry tree that I had thought was dead was swelled out like cotton candy with pink blossoms. It was beautiful, but it was sad, too. All those trees, planted and pruned and cultivated by somebody, and now they were blooming here for no one, in the stillness of that forgotten place.
“I walked through the orchard, and saw fresh deer tracks again. I looked around until I found a tree that was right for sitting in, where I could see everything fairly well and pulled myself up in it. I had a gun with me, an old shotgun. I always carry a gun in the woods, because I’d have felt naked without it, but I didn’t intend to kill, a deer. I got comfortable in the broad fork of the tree with a limb to rest my back against, and tested my view. I could see the old cart track coming to the house, grown over with weeds two feet high, and the moonlit house itself behind the rotten palings that were more honeysuckle than fence. I could see where a little hollow came into the orchard field, and I was sure that this was where the deer had been coming in.”
He lit another cigarette with a stick from the fire, and blew the smoke upward. The old man sat like an Indian, hugging his knees in thoughtful contemplation of the rising moon. There was no sound but the slight hissing of the fire.
“I sat there,” Clayton went on, “for a long time before anything happened. The whippoorwills were calling, and the night was full of sounds, but I couldn’t see much until the moon got up. The smell of all those blossoms was overpowering in the still air, and in the moonlight the trees hardly looked real around me. They were like clouds of vapor, and after a while I lost my sense of distance and couldn’t tell for sure where the ground was. Then I saw a movement, and there was a deer feeding in the grass a few yards away. After a few minutes I saw another one move into my view, and then another. I couldn’t tell much about size and I never could pick out antlers for sure, but I could see their white patches plainly, and after I stared a minute or two, their outlines. It was quite a sensation. I knew that I could kill one with the shotgun, but I didn’t want to. It was as if I were invisible, with the power to watch them for hours without being detected, and it wouldn’t have been right to take advantage of it. I just sat there, listening to my heart pound, and watched them move about the orchard.”
He paused, and the old man took the opportunity to pass the flask over. They both drank in silence, and washed down the liquor with hot coffee. The fire was dying down to coals, but neither made any effort to refuel it.
“I have no idea how long I’d watched, but I was beginning to get stiff in the back,” said Clayton. “You know how it is, sitting in a tree. I was just easing myself into a more bearable position, when I heard something coming from the direction of the road. At first I thought it was a deer running, but I soon realized it couldn’t be that. It was the sound of a horse galloping on the road, and you could hear his shoes clopping in the hard gravel. Then I heard the hoofs leave the hard road and take the cart track to the house, and a thousand things went through my mind before I noticed that the deer hadn’t even raised their heads. I think I had just decided that it must be a range horse the deer were used to, and relaxed a little, when I heard the door to the house swing open with a sound of unoiled hinges, and I swiveled my eyes toward the house. The moonlight was slanting in across the porch, and I could see the black patch that was the open door. I fastened my eyes to it, listening at the same time to the horse.
“Then, as if in a dream, I saw a man step out onto the porch, and I saw the blue gleam of a rifle barrel.”
Clayton put his cup down, and his hand trembled a little. “I heard the creak of a saddle and the clink of metal from the road, and I saw the man on the porch duck off to the side and kneel behind a big leafy bush near the yard fence.”
He took a long stick and poked aimlessly at the fire.
“Then the horse came over the hill and I saw that it had a rider. I couldn’t see his face well, but he was tall, and had on a slouch hat, and a military jacket of some kind, with buttons that winked in the moonlight. I think he had a mustache too, but I’m not sure. I sat there in the tree and watched him ride up to the gate and stop, and for the life of me, I could neither move, nor think clearly enough to imagine what could be happening, or what I should do. I was like a man watching a play, sure that what I was watching couldn’t be real, and that I could have no effect on the outcome, whatever I did. Then the gun roared behind the bush with a noise that was loud, but more like the echo of a shot than the actual report. I saw the tall man jerk back in the saddle, stiffen and finally topple to the ground, his hand still gripping the reins.”