Chaneysville Incident (40 page)

I heard briers rattle as they would have had there been wind. But there was no wind. I swung the gun slowly, cursing stiff muscles and dead fingers. I peered into the gloom, waiting for him to emerge.

He stopped. I heard the briers give a final rattle and then there was silence. But I knew where he was; the silence was almost visible, a little dead spot in the creakings of the forest. About a hundred yards. I knew he was there, even though I couldn’t see him.

I wondered if he could see me.

I waited some more, getting impatient, working on the impatience as a way of avoiding boredom. My muscles ached. My fingers were lifeless. When he moved again I would have to be careful; when the moment came to fire, my numb trigger finger might make me jerk. But he didn’t move. My toes went numb. I could not last long.

I considered shooting into that dead spot. It’s something you always think about at times like that, when you’re cold and tired and you know there’s nobody else out there with you. You think, oh, it won’t matter this time, and then it’s either shoot or put the gun up and go home, and if you’re any good you put the gun up. Because there
might
be somebody there. You might believe you’re alone, but the truth is, you don’t know.

He moved. Before I realized it, he had closed to maybe sixty yards, the sound of his passage little more than a whisper now, an intermittent rattling in the briers. He stopped again, matching his patience against mine, and I had the eerie sensation that it was he who was the hunter, and I the stalked. I waited, wondering if deer think as we do, wondering if he was standing up there, not just waiting and listening and watching, but actually
wondering
if this would be the time when his curiosity would kill him. And then I heard him move again. One step. Then another. And I realized I could not fire. The cold had numbed my hands and cramped my arms, and I could not hold the gun steady. There was only one chance. I waited until I heard the first whisper of his next step and then I moved as swiftly as I dared, lowering myself to the ground, settling in prone. I waited for the next step, and when I judged it was coming, I got the gun set and lined it on the sound of him. And then there was only one problem: the safety. It would make a small sound coming off, small but totally unnatural. It would be all he would need. So I needed sound from him to cover it. I waited two more steps, reestablishing the rhythm of his movement in my mind. I waited and listened, and then, when I
knew
he would be taking a step, I slipped the safety off.

He had not been taking a step.

He heard the sound, stopped dead. I waited, knowing it was useless, but knowing too that to rise now was to lose all chance. And then the wind sprang up suddenly and swirled the mist and snow into a new pattern, and for just a moment the air between us was clear, and I saw him. He was standing thirty yards away, beneath a barren sugar maple. I couldn’t see much of him, because his coat was thickly covered with the wet snow; just the outline of an antlerless head, a sloping chest. There was nothing I could shoot at. Nothing I could be that sure about. But I saw him. For a moment or two I watched him and he watched me, neither of us moving. And then the freakish wind that had cleared the space between us died, and the sight of him was lost to me. But through the gloom I heard him move again, quickly now, and confidently, in no great hurry but not wasting time, not alarmed, just moving on. Because he was finished there; he knew what lay behind him, and now it was time to be about more pressing business.

I lay there for a few more minutes, the snow falling gently on me, making me cold. There was no point in following him—I would never find him. I was not that good. So I clicked the safety back on and got to my feet and headed back the way I had come.

A mile and a half from the cabin, at the short end of a ridge that provided them with shelter from the steadily worsening storm, I found a small herd. I circled above them, looked them over and then, with a long and fairly difficult but unhurried shot, dropped a small buck. I dressed him out and butchered him, cleaned my hatchet and knives, and left, taking with me both haunches and a shoulder, the meat wrapped in the flour sacking I had carried in my pack.

It was early afternoon when I reached the bottom of the slope. I climbed up slowly, in part because the snow was deep now, making the footing uncertain, especially to my numbed feet, in part because I was feeling the fatigue now, in my legs and in my back. Just below the spring I stopped and put down the pack and the gun and the meat and tried to work some feeling back into my hands. I did not get any—they were too numb—but I got enough flexibility into them to get the pack fastenings undone and get out the rope and hang most of the meat. Then I moved on up the slope. I should have gone carefully—there were such things as game wardens, although they weren’t given to prowling the Hill’s far side—but I was too tired, and so I went wearily and without caution. But something made me stop when I reached the edge of the clearing. Something made me stay there, just at the edge of cover, stop and look at the cabin.

There was little wind in the hollow; the smoke from the chimney rose straight up for fifty feet before even starting to drift. There was nothing odd about the smoke; I had taken the risk of not dousing the coals entirely before I left, and a little smoke was to be expected. There was nothing else odd, either; the woodpile was as it had been, the logs I had cut and stacked as they had been, except that all was now covered by a white layer of snow. But something was wrong. There was somebody in the cabin.

I stood there wishing that I had a better angle so that I could see if there were tracks leading into the cabin. I considered circling around, hesitating because it had been a long night and I was tired. I tried to tell myself that I was simply tired and a little uneasy about having taken a deer out of season, but that made no sense, really; I had done it before. I tried to think if there really was any likelihood of danger, if maybe, after all these years, some fool had decided to come gunning after Moses Washington’s folio. But there was no way to decide. And so I started to fade back into the woods, getting ready to begin the circle. And then I began to think again, to reason, and I stopped and looked up at the path where it came down from the ridge.

There were tracks on the path.

It looked that way, anyway. There were indentations in the snow, at fairly regular intervals, the way it would look if somebody had come down that path after the snow began, but not recently—say more than an hour ago. But the indentations did not have to be tracks. They could have been caused by many things—they could have been shadows.

And so I reluctantly stripped off my gloves and fumbled rounds into the rifle. Because that’s the way it always is: you assemble your facts with all the diligence in the world and come to the best conclusions in the world, you check the conclusions against the facts with all the care in the world and, if you want to be professional, you check them again. But in the end preparation is procrastination; you have to go in and see.

I did not crawl. A purist would have insisted on it, but I had hands that had lost all feeling, and I wanted to be inside now, wanted the fire and a toddy. So I went more quickly than I should have. I reached the side of the door and put my back against the cabin wall and waited, listening for movement inside, hearing nothing. I checked the rifle, made sure the safety was off, and then leveled it. I was about to hit the door when a chance gust of air brought the scent to me: coffee. And strongly made. Judith.

I took my time. I slipped the safety on and unloaded the rifle. I stood outside the door, trying to get my breathing under control, trying to figure out what to say and how to say it. And then I realized what I was doing, figuring all that out: I was wasting time. Because I was afraid to go inside. Afraid of finding out that it wasn’t her, or that it was; afraid of the truth. But the feeling was gone from my hands, and the rest of me was as cold as it had ever been, so finally I just opened the door and went in.

She was sitting in the chair that had always been mine, her back to the door, reading a thick file by the light of the lamp. When the door opened she turned and looked up at me over the square lenses of her reading glasses. She had a slightly sour expression on her face. She took the glasses off and looked me up and down, taking in my snow-and-blood-covered boots, my bloody hunting coat, the rifle held in the crook of my arm.

“Who the hell are you supposed to be?” she said. “Davy Crockett?”

I pulled the door closed behind me, stood there for a moment, feeling the warmth. “No,” I said finally. “Old Davy, he was into bears. That’s too much for me.” I went and racked the rifle. Then I let the pack slip to the floor and shrugged out of the coat. I hung it up behind the door, where it could dry without the heat making the blood sour. I leaned against the door and struggled with the laces of my boots, trying to get them off using only my thumbs and forefingers; I couldn’t control the other fingers anymore. I got the laces undone finally, and got the boots off, feeling the pain in my toes. I slipped off the heavy wool trousers; they were wet, but the jeans I wore underneath were still dry. I hung the pants up next to the coat. “You’re serious, aren’t you?” she said. “Those aren’t somebody’s old clothes; you actually went out there and shot at something.”

I turned to look at her. She was staring at me. The lamplight made golden highlights in her eyes.

“I didn’t shoot
at
something,” I said. “I shot it.”

“A deer,” she said.

“That’s right,” I said. “A whitetail buck.
Odocoileus virginianus
, if you care about such things.”

“You killed it?”

“Of course I killed it. You don’t think I’d leave it out there wounded, do you?”

She shook her head. “Oh, no,” she said. “No, that would be against the Code of the West or something, wouldn’t it?”

“It would be against the code of common sense. A wounded animal is unpredictable. It’s liable to charge. You get hit by a hundred-pound deer going maybe seventeen miles an hour, you’re the one who has to be put out of misery.”

She shook her head, closed the folder, laid it carefully on the table. “Are you just going to stand there?” she said.

“No,” I said. “I’m going to have some coffee as soon as my hands get warm enough to pour it.” I really wanted a toddy, but I didn’t want to tell her so.

Her gaze moved from my eyes down to my hands. I didn’t have to look to know they were pale and wrinkled with the cold. She sucked her breath in, got up quickly, and came to me. She took my hands. The heat in the cabin had begun to warm the skin, and the thumbs had already begun to tingle, but the fingers were still numb; I saw her touch me, but I couldn’t feel it, not even when she squeezed. “They’ll be okay in a minute,” I said. She stepped closer to me and thrust my hands into her armpits and held them there with her own. Slowly I felt the sensation come back, felt the warmth and the pressure from her, the swell of her breasts against my wrists. I tried to catch her eyes, but she would not look at me. Her eyes stared straight ahead, at the five days’ worth of stubble that was growing on my chin. Her jaw was set. I looked down at her, along the inch of air that separated our bodies, seeing her cheek and belly and the faint hint of thigh beneath the material of her slacks, and I remembered how it felt to have the cheek against my chest, the belly and thighs solid and warm against mine. I tried to draw her to me, but she resisted, swaying with the first slight pressure but refusing any contact beyond that of my useless hands. I eased off the pressure, doing it gently and slowly so that she did not lose balance, so that she would not stumble or even sway, so that we would not acknowledge any of it. After that we just stood there, waiting for my hands to warm, waiting for the numbness to go away. When I had feeling back in the fingers I ended it. “I’ll have that coffee now,” I said.

She let my hands drop immediately, as if she were glad to be rid of them. She went and got the cup she had been using, while I poured coffee into mine and added sugar. I poured hers for her. And then I went and sat down in Old Jack’s chair. It felt strange—I had never sat in it before. But the cup was warm in my hands, and the coffee was hot and soothing in my throat. Suddenly all the tension left me; it was almost as if I had just come back and made the coffee and settled down, with no one to explain anything to. I closed my eyes and let my head loll back. I held the cup in my left hand and wriggled the fingers of my right around. They ached slightly: a little frostbite, not too much.

“Don’t you have gloves?” she said. She was still standing by the stove, and her voice came to me out of a haze of heat. I realized that she must have worked hard at getting the fire up, and not without a few false starts; the faint odor of smoke still clung to the air.

“Sure,” I said. “But you can’t wear them all the time. You can’t handle a rifle very well with gloves on. And you can’t gut—”

“All right,” she said.

I heard her leave the stove and go sit down; heard her sipping at her coffee. I waited for her to speak, but she didn’t. The waiting was hard on me, and after a while my concentration started to go; for a while then I was back there, tracking him, my feet driving through the underbrush, making the dry leaves rustle despite everything I could do, the moonlight filtering down through the clotting clouds and the first flakes of snow falling as I struggled up the slope, searching in the shadows for the greater darkness of a cave entrance, because the map said that he had hidden the whiskey there, or at least that’s what I thought it said, and I needed the whiskey, because I was cold, terribly cold, and it was the thing I believed would warm me. I moved as quickly as I dared, searching, not finding, shivering, doubting, despairing, and then I found it, a log fallen across the opening, detritus clogging it, but a cave, and I dug the opening clear and crawled inside, into the darkness, searching with my hands and finding, not nothing, but a bit of broken crockery that might have been the remains of a jug—and might not have been; that might not have been crockery at all….