AllFreeNovel
Share Us
We left on November 11th of that year, a Saturday, and the plan was to be back on the 17th or 18th, maybe earlier if one or both of us got our deer. If we did, we’d have plenty of time to get them dressed out at Ordway’s Butcher Shop in Gates Falls. Everyone enjoyed venison at Thanksgiving, especially Mark, who was due home from college on the 21st.
Butch and I clubbed together to buy an Army surplus Willys jeep back in the early fifties. By 1978 she was an old lady, but still perfect for loading up our gear and groceries and bucketing off into the woods. Sheila used to tell me every year that NellyBelle was going to throw a rod or drop her transmission somewhere in the 30-Mile, but she never did. We drove that Willys out there until Butch headed west. Only we didn’t do much hunting after 1978. We even avoided the subject. Although we thought about it, of course. Hard not to. By then I’d sold my first book, and Butch was making money doing comics and graphic novels. Nothing like the money he made later, but a-country fair, as Rennie Lacasse might have said.
I kissed Sheila, Butch gave her a hug, and off we went. Chapel Road took us to Cemetery Road, then to three woods roads, each more overgrown than the last. By then we were deep into the 30-Mile and pretty soon we could hear Jilasi Creek. Some years it wasn’t much more than a chuckle, but that summer and fall we’d had buckets of rain and old Jilasi was roaring.
“I hope the bridge is still there,” Butch said.
It was, but listing a bit to starboard. There was a yellow sign nailed to a stanchion with one word on it: UNSAFE. When the spring runoff came the next year, the bridge washed out entirely. After that you’d have to go twenty miles downstream to cross the Jilasi. Damn near to Bethel.
We didn’t need the sign. It had been years since we’d dared to drive across that bridge, and that day we weren’t sure we even dared walk across it.
“Well,” Butch said, “I’ll be damned if I’m going to drive twenty miles down Route 119 and then twenty miles back.”
“You’d be pulled over by a cop for sure if you tried,” I said, and slapped the side of the Willys. “NellyBelle hasn’t had an inspection sticker on her since 1964.”
He grabbed his pack and his sleeping bag and walked to the edge of that clattery old wooden bridge. There he stopped and looked back. “You coming?”
“I think I’ll wait and see if you make it across,” I said. “If the bridge goes, I’ll fish you out. And if the current takes you before I can, I’ll wave you goodbye.” I actually didn’t want both of us on it at once. That would have been tempting fate.
Butch started across. I could hear the hollow clonk of his bootheels over the sound of the creek. When he got to the other side he put down his gear, dropped his pants, and mooned me.
As I went across I could feel the bridge trembling like it was alive, and in pain. We went back—one at a time—and got the cartons with our food in them. They were full of things men eat in the woods: Dinty Moore, canned soup, sardines, eggs, bacon, pudding cups, coffee, plenty of Wonder Bread, two sixpacks of beer, and our annual bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Also a couple of T-bone steaks. We were big eaters in those days, although far from healthy ones. On the last trip we brought our rifles and the first aid kit. It was a big one. Both of us were members of the Harlow Volunteer Fire Department, and the EMT first aid training course was a requirement. Sheila insisted we drag the VFD kit with us for our hunting week, because accidents can happen in the woods. Sometimes bad ones.
As we tarped NellyBelle to keep her from filling up with rain, Butch said, “This is the time one of us will go in the drink, you wait and see.”
We didn’t, although that last trip we had to make together, one holding each end of the first aid kit, which weighed thirty pounds and was the size of a footlocker. We talked about leaving it in the jeep, but in the end we didn’t.
On the far side of the bridge there was a little clearing. It would have been a nice place to fish, except the Jilasi ran through Mexico and Rumford before it got to us, and any fish we caught would be toxic because of the runoff from the textile mills. Beyond the clearing was an overgrown path that led a quarter of a mile to our cabin. It was neat enough then, with two bedrooms, a wood-fired cookstove in the kitchen half of the main room, and a composting toilet out back. No electricity, of course, but there was a little pumphouse for water. All a couple of mighty hunters could possibly want.
By the time we got our gear bucked up to the cabin, it was almost dark. I made a meal (Butch was always willing to do his share, but that man would burn water, Sheila used to say) and Butch built a fire in the fireplace. I settled down with a book—there’s nothing like an Agatha Christie when you’re out in the woods—and Butch had a Strathmore drawing pad, which he would fill with cartoons, caricatures, and forest scenes. His Nikon was on the table beside him. Our rifles were propped in the corner, unloaded.
We talked a little, as we always did up there, some about the past and some about our hopes for the future. Those hopes were fading by then—we were in our early middle age—but they always seemed a little more realistic, a little more attainable, out in the woods, where it was always so quiet and life seemed less… busy? That’s not exactly right. Less cluttered. No phones to ring and no fires—literal as well as metaphorical—to put out. I don’t think we ever went into the woods to hunt, not really, although if a deer walked into our sights, who were we to say no? I think we went out there to be our best selves. Well… our honest selves, maybe. I always tried to be my best self with Sheila.
I remember going to bed that night, pulling the covers up to my chin and listening to the wind sigh through the trees. I remember thinking that the fading of hopes and ambitions was mostly painless. That was good, but it was also rather horrible. I wanted to be a writer, but I was beginning to think being a good one was beyond me. If it was, the world would continue to spin. You relaxed your hand… opened your fingers… and something flew away. I remember thinking maybe that’s all right.
Out the window, through the swaying branches, I could see some stars.
That pitcher has never excaped my memory.
On the 12th we put on our orange vests and orange hats and into the woods we went. In the morning we separated, getting together again for lunch and to compare notes—what we’d seen and what we hadn’t. That first day we met back at the cabin and I made a big pot of pasta with cheese and half a pound of bacon. (I called this Hungarian goulash, but any self-respecting Hungarian would have taken one look and covered his eyes.) That afternoon we hunted together.
The next day we ate a picnic lunch in the clearing, looking across the creek—which was more like a river that day—at NellyBelle. Butch made sandwiches, which he could be trusted to do. There was sweet water from our well to drink, and Hostess Fruit Pies for afters: blueberry for me, apple for Butch.
“Did you see any deer?” Butch asked, licking frosting from his fingers. Well… those fruit pies aren’t exactly frosted, but they have a glaze that’s quite tasty.
“Nope. Not today, not yesterday. But you know what the oldtimers say—the deer know when November comes, and they hide.”
“I actually think that could be true,” Butch said. “They do have a tendency to disappear after Halloween. But what about gunshots? Heard any?”
I thought it over. “A couple yesterday. None today.”
“Are you going to tell me we’re the only hunters in the 30-Mile?”
“Christ, no. The woods between here and Dark Score Lake are probably the best hunting in the county, you know that. I saw a couple of guys this morning not long after I started out, although they didn’t see me. I think one of them might have been that nummie Freddy Skillins. The one who likes to call himself a carpenter.”
He nodded. “I was over on that humpback ridge, and I saw three men on the other side. Dressed like models from L.L.Bean’s and carrying scoped rifles. Just about had to be out-of-staters. And for every one we see, there’s probably five or ten more. There should be plenty of bang-bang, because not all the deer decided to up stakes and head for Canada, did they?”
“Seems unlikely,” I said. “The deer are out there, Butchie.”
