Hunter's Moon Read online

  He retreats into a silence.

  “Yeah, I knew you’d react that way.” There are notes of resignation and disappointment in her words. “It’s what you told me when we were first married. That time I fell on the floor at that dance club in Marquette. If I didn’t straighten up and fly right, you said, then everything was off. You remember?”

  “Sure.”

  “So I did. I’ve been going to those damn meetings every week for over thirty years. I don’t see why you can’t make an effort.”

  “For what? To hear that it’s post-traumatic stress and get fed Elavil or amitriptyline or whatever?”

  She rests her chin on her knuckles joined above perched elbows. Her eyes fasten on him. “Well, you’ve got to do something. I’m not going to go through what we did those first couple of years we were married. Not again. I’m not going to live like I have been the past couple of months.”

  Maddie inherited her hair from her mother, the straight hair that looks spun from charcoal, and the arctic gray-blue eyes from her father. The contrast has always captivated Will, as it does now. But her threat tampers with his captivation. He cannot imagine a life without her; the possibility of losing her rises in him as terror of the night rises in a child.

  2.

  The next morning, while Maddie is at church, Will writes down every instance he can remember when he’s said or done something offensive and to whom. Some of those people are gone, dead or moved away, but he intends to apologize to as many as he can. His thought is that making amends will aid in his own rehabilitation; it will improve his opinion of himself, giving him the mental strength to wrestle the Dark Ones to the mat. It is a less-than-logical idea, but Maddie pleaded that he do something, so this is what he will do. He decides to begin with Bruce Skrydlowski. It’s been about ten weeks since he called him a fucking loser; Skryd, who couldn’t remember the huge black airplane half an hour after seeing it, has probably forgotten. Nevertheless, Will is determined.

  Skryd’s thirty-year-old pickup is not at the cabin. The generator thumps in a shed outside; a light is on inside. It’s not a good idea to leave a house with a generator running. Maybe Skryd wants any would-be burglar to think someone’s at home. Not that there’s much threat of a burglar this far into the boondocks. More likely, he plans to be away only a short time. Will believes that is the explanation when he tries the door and it swings open. The morning is dull and overcast; it’s dim inside, except for a low-watt desk lamp and a hazy shaft falling through the skylight onto the small pinewood dining table, across which a topographic map is spread. A Post-it note is attached to the doorjamb: Roseanne—Out hunting. Back this aft. Make yrself at home. Leftovers in fridge.

  Does the eccentric recluse have a girlfriend? That doesn’t seem likely. Will steps inside to look at the map. On a vast smear of nearly trackless green, a black circle has been inked between a lake and the Big Two-Hearted, the river Ernest Hemingway made famous; complicated directions are written in the left-hand margin: H-44/ S. 5 mi. jeep trail on left. ESE 1.5 mi. Dead end. E. 1/2 mi. Beaver ponds. E.+ 1/2 mi. Old clear-cut. Why Skryd made such detailed notes, only to leave them here with the map, is mystifying. That area is one of the wildest and most remote in the county. Right then Will’s less-than-logical plan dips further into illogic. He swipes the map and drives home.

  Maddie isn’t there when he arrives. He feels a stab of panic at her absence, then he remembers that the church holds a social hour after services. The saved celebrating their salvation over coffee and stale sweet rolls. He calls her cell, gets her voicemail, and leaves a message that he’s gone hunting with Skryd and will be home in a few hours. He collects his gear, shotgun, and Samantha—yipping ecstatically—and is out the door.

  The county road, H-44, is paved as it runs eastward from Vieux Desert, skirting Lake Superior for some twenty miles before it turns to dirt and hooks due south for thirty more to its intersection with a state highway. At the turn, Will zeros his trip odometer, then heads south, at first through pine barrens, later through mixed popple and spruce, and crosses a wooden bridge over the brandy-brown Two-Hearted. The odometer reads exactly five miles, but he doesn’t spot a jeep trail on the left side. After driving on for another half mile without success, he stops to study the map, which doesn’t show any sort of trail joining the road. That’s not unusual—not every track in these big woods has been plotted. He turns around and has backtracked two or three hundred yards when he glimpses, now on his right, an opening in the wall of trees.

  The jeep trail—two ruts divided by a grassy strip—is so narrow that Will has to pull in the side-view mirrors to avoid hitting low-hanging branches. And it’s so rough that covering the one and a half miles to its end, in a clearing matted with bracken fern, consumes almost twenty minutes. He could have walked it faster.

  The old brown-over-cream Dodge is not there as he’d expected. Now that Will thinks about it, he hadn’t seen any fresh tire tracks on the way in. Skryd has gone hunting somewhere else. His absence ought not be cause for dejection, but there’s been nothing ordinary about Will’s emotions lately. His idea had been to run into Skryd accidentally on purpose; they would hunt together, as they had in years past, and at an opportune moment, he, Will, would ask Skryd’s forgiveness, whether or not the absentminded hermit remembered the insult. Feeling as gray as the sky, Will reflects on the idiocy of this scheme. Did he really think he could engineer a chance meeting in this wilderness? Skryd would have needed to be wearing a tracking collar.

  The thought of going home to sit around idle all day oppresses him. But something can be salvaged from this foray. The release of motion. If he can keep moving, he can stay ahead of the Dark Ones, for now anyway. Satchel Paige’s droll advice comes to mind: Don’t look back—the bastards may be gaining on you.

  Samantha, leashed to a spare tire in the truck bed, is straining to jump out and hunt. Keep moving, Will commands himself. Walk it off. Ever since boyhood, when his father took him out of Detroit’s mean streets on hunting or fishing trips, being in the woods has seldom failed to buoy his spirits. He climbs out of the cab with his shotgun, drops the tailgate, and clips a leather bell collar to Samantha’s neck. She licks his face. In the way of dogs, she’s forgotten and forgiven the kick he gave her yesterday. Will checks the compass hung pendant-like on a lanyard around his neck. East for half a mile, the map directions say. Samantha leaps from the truck and sprints off into the shadowed forest. He follows her. Keep moving; don’t look back; walk it off.

  They are in hardwoods, the ground matted with orange and yellow leaves. Will shoots a compass bearing at a black-eyed knot bulging from the smooth gray trunk of an old beech tree. When he comes to it, he takes another bearing on a prominent tree farther on. He doesn’t carry a GPS, partly because he dislikes depending on an instrument that requires batteries, partly because he’s proud of his reputation as a woodsman’s woodsman who doesn’t need high-tech devices to find his way. On clear days, he can navigate by the sun alone. The sun today is a pallid, diffuse wafer, barely visible through the thick overcast, so he relies on the compass.

  Samantha is out ahead of him somewhere. He can tell where only by the erratic jingling of her bell. She’s what’s known to setter aficionados as a “blue belton,” although her ticking is black rather than blue. A precocious dog who hunts, at two, like a veteran of five or six. She reappears, quick-stepping, zigzagging, nose to the ground, keen for the scent of wild birds. She was bred for this. It’s the full expression of her being. What’s mine? he asks himself, pressing farther into the woods. Keep moving; don’t look back; walk it off.

  Samantha stops suddenly, striking a solid point, long, feathered tail curved at the tip like a fishhook. Poised, alert, she pulls Will out of his own head and puts him in the moment. He takes a step or two toward her. A grouse pair burst from under a baby spruce, zero to thirty-five in one second, and fly out of sight before he can shoulder his gun.

  “Nice work, Sam,” he says, rewarding her wi
th a head rub. “Go ahead. Hunt ’em up.”

  And she’s off again. He senses the joy she feels in running through rough country, and somehow she transmits a measure of it to him.

  Skryd’s directions—assuming it was he who wrote them—are inaccurate. It’s not half a mile to the beaver pond but twice that, at least. Looking down from the hardwood ridge, Will sees that there are three ponds: peninsulas of hard ground, choked with tag alders, spread between the ponds like long green fingers. He crosses the nearest pond by way of the beaver dam and plunges into the alders. They remind him, in their tangled density, of the liana and mimosa vines in Vietnam. Samantha flies a woodcock. He hears its high, piping whistle but never sees it.

  He thrashes forward and climbs a gentle rise into a spruce and birch woods, relieved to be out of the alder jungle. Samantha trees a grouse. Will spots it perched on a spruce branch some twenty feet above, takes aim, and fires. The bird drops like a lead ball, feathers twirling in the wake of its fall. Then he sees another in a neighboring spruce and kills it. The dog retrieves both, and the weight of the birds in the game pocket in the back of his vest feels good.

  Once again, the directions are off the mark. Half an hour’s hike, representing a distance of a mile or more, brings Will to the destination scrawled in the map’s margin—the clear-cut. Stretching across an oblong basin below the pine and birch woods, it must cover an entire section—that is, a square mile. Whatever trees had grown there had been logged off at different times. Will discerns this by the height of the aspen that have sprouted up in their place. The fifteen-to-twenty-footers are about ten years old, the shorter ones anywhere from two to five. Grouse will be in the older aspen, the cover thick enough to offer concealment from hawks but not so thick as to block flight from terrestrial predators. Pine martens. Fox. Coyotes.

  The birds, however, are not where they’re supposed to be; they are where they’re not supposed to be. He and Samantha cross the clear-cut without a flush and are skirting a stand of mature red pine, an eco-desert, where, to Will’s amazement, they fly a bird. He downs it on the wing. A hundred yards farther in, a second grouse takes off, crossing right to left, a brownish blur against the steel-colored sky. Will’s shot produces a puff of feathers, but the bird doesn’t tumble; it glides downward as if on an invisible inclined plane. He marks its long, angled fall and heads in its direction. He never leaves a wounded bird in the bush, not if it’s humanly possible to find it. Ten minutes later, Samantha’s run slows to a quick but methodical walk, her nose down. The grouse, either wing- or tail-shot, is running. Her stalk ends at a clump of young pine. She pauses, then darts in and emerges with the bird in her jaws and presents it, still living, to Will. Taking it in hand, feeling its heart beat against the tips of his fingers, he sees its reddish eye staring up at him and the light go out of it when he breaks its neck with a quick, hard twist. The heartbeat stills. He shoots only what he can eat, but he hates moments like this; the grouse, after all, was a free, wild creature, not some factory-farm chicken bred for slaughter.

  He has four, enough for two meals for Maddie and him. With the sun all but completely hidden, he takes a westerly bearing with his compass and starts back to where he left the truck. After bushwhacking a quarter of an hour, he realizes that something is wrong—he should be in the overgrown clear-cut by now. He must have lost direction, chasing the wounded bird. He pauses to take stock. The long axis of the oblong-shaped cut runs north to south; the older trees are at the northern end, where he’d crossed into the red-pine forest. If, pursuing the injured grouse, he’d veered north, backtracking would have taken him past its northern boundary. That explains why he missed it. The damn thing is close to a mile wide, so if he walks south from here, he should find it.

  Which he does. His confidence renewed, he continues south through the aspen, guesstimating at what point he should turn west again toward the beaver ponds. Samantha slows him down. In her mind, they are still hunting. She slams onto a point, a woodcock towers, and the dog bounds off again. In minutes, Will can no longer hear the bell. It’s usually audible at seventy-five to a hundred yards; therefore, she’s either on another point or out of hearing range. It turns out to be both. When he locates her at last, she’s frozen on a slash pile in the younger aspen, ten-foot trees packed so closely together that he has to turn sideways to pass between them. A woodcock whistles skyward.

  He doesn’t bother shooting. To stop Samantha from hunting, he leashes her and leads her back into the older part of the cut, where there is more room between the trees and he can make better time. Less than three hours of daylight are left, and he reckons he has at least three miles to go. If he can maintain a good clip, say two miles an hour, he should make it before dusk. Walking Samantha on lead slows him down—she wraps the leash around tree trunks or catches it in underbrush, forcing him to disentangle her. He removes the leash and proceeds out of the cut into big trees, figuring to reach the beaver ponds in an hour.

  That isn’t what happens; skirting windfalls and deadfalls shunts him off course no matter how hard he tries to stay on. He comes to a stream, most likely the one the beavers dammed to form the ponds. Are the ponds upstream or down? The latter, he thinks, though he isn’t as certain as he’d like to be. Following the stream isn’t an option—its meandering bends and bows will add distance, and the tag alders strangling both banks are all but impenetrable. A hardwood ridge rises on the opposite side, probably an extension of the same ridge he’d traversed from his truck. At this point he realizes he can’t find it by direct backtracking, but he does know that the county road, H-44, scribes a straight north–south line for miles. All he has to do to reach it is go west as accurately as he can. Once on the road, he’ll hike to its junction with the jeep trail, then take that to its end in the bracken-covered clearing.

  That’s his new plan. He bashes through the alders, fords the stream—it’s shallow and no more than six feet wide—and scrambles up the opposite bank into the oaks and beech and maples. Paying close attention to his compass bearings, he sets as fast a pace as the woods allow. The old-growth trees, spaced wide apart, are like a park compared with what he’d gone through earlier. Will is feeling much better than he did this morning. The day’s exertions, solving his navigational problems, watching Samantha work, have combined into a kind of medicinal cocktail, purging the toxins from his brain; he hopes the remission is permanent, though he knows better.

  But the day’s exertions have also taxed his sixty-four-year-old body. He’s dragging his feet a little while he squints at his compass in the fading light. He trips over a tree root—partly hidden under a pile of leaves—and pitches forward, his gun flying from his hands as his arms windmill in a futile attempt to keep from falling. At the last second, he throws one arm across his chest to execute a kind of shoulder roll, which spares him from smashing his face against a rock the size of a medicine ball but twists his knee as he goes down, tumbling over something hard, another rock or root.

  He pushes himself onto all fours, catches his breath, and stands; but when he takes a step, pain shoots through his right knee, and it buckles. Bending down to massage it, he notices another misfortune: the compass hanging from his neck was smashed in the fall, the dial cracked in two, the needle bent.

  “Son of a bitch!” he yells into the silent woods, then, with his good leg, kicks the root, as though some malignant spirit had placed it there for the express purpose of tripping and crippling him.

  Knee throbbing, he retrieves the shotgun, then looks up through the trees, seeking the brightest part of the skies. That will be west—maybe. It could be nothing more than a thinning in the clouds and thus a deception. Nevertheless, he hobbles toward that band of shimmering gray; then his knee betrays him, and he trips again, nearly impaling himself on a branch protruding from a fallen log. He unloads the gun, repurposes it as a crutch. A few limping yards later, he’s convinced that he’s not going to make it out of here, not today. He’s hurt and he’s lost. Panic flashes throu
gh him, and he yells again, “Son of a bitch!”

  He calms himself and says, mostly to hear the sound of his own voice, “Hey, Sam! We’ll be spending the night right here.”

  A pine grove stands nearby, half a dozen trees, give or take, tightly bunched in a semicircle. Despite his disbelief in providence, he regards the presence of this conifer island in a hardwood sea as heaven-sent. The pines form a natural tent that will shelter him from a wind, should one spring up, and offer some protection from a rain, should one fall.

  Will carries basic survival gear in a jacket pocket—headlamp, waterproof matches, a pocket saw. For the next half hour, as late afternoon matures into twilight, he gathers firewood, picking up oak and beech twigs for kindling, cutting branches from blowdowns with the saw. The task is harder, and takes longer, than it would if his knee were fully functional. The pain is bearable but occasionally sharp enough to force him to pause until it subsides.

  He spots a paper birch not far from his campsite, another providential find—the bark makes excellent tinder. Peeling off a roll from the trunk, he remembers his mother-in-law’s tales about the Ojibwa shamans of the Midewewin, the Grand Medicine Society, and how in centuries past they kept birchbark scrolls on which remedies to various diseases had been written in pictographs.

  Inside the semicircle of pines, he builds a teepee of kindling over the bark and lights it. When the kindling catches, he lays on larger pieces, and the fire leaps into a cheery blaze. Next, he saws and breaks off pine boughs and piles them on the ground to make a bed for himself. Not very comfortable, but it will provide some insulation from the cold in the soil. All this gives him a feeling of competency, though he doesn’t suppose he’ll be asked to host a survivalist reality-TV show anytime soon.

  In the woods, under clouded skies with no moon shining, the darkness is impenetrable. Strapping on his headlamp, Will lays out the four grouse, cuts off their heads and wings and feet, guts and skins them, and feeds the entrails to Samantha. She doesn’t eat so much as inhale them. When the fire has burned down to coals, he whittles each end of a long stick to a point, drives it firmly into the ground at a slant, braces it with a rock, and spits one of the grouse over the other end, so that the bird hangs about half a foot over the coals. Dripping fat raises tiny flames, and the smell of the roasting meat is drool-inducing. It takes a long time to cook through. He removes the grouse from the fire and lays it on the pine boughs to cool. Once it has, holding it in both hands, he bites into the breast. Juices dribble down his chin. He imagines that he must look like a Neanderthal, devouring his kill.