The Beautiful Hunt

The Beautiful Hunt

We woke up before sunrise to hunt. I walked out into the cool, gray day, in that strange time before the sun rises but after the light has seeped into the air. It was quiet; even the frogs and the crickets seemed to still be asleep, and the tall, naked elms were like white bones sticking up into the sky. Everything was still.

           Charlie walked out behind me; his soft footfalls on the dead leaves the only sound around. We didn’t need to speak. We knew what we had to do.

           I strapped on my boots over wool socks, buttoned up my flannel. It was going to be another cold day, though the wind would probably hold off enough so that we wouldn’t have a hard time listening.

           Something had been eating our crops for about a week. We hadn’t seen the culprit yet, and stranger yet we hadn’t even found any tracks leading away. But we’d eliminated any rodent or smaller animal. It was eating a lot, and whatever it was, it was big. Potentially dangerous.

           That was the reason I carried a rifle strapped to my back and the reason Charlie had a crossbow at the ready. In the wild, you can’t just let things go. If this thing kept eating our crops, then we’d starve to death through the winter. Better to go out and hunt down whatever was stealing from you before it went any further.

           We started our trek through the woods as the glittering sun rose over the horizon. Dew still clung to brown leaves and bark, and the sun made it explode into a million fragments of blinding light.

           Our breath fogged out into the crisp morning air.

           Hunts are often filled with stunted adrenaline, blood pumping fast and hopeful at first but slowly dying, decaying to a dull rumble in the veins as the day wore on and nothing was found. Most hunts were like this, in reality – random ambling through the trees in search of something. In our case, we were in search of something we didn’t even know existed.

           Was it a bear? A bobcat? Wolf?

           Charlie and I had discussed it briefly the night before over tough cuts of elk, muttering to each other over the lamplit table.

           “You think it could kill us?”

           “There’s no tracks, no way to know. But based on the amount it ate . . . it’s possible.”

           “A bear.”

           “Maybe. There’s grizzlies around not too far. Don’t usually stray too far north.”

           If it was a grizzly we were after we could be chasing our own deaths, but our curiosity and our fear of losing more crops outweighed our initial concerns. There’s a dull kind of apathy you accept towards death when you live in the wild long enough. Pretty soon you stop rejecting its existence and learn to befriend it, explore it, because out there, it’s always resting on your shoulders.

           Our strategy was to hunt for tracks first, and by following the tracks we figured it might lead us to its home. From there, we’d use whatever force necessary to protect our crops for the winter season.

           We weren’t hunters by any stretch of the imagination. We were survivors, slaves to the land and the earth, just two humans looking to get back to the old ways and live off the land. We didn’t relish the killing, as some other psychopathic outdoorsmen do. We did it out of necessity.

           Silent, giant snowflakes dropped from the sky, blinding us once again against the sun’s rays.

           An hour passed. No tracks, no sign of much except a few birds waking up from their slumbers and shrieking into the break of day.

           The sun climbed and climbed and soon we started shedding our hats and gloves, unbuttoning the topmost buttons of our flannels. The woodland dripped and shook alive in the afternoon sun, and the small things that called this place home began to scurry around. Rabbits and groundhogs peeked out from their nestled houses to look curiously up at us.

           “Be a lot easier if we could just ask him what the hell was eating our garden,” Charlie muttered as we crossed paths with a squirrel clutching onto the bark of a huge oak.

           We had a lot of ground to cover if we actually wanted to find this thing. Our home was in the middle of a vast taiga region – miles and miles of pines and spruces rolling over snowy hills. We knew the area well, though if we strayed too far it would be easy to get lost in the mirrored halls of the evergreens. More than once we’d lost our way but had been able to keep our wits and use our compass and map to guide us back home. Nonetheless, it was frightening. It was easy to see how one could lose themselves to the forest.

           There’s no doubt that this thought was on Charlie’s mind as well as mine. The sun had crossed its zenith and was coming back down in the west now.

           “We’ve been at it nearly all day,” I said. I was about to question Charlie about heading back.

           “Ben.” He said.

           I already knew, before he’d bent down to examine the ground, what he’d found by the tone of his voice.

           “Come look at this.”

           Browns tracks in the snow. Two almond-shaped imprints in the ground, and beyond it, more leading away.

           “Deer,” I said.

           “Looks like it.”

           Without another word, Charlie got up and followed the prints. It was clear he was motivated to find this thing today. So was I. Who knew if we’d be able to get a fresh track as good as this one next time around? But I was also cognizant of the sun and the cold beginning to seep into my bones. The hats and gloves were back on, the flannels were buttoned up to our necks, and the wind was starting to pick up. The blue markers we’d used to mark for navigation in the past were beginning to become more and more spaced apart, meaning we’d started to go off the beaten path.

           We went ahead.

           In another hour we’d reached the last blue marker – meaning from here on out, if we continued, we’d be in uncharted territory.

           “We’re gonna follow this thing to our deaths if we keep going, Charlie.”

           “We’ve almost got it. We’re close. We’re so close. Look how fresh these are.”

           We looked at each other, in a silent, thoughtful way that only those who’ve lived together intimately can. I gave a soft nod to him, and we turned and crossed the last blue marker.

           The sun was falling and had started to turn an orangish-pink. Everything around us became glazed in color and added heaviness. The trees looked darker, somehow sturdier. The little animals had begun to scurry back into their warm homes. It unnerved me a bit to see them all going back except us. A small part of me was worrying how we were going to make it home in the dark.

           But, like a huge wave that lifts you off your feet and plunges you into its current, we were being swept up towards something unknown.

           And finally, we found it.

           It was in a clearing neither of us had ever been to before.

           For some reason, the pines gave way here and the sun shone down onto an orange, needled ground flecked with patches of grass. Flowers sprouted out from this grassy earth, purple and red with yellow petals, reaching out towards the sky. The dying sun’s light bled through the trees and illuminated everything with a shadowy redness. It would have been a sight in itself were it not for the animal standing in the center of the clearing.

           It was an albino deer, almost glowing white. Its neck was stretched up to a low-hanging branch where a swatch of purple berries hung. Its fur was almost spotless, it looked ghostlike – no, spirit-like, as if its presence was only half here and half in a different realm.

           Without even making eye contact Charlie and I agreed this was the creature that had been eating our crops. In the moment that I raised my rifle to my shoulder, it shifted its head and looked at me.

           Dark, endless eyes, eyes that didn’t seem to fit on an animal, though in times of great fear you can see a lot. But she didn’t seem scared. She, because while I fingered the trigger but before I made my decision, I had a strange, certain realization that it was a female.

           Later that night, the dim, gold lamplight cast long, sinewy shadows on the wood as we prepared for dinner. It was a table we’d made ourselves, cut from a tree we’d sawed between the two of us, shaped and built, finally polished to a smooth, shiny finish. I placed the salad down and we both sat to eat.

           As he forked the greens onto his plate, Charlie looked up at me.

           “It was the right thing,” he said, and I nodded slowly.

           Some things are too beautiful to kill.