Brian's Hunt (5 page)

“You’re a friendly girl, aren’t you?” Brian rubbed her ears and studied the wound in the bright daylight. The sewing didn’t look half bad but now he could see that there were other lines as well, scratches, as if the dog’s side had been hit with a small, very deadly rake.

“Something with claws,” Brian said. “Not dogs, not wolves, not teeth. Cat, big cat, panther, or bear.”

There it was again. Bear. It almost had to have been a bear and either the dog ran off from its home for some reason and into a bear or . . . what? Was attacked and
then
ran off?

“No.” He shook his head, absentmindedly petting the dog. “I wish you could talk—this doesn’t make any sense at all.”

The pot on the fire boiled over and he used a stick under the wire handle to lift the lid off and check the contents.

The rabbit meat had started to separate from the bones and the fish were right on the edge of disintegrating so he set the pot aside to cool and threw some green leaves on the hot coals. The day was starting to warm up and the black and horse- and deerflies were getting active. The smoke would keep them at bay while the stew cooled and he and the dog ate.

Then what?

He had a friend now, a new friend, and he smiled, thinking, First dog, his first dog, although technically she wasn’t really a pet and truly belonged to herself more than she did to Brian.

But she was a friend, a friend in need, and as the cliche said, a friend in need was a friend indeed. The cut seemed to be starting to heal, although he worried about the flies and thought of boiling up some kind of mud to sterilize it and putting it over the cut to keep them off. In a week or so he would cut the stitches out.

But he would need more food now than he did for just himself, and for that reason, he thought, he felt a sense of urgency that he had not felt before.

A need to go, to move.

But there was no real reason for it.

And yet it was there, the odd feeling, the odd push in his mind.

No plan, no direction, just a strange unease as if there was something he needed to see or do or hear or feel somewhere . . . where?

All right. From the sparse sign Brian had found, it seemed that the dog had come from the north.

So he—no, not just he anymore, they—
they
would head north. The Cree summer camp was up there on that arrowhead lake with the island, maybe twenty, thirty miles. He would go see his friends and maybe they would know where the dog came from and even if they didn’t he might be able to meet Susan, Kay-gwa-daush, and tell her about the beauty mark.

Now they would eat the stew and he would make a sterile mud pack for the wound and they would head north. Just a nice, leisurely trip to see old friends.

But still he found himself pushing, hurrying, and he didn’t really know why.

Brian boiled lake mud and packed it, still wet but not hot, on the wound. Much of it fell off but some stayed and seemed to help and while he was doing it he thought of a better solution. He would get spruce and pine gum from tree sap where it formed on the trunks and melt it and put that over the wound. That stuff stuck to everything. He thought, I’ll do that when we stop this evening. He smiled. He was already thinking and saying
we
—it was like the dog had always been there.

He ate a little of the rabbit meat and two of the fish and gave the rest to the dog, still in the pot. And the dog ate everything, fish heads, bones, rabbit bones, meat, and then drank all the broth and looked at Brian in open gratitude, wagging her tail and folding her ears down in a submissive gesture.

“My, my, you were hungry, weren’t you?” Brian cleaned the pot and loaded the canoe, wondering how it would all work. He had become competent with a canoe, perhaps even expert, but he had never tried to take a large dog with him. Canoes were not the most stable of craft and a dog going crazy would pretty much upset the whole applecart. He tied the cargo down well and used a bit of cord to lash his bow and quiver so that if they rolled all the gear would stay with the canoe.

He needn’t have worried.

He pushed the canoe into the shallows, turned it until it was sideways to the bank and turned to get the dog but she jumped in ahead of the cargo and sat down and waited for Brian to get in.

Clearly, Brian thought, the dog had been in canoes before—as she would have done if she had been a Cree camp dog.

He pushed off and had not gone twenty yards when the dog’s full stomach, the warm sun and the rocking motion of the boat combined and the dog lay down on the floor of the canoe and went to sleep.

Brian stroked evenly, using a long reach and a straight pull back to move the canoe in a steady flow forward. There were thousands of lakes in the north country, and almost all of them were connected by streams or small rivers. The general flow was north, or northwest, although there was a lot of meandering through low hills. Brian moved to the north end of the lake looking for the outlet and saw a beaver dam across the stream that flowed there.

He had to unload the canoe on top of the dam, lower it by hand and repack it in the stream below. It was the only thing he didn’t like about the Kevlar canoe. It was light and wonderfully strong, but too flexible for hard work. He knew the Crees had heavy old thick fiberglass canoes and when they came to a beaver dam like this they would simply get up a head of steam and just slide over the top of it, down the far side and off into the stream.

But the dog jumped nimbly out of the canoe and back in with no problem and they followed the stream four or five miles, moving through several ponds and over five more beaver dams before coming to another lake.

Because of the time spent going over dams it was coming on to evening, time to find a place to stop before dark so he could catch some fish and maybe do an evening hunt for a small deer.

They had seen four moose during the day, feeding in the ponds, and two of them would have been easy kills. Brian had come very close on one of them, a small bull. But still, he was over six hundred pounds and even with the dog that was too much meat to deal with and he didn’t want to waste it.

The dog’s reaction to the moose had been interesting. Rather than bark or whine or even make a fuss the dog had merely crouched in the canoe, laid its ears down to lower its silhouette and watched in silence, now and then looking back at Brian as if to say, “Aren’t you going to shoot?”

He found a flat place near the outlet to the stream into the next lake and pulled in to shore.

“Out,” he said to the dog, which he had been doing with each beaver pond, and the dog obeyed. Brian let the canoe drift back out and used the fish arrow to spear a dozen small panfish—there were hundreds under the lily pads. He used a piece of string for a stringer, which he fed through their gills, and left them in the water to keep.

He tied the dog up again, took the bow with his quiver and moved into the brush. From the canoe he had seen another clearing farther up the shore and he knew white-tailed deer liked to come in to clearings in the late day, probably to get away from the flies in any evening breeze. He moved as silently as possible through the trees and thick willows toward the clearing.

He stopped and watched a rabbit move past him and freeze into what would have been an easy shot and a quick kill. Good meat, but he felt confident about the clearing and didn’t want to take a chance. He had become extremely good with the bow, exceptional. Twice now he had taken grouse on the wing, an almost impossible shot. He knew he was good.

He was good with a bow because his eyes were quick and he saw “inside” things, where the arrow had to go, and “saw” the arrow almost as a line of light to the place where it should hit. Not a target, not for fun. As an extension of his mind, in an almost Zen state, but for one thing and one thing only.

To hunt.

To see where the arrow would have to go to make food, to make meat, to make, oddly, life out of death. The Cree family had thought him strange at first because he still used a bow while they had 30-30 rifles. But then they had seen him shoot and seen how much a part of the kill he became, with the bow and arrows he had made for himself, not with these modern laminates and truly straight shafts, and they had thought him like the Old Ones, the ones who knew the Old Ways, and had respected him for it.

He stopped well short of the clearing, before he could see anything and before any deer could see or hear him.

And this time he was rewarded.

There were four deer in the clearing. Carefully, he inch-step by inch-step moved to the edge of the thick willows and parted the leaves with the point on his arrow, nocked in the bowstring, ready.

Two doe, two bucks, one old with a large rack in thick velvet, the other a young spike buck with small single antlers in even thicker velvet.

The old buck would be too tough and fat. Doe had the best meat, but he hated to shoot them because there was a slight chance they might be pregnant.

So it was the young buck.

The deer did not know he was there and he waited patiently, controlling his breath, waiting, waiting.

Twenty yards to the young buck, maybe less. Fifteen. A bird flew from the other side of the clearing and the deer were startled by the sudden flight but it was merely birds squabbling and they did not run.

The buck took a step, paused, stood not fifteen yards now from where Brian hid in the willows, then turned its head away.

Perfect.

Brian drew the broadhead back until it nearly touched the bow, sliding the wooden shaft on his finger so it wouldn’t make a noise rubbing on the arrow rest on the bow, aimed just above the shoulder blade knowing the arrow would drop a bit in flight, held for an instant to be sure . . .

Then released.

The arrow flew clean, left the willows without touching anything and seemed to disappear against and then into the buck.

The young buck jumped, seemed to arch in the middle, took three faltering steps and lay down on its side.

Brian waited. The other deer still had not run, were merely watching the small buck as if curious, and Brian stood that way, quietly letting the arrow do its work for a few seconds, and then the buck laid its head over, facing east, as so many animals did when they died, and the light went out of his eyes and he ceased to be a deer and became meat, food.

Thank you, Brian thought, thank you again, and still he stood and still the other deer did not run although the bigger buck came over and smelled the young one as it lay dead.

Then Brian stepped out into the clearing and the whole world blew up. The deer exploded in huge bounds that had them out of the clearing and gone in fractions of a second. Brian moved to the small buck.

He poked it with his bow to make sure it was truly dead. The arrow had gone clean through and lay in the grass on the other side ten or twelve feet away. Brian picked it up and used his fingers to wipe the blood off and squeegee the feathers so they could dry straight.

Then he cut the deer’s throat to bleed it and began the drag back to camp. He would normally have dressed the deer out and left the guts but he wanted them for the dog, especially the heart and liver.

It was four hundred yards to camp, not very far, but through thick brush. It was almost dark by the time he had dragged the deer back.

The dog whimpered when he arrived and wagged her tail and Brian put a pot of water on to boil—he was dying of thirst—and gathered wood for a long fire. He would be dressing and skinning and cutting the deer after dark and would need light.

“Big feed,” he said to the dog, taking out his knife and the stone. “Big feed tonight and tomorrow. We’ll stay here and eat.”

And from the way the dog was wagging, so hard she nearly fell down, she agreed completely.

But in the morning Brian had changed his mind and couldn’t explain why. . . .

He had skinned the deer and rolled the hide to stretch later—it would keep for a day or two—and the dog had eaten the heart and liver and lungs in one sitting. Easily five pounds of meat. And then chewed on scraps while Brian cut the rest of the deer into manageable hunks, two back legs and two front, the meat from along the spine—the tenderloin—which was the best meat but on this buck very small.

He had read somewhere that wolves could eat up to twenty pounds of meat in a single meal and he thought the dog was coming close. She . . . just . . . kept . . . eating.

Brian cut pieces of raw meat off and threw them to the dog and even when her stomach was so distended Brian was worried about it stretching her skin and opening the wound, she still ate.

He put a stick by the fire and hung meat to cook and ate the tenderloin, probably three pounds, until it was gone and then roasted a front shoulder and ate some of that, but the dog didn’t stop until Brian finally quit handing her meat.

Then she dropped like a stone and was asleep when her head hit the ground, sound asleep, gone. Brian smiled and squatted by the fire and studied the dog sleeping.

He had watched her during the day, learning about her, amazed at how the dog keyed to him and he keyed to the dog. When the dog was sitting up, looking around, Brian found himself watching her, watching for a reaction, depending on her for warning in case something came. It was all new, the bond, and he wondered how he could have lived his whole life and never had this, never had this closeness with another species, with a dog. It had been a great loss. He decided he would never be without a dog again.

In some way, the dog filled a hole in his life, filled a loneliness he hadn’t even known existed, and he wondered if it had always been the same for men; if somewhere back in time in a cave a man took a wolf pup and sat him down and thought, There, my life is better now. Well, not that way exactly. But something like it, something ancient man had recognized, some connection, because when he thought about it, it seemed that almost all cultures had dogs with them to work and enjoy or—and he shuddered—to eat. He went to sleep sitting by the fire thinking that the next day they would lie around, eat more of the meat and then dry, or try to dry, into jerky what little there was left.