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“There are always and only two trains running. There is life and there is death. Each of us rides them both. To live life with dignity, to celebrate and accept responsibility for your presence in the world is all that can be asked of anyone.” —August Wilson , American playwright, 1945-2005
The hunting camp was empty and he could see the November dawn through the window approaching over the trees. The other men had left in the dark by flashlight. They were waiting quietly now for the hunt to begin near granite ridges, green swamps, and game trails.
He had shown most of them how to find these places, where to stand, which way to look, and when to shoot. Then he set the dogs and ran deer to them and many others before their time.
Now he was too old to go to the woods and hunt. His legs got weak first. Then his eyes went. He tried to keep hunting but felt tired all the time. That’s when he knew something was eating away at him. He didn’t need a doctor to tell him that.
So he stayed behind at camp. It was his job to keep the fire going and clean up and cook lunch before the men returned from hunting.
He emptied the warm bacon grease from the cast iron fry pan into a jar. Then he lifted the metal coffee pot with his name scratched on the side to see if there was one more cup left. He sat down at the big wooden table in the middle of the room and stared at the crumbs and ashtrays filled with cigarette butts while he drank his coffee.
He thought about how his name would be scratched on the back page of a newspaper one day and then on a piece of stone. He didn’t care about that. He just hoped someone remembered him when they looked at the scratches on the coffee pot.
He knew it was a long time to wait for the hunt to come around each year. In the past, he had begun to miss it only weeks after it ended. So he learned to use his memories to help time pass until November came again.
Eventually he could return to the woods whenever he wanted. It didn’t matter where he was or what he was doing. He only had to release his imagination to be there. It was easy because he had paid attention to all the details and rituals in the woods and at the camp. He always thought he could go back to the woods each November and look and listen again to keep the memories alive and make new ones. Now he had to work hard to rely on the same old memories.
He knew that visitors and hunters looking for lost dogs would be dropping by soon. He used to like talking to them. But now he hoped they wouldn’t come. They would see him alone in the camp and ask him why he wasn’t hunting.
He also knew he could never sell his guns. But he wasn’t ready to give them away either. He had watched that happen before and it upset him and everyone else at camp that night. He could still hear the quiver in the voice of a man he once hunted with when he handed his grandson his knife and said, “This is yours now.” As the boy cried, his older brother refused their grandfather’s rifle and ran outside.
He looked around at the empty gun racks and unmade beds and bloodstained boots placed near the woodstove to dry. There were deer antlers mounted on the walls and plenty of pictures framed and taped and pinned there. He stood in front of a Polaroid photo of himself as a young man in an orange coat kneeling in the woods behind a deer holding up its head by the antlers.
He stepped forward and looked closely at the face in the photo. He was tired that day, too, but it felt good then. His smile was as big as his shoulders. He sat back down at the table and thought about how that was the face he still saw sometimes when he looked in the mirror.
Then he heard the fly.
It was at the window by the stove. Numerous other flies were piled dead in heaps along the window sill. That one fly kept buzzing as it flew up from the pile and into the closed window before falling down over and over. Just one wing seemed to be working.
“You won’t last long but you’re not going out with a whimper,” he said out loud. He looked at the fly swatter hanging by a nail on the cupboard, but decided it wouldn’t be right to use it. He admired the fly. It was a fighter. Like him.
Early that morning, when the hunters had left, he’d gone outside to watch. As they walked over the first ridge, someone had looked back and returned his wave. Now he was looking out the window, waiting for their return.
He saw them coming back over the same ridge. Two men were dragging a deer. He knew the ritual – the other hunters would be walking in front if the deer was a doe. But they were walking behind the men dragging the deer admiring it stretched out and moving along the ground.
The old hunter took out his grandfather’s knife and stepped out into the sunlight.
He was going to help the boys skin that buck and be part of the final ritual of the hunt.
He went to bed early that night and as his head hit the pillow, he closed his eyes one last time and he returned to his favourite part of the hunt – waiting alone in the dark at his watch when the approach of dawn can seem like an eternity, and feel like time is standing still—holding its breath, as night silently withdraws into the shadows, giving way to the break and light of day. In that moment and in his mind, the old hunter heard a dog howl in ecstasy, signaling to the men and deer that the hunt had begun again.
He followed the voice of the hounds in his mind’s eye as they pursued the deer around cedar swamps, over granite ridges, and into the tall pines near the beaver dam he had been watching.
It seemed like only a few minutes had passed, though it could have been an hour or more. He existed now only in the moment. He knew a deer was near, and soon he heard the unmistakable faint snap of a twig—and then another.
When the autumn woods went quiet again, he looked over his right shoulder and saw the deer, its white chest rising and falling, drawing breath to recover from the chase that was about to end and to prepare for the drama that was about to begin.
The old man thought that the buck seemed immersed in the green-grey gloom of the tangled woods. At first glance, it didn’t look like a deer but the faded apparition of one. As he raised his gun, the buck suddenly charged the old man, gathering speed and power with each leap and bound.
Later at camp, the old man told everyone how its rack tilted and swayed like the outstretched wings of some giant bird in flight. He said, “I could see his powerful heart and great spirit.”
He remembered his own heart pounding, too, and his blood racing and the hair on his neck standing and his sweat from his brow running down his cheek. But he could not recall his finger squeezing the trigger or the sound of the gun being fired or the recoil and jolt of the butt against his shoulder.
“They must have heard me shoot,” he thought to himself as he told his story at camp. But no one said they did. Instead someone said, “We all miss. It’s part of hunting.”
Then the others told their stories about how they, too, had missed the unkillable buck they called The Ghost that crossed the beaver dam that he had been watching that morning. He had heard the stories many times but listened anyway, because somehow it always seemed like he was hearing them for the first time. He liked to watch the men telling their stories and see their faces become brighter and younger as their voices sounded more excited.
He remembered that he went to bed early that night too and fell into a deep sleep without dreams or nightmares, and how breakfast was prepared and eaten quickly with little talk so the hunters could get back to the quiet woods before daylight in the swamp.
He stood at that same watch again, trance-like in the dark, marveling how it seemed he had never left. It was his favorite place in those sacred woods. He wanted his ashes to remain there. He called this place the “Last Watch.” He could not remember the last time he had seen another hunter so deep in the woods.
And then he heard the dog howl—or was it the wolf inside it somewhere far away in the timeless woods of the Canadian Shield that have not changed since time began. He thought about day and night and the time between and how it comes and goes in shadows and light and how it reminded him of life and death.
Later that morning, the old man heard the unforgettable sound of a twig snapping, and then another, as he turned his head towards eternity.
LW Oakley is a retired accountant living in Kingston, Ontario, and the author of Inside The Wild.
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