In Silent Country

We came to this part of the country, to the fir and cedar swamps thickened with Canadian hemlock, after the deer. They would lie in small groups, sheltered from the thieving wind. Under the branches of hemlock and cedar and fir, less snow reached the ground here, and a deer could run without wallowing through the deep drifts. They could outrun a wolf, or paw through the snow at last year’s grass. Even with the migration, they lived a cold and Spartan life. In an average year, a quarter could die of starvation, skeletons with full bellies, bellies full of barks and twigs.

The deer came to this part of the country in the winter with the deep snows and driving wind. They came from a few miles away, from the surrounding woods, and they came from dozens and dozens of miles further north. Only now, Buddy said, they came later and later in the year. Buddy believed in global warming, said that it was changing everything here, the deer, the lakes, and the winter snow. Falls were warmer and longer, and the heavy snows, when they came later, would fall quickly with even more snow.

Buddy had shot the deer, shot and hung it before I even arrived. The doe was a good size, 2 ½ years or more. His old man wouldn’t have liked us shooting does, he said that would mean fewer good bucks later on. “Go shoot your wife” he had told me once, “Go and see how many sons you have then.” It had been his father’s camp, and in his day everyone shot bucks. Every year when Buddy was young and the family arrived for Thanksgiving supper, two or three deer had been shot and were hanging from the pole, all of them good bucks.

That was back when the land was good, back when the country was truly wild. The bridge hadn’t been built, and the highway ran one narrow lane in either direction. Mines were open and ore spilled from the train cars, mixing red with the snow. Tall pines eight feet wide spreading across forests with hard maple were felled in groves by teams of lumbermen. I didn’t know those days. When my days had started, the bridge was always open. One iron mine still ran, but the flow of copper had stopped. Logging trucks still rumbled, but now they were stacked with the small boles of pulpwood. The drive was still long though, and we shot does like the one Buddy had hanging from the pole.

Buddy, then me, were first at the camp. The buildings turned in an arc of a circle, all facing the pole. I parked next to Buddy’s jeep. Walter would come next, and park next to me. Finally Skip would arrive, later that night. The trucks too would all face the pole, closing the circle with the buildings and the clearing and the woods, blocking the camp from the drifted and snow slicked road. As snow fell the cars became another outbuilding, all part of this silent and still and cutover land.

The talk that night would be of girls and friends and families. Of work and weather and fortunes lost and gained. But for now there was only me and Buddy and a good-sized doe, hanging stiff and still from the buckpole.

Walter would talk of the bucks further south, south beyond the heavy snows. Clay loam fields supported farms, acres of sugar beets, oats, and alfalfa hay. There were more deer, many more deer and nice bucks among them. Being further south they would dress out lighter; in response to the northern snows our deer were heavier, he said. Nature selected longer legs and thicker layers of fat. But in the south, deer could eat oats and hay. The better diet was more nutritious, and the antlers of the young bucks would grow tall and broad. Without having to eat bark and lichen and buds like they did up north, they would mature quickly on a good diet. And there would be more deer, he said, enough deer so that we could all shoot does and maybe even take a good buck too.

If a farm was what we wanted, Skip would say, we could all buy a camp together. Together, further south, where the land was better and the deer were many, and where we could all shoot as many does as we wanted. Skip was a realtor there and knew that country. I guess we all came from the south now, in some way. Everyone except Buddy; he had married a local girl after school, and now cut timber for his father-in-law. The rest of us all drove up. We would discuss coming all the way to camp. The past few years had been difficult. If the camp were closer in the south country, still good country, we could get to it easier. That meant more weekends hunting, brushing trail, scouting. Deer would come further south, to our farm Walter said, during the December hunt. They would escape the cold wind and heavy snow and graze in thick herds over the stubble of our cut over fields.

Through all of this conversation, Buddy remained silent and tended the stove, the woodstove that burned all day night to drive off the still and stubborn cold.

Walter would shoot his doe that first morning. He had an eye for the land. One wet and warm fall, we had tracked a deer for three miles through these big woods. Over Thanksgiving break it had rained and driven off the snow. The wet leaves cushioned our boots and Walter had followed the big track, through its impressions in the carpet of leaves, through the swamp and open maples. The deer circled a big loop, crossing our tracks, winding us and running off. He always had an eye for these things, Walter did. When I heard the shot from my left, I followed the sound. The smell of sulfur grew strong in the slackness of the morning, and I followed his tracks like a hunter of men. At a clump of hair and specks of bright red blood, my prints merged with those of Walter and the deer.

Thirty-five steps I had counted, the lead ball traveled thirty-five snowshoed steps. The impact was broadside, and the doe had run but another forty yards before she fell. She lay still now, having been felled by a clean and straight shot through the tangle of fir and cedar. Walter bent over his doe checking the teeth and the hooves for wear, feeling the layers of fat. “It’s a healthy deer,” he would say to me, “a good healthy doe.” I would nod and shake his hand for making a good clean kill.

I held the hind legs while Walter cut. A clean kill would mean a cleaner field dressing. The best cuts would spoil with a poor shot or inexperienced hand. He worked elbows deep, and then packed the cavity with snow, replacing the liver. When the doe was hung from the buckpole, he would retrieve the liver, cut the windpipe, and remove the heart and lungs from the chest cavity. The grim work would finish, and he would stew the heart and liver and tenderloins for dinner.

Skip would be back at camp when we returned, Walter dragging his doe and me carrying his rifle.

The rib cage was hung from the pines. Once, when it was too cold, we cut chops and left the broken ribs for the coyotes. Buddy had to show us how to use the chainsaw to butcher the frozen deer. He had grown up when it was always cold, and the carcass would freeze too hard for the delicate butchery that we now preferred. They used olive oil to lubricate the bar and filed the teeth down and rakers low. Chips of bone and meat fell in straight lines, Buddy said, flung from around the buckpole in pink ribbons to become fodder for the mice and the whiskey jacks. But now all of us, even Buddy cut the backstraps off whole, searing them in thick iron skillets. The rib cage we hung from the red pines on the edge of the clearing. Chickadees and nuthatches perched to pick at the gristle and fat.

In late fall the deer were still fat and full. Walter and Buddy’s deer each had broad strips of tallow in their backs, and in hard firm bumps along the loins. It was a hard life they had lived, and in a hard life they flourished. When overcrowded, they would develop and pass disease; too many deer, and too many livestock and too many people were harder and more violent than starving to death in the snow.

Deep in the swamp, by accident, I had followed a beaten run. One track had combined with two and then four others, leading to the edge of an alder swamp. Hemlocks towered over the side of the bluff, silent olden soldiers standing watch over the narrow valley. The cold wind had wrested the top from one of these giants. From a distance, it lay green, pointing from the toe of the slope. Tracks grouped into a single path, beaten flat around the hemlock top. With bellies full, the deer would not be far, chewing and rechewing the needles, a safe distance away in the swamp: they would venture out again.

I found a spot above the snag, halfway up the bluff, taking refuge behind a wedge of snowy basalt. The little wind drifted south past the tree, past me and away into the valley, the way I had come. I wasn’t walking now and I took off my orange vest, my safety blaze of color. Here I waited, I waited and ate and sipped coffee, glassing over the snag. When the deer came out, they came out in groups, family groups of two or three or five. The mother doe steps out first, leading her one or two yearling fawns. She smells the wind, standing still and silent, her tail twitching, head immobile and statuesque up in the air. Walking, she drops her head, sniffing at the snow a few steps at a time raising her head, always alert. The deer feed, stripping the hemlock needles with their tongues and their cheeks. They pressed in through a tangle of bare branches, jumping and ducking. They were no longer alert now, feeding quietly in the silent afternoon.

Silently, I wait, me and the three deer and my rifle. I wait for my buck, the buck whose track led across the road and into the swamp, past the big hemlocks and merged with the others around the snag. In this good country, in this still and silent land, I wait for a grunt, and the shadowy bone white motion of antlers silhouetted by the black tangle of fallen trees and alder branches. The rut is over now, and the buck has mated. He is wary now, tired and worn down. Silently he waits; he waits in the darkness of swamps for the cover of night. He has been harassed, hunted, and chased. He may bear the scare of a broadhead, or a limp from an errant slug. A ghost, skillful and silent, he waits.

Two more deer walk from the swamp to the snag. A lone doe trudges from up the valley, heartened by the site of her brethren. The buck enters from down valley, his small horns bright white against the cedar green brush. Stillness gets stiller, and through the glasses I can count three distinct prongs. The springbuck is 1 and ½ years old, and has spent his fall going through the motions, the rites and passages of his kind. He is an outcast, solitary and aloof, without the awareness and concept of fear. Likely he has been chased by the older and grizzled bucks, chased from feeding areas, and chased from the bleating females in estrus.

The sun sets, the five deer feed, and I wait in silence. Night and darkness are not far off. Setting down my glasses, I brush snow from the riflescope, resting it on the granite slab. The scope is clear and bright, brighter than the glasses. The first doe continues feeding; through the scope I can see the curve of her haunch and the fatness across her flanks. She is full and calm and bright. The young buck is smaller, stands shorter, tired and beaten from the travails of the rut. But he is young and alone, and stands to survive the winter.

When the shot rings out, four deer retreat to the swamps edges. The report rolls up the valley, and returns, weaker. White smoke billows, obscuring the view, and then clears. Sulfur stings my nose. Silence returns, heavy and oppressive. The big doe has bounded only a few feet from the tangle, and sunk to her knees. Her head is still up and alert. I eye this through his scope, again fixed upon my prey, watching the doe with her eyes still bright, her head held high and proud. She stares up the valley along the swamp to where the two points meet, not towards me, or at her two yearling fawns. She sits under the trees in the snow with a full belly, bright and calm and still.

I wait behind the granite, my back to the bluff, watched by the quiet air and silent trees. Too many times I had gone right after the deer, pushing it bleeding into thicker and thicker cover. I wait, prying the primer from the breach and tossing it away. After a quarter of an hour her head was down on the snow, and there would be no need for another shot. The three-pointer, too young and too small, bounded away with a grunt as I pick my way down the bluff. My doe lay on her side, silent and still, red mixing with the snow. She had been quartering away from me, and the field dressing would show I had taken a lung and an artery, and she had bled quietly on the snow. Two small yearling deer watched me approach, watched the three-pointer bound away, and then turned to go as well. It was a good-sized doe, I thought, a good clean shot. She would fill a cooler and feed us well. It was a good deer, shot in good country, I told myself, a country cold and still.

That last night we would sit in the camp, drinking loudly and with cheer. The camp was made of cedar timbers, chinked tight with stuffing and caulk. Four rifles hung above the plank table, and the woodstove glowed red in the faint kerosene light. We knew that we would return to the camp, to the simple frame structure. It bounded us within its four walls, within the circle of the woodshed, the clearing and the trucks, under blankets of snow, all facing in toward the buckpole. The circle would remain unbroken until the early morning, when Skip would leave, followed by Walter. Buddy would stay the week at camp alone, and try to kill his buck.

I would drive back home on the next day through driving snow. December snows came deep and heavy and the wind whirled powder across the lakes. The landscape was sterile and silent. Even when the snow didn’t fall, the wind would whip loose powder into a blizzard. The world was shrouded in a grainy opaqueness, though through gaps I could see the blue sky above. The same blue sky over my home looked over this good country. When the winds fell and the powder settled, everything looked fresh and sterile and cold. In this country beauty was stark and wild, mercilessly frightening. It was so clear and beautiful my heart would ache. I drove back, alone through the small and shuttered mining towns and crossroads where logging trucks rumbled, hauling timber south to the pulp mills.