Filed to story: Return of the Reaper Story
“You wanted to come along someday. You’ve been asking since you could talk.”
“I wanted to go Disneyworld someday, too.”
“I promise I’ll get you there, Merryberry.”
“I know you will, Dad.” She turned to him, her freckled nose wrinkling above the smile hidden by the woolen scarf wrapped around her face.
“Hope, too,” Isaac said in reference to Merry’s adopted sister.
“You might have to keepyour promise to Hope. She’s got no interest in hunting.”
“Well, I suppose it’s not in her blood. It’s in yours, though. Kanes have been hunting these hills a long time.”
“With rifles like these?” Merry patted the burnished tiger-striped stock of the heavy percussion rifle.
“Much like these. Only I doubt any Kane ever had weapons as fine as this.” Isaac had built the two muzzleloaders over the summer from kits purchased on Hawken’s website. He and Merry had practiced loading and firing and zeroed them on the range in back of Uncle Fern’s farm.
They were quiet for a while longer, watching the sky turn pink to the east and the fog drift clear of first the pine tops and then the boles of the trees below. It clung to the boughs like cotton before the wind rising up the incline began to stir it and spread it, and finally caused it to vanish.
“Dad?”
“Yes, honey?”
“Do you wish you had a son instead of a daughter?”
He turned to her. She kept her gaze steady toward the holler floor.
“You’ve never said anything like that before.”
“This is our first time hunting. I was only wondering if this was something you’d rather be doing with a son.”
Isaac touched the shoulder of her quilted coat with his gloved fingers. She turned her head to look at him.
“Honey, there’s nobody in this whole world I’d rather be here with right now than you.”
Her nose crinkled in answer.
“Now, let’s get us a buck so your uncle can stop complaining his chest freezer is empty,” Isaac said.
Side by side, they walked down the incline, rifles cradled in their arms.
* * *
A narrow streamran along the floor of the holler, narrow enough to cross in a leap.
There was a confusion of prints in the snow along both banks where a game trail crossed the iced-over water. The daintier tracks of varmints such as possums and raccoons mixed with the impressions left by deer. Some larger animal had pawed a hole through the inch-thick ice to reveal the water trickling below on its way to the base of the five-mile-long gully.
Isaac handed his binoculars to Merry, who braced herself against the bole of a birch to steady her hand.
“What do you see?” he asked, voice low.
“Looks like most of the tracks are on the far bank,” she said, holding the lenses away from her eyes the way her father had shown her. “Like they came down the hill for a drink and went back up the same way into those black oaks.”
“How long ago?”
“Since the snow stopped. The prints going back up the hill are clear.”
“How many you guess there are?”
“I dunno. Five. Maybe six. It gets kind of mixed up.”
“That would be my guess, too,” Isaac said. He rose from his crouch and scanned the trees to their right. “I say we move along south here and cross the stream where it goes into those pines.”
Merry pointed at the trail below with the binoculars. “But the tracks go east.”
“Once the buck leads his herd into the oaks, he’s gonna hook one way or the other. Left or right. I’m guessing right.”
“Why pick the right?”
“Gotta pick one. And the trail follows a shelf of land up toward the razorback.”
“You can see that?” Merry raised the binoculars to squint through the lenses. She glassed the steep incline but saw nothing but beeches and pines.
“I told you, I’ve hunted here before. I wasn’t much older than you the first time.” Isaac moved along the slope to the south.
Merry replaced the caps on the binoculars before hanging them around her neck. She adjusted the Hawken over her shoulder and followed her father.
The sun rose higher in the sky to touch the tops of the trees. The snow that was weighing down the higher boughs began to melt. Droplets fell through the leaves like light rain. The constant patter covered the sound of the two hunters moving through the spruce and red cedar that covered the eastern slope of the holler.
Isaac reached the false crest first. He dropped down on the soft bed of pine needles to wave a hand back at Merry. A narrow ledge of rocky earth followed the wall of the holler a stone’s throw shy of the ridgeline. The milky sunlight of the open sky was barely visible through the trees above them. They moved with care along the downslope below the ledge, Isaac taking turkey peeks over the lip every few steps. He stopped, crouched, and turned to Merry to cock his head upslope.
Merry held her breath and listened. From somewhere above, a sound could be heard under the dripping snowmelt: a raspy bellow that rose and fell before dying away. Her father crept on his hands and knees under a low-hanging cedar bough. She followed, the spiny needles brushing the back of her coat. Ice-cold slush dripped on her exposed neck.
She kept on, duck-walking while her father moved low over the slick surface of a rocky ledge to take cover behind the massive girth of a fallen red oak. Merry dropped down beside him. The bellow was more pronounced here. Isaac slipped his rifle from his shoulder and gestured for her to do the same.
They slid the rifles over the top of the deadfall and sighted down the long barrels to sweep the slope above. Merry watched for movement the way her father had taught her. The bough of a longleaf pine shuddered about fifty yards above their position. She focused her eyes past the front tang at the end of the octagonal barrel and could see in the shadows under a lowering bough a doe and two fawns nested there. The two yearlings lay with their long legs folded under them, pressed to their mother’s side for warmth.
Another bellow, more of a bark. It sounded closer than before. Inch by inch, Merry shifted the barrel, looking for the source of the sound over her sights, and caught a hint of movement, a change in the light. She strained her eyes, searching for the cause.