Anatomy of a Miss

In a generation of New England seasons, a steel cable strung between gateposts can rust nearly all the way through. The exposed end that protrudes beyond the crimp, what knot-tiers call the running end, bristles like an overworked paintbrush. Inside a halo of headlights, I clutch the cable by one end and pull the slack belly out of it. With the tension off the shackle, the lock swings open, and the cable loop drops free. Ten feet of twisted steel resigns itself to gravity, and a single fiber inserts itself under the skin of my palm. Physics again proves immutable, and the flesh resigns in kind: I yip and pull my hand back and survey the damage. A precise drop of blood blooms from my pale skin in the headlight glow.

Getting a little bit hurt makes me angry at my haste, angry at rusting cables, angry that my anger has curdled even a spoonful of the morning. I kick the cable into the mud, wipe my hand on the seat of my pants, climb back into the truck. I push the lever into gear and pull up into the meadow. I think about sore hands and the correlative demands of bows and arrows. I think about mistakes I make despite my intentions. I think about the sharp hazards of the mundane. I think about tetanus, and if it’s still a thing.

I think I better get a move on to reach my stand before the daylight makes me plain.

*

I know that the woods speak a different language in the dark. I’m embarrassed to be grown-up and still a little afraid, but I step out into the nighttime, and I let it swallow me up. The barred owls, the ghost gray foxes, the rabbits in their throes: in the dark they are bold about their words. I wonder if the animals know this, and if they feel superior. More likely that their dialog is inconsiderate of me, that I somehow stumble into the sphere of their nighttime voices, and the intimacy knocks me off-balance. Maybe it’s the same I’d feel to hear my parents’ lovemaking, confused by the definition of them changed. In the night, privacy is lost to blue-black darkness… I hear the sentiments of animals, and I wonder if I shouldn’t.

A cart road bent around the contour of a hill; a band of fallen leaves defines the way. It’s a flatter dark, and uncluttered, vague in detail but complicated underfoot. I feel the resistance, the crunch and give of each twig and pinecone, but can’t retrieve my footsteps fast enough. It feels impossibly noisy. The shadow patches where the deer have made their scrapes allow a softer footfall. I’m encouraged by these silences, and the implication of their frequency. A hard bend left at the skeletal pine, a few hundred yards on, leaning into short steps up, and again I find some level ground.

I stop.

The breathing commanded by the climb settles back. I listen long enough to stillness compressing in around me, and in that space I’m nervous again. So, I take a step.

Toe touches first, then heel.

Each land softly.

I think I’ve done this perfectly.

Something snorts and bounds and crashes to my 10 o’clock, closer than I could have imagined, close enough, it seems, to touch. A moment before and I’d heard my own breath receding, softening, heard the swish of blood inside my temples, thought I’d heard the fading moonlight. Surely, I should have heard a hundred pounds of living flesh just feet away, her own blood pumping faster as mine slowed, her own breath quickening as mine evened, her muscles tightening to rise. The symptoms of our intersecting awareness, the duality of our roles: silence seems a virtue we both seek in darkness, albeit for different reasons. I sneak up on things while she tries not to be snuck upon. Regardless, she is gone now, crashing through the present into what lies beyond the hill. I suppose we both have failed. The issue is moot in the pre-dawn dark, and it’s too early to fling arrows anyway. I keep moving, quicker now, wanting to be in the place that I am headed so that I can stop, try to listen. If I’m lucky, maybe I will hear.

*

There’s a thicket up on top, south of the big white pines, opposite the orchard. There’s honeysuckle and rosebush in there, all grabby stuff. It’s a bugger in the dark. It holds you back, and it’s noisy too.

The origin of sound in darkness is an abstraction I accept without liking to, given the nervousness I’ve mentioned. I think an owl, or possibly a Wendigo, shrieks off in the direction of my stand. I can only imagine how the dark sees me, illuminated and pale as an albino rabbit, at the mercy of the night. I shiver and am embarrassed. I’m at sea in the dark and wishing for daylight, and I’m a distance still from where I’m going. I blink my eyes and wish just a little that I’d stayed in bed, that I weren’t here. I think I should maybe thrash through the last hundred yards of thicket to my maple tree, drowning the night noises with my own.

I wonder if I should be quiet or loud, if I should assert my human supremacy in a world I don’t belong. Maybe I should slip through the tangle, meek as a dormouse, owning the vulnerability that I, and undoubtedly the animals, know intimately. One way will serve my greater goal a bit better. I strike a compromise with the world and the Wendigos, and walk a straight-line in. I’m loud in the context of the silence, but quieter than the shrill laughter of the barred owl. Having said his peace, he dips from a branch at my first step and exits on whisper wings.

*

A ladder up a maple tree to a cold hard seat.

A step of exposed ledge to the east littered with moss-clad erratics. 

A sky barely lightening from behind, laying bare a wedge of hardwood forest.

A thicket to the north. A wet meadow to the south. A string of “POSTED” signs and a stone wall that declare the neighbor’s proprietorship, and the extent of my permissions.

This is the ecosystem in which I sit, my thoughts wandering beyond its boundaries only to be snatched back in when the squirrels start feeding, and the woodpeckers come to work.

My bow is on my lap, an arrow nocked. Sunlight gains my hardwood stand, and wind shivers the beech leaves, whose rigor anchors them to their branches long after they’ve gone coppery and died. Their year’s work is done, but they stay here still, precise as spearpoints, making my world rustle and shimmer. I dial my focus in and out, swallowing up the woods in bits and pieces.

I get bored.

I see one sapling, one shadow, then the whole of the woods. I see a shaft of light dancing through beech leaves, hear a raven gargle out its flying call, close my eyes and try to doze off, and can’t. I send my intentions out in concentric rings, and I wonder if they wash across any deer, and how they are interpreted. I think about what is going on back home.

The hours come and go. Sunflower seeds, chewing tobacco, the growing need to urinate. My release hand is sore where the cable got me, and I examine the small and ragged cut. Under tension, the release will push on it I know, and it will hurt. I wonder what that will mean.

*

In daylight, the precision of the forest sounds is gone. It’s as though the lengthening field of view pushes the walls of the sound chamber ever further out, letting the reverberations stretch, letting each moan and crackle and undulation spread out so wide as to dissipate to nothing. I assume this is why a deer can walk the same ground as I did just a few hours prior but make so little noise.

He’s to my back and right, behind my tree and feeding. He’s come from the thicket I can only assume, and past the blown-down pine. He’s thirty yards at best and yet a world away, what with the tree trunk to which I’ve tethered myself between us. What made me turn to look I’ll never know. It certainly wasn’t that I heard him. I stand slowly and turn to face my tree, peeking out from behind it to watch him.

He dips his head to feed and pops back up, circumspect. Looks around. Not thirty yards away. And somehow, he seems unable to hear the cacophony rustling in my tree as the body and the mind grapple onto each other and twist. The blood comes fast through my neck and up into my ears, roaring and sloshing, and the shakes take hold. One eye peering out from behind a tree and the other focused inward, willing these things to calm themselves, clenching them down, or trying to. Choppy breaths in and out, all the way out, remembering a man who once told me that if you can’t breathe you can’t do anything. Squeeze myself as hard as I can and let go, and there is a blink of stillness, and then the cresting wave of the heartbeats comes back again. All for an animal, a life I’m willing to unfurl into mine. I’m directing his delicate footsteps closer into my sphere and I’m again nervous. The layers of my intention peeling back like the windblown pages of a book.

Will he come?

Will he move to my stronger side?

Will my hands submit to the commands of my hunter’s heart? Will my thoughts and my body find a truce up here? Will the exchange of blows, of clutch and shuck, of muscles tensed against each other stay hidden behind the trunk of a maple tree, behind layers of camouflaged fabric?

It has again become an opposition less of predator and prey, and more of hapless quest for self-control. I know this because I am rational. I’ve fought in this match before.

The buck becomes an abstraction now, an animated prop without definition. He’s there only academically: fur and dainty deep black feet, a crown of small horn that is quantifiable. On-two-three-four-five-and-six.

He walks a few steps and I fix myself to a bowstring, completing the circle of body and instrument, the tied ends of a knot. I tighten those ends together. I cinch the whole thing down.

What becomes blurry was for hours and days so easy to define: beech whips, a carpet of leaves, a swatch of sky, the promise of something close but seemingly unaware. He’s framed between, one step further. Memory in my muscles, transcendence in these moments, an incremental departure from thought. Limbs bending smooth and an anchor on the cheek, one eye peering through a tiny objective, my will encircling his heart. I’ve known this moment, and I trust it. I want it. Badly, I think.

A sliver of time that is finite and definite, one in which I can isolate a ping and a whoosh; I can isolate a tinny thwap. Potential energy becomes kinetic, then becomes mechanical. Something hurled will invariably hit something else. The dominoes tip and fall, and an unseen arrow travels the course I have laid. I have already told the story, maybe finished it. A passage through fur and flesh, glancing off bone, severing organ meat. It will end with blood and gristle anchored into earth, and a hole in a life through which blood will pulse out, leaving only a hunk of meat, one that I have wanted.

He jumps, I think. He stands there looking up, wholly alert. Why has he not run? Could the precision of the razors at the point of my arrow be such that he has yet to realize what has happened? Will his very life depart him without his even knowing?

Where is the blood, the steaming reality, and why is it not darkening the brown of his flank? Where is the terminal hole I poked? Why is he indifferent?

The shivers and the pulse are gone, and the silence settles back like falling ash. He turns, his backside to me now, allowing me perpendicular perspective on the path my shot should have traveled, intersecting his trunk, turning him from an opportunity and into a burden. He’s clean. Untouched. Unscathed.

He’s no more mine than he ever was, no more mine than he’d ever, quite possibly, be.

I scramble another arrow from my quiver, more dexterous now that together we have made the crux, and the stone of our relationship is tumbling down the slope. He stands there, his head back, trying to mesh the facts with intuition, or perhaps just letting his instinct fill the gaps. I don’t know whether he’s picked me out of the mosaic of the treetops, whether I even matter at all. My construction of his thoughts may well be all I am left with, but I hope, arrow knocked, for him to turn broadside anyway. Which, in the end, he does not.

*

His departure over the hill will live within the almanac of several others, each stark and bitter and exact. It will live on without effigy, as lasting as a shoulder mount, as nourishing as a tenderloin blood rare. Maybe even more. I’ll not know the warmth of him, nor the stiffening weight.

I look down at my hands. The fingertips are white and cool, crescent nail marks etched into my right palm. A smear of dried blood fills the craters downstream from a small and waxy tear. Not enough to worry about. That little wound will be healed by morning.

 First Published Gray’s Sporting Journal