The Last Hunt

  The Last Hunt

  (a short story)

  Mike Dellosso

  This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form without prior written permission of the author except as provided by the United States of America copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright 2013 by Mike Dellosso.

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Symon Drake.

  Chapter 1

  It doesn’t seem like it’s been twenty years. I remember it like it was just last night, my last night at the hunting cabin. Actually, cabin might be a stretch. It was more a shack, but hunting shack just doesn’t have the ring that cabin does. It wasn’t anything more than a sixteen-by-twenty, plywood and two-by-four structure set up on a cinderblock foundation. It had the basics covered: four walls, a floor, a roof, a dry sink, a rough-hewn table and five chairs, five cots, and a woodstove. All a gaggle of anxious hunters could expect for a week of hunting and eating and telling of tall tales.

  It did the job just fine. Nobody complained.

  The cabin was located in northern Maryland, in a shallow part of Darlington Woods thick with hemlock and birch and oaks older than Grandpa’s grandpa. The ground was stony, the terrain almost impassable, and the forest as dense as the hair on my dad’s arms. There was only one way to and from the cabin, a deeply rutted jeep trail that zigzagged through the forest and over and around hills like a corn snake in tall grass. Dad used to say, “If you don’t have a good four-by-four and even better insurance, stay home.” The trail was like Rocky Balboa beating the tar out of even the sturdiest suspension. There was just no getting around it.

  I started making the yearly trek when I was twelve (as soon as my mom gave the okay) and went every year for the next six years. It was always the same group: my dad, Uncle Rick, my cousin Andy, and my dad’s dad, Grandpa Bishop, who was nearly eighty and probably hadn’t fired his .30-06 in ten years. He hadn’t lost hope, though. Every year he’d say the same thing: “I got one more in me. I’m just waitin’ for the right one.” We’d laugh and he’d pretend to be upset, but we all knew he was just fooling around. Though I think somewhere deep inside all of us, we truly believed he did indeed have one more in him. If not a buck, at least one more year at the cabin.

  I had just turned eighteen when we arrived that last year. Little did I know then, as we pulled up in Uncle Rick’s Wagoneer, that it would be my last hunting trip—the last trip for all of us—and that it would change my life forever. Funny how one night can change the way you look at everything, the way you feel, think, taste, cry, and laugh. Really change who you are, down to the very cells of your guts.

  I remember thinking as I walked into the cabin and smelled the familiar odor of mice droppings and stale dust how much I’d learned within those four walls. I stood looking around and letting my mind wander while Dad and Uncle Rick and Andy unloaded the food from the back of the Wagoneer. It was in that cabin that I took my first drag on a cigar—it was Grandpa’s and I was sure I’d either suffocate or cough up my lung. It was there that I first tasted the bitterness of a beer and felt the burn of whiskey, like shards of glass in my throat. It was there that I learned a whole new vocabulary consisting of nothing more than four-letter words. And it was there, wide-eyed and naïve, heart racing like a spooked buck, that I got my first education in the female anatomy. Looking back on it now, it’s an education I could have done without. It’s been twenty years and I still have those images hiding somewhere deep in my brain. On occasion, one of them will rear its perverted head, and I have to fight to push it back into the darkness. But it was in that cabin that I grew from a spindly, knock-kneed boy into a man. Albeit an eighteen-year-old man, but a man nonetheless.

  Going into that last year I had four kills under my belt. Four years running. That year would make five. I was sure of it, could feel it in my heart. I was going to bag the biggest buck yet.

  I thought back to the first one. I was fourteen and scared stiff as a thick-necked eight-pointer bolted out of some thickets and bound through the snow like a ballerina on steroids. I don’t remember pulling the trigger, but the blast from the rifle nearly knocked me over. When I looked up, the buck was still bounding and Dad was yelling something about me hitting it in the butt. We tracked that thing for at least a mile before it was finally too tired and wounded and scared to go on. When we came upon it, it was lying on its side like it was asleep. The snow around its hind quarters was stained dark red and its chest rose and fell in rapid, jagged breaths. With my hand shaking almost uncontrollably and my eyesight blurred by tears, I pointed the barrel of my rifle at its head, right below the ear. Dad stopped me and told me to put the bullet through its heart. It’d be a quicker way to die and I could mount the head.

  Dad said that was when I became a man. I had killed a living thing, taken its life and felt its hot, slippery blood on my hands. I had crossed the threshold from childhood to manhood.

  As I stood there looking around at the cabin, remembering that first kill and the card games and checkers and late night snacks and story after story of the big ones that got away, butterflies started flitting about in my stomach. It wasn’t unusual, just a mix of nerves and excitement. Pre-hunt jitters, Grandpa called them. They would pass as soon as I stepped out of the cabin, rifle in hand, one thing on my mind.

  That first evening, though, all of us returned empty-handed. We stoked the fire in the woodstove, undressed, and cracked open five cans of beef stew and a loaf of bread. Then we sat around the small table and told our tales by the soft glow of an oil lamp.

  Grandpa and Uncle Rick hadn’t wandered far from the cabin on account of Grandpa’s arthritic knees. Uncle Rick and Dad took turns babysitting Grandpa. Nobody called it that to his face but that’s what it was, babysitting. His knees and heart were too bad to let him go off on his own so they felt it was their responsibility to stick with him, make sure he could make it back when that “right one” finally came along. I suppose neither of them liked it much but they never complained and never, ever let on that they saw it as babysitting. Anyway, Uncle Rick had first duty with Grandpa that day. Neither of them saw anything, but that seemed to suit Grandpa just fine. I think he was at the point in his life where he enjoyed the camaraderie at the cabin more than the hunt itself. He’d trophied over fifty buck in his lifetime, one of them a sixteen-pointer, and I guess he was satisfied with just communing with nature during the day and shootin’ the breeze with his family at night.

  Dad had gone over the ridge to a hillside about two miles of tough hiking away. I was always impressed with my dad’s stamina. He was forty-two at the time and could keep pace with Andy and me on even the toughest terrain. He said he’d seen two buck, one a ten-pointer, but couldn’t get a clean shot at either of them. He was planning on heading over to the same location tomorrow.

  Andy and I had hiked over to Potter’s Hole, a gorge about a mile from the cabin so named for Eugene Potter who’d killed more deer than any hunter I ever knew of. He once told Grandpa he’d seen an eighteen-pointer with a neck as thick as a tree trunk near the gorge. That was long before Andy and I were born, but we both reckoned that if deer were anything like people (and after seeing the fear in the eyes of that first buck I’d shot, I thought we must have something in common) than size ran in that family. And since deer usually populate the same general area generation after generation, we figured we had as good a shot as any at slaying the big one around that gorge. But the big one, or any other one, for that matter, never showed and so we’d come back to the cabin fatigued, hungry, and empty-handed like our counterparts.

  It was eleven o’clock befo
re we even started preparing for bed. Grandpa threw a few more logs in the woodstove, Uncle Rick passed out the empty milk jugs (we used them for peeing in during the night), and Dad capped the Jack Daniels. When the last oil lamp was extinguished, I burrowed into my sleeping bag, laid my head against my pillow and stared into the darkness. I was tired, dog-tired, but adrenaline must have still been coursing through my veins because sleep was slow coming.

  If I only knew then what I know now, what that night would hold, I’d have done everything and anything I could to get us out of that valley.

  Chapter 2

  I had just dozed off when the sound of crunching leaves from outside the cabin woke me. I sat straight up in my cot and listened. There was silence for a few seconds, then more footsteps and rustling of leaves. I slipped my arm into my sleeping bag and groped for my flashlight. I always kept it in the sleeping bag with me so it would be easy to find if and when I needed it. Finding it nestled in beside my leg, I pulled it out and flipped it on, aiming it at my watch. Ten after one.

  Uncle Rick was stirring in the cot at my feet. Andy or Dad made a grunting noise from across the room. I swung my legs out of the sleeping bag and over the edge of the cot and listened again, the flashlight trained on the door of the cabin.

  There was another stretch of silence then more crunching and rustling. A shiver ran through my bones.

  I flicked the flashlight off, inviting the darkness back. If something was out there, it’d be better if it or he or they didn’t know there was someone stirring inside.

  “Uncle Rick,” I whispered, not knowing if he was awake or not.

  “Yeah, I’m up.” His voice was thick with sleep. I couldn’t see him but knew by the sound of his movements that he, too, was now perched on the edge of his cot.

  “You hear that?”

  “Yeah. Sounds like a bear.”

  “Yeah. Should we—”

  “Shhh-shhh. Just wait,” Uncle Rick said. “Let’s see what it does.”

  We both sat in silence and listened as the footsteps circled the cabin two or three times, I couldn’t tell how many, then faded into the distance.

  I switched my flashlight on and aimed it at Uncle Rick’s thick chest, noticing for the first time the slight tremor in my hand. The glow of light illuminated his face and reflected off his glasses, making it look like he had two glowing orbs stuck in his eye sockets.

  “You think it’s gone?” I asked.

  He smiled. “Must’ve smelled our good chow and wanted to investigate.”

  Suddenly, the silence of the outside world was shattered by a woman’s scream. At least, that’s what it sounded like at the time. It rose in volume, held at its peak maybe two, three seconds, then faded into a moan. It reminded me of the peacocks Grandpa used to have on his farm, but it sent a pair of cold fingers crawling down my spine.

  The cabin sprang to life, filled with hushed movement. Grandpa grunted and cursed. Dad and Andy were both struggling to free themselves from their sleeping bags. Uncle Rick moved across the cabin to the front window. I swung the beam of my flashlight around the cabin in a sweeping motion and noticed Grandpa and Dad were sitting up on their cots, Andy was standing and wiping the sleep from his eyes.

  “What was that?” Andy asked.

  Uncle Rick stood motionless at the window, hands on his hips, seat of his sweats sagging almost to his knees. “I don’t know.”

  “Sounded like a peacock,” I said.

  “That weren’t no peacock,” Grandpa said, his voice rough like gravel in a bucket. “Sounded like a woman to me.” He reached for his milk jug, stood up, and shuffled over to the corner.

  I felt my eyes widen. “You think there’s a woman out there?”

  Uncle Rick stayed at his post by the window. From the corner of the cabin, by the woodstove, I could hear Grandpa’s pee banging off the bottom of the plastic jug.

  “I didn’t say it was a woman,” Grandpa said. “Just sounded like one is all.”

  Andy moved over to where Uncle Rick was standing and peered over his father’s shoulder.

  “Maybe she was hiking or hunting and got lost,” Andy said.

  “Maybe,” Uncle Rick said. His voice was even and serious.

  “Maybe she ran into the bear,” I said.

  Uncle Rick turned his head a quarter turn as if he were thinking about that, then went back to staring out the window.

  “What bear?” Dad asked. He flipped on his flashlight, a big powerful Maglight that illuminated most of the cabin, and shined it on the far corner, where ceiling met wall. He looked at me and our eyes met. I couldn’t tell what I saw in his eyes, whether it was concern or fear, but whatever it was, it unnerved me and I suddenly felt the urge to pee too.

  I grabbed my milk jug and stood. “Me and Uncle Rick heard a bear outside just before you all woke up. Just before the scream.”

  Nobody said any more. I guess they were all thinking about what we should do.

  I was in the corner by the woodstove, facing the wall, filling my jug when I heard it again. The scream. It broke the silence like a shattered window, held, then faded away again. It sounded pretty close this time, maybe just fifty yards away. It was so haunting and mournful that I stopped peeing midstream and couldn’t finish.

  Grandpa cursed again and started pacing back and forth on the gray wood floor. He finally made it over to the table, struck a match, and lit the oil lamp.

  “Are you sure it was a bear?” Dad asked. I could tell by the sound of his voice that he hoped we were mistaken. I don’t think any of us wanted to take on a bear in the dark, let alone face the truth that there might very well be a woman out there taking on a bear.

  Uncle Rick shook his head. “No. We heard footsteps outside, leaves crunching, you know. Like something was rummaging around, lookin’ for food.”

  I was just about to say that the footsteps didn’t sound human when the scream ripped through the air again. This time it held on longer and ended in a kind of howl, almost like a wolf’s. The scream was definitely coming from somewhere in front of the cabin. Everyone froze and looked at each other. Grandpa was standing by his cot. Dad was sitting on the edge of his. Uncle Rick and Andy were still by the window. I didn’t like the feeling in the air. There was a tension that made my stomach do a flip. My heart started beating faster, felt like it was going to sprout spidery legs and climb up my throat.

  “Hey Ed, throw me that light, will ya,” Uncle Rick said.

  Dad tossed him the Maglight, and Uncle Rick put it right up against the glass of the window and aimed the beam into the woods. He moved it back and forth in a sweeping fashion, real slow, like we do when go deer-spotting.

  “Do you see anything?” I asked, half hoping he did and half hoping he didn’t.

  He shook his head.

  Andy started looking real agitated, shifting his weight side to side, smoothing his hair with his palms, scratching the back of his neck, clearing his throat. Finally, he walked over to his cot, reached underneath and slid out his duffle bag. He opened it and pulled out a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt.

  Chapter 3

  “What are you doing?” I asked. I knew full well what he was doing; he was changing his clothes. But I didn’t know why. Or maybe I did know why but didn’t want to accept it. Andy was three years older than me and I always looked up to him, sort of like a big brother. We spent a lot of time with each other, shooting pool, watching movies, and, of course, hunting. I knew him like he really was my brother, and I knew he was planning on going out there. Whether I wanted to admit it or not.

  Andy didn’t answer at first and I don’t think he planned to until Uncle Rick asked the same question.

  “Somebody’s gotta do something,” he said, buttoning his flannel shirt. He sat on the cot and pulled on his boots.

  Uncle Rick turned away from the window for the first time and shined the beam of the Maglight right in Andy’s face. Andy squinted and lifted a hand to shield his eyes. The hair on one side of h
is head stood straight up, like he’d hairsprayed it that way, and the hair on the other side was smoothed flat against his skull.

  “Well it ain’t gonna be you,” Uncle Rick said.

  Andy stood and pushed out his chest. I don’t know whether it was intended to be or not, but I saw it as a direct challenge to Uncle Rick’s authority. Uncle Rick must have viewed it the same way because he threw back his own shoulders and took two steps toward Andy. “You’re stayin’ put, you hear me.”

  Andy didn’t budge. He leveled a cold, hard stare at Uncle Rick, and his chewing muscles flexed as he clenched his jaw. “There might be a woman in need out there, Pop. Someone’s gotta help her.”

  Andy was twenty-one and therefore an independent man, but in our family there was still a hierarchy no matter how old you were. Uncle Rick turned and looked at Grandpa, the patriarch.

  Grandpa put his hands on his hips, looked Andy up and down, then bit his lower lip. Finally, he pointed a thick finger at Uncle Rick. “You go with him. But stay within sight of the cabin. Don’t go wanderin’ too far and get yourselves lost.”

  That seemed to satisfy Uncle Rick and he went about getting himself changed. Nobody spoke again until both Andy and Uncle Rick were fully clothed and ready to head out. Each had his rifle in hand, and Uncle Rick had the Maglight.

  Grandpa clapped them both on the shoulder. “Twenty minutes, okay? No longer. If you don’t find anything in twenty minutes come on back.”

  Uncle Rick slid the bolt on the cabin door and slowly opened it. A gust of cold air rushed in and nearly took my breath away. The wind had kicked up, and it had begun to snow. White flakes whipped past the door left to right instead of top to bottom. Andy turned at the door, looked at me. We both nodded, and then they were gone. Grandpa stood by the window and watched for maybe a minute or so then turned and walked over to the woodstove.

  Not much was said while Andy and Uncle Rick were gone. Once, Grandpa asked my dad how long it’d been, and Dad told him thirteen minutes. Dad then said something about it being extra dark on account of the cloud cover, and Grandpa told him to keep his observations to himself.