The Drive

It is ten below and breathless, one of those mornings in the deer country of the north when every sound is magnified, when the tattoo of a woodpecker sounds like the rattle of a jack hammer, when all the world seems waiting.

I am standing on a bare glaciated knob of rock. Below is a valley choked with ash and spruce and swamp grass, a veritable jungle. Through that tangled gulley runs a deer trail. If anything comes, it will be through there.

Then it comes, a faint crackling of brush growing louder and louder, the drivers who had started from camp half an hour before. If there is a deer ahead of them, he will soon be on his way. My rifle is cold to my hands and my breath rises in a fog. Then a sharp crack on the hillside just across and a great buck is bounding easily along. For an instant, I stand transfixed. There he is, two hundred yards away, bounding along as unconcerned as though there is nothing to fear. This is the chance I have been waiting for. I slip off my right glove, take hasty aim. The crack of the rifle shatters the silence and the sound reverberates from the ridges across. The deer does not increase his pace, keeps loping quietly along. I fire again and again and at last he stumbles. Now he is out of sight.

Reloading quickly, I plunge down over the smooth treacherous rocks, struggle through the deep snow in the tangle of the gulley, and scramble up the other side. There is his fresh trail, great jumps twenty feet at a time. For a moment, I stand ready, waiting for the crash of brush that should come, but nothing happens. Gradually my heart stops its pounding and the woods are quiet once more.

A few cautious steps and I see what I have been looking for, a spatter of blood, bright red on the snow. He fell here, picked himself up and went on. The brush and snow is spattered on one side only, the side away from my rock. He was shot through and bleeding from the front quarters. I followed swiftly. He cannot go far. Down into the brushy gulley, weaving through the maze of tracks. He cannot go very far, and then I find a few long gray hairs, which mean only one thing, that he has been grazed, creased across the brisket. It might be a long time. Perhaps I had better wait or follow as fast as I can.

For two hours I follow him through the swamp and then, tired, stop under a big pine to rest. The sun is high now and warm and the snow is getting soft. Chickadees and a red squirrel play in the sunlight above me, unaware of the game of death we are playing. I watch them for half an hour. It will give my buck a chance to calm down, perhaps stop him from going too far. I settle down against a hummock of grass, nibble a sandwich, throw the crusts to the whiskey jacks. This is living; this makes up for nights of bridge, for days spent indoors, for too much comfort. Now I am a hunter, a fighting man again and I have death in my hands.

Behind me I see the trail, spots of red on the snow. How easy it is to distinguish that color in the woods, how far one can see a pinpoint of color against the background of white. And then I think of the generations before me, hunters of the wilderness to whom that same red has meant food and warmth. Red is the color of the hunter, danger, courage--red against the snow--against the brush.

It is time to be going. I follow the trail up into the highlands. The spatterings of red are rarer now and seldom do I find even a trace on the brush on the right side of the trail. It is harder and harder to distinguish the trail from the others.

Just below me lies a swampy creek bottom, grown high with rushes and grass. Through the center runs a narrow white ribbon, the creek. Dogwood and alder border its muskeg banks and in some of the bens are stands of spruce and tamarack. The timber of the highlands on either side crowds close. Here I will find my deer.

He is probably lying down in the long grass just below me, but as I work my way down, I see the trail goes right across the swale out in the open. I will have to watch myself, for when he goes that white flag will be flying and he will be making thirty feet at a time.

As I reach the center of the swamp, out in the full flare of the sun, the brush cracks sharply and not a hundred feet away my deer goes out of that swamp as only a whitetail can. Snap shooting, but he keeps going. On the ridge at the other side, I get a broadside view and a perfect shot. He drops with a bullet in his neck and the hunt is over.

I struggle through the long grass and the snow, stumble into a beaver hole and out again, climb breathlessly to the ridge, and there he lies, a great buck, brown and gray against the snow, dead, a trickle of blood coming from his throat. For a moment I stand and look. There is my deer and it seems impossible to think that now I could go up and touch him, now he is mine. Here is the animal I had hunted all morning. Here is the prize I had dreamed of. It doesn't seem real; it never does when you finally find your deer. It seems as though something impossible has happened, something that you had hoped for but which was in the end unattainable. And there is where part of the thrill of all hunting, and especially big game hunting, lies, the attainment of the impossible.

I clean my deer carefully, take out the intestines, the heart and the liver, the great bulging stomach full of browse, warm my hands against the steaming paunch. The hunt is over and now I have my meat. While I string him up to freeze, I am conscious of a feeling of disappointment that it was over, that I had killed for sport. But as I sat and looked at my kill, I was also conscious of the old thrill that is always mine when I have been successful, the old ancient thrill of getting my game, proving to myself that I am still one with the hunters of the past, that the blood of ancestral hunters of Europe still runs strongly in my veins.