Home from the Hill (12 page)

“Yes, sir,” he said. But he had heard nothing since the words
I expect this one is pretty good sized
. He had turned then to look at the head hanging above the mantel. Was his as big as that? What if it was smaller, much smaller? What if it was plain puny? It had to be as big. It just had to be!

“Make your first shot count,” his father said. “Because it's the only one you're likely to get. And don't wait then to see if it was good or not. One of those brutes can keep going with a .30-30 bullet in his heart and still hit you hard enough to take off your leg with one of those tusks. Stand by a tree with some low limbs and throw the gun away from you and start climbing the second you pull the trigger. That way there's nothing to worry about.

He promised him he would, but he promised himself he would not.
He
hadn't, when he shot his.

14

So he had no boar hounds, properly speaking. But though they never been used for what they were intended, he had two of the little black-brown hounds that the Plott family has bred to a famous line over the years to run bear and Russian boar in the Great Smoky Mountains, and he had Deuteronomy. Neither he nor his forebears were ever trained to hunt wild boar; but they had never needed to be trained to herd swamp-grazing razorbacks that sometimes turned almost as wild and vicious as a Russian boar. For his master the Captain, Deuteronomy had run coons and sometimes foxes, but pork was his true scent. The two Plott hounds seemed to trust him. They bayed; he barked like a yard dog.

It took all the early morning to find tracks to set the dogs on. So it was after nine when they first gave tongue, and after eleven when they gave their frantic fighting cry, when the boar first stopped and turned to take them on. But three dogs were just not enough to hold him at bay. By the time Theron and Pritchard caught up, the chase was on again and at least a mile away from them. In the next hour and a half they heard the boar stop twice again to stand and fight, and the second time, as they ran, above the barking they heard suddenly the scream of one of the hounds. When they arrived at the scene of that stand a quarter of an hour later they found a circle of ground so churned up it looked as if it had been disc-harrowed, and on the edge of it in a pool of blood lay the male Plott hound, his chest ripped from throat to belly to the depth of a man's hand and his guts spilled out onto the ground. They trailed for another hour, following the sound that rang in the damp and cavernous woods, and then they ceased to hear the baying of the Plott bitch—though still they heard at great distance the barking of Deuteronomy—and in another few minutes they came upon her lying in the trail, not dead, not even injured, and not cowed, just worn out. They quit then for the day, and Theron called Deuteronomy off with his father's hunting horn.

He spent the night at Pritchard's. He was not going home without what he had come after. He had told his mother he would be gone a day or two, probably not more than two. Amazingly, she had made no fuss about his setting off to encounter a wild boar. Perhaps she did not realize what was involved. Perhaps he didn't either. But now, seeing himself already as its killer, a vision which this first unsuccessful day, by adding a day's hot chase and a dead, valiant hound to the story it made in his mind, only made seem more real, he could not imagine ever going back to town, leading an everyday sort of town life.

Waiting for sleep that night in the strange bed, a worry he had already had returned to bother him. He remembered the confident way his father had offered him to the swamp men for this job, and their non-committal looks. What if Pritchard got the first shot, brought down the boar? And even if he did not, people still could say, Pritchard had been there with a shotgun loaded with heavy slugs, backing him up all the while. Where was the danger, where was the glory in that?

But it was not what “people” could say that he was thinking of, and he knew it. It was only his father's opinion that he cared about.

It had long been his habit to wake before daybreak, and the next morning he got up in the dark and with his rifle in one hand and shoes and clothes in the other, stole out of the sleeping house. Fortunately he had made friends with Pritchard's foxhounds the day before; now they kept silent. He dressed in the barn. He led out Pritchard's saddle horse and led him across the back lot and down the road and hitched him to a tree and saddled him. He had brought a coil of lariat. With this he leashed the dogs.

Steam was beginning to lift from the fields, and at his passage, out of the rows of fresh-plowed and seed-sown land rose flocks of indignant crows that glinted blue-black and copper in the first red rays of the sun. Ahead, where the cleared land came to an end and where the sunlight stopped, loomed the dark wall of the woods. The road disappeared between columns of black pines. Inside the shadow he crossed an old logging bridge over a slough. The horse's hooves rang on the boards and the echo rang in the woods. Soon he would be in the bottom proper; already the dogs were straining on the rope. “God,” he prayed, “let me get him and let him be a big one, as big as Papa's, and I won't ever ask you for anything more.” He saw in his mind the mounted head over the mantel in the den, and it was enormous. He succeeded with a little effort in thinking of himself as being engaged in a friendly rivalry. His father would be the first to wish him luck.

When he reached the spot where the old logging road gave out, where brush had overgrown the ruts, he dismounted and hitched the horse to a tree. He unleashed the dogs, and with Deuteronomy in the lead the two of them at once disappeared into the woods, casting about for a scent. Then he thought, what if the boar came out here and found the horse, and it tied and unable to defend itself? He thought then how little use to him the horse was going to be anymore anyway, when he had three or four hundred pounds of dead wild pig on his hands. No question that he was going to have that boar—or certainly he would not need the horse. Because he was not going back without it. He unhitched the reins and tied them to the saddle pommel. Turning the horse about he slapped it on the rump. It seemed to know its way back. He watched until it disappeared around a turn. At that moment he heard the first bellow from the hound.

Standing under the soaring pines, branchless for forty feet up, that high above him swished softly in a breeze, looking down from the crest of the knoll where four years before, his first, they had sat around the fire all night listening to the hounds run foxes and he had heard for the first time that sudden gasping scream of a person being strangled to death: the bark of a fox; watching the dew distilling up out of the woods, the fog rising off the sluggish, yellow river branch, he could feel the teeming, deceptive somnolence of the land beating up to him like the ponderous ebb and wash of some vast body of water. He remembered that wet November dawn three years before when, carrying his father's .30-30, he had stood on this same hill before plunging in and thought that somewhere in there, grazing or asleep, was his first buck, his first big game. Now he was going in after game of a kind that no man but his father had ever brought out of Sulphur Bottom. “God, let me get him and let him be a big one and I'll never, never ask you for anything more.” He was ashamed of praying for such a thing.

It had been Pritchard's opinion over the supper table the night before that the boar would be in deep, sulking, this morning. Theron's feeling had been that yesterday had not given the boar many fears. He was right. In fifteen minutes the hound was joined by Deuteronomy's bark, and his message was unmistakable: the trail was warm.

When that sound reached him, Theron was in a stand of liveoaks where the going was good. He broke into a run. He figured the dogs were leading him by not more than half a mile. But the good-going soon gave out. He waded through a slough and tore through a canebrake with wet trousers flopping against his legs, and the land took its first sharp dip. He found himself in what his father had told him to expect—brush, thick as a privet hedge, with mud underfoot. He held the gun with both hands above his head and felt the brush tear at him, stinging his face and ears, and as he ran and stumbled he heard the hound change her note and then heard Deuteronomy begin to yelp. The boar had turned. And now the hound was not able to hold her note, but went sliding up and down the scale in broken-voiced frenzy. And now he could no longer even stumble. He was on his hands and knees in the mud, crawling blindly.

Then he heard baying again, tore his way out to a little clearing, got to his feet, and heard the baying already fading in volume, like a pail knocking against the sides as if plummeted down a deep well shaft. The boar had broken stand, and the chase was on again.

And so it went. Twice again the boar turned and took the dogs on, twice again broke through them, and the second time, when Theron reached the stand, it was noon. There was blood on the ground there. He stood on the edge of the glade in the sunlight to get away from the swarming gnats and mosquitoes. Beyond, in the direction from which the hound's note reached him like a faint echo of itself, a call as soft as the cooing of a mourning dove, the land dipped sharply and he could see rattan vines festooning the oaks like nets. He knew, as if a fence had been there, that he stood at the bounds of the land he knew. It was hot and airless, the sun was high, and all its rays seemed aimed, as though gathered by some giant magnifying glass into a point, at the spot on which he stood.

He crossed the glade, following the tracks, deeper now as the ground suddenly softened—though his first impression was that the boar had suddenly put on a great deal of weight—and plunged into the hot, stagnant shadow. Just inside it he stopped. The air hit him. It seemed to have hung there unstirred since the beginning of time. A bird shot brightly across his sight like a fish darting through a still green pool. The trail was lost in shadow a dozen feet ahead and it was as if the boar and the dogs had waded in where water had washed and crumbled away their tracks. His impulse was to step slowly and softly backwards. Ancient and inviolable and pathless as the bottom of the sea, it seemed a place where men were not meant to go. He was sweating fast and steadily notwithstanding the shaded and cavernous gloom. He heard again the distant ululation of the hound, and, taking a breath, he plunged in.

In that green light he had to strain to see. As the trees grew in height, it was as if he himself was walking down an incline into darkness, down into a cavern, or swimming on the bottom of a deepening lake, into a strange growth like submarine plants and into a silence that seemed to exert a pressure on his eardrums.

And it was as if he had surfaced when at four o'clock he climbed a knoll and emerged into a little clearing. It was the first time since noon that he had looked at his watch. What it told him, or rather the implications of the time, stunned him. Even if he turned back now, the last hour at least of the trip would be in the dark.

It would be more than an hour—because before he could start back, before he could recover wind enough to blow the horn for the dogs, he had to rest.

It was four o'clock when he sat down, five-fifteen when he awoke. There was utter silence. The dogs were not in hearing. Retracing his steps, he re-entered the woods, and he learned then that even had he not fallen asleep, he had still miscalculated. He had counted on the long spring daylight hours of the outside world or in the thinner woods where he was used to hunting. For at five-fifteen there was daylight; now at a quarter of six the sun dived below the high treetops, and it was dusk.

If he had been in pine woods, pitch-pine, he could have made torches of pine knots. Here there were no pitch-pines. He marched in the failing light and came upon one pine, a long-needled pine, the first branch fifty feet up its straight, smooth trunk.

There came a moment that he knew was the last in which he would be able to see. He stood and watched his footprints, pointed towards him, fade out as the trees all rushed together and it was night.

He stood while the darkness steeped and settled about him. Then he saw a glow, misty, luminous, a pale, cold blue, foggy, like the glow in the sky of a distant town on a winter night. The distance was deceptive. One moment it almost seemed he could reach out and touch it; the next it seemed like the atmospheric haze of distance itself.

“What is it?” he asked himself when at last he stood upon the edge of what looked like a pale blue neon pond. “Marsh gas,” he said. He knew because he had heard about it, not because he had ever seen any such thing. It hung in a motionless nimbus above the shallow, stagnant, black water. But stagnant or not, he was too thirsty to care. Falling on his knees he bent to the water. The smell repulsed him. The water was covered with a viscous black scum. He recognized that smell. It was oil. It was crude petroleum.

He stood up, ghostly in the pale gaseous light, and tore off his clothes. He flung down his jacket, took off his shirt, stripped off his undershirt, stepped out of his pants, out of his drawers. Then he put back on his pants and shirt. He began ripping up his jacket, the underclothes, his handkerchief, ripped off his shirttails. He searched the ground for sticks. He made eight torches, like oversized medical swabs. Rolling the cloth sideways over the surface, he managed to pick up the oil without getting any of the water. The layer of oil was thick and lifted onto the cloth easily. While one was soaking he rolled another, until finally none of them would absorb any more.

He never found his trail that night. He marched in the blackish-yellow flicker and the roiling black smoke of the torch and saw his bundle of dripping unused ones dwindle and watched and felt the ground underfoot become a thing he had not seen or seen anything like on his way in, and three times he had his shoes sucked off by the gummy black mud. He began to see trees of a sort that he had seen in Caddo Lake once when he and his father and a party of men went on a fishing trip there, but had never seen in the Bottom, in Texas, before: big, twisted, towering black bald cypresses rising stark up out of the darkness into the moonlight. By nine o'clock, when his last torch was burning down, he not only knew it was hopeless, but knew he should never have moved in the dark, that he had undoubtedly been going farther from the trail all the while, and that now there was only one thing to do and that was sit down and wait for daylight.