Draigkhiun: Chapter Two, Section VII

VII

“Are you sure that you missed him?” Pap asked. He was reexamining my botched shot to make sure that I hadn’t left a wounded animal to die slowly.

It was dark and the three of us gathered around the fire pit after dining on antallop tenderloins. Pap and I were enjoying whiskey and the fire felt good against the chilly night. The Indian summer was rapidly ending. The equinox was only a few days away and we would be spending the Sawhin festival in hunting camp this year. That was why my uncle Collin wasn’t with us.

As we talked, Cali stared off towards the hide and head of her young buck. She looked a little wobbly in her seat. Today was a major rite of passage. Pap had let her have a beer to celebrate.

“I couldn’t be any surer. The bullet struck the dirt about a quarter of a meter in front of him and just the other side of his bed.”

“You’re positive of this?  You actually went over to where he was standing?”

“You taught me. There was a nice long furrow of dirt. No blood, no hair and no antallop. He did leave me a nice pokakhmor.” The dung pile had been impressive.

Cali snickered.

“Did you see him go?” Pap pressed the inquiry.

“Yes, in those great, big bounding leaps they do.”

“He could have been hit.”

“Not bounding like that. I gave him half an hour before I started following him.  If I’d hit him he would’ve fallen by then.”

“You didn’t miss his body?”

“No, Pap.” I was getting a little irritated. I had worked hard for this animal and had shit to show for it. “I followed him two, maybe three, kilometers. I watched him run across the Follav Duhv. He kicked up so much dirt I could’ve followed him blind. I also zigzagged across the trail on my way back.”

“What was the distance for the shot?”

“I paced it off at three hundred, twenty-three meters. I reconfirmed the distance through the GPS.”

“You’ve made similar shots.”

“My rangefinder is a little off. It told me he was at three hundred, eleven.”

“That’s only twelve meters, Caleb,” Cali said.

“It makes a huge difference at that range,” Pap replied. He looked back at me. “You’re carrying the two-fifties this trip, aren’t you?”

“Yes. I’m feeling a little weird after that attack near Scoiteville.”

“A bullet that heavy,” Pap said, turning back to Cali, “is losing velocity—fast—out at that range. The wind will also affect its trajectory.”

“You looked at the horns,” he said to me.

“Oh yes!”

“What is that a good example of, Calliope?”

“Buck fever,” she replied. She tried to take a sip of her half-finished beer. She wound up spilling quite a bit down the front of her jacket. She started giggling.

Pap and I started to laugh, too. It felt good.

Cali slipped off to bed and Pap and I sat staring into the fire, listening to the faint hum of the camp’s perimeter. I looked at my father but his face was unreadable in the firelight. He had always been difficult to read, often choosing to keep his own council, but it was worse since Malakai’s letter had arrived.

“Do you want another drink, Pap?” I asked him, breaking the silence. I was getting too hot by the fire.

“Nee’r woh lahm, go roh mohagat,” he declined. “I’m going to go check the ATHV and the perimeter genset.” He got up slowly, letting his back stretch out.

I opened the cooler and pulled out a beer. I’d had enough whiskey for the evening. I walked over to where the hide and head of Cali’s little buck was stretched across some brush. The animal had been quartered and safely locked in a steel, scent-proof cooler. I poured a little beer on the ground in front of it as an offering.

“Go roh mil mohagat,” I thanked it for its sacrifice, “Go do anam gahvihd tu’ sweenahs n’Sruh Mor!” I held my bottle high for the antallop to see as I wished it to find peace in the river.

“Tcha anam an shaylig,” Pap toasted the spirit of the hunt from behind me. He reached out and we clinked bottles together. I drained mine. Pap proffered another.

“Tcha mo gharinyon go moh, nihah?” Pap asked, beaming with pride.

“Yes, she did well.” I had to remember to begin speaking in the Confederate more.

I looked up into the night sky. All the familiar stars and constellations shone so brightly away from the settlements. Each little pinpoint was so clear. I found myself wondering how they would look from Terra. It was suddenly unnerving to contemplate the distance between each tiny source of light.

I was going to cross those distances.

“It is a beautiful sight, isn’t it?” Pap asked, looking towards the sky with me.

“Do you ever wonder what sort of sky looks down on you from planets you haven’t been to, Pap?”

“When I was younger than you, I did. It seemed I couldn’t wait to get away from Andowhan and the Tchakh Clann. Looking at the same scenery, over and over, drove me absolutely crazy. There always had to be an adventure calling my name, waiting for me to answer it. The adventures were like mountains I could climb.”

Pap took a swallow from his beer. I couldn’t discern his face in the dark although I could picture it in my mind. It would be somber. I couldn’t ever remember it being otherwise.

“You know,” he continued, “the mountains always look awesome until it comes time to actually scale them. Under all that beauty lays too many cliffs and crevasses and slides, which you won’t see from afar, until you’re stuck at the edge of them. For most of us, once there, we decide to continue on. Then, you get to the top, and look out, and there are only more mountains.” He drank some more. “I’m ready to just be; to just be right here!” He held his arms wide and turned in a slow circle.

“You regret entering the service?”

“With one exception,” he looked himself over, “no. No, I would never have done it differently. I couldn’t. If it weren’t for the service I would never have met your Ma.”

“You paid a lot for that privilege.”

“And, knowing that price I paid, you still wish to go to Terra?”

“Yes!”

“Huh?” He cleared his throat and looked across the countryside beyond the perimeter. “Your grandfather never convinced me otherwise, either.”

“So, you’re not going to try and talk me out of it?”

“No. I think your Ma is hoping I will try on this trip, though. I just hope you won’t have to pay too dearly.” He squeezed my shoulder, hard, and I silently winced in the dark. “In this life, there’re some things I’ve learned: there is more behind family actions than simple love and there is more behind valued experience in the offering of the job of your dreams. You will find much more to this posting than anticipated. And, most importantly, be careful of what you wish for—it just might come true.”

“Huh,” I wasn’t sure of how to interpret what he said. “What are you going to do, then?”

“I’m going to pray.” He said no more on it.

We ambled along the perimeter to where it ended at the kettle lake we used for our water supply. There were no sounds of night creatures.

Standing on the gravelly shore, we continued to stare at the night sky; each of us drifting away to our own particular part of the universe.

Pap fiddled with the inside pocket of his jacket. I thought he was going to take out his pipe. I was dumbstruck as he removed two of his priciest cigars—the ones he used to celebrate a successful hunt—and handed one towards me. I couldn’t get myself to reach for it.

“Well, are you going to celebrate with me, or just stand there like you can’t remember how to breathe?” His left hand extended with my cigar, he thumbed the lid off the tube in his right hand, gripped the end of the cigar in his teeth and slid it out.

“Pap, I can’t take that. It’d be a waste.” I smelled the unlit tobacco from his cigar. I did want one but I didn’t feel worthy.

“Don’t be so humble, Caleb, this was a big day.”

“Then why aren’t you offering it to Cali?”

“This isn’t about Cali.” He practically slapped the cigar tube into my tentative palm. He pulled out his lighter and immolated the tip of his cigar.

“What this is about,” he continued, between puffs, “is you.”

“Huh?” It was all I could manage as I lit my cigar. Pap’s Victories were far better than the mundungus I rolled by hand.

“Two things,” Pap replied. “The first, how long before I get this chance with my youngest son again, huh?”

“Okay; fair enough.”

“The second,” he continued, “is I wanted to welcome you into the true ranks of Anam an Shaylig.”

“What?” I almost inhaled some of the smoke. “I had buck fever. I missed.”

“Exactly! If you succeeded every time, it would be killing instead of hunting. Today, you got a taste of what havoc nerves, over-excitement and plain old bad luck can wreak.” He chuckled as he puffed on his cigar some more. He looked me in the eye.

“Caleb, I’ve seen you shoot. You are usually a natural. Your pride took a sharp blow to the chin and you are taking it well. You admitted your mistakes.”

“I guess. Zeke never did this.”

“Zeke wouldn’t admit to it!” He took a long drag and held it a moment. “He’s my son and I love him but, he can be the most stubborn, arrogant shisa possible. He’s done this far more than you would know. Do you remember that tip of horn Zeke always wears around his neck, Caleb?”

“Yeah, what about it?”

“The next time you see your brother, get him drunk and ask him about it.”

“How about you?”

“How about me,” Pap responded. He started walking back to the dying fire. It was down to hot coals. I followed him.

“My most memorable hunt was on Cairibhe, in New Brunswick.”

“This was during the Histaklii war?”

“Yes.” The humour left Pap’s voice. “I spent quite a while there—almost two years convalescing—after my desire to be a Marine ended.”

Pap sat down and threw two small logs onto the coals. They caught and created a cheery glow.

“Anyway, once I could make my way around, I applied for nonresident permits to hunt. I drew a permit with three tickets to hunt those big old deer in the northern latitudes.”

“Three?”

“Three. With the war on, there were more harvest tickets than hunters. The deer were starting to get into crops a little too much.

“For a modest fee, I signed two of the tickets over to some friends of mine from the CAF.” Pap glanced towards the stars, took a final drag from his cigar and tossed it into the fire. “Hmpf! They’re both gone, now, lost to that war.” He drank the last of his beer.

“We pooled our credits and booked a first-class, guided hunt in New Brunswick. We had fowl hunting, fishing, and those big damned deer. Scott and Tomas were lucky and filled their tickets on the first day. I held out for a truly huge old buck that, Wilhelmson, our guide, kept saying was around.”

My cigar had died out so I threw the stub into the fire.

“Did you ever get to see him?” I asked.

“Oh yeah! It was on our last day. You know, after stalking him for an entire week, I thought fate owed me that damned buck.”

“Isn’t that a little hubristic, Ahir?”

“A little,” Pap growled at me. “Don’t you lecture me on being a good Shondrean. On the last day, Willie and I were walking out to the edge of a corn field where that old mossback—as they call those big bastards—was seen carousing often with the does. We were having a great walk; chatting, and swapping stories. It was early afternoon and we were going to sit in a blind that Willie has set up in a little stand of cedar.

“We get near the blind and a little doe comes out of the cedar stand, into the corn field. She just stood there, nibbling on the old cobs.”

“Nice,” I commented.

“Yes, it was nice, until that damned mossback followed her out of the cedar! The rut was on and he was oblivious to our presence; just strutting his stuff for that doe.

“Old Willie’s muttering for me to be steady and pick my shot carefully. He kept warning me to not look at ‘dose damned-fuhkin’ antlers’.” Pap pitched his voice higher to rasp those last four words.

“Did you?”

“I did. I put my sights on him and started firing as fast as I could work the lever and pull the trigger. I was so fixated on bringing him down that I couldn’t feel the recoil or hear the muzzle blast. And that buck just kept walking, broadside to me, through the field.

“To add insult to injury, I fired my last round, let out a war whoop and began to run after him. That’s when he forgot about his loving and bounded out of the field.”

“What happened?”

“Well, I hear Willie gasping and sputtering behind me. I look back towards him and there are my five cartridges lying on the ground, unfired.” Pap stared into the fire and slowly shook his head.

“Nil kakamas!” I exclaimed. 

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