Hunter's Choice, page 4
“What did I tell you?” Yumi said after they’d all removed their earplugs. “Hunter ‘Sureshot’ Higgins.”
Hunter stayed on the ground a moment longer. Fine. He could shoot. Even with the distraction of Annette being around. But targets were one thing. Deer were another. He could shoot. But could he kill?
He slapped the ground in frustration. Why did Yumi have to come? Why on earth did she have to bring Annette? If Hunter messed up tomorrow, it would be a million times worse with them around.
CHAPTER 5
“LOOK AT THESE SNOWMOBILES AND FOUR-WHEELERS AND things. There’s so much,” Annette said, surveying what Grandpa sometimes called the “big toys” back in the garage part of the lodge.
“Yeah.” Hunter shrugged. “Well, it all belongs to the whole family.”
“You all must have so much fun here.”
Hunter smiled. It was neat how Annette allowed herself to be excited about things, instead of holding back, acting like everything was no big deal, the way the cool kids always did.
Annette turned back to Yumi and Hunter. She smiled too. “I would never want to leave this place.”
“Yeah, well, some of us don’t leave here,” Yumi said quietly.
As Yumi and Annette put the rifle and extra ammo into the gun locker, Hunter headed into the warmth of the living quarters.
“I don’t know, Dad!” Uncle Rick spoke sharply. “OK? I don’t know! It’s been ten years, but I can’t . . . I mean, the dreams have come on sharp lately, and—” Uncle Rick broke off, his voice tightening up like he was about to cry.
Hunter stood behind Reagan. So far nobody had seen him or heard him come in.
“Hey,” Dad said. “It’s OK. From what I’ve read, lots of soldiers and veterans have these problems. It’s good to hear you’re talking to someone—”
“All the shrinks at the VA want to do is medicate me. Get me on this or that drug,” said Uncle Rick. “Well, I won’t do it.”
“Son—”
“And I can’t be around Yumi and Tomoko if I’m all messed up,” said Uncle Rick. “I just need more time. What’s wrong with that?”
Dad answered. “Well, how much longer—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Grandpa said, cutting Dad off quickly. “It doesn’t matter! Rick, you stay out here as long as you need to. Get yourself right. It’s fine. That’s final.”
The door to the garage opened and the girls came back in. Hunter emerged from behind Reagan, quickly joining them so the men wouldn’t realize he’d been listening.
“Hey!” Uncle Rick said, a little too loudly, a little too cheerfully. “They’re back! How was the shooting?”
Any smile or good cheer that Yumi had managed while out on the firing range dropped as fast as any of the targets she’d hit. “Fine,” she answered curtly.
“Better than fine,” Annette said. “It was amazing. They are both really good at it. Hunter hit them all.”
“That’s great,” said Uncle Rick. “Did you have fun shooting, Yumi?”
“Sure. Whatever,” she said. “Chili ready?”
Uncle Rick stood there silently, gripping the island countertop.
Hunter watched them both. He exchanged a look with Annette, but the connection made his cheeks flare hot.
“Sure,” Grandpa said. “Food’s ready. Venison chili. Plus we have cheese and crackers.”
Dad went over to the TV and started flipping through the stack of old DVDs. “I know just the thing to get us all in the right spirit.”
Yumi sighed. “Oh no. Not Big Time Bucks. We’ve seen all of these a thousand times.”
“What’s Big Time Bucks?” Annette asked.
“It’s this boring old—”
“It’s great!” Hunter burst out. “It’s just hours of hunters taking trophy deer or bighorn sheep. We watch them all the time. It’s tradition.”
“Sounds great.” Annette shot a nervous glance at Yumi, but Yumi just dug into her bowl of chili.
Dad nodded with a big goofy smile and slipped the disc into the player.
Big Time Bucks 16 came on screen. Hunter smiled as he ate his chili, a melted string of the shredded cheese he’d sprinkled on top falling down on his chin. Annette laughed. Hunter quickly wiped his mouth.
Big Time Bucks always kicked off with a hard and fast electric guitar edge and a thumping base with clip after clip of big-time pro hunters taking down magnificent animals, before getting to the first of several live hunts that would be shown on the disc. The camera followed two men clad head-to-toe in camouflage, rolling through a grassy field on a John Deere Gator. They stopped and the film cut to a close-up with the name Timmy Ballings: Pro Hunter at the bottom of the screen.
“Welcome to MegaHunt Adventure Gear’s Big Time Bucks 16,” Timmy said as he dismounted from the vehicle and, compound bow in hand, started walking across a grassy field toward a row of trees along a fence line. “We’re out here in northeast Iowa on a fabulous fall day, hoping to take a serious big time buck.” He lowered his voice to a loud whisper. “With all this corn for these hungry deer to eat, Iowa has some of the best whitetail deer hunting in the country. These kinds of woods along the field edge are just the perfect place to line up a shot on, maybe a sixteen-, maybe a twenty-point buck. We’ll settle in to my tree stand and see what kind of bucks pass our way. Wow! I’m excited!”
“Why is he breathing so heavy?” Annette asked.
Dad and Uncle Rick laughed.
“You haven’t seen anything yet,” Yumi said. “This guy is weird. He goes crazy in these videos.”
“Hunting is pretty fun,” Grandpa said. “It can be exciting. The thrill of the hunt, when you’re closing in on a great buck. The adrenaline can really be pumping.”
“They call that buck fever,” Hunter said. He could hardly wait to experience it himself.
“Right,” Yumi said. “If there is buck fever, this guy always catches buck whooping cough.” The men laughed, and Yumi smiled a little. It was the first time so far this weekend that Yumi and Uncle Rick had both smiled at the same time. Hunter thought it was a good sign. “Or buck bubonic plague. He’s just ridiculous. Plus, he’s a grown man and he goes by the name Timmy? He’s the mayor of Patheticville.”
“Yeah,” Uncle Rick said. “I can’t stand this guy. He’s like a big baby, a disgrace to hunters.”
“What do you mean?” Annette said. “He looks pretty tough with that bow and arrow.”
“He’s not tough!” Yumi said. “He’s a freak. You’ll see. Let him do his thing. Spoiler alert, almost every hunt on these videos ends in success.”
“Which is very different from real life,” Grandpa said. “If you’re hunting mature bucks, it’s not uncommon to go three to five years without shooting a deer.”
Timmy Ballings kept whisper-narrating to the camera. “It’s a warmish day in late October, but as the sun’s lowering in the west, so is the temperature. That’s why I’m glad I have MegaHunt Adventure Gear’s Fast-Action Hand Warmers in my gloves, and MegaHunt Adventure Gear’s Fire-Foot Boot Inserts.”
“Does this guy hunt, or is he just a commercial?” Annette asked.
Hunter had watched hundreds of hours of these hunting videos during his visits to the lodge, but he’d mostly focused on the hunting action. Now that he thought about it, the video did seem kind of like a commercial. Annette was right. But a part of him wished she’d be quiet about it. She felt too much like an outsider come in to bash on their family traditions. She wasn’t even supposed to be here.
“Well, all these pro hunters are sponsored by different companies who make hunting gear or weapons, so they have some promotional consideration,” Dad said.
“I can hear a lot of activity out in the field, cornstalks rustling,” Timmy Ballings whispered with a big smile on his face. “And I saw a little four-point buck come out of the field a while ago. But you don’t always want to take the first buck you see, especially a smaller one like that. Oh boy. So, I’m holding out for a bigger—Oh!” He held his fist over his mouth as if to keep from bursting out. The camera cut to a large twelve-point buck.
“Is he going to be OK?” Annette asked. “He looks like he’s going to cry.”
“Yep, that’s Timmy Ballings,” Dad said. “Every time.”
“Oh-ho-ho-oooh!” Timmy Ballings hissed, slowly bringing his bow up and nocking an arrow. “I can’t . . . I can’t believe it! This . . . this is the big time!”
On-screen, Timmy Ballings slowly raised the bow, using a release to draw back the bowstring. Everybody in the room got quiet for a moment, almost as if making any noise would somehow scare away the deer on the video.
Ballings loosed the arrow. A second later the buck jerked, tried to run, stumbled. Hunter could see its blood, see the surprise and anguish in its wide eyes. The buck tried to take two more steps but then fell, gasping on the ground for just a moment before going still.
Hunter watched the animal’s last struggles. This was what hunting, his family’s main hobby, was all about. Timmy Ballings could have scored a cleaner kill, dropping the animal faster, but Hunter had heard enough family hunting stories to know perfectly clean kills didn’t always happen. He didn’t feel sorry for that deer. He didn’t.
The video cut to Timmy Ballings inspecting his kill. He was no longer whispering, but kind of gasping, whining, almost sobbing. Tears were in his eyes. “. . . so beautiful. Suh-huh-huh-ho-ho! Whoa! I saw him coming out of the corn. And I thought . . . I just thought. It’s the big time, you know?”
“This guy is pathetic!” Yumi called out. “He’s crying like a baby just ’cause he shot a deer!”
Well, at least he took his shot, Hunter thought. I might be too much of a baby even to do that.
AFTER DINNER EVERYONE PLAYED A COUPLE OF ROUNDS OF Uno before they started shutting everything down for the night.
“It’s kind of early,” Annette said quietly to Yumi and Hunter. “Is everyone really going to bed already?”
“We go out right before dawn,” Hunter told Annette. “During the day, deer find places to hide and bed down. It’s tough to find them then. So we go out early, when it’s bright enough to see to safely hunt while the deer are still running around trying to find food. Then we return to the lodge and hang out all day. And we go out again just before it starts to get dark at sunset, when the deer are coming back out.”
“Which means everybody will be up at zero-dark-thirty,” Uncle Rick said. “So, time to hit the rack.”
The girls set up sleeping bags on the living room floor. “Well, if there’s any trouble,” Annette said, “we have Reagan the giant bear here to protect us.”
Minutes later Dad and Hunter were settled under the blankets in the two twin beds in the duck room, lights out and the lodge going quiet, save for the sound of coyotes howling in the distant dark woods.
“Big day tomorrow,” Dad said sleepily. “This is going to be great.”
And Hunter was sure it would be. If only they found the right buck. If only Hunter was in the right position and could manage to shoot straight under pressure. If only he had the nerve to shoot—to kill the animal. If only he didn’t make a fool of himself in front of Yumi and, worse, in front of Annette. If only. If only. A lot of hopes rode on “if only.” And a lot of fear.
CHAPTER 6
THE BED WAS COMFORTABLE. THE MATTRESS WAS JUST right, not too hard or too soft, not too hot or too cold. He was living the story of the three bears, or in the house of one dead stuffed bear anyway. Hunter relaxed in perfect warmth, wrapped in flannel sheets beneath a checkered quilt his great-grandmother had made long ago out of old hunting clothes of various camouflage patterns. The night should have passed in deep sleep and happy hunting dreams.
But Hunter could hardly sleep. He might have drifted off for a few hours around midnight, but he could not still his heart or his eager imagination enough to settle into a full, deep sleep for long. For at least two hours before wake-up time he lay awake in the bed, imagining the rifle in his hand, stalking quietly through the woods, with his family, with Uncle Rick. Like a soldier. He’d hiked his family’s land for years, seen all manner of wildlife. Mule deer, elk, moose, coyotes, raccoons, porcupines, all sorts of snakes, hawks, owls, eagles. He’d even seen a few bears. McCall rested in a valley on a lake wedged right up amid some of the largest national forest areas left in America—a wilderness paradise.
He remembered hiking with Yumi down to what the family called Split Rock Falls, a place where a creek spilled down between two great columns of rock, as though a giant had cleaved the hillside with a colossal ax to let the water flow out. From atop the little cliff, they’d spotted the largest buck either of them had ever seen. For the last two years, he and Yumi had argued about how big he was. Hunter thought he’d counted it a ten-by-ten, but Yumi insisted he was at least a twelve-by-twelve. Either way, he was massive. He had to be a state record buck. He would have provided at least a hundred pounds of meat. As the night wore on, as he waited for morning, Hunter wondered if that buck was still out there. Grandpa had doubted the deer was real, calling him the Phantom. What would it feel like to take a prize so big?
A buck that big, so beautiful, that had survived so many hunting seasons—it seemed a shame to take him down now.
“No,” Hunter whispered to himself. He couldn’t start thinking that way again. First, that whole idea was backward. It was far worse to shoot the younger bucks that had never had a chance to really live and mate. Better to let them grow. Second, he had to stop being a baby and finally man up about all this. Hunting was great. Hunting required killing. That was the end of it.
The way of the wild was that some animals kill other animals to survive. Either he took his meat from an animal he killed on the hunt, or he went to the store and bought meat killed by someone else. And, like Grandpa often said, hunters were often more kind to the animals they took. Deer, elk, goose, or other game animals lived in the wild until a hunter took the cleanest, quickest kill shot he could make. Meat in the store came from animals that often lived crammed into filthy confinements, injected with hormones and other chemicals, until they were led in terror to the slaughterhouse. The hunting way was better. That was his way. It was.
Finally Dad’s phone started playing the quiet spacey music that served as his alarm. That was Hunter’s cue. He threw back his covers and rolled from the bed, flicking on a flashlight to see his way to his duffel bag packed with carefully unscented clothes. He’d showered the night before so he could get suited up right away. Pajamas off, long underwear tops and bottoms on. Then he hurried into his jeans. Hunter wasn’t wasting a moment of the day.
Dad still hadn’t silenced his phone. “Ugh, how could such beautiful music sound so bad?” Dad said quietly, tapping the phone to stop it. He sat up in bed and ran his hand down over his face, scratching his stubbly chin, then seemed to notice Hunter. He chuckled. “Wow! Up and at ’em already. You ready for this?”
Hunter took a deep breath and smiled. “I’ve been waiting years for this.”
Dad moved much slower getting dressed. “Well, you’ll have to wait a bit longer. We gotta be out there before dawn. Sure. But even so, nothing happens here before coffee.”
Out in the kitchen a while later, everybody was up and ready, showered in no-scent shampoo and dressed warmly in their first de-scented layers, their scentless camouflage coveralls and boots waiting in the garage.
“There’s toast. Some Pop-Tarts.” Grandpa tapped the brew button on the coffeepot. “Some Cheetos. Or nuke some of last night’s chili. Heck, I don’t know. Nobody’s in diapers here. Get what you want.” He sat at the island counter with his favorite “How ’Bout a Nice Cup of Shut the @#$% Up!” mug and watched the coffee maker brew.
“Is this the same man?” Annette said very quietly to Yumi.
Yumi shook her head and drew her finger across her neck in the universal kill-it gesture. “Not before coffee,” she whispered.
They all ate what they wanted in silence. Hunter enjoyed more chili and was surprised when nobody said he was too young for coffee.
“You eat too much of that chili, you’ll have to make an emergency stop in the woods. Better bring some toilet paper,” Uncle Rick said. Hunter laughed. Uncle Rick continued, “I’m serious.”
Now the girls laughed, and Hunter’s cheeks flared red and hot.
Grandpa brightened up by his second cup of coffee. “All right. For those of you new to this, I’ll tell ya how it’s all going to work. In a minute we’ll finish suiting up and then head out in teams. Now, I’ll go with Hunter and his dad. Yumi, you’ll go with Annette and your dad.”
“I want to go with you and Uncle Dave,” Yumi said quickly. Uncle Rick looked away. Yumi stood up off her stool and folded her arms. “Please.”
Grandpa coughed. “Well, Yumi, I think your dad wanted—”
“No, it’s just that I never get to see you, Grandpa. I want to be in your team.”
Hunter gripped his mug so tightly that he had to consciously force himself to relax for fear of breaking it.
Grandpa tried again. “But you see, Yumi, part of the point of this weekend is for you and—”
“Right, but it would be so great to go on the hunting team with my grandpa. Plus Annette’s kind of profiling you for the middle school newspaper, and—”
“Kind of writing about all of this—” Annette tried.
“But more about you, Grandpa, and—”
“It’s fine!” Uncle Rick snapped. “The girls will go with you and David, Dad.”
Hunter’s dad spoke up. “Then that’s four on our team and only two on yours.”
Yumi and Annette exchanged a look. Then Yumi glanced at Hunter. He so hoped she wasn’t about to say what he thought she was about to say.
“Annette can go on Hunter’s team.”
She’d said it.
“That’s great!” Uncle Rick said quickly. “Three and three. Your team is pushing?”
“Rick—” Grandpa tried.
“We’re wasting time,” said Uncle Rick. “Your team pushing? Where from? Near Split Rock Falls?”
