The Great Shot

He started out in the morning, early.  Sounds glared out in the pre-dawn: spoon in the coffee mug, twang of the egg skillet, running water; and then those few minutes of silence while he stared into the coffee mug because it was blacker than the night outside the window.

He put the coffee mug down and stood and picked his pack off the other chair.  He took up his old 16-guage pump by the case handle and tucked it under his arm so he had a hand free to lock the door.  He put on his cowboy hat and went outside.  The rain muffled everything, even the closing of the car door.  The car started with a cough and he backed her out and put her in forward.  It was a twenty-mile drive to the new place and he drove slowly, thinking that the rain would keep the birds on their roosts.  He found an old sweet song on the radio and let his mind wander.

No other cars on the road.  In the fringe of the headlights the desert began.  The sun wasn’t rising.  He flicked the radio off.  You never can rely on the weather, he thought, not even in Arizona.

At the dirt road, mile mark, 105, he pulled off.  The sun began to brighten the sky behind the clouds.

He always felt refreshed walking in the rain in Arizona.  The smell of the desert during a rain was as if every parched particle was singing in harmony.

The old car rattled like she was dying over the potted road except when all the loose joint hummed crossing the cattle guards.  Two miles down the dirt road he pulled the car off to the side and stepped out.  The air was still and rainless, the sky a flat gray mat.  Early in the morning the weather was always his mood.

He opened the trunk, put the pack on, and slid the Featherweight Ithaca out of its case.  He tucked it under his arm and filled his pockets with shells.  He shut the trunk softly, listening now.  He wanted to hear the quail.  They would be moving soon.

The wash he intended to hunt ran southeast and bent due east around a hill a mile or so away.  Smaller washes led down to the wash from the surrounding hills.  The land looked creased like the skin around an old man’s eyes.

Walk in the wash till you hear birds, he told himself.  In the early morning the birds moved off their roosts in the mesquite trees in the washes and could be found in numbers, groggy from the cold night.  They were easy shooting but he didn’t like to shoot them in the morning.  He liked to walk the wash to see what he could.  Sometimes he’d stop to search for artifacts.  Today he just walked.

From sunrise on the birds moved higher onto the hillsides, grazing.  They were like cattle the way they grazed together, and had some of the characteristics of some people the way they called to each other and seemed so gregarious.  But they’re not people, and later on the hillsides where the shooting is a challenge, he might shoot some for dinner.  The breasts were delicious braised in butter and garlic and ginger root, and the legs were good, deep fried in oil with flour and curry spice coating.

Today, with the rain, the birds would hold tight and flush sporadically.  He looked forward to trying the birds that flushed out behind him, the ones he couldn’t see flush.  He heard birds chuckle off to his right in the mesquite and he walked into the trees, dropping low under branches. A thorn caught in his ear and he stopped, staring at the droplets of water at the base of the mesquite spines as he unhooked his ear.  He crouched through the prickly brush and stood.  The birds saw him and flushed, two, then three, and then the rest, showering water off their wings as they went.  He took a step and one more flushed out.  He watched them fly up the hillside, cup wings, drop and flare down on the other side of the hill.

He cut across the wash, through slow granular desert sand, and went up over the hill after the birds.

They lay on the far side of the hill in ones and twos, the way he liked to hunt them.  He was sweating from the climb and he felt purified sweating out the poisons in the cold air.

Two birds went out at his feet, giving his heart a little jump, and he raised the gun and pointed the birds, heart racing out with them through the air over the hills.  He walked through the desert grasses flushing the birds and pointing them with the gun, watching them as they dropped out of range.

Then he lowered the gun and walked through the rest of them, not watching as they flew.  He wasn’t in a hunting mood yet.  Something was wrong, something seemed missing.  He walked on.  Now he looked into the distance.

In the distance the hills grew larger and then turned into mountains.  Above a certain altitude they all had snow, starting on the tops of the closer hills and traveling off like whitecaps into the mountains.

There was frost in some of the wash bottoms in the distance where it hadn’t rained.  It looked as if it got colder the farther away from the road you were.  It had stopped raining.  Something else was wrong.  Something was wrong with the land.  He turned around.  Behind him, far away, the twin stacks of a copper mine rose like cigarettes out of a pack.  He saw how the sulfur smoke poured out of the tops of the stacks and blew north and south with the prevailing winds.

He turned away from the mine and went deeper into the country after the birds.  Much of the land was barren of cacti and only sparse patches of grass grew.  The birds ran out ahead of him, appearing and disappearing.  Farther and farther he walked into the desert.  This was not his desert.

The birds outran him, scurrying over the top of another hill.  There was no cover for them to hide and hold.

It started to rain, big drops spattering on his hat, and then it stopped.  He had been walking in the barren path of the sulfur smoke.  He looked back again and could see that the vegetation on the leeward side of the hills was not much thicker.  He could hear birds calling, “Chi-ca-go, Chi-ca-go.”  No — it sounded like they were asking, “Where are you?  Where are you?”  They were calling from the east.

As he walked through the calling birds he thought about a hunt in the rain three weeks ago.  The rain had turned to hail, then snow.  From where he’d sat, under the outcropping in the arroyo, he’d seen the saguaro cacti light up, looking like dead men walking off into nothingness.  And he remembered how every time the rain stopped he’d set out again, only to be driven back as the rain changed to snow or hail.  And lastly he remembered how, when the sun finally won through, all the desert creatures had come out in it and he walked so close to them in a kind of truce brought on by the weather.

He stopped.  He had come to the top of a ridge.  Cacti grew along the slope below him down into the wash.  He could hear birds chuckling in the wash.  It was lucky there were still birds, and good cover for them to hold in.  He turned back and looked out over the barren strip of land.

“Damn,” he said under his breath.

He stared at the snow-covered hills.  Coyotes yelped back in the hills and it grew into howling, a sound like laughter the way it echoed.

He put his gun to his shoulder and fired a shot into the sky over his head.  The report seemed to snap the air into a vacuum.

The coyotes stopped their howling and their echoes faded away.

And he heard the rain.  At first he thought it was the lead pellets falling back down on him.  Then he realized it was the rain and he laughed.  He turned away from the barren land and walked down through cholla and prickly pear to the wash.  He was careful to avoid the cholla’s vicious travelers that had spines like porcupine quills.

The End

From Seasons of The Hunter published by Alfred E. Knopf 1985