Closer to the Ground Page 15

  We pick our way through discarded slash, tripping and sliding, to an enormous stump we can lean against and have a commanding view. The rain has quit, but the icy north wind is rising. Sweeney starts glassing from the right edge, sweeping his binoculars slowly in a grid pattern. I have the rifle cradled in my lap and scan with naked eyes from the left side, searching for movement. I catch a brief flicker of something – an ear? A tail? – way down on the far edge where the uncut timber starts. I try to focus, squinting my eyes until I spot the blue and black Stellar’s jay hopping along a fallen log.

  Gradually, a deep chill sets in, the kind you only get from sitting on cold ground for a long time without moving. The wind blows harder, trees sway and thrash, and yet we see no sign of deer. They should be here, seeking fuel to keep warm, or moving through ahead of the lunatic crowds. At some point, a lone doe steps cautiously out of the forest and picks her way through the slash. My pulse quickens. We watch for the buck who’s surely following until it’s apparent she’s traveling alone. My excitement fades, and with it, the last of my warmth.

  Rigor mortis sets in. When I try to stand up, my knees can barely unfold to climb the hillside and my lower back tingles as though any sudden movement might trigger a blowout. In this ossified state, slipping and crashing our way back to the truck, we stumble upon a big three-pointer bedded down behind a root wad. It leaps to its feet, looks directly at us, and calmly angles away through the brush. I’m so surprised, I never even unsling my rifle.

  The buck reappears in a small clearing about 300 yards downslope, looks back over its shoulder, then slowly browses its way out of sight again. We hold still for a few moments, and without speaking, start working our way down. There are tracks in the loose dirt where he last appeared; calm, evenly spaced hoofprints, headed toward the creek bottom. We follow with as much stealth as we can muster, which means only a few dozen loudly snapped twigs and the occasional hissing call of “Hey, you see anything over there?”

  But now, with prey nearby, I’m hunting, my senses taken over by a strange, heightened awareness of surroundings, sparked, perhaps, by latent predator instincts. I can smell wet moss growing on rocks along the stream. A pair of silver salmon spawning in a shallow tailout catches my attention. The bright, ruffled edge of a hidden chanterelle peeks out from under deer-trampled sword ferns. Half a hoofprint, barely visible, appears clearly to me in a muddy seam between rocks. When the wind shifts, I catch myself inhaling deeply, searching for a scent of prey with an olfactory sense no longer sharp enough to do the job.

  My old friend Andy Landforce, renowned Oregon steelhead guide and a man more in touch with the natural world than any I’ve known, would track this deer until he caught up with it. When I was a kid, I followed Andy into the woods and watched him slowly, methodically chase down a buck, my skepticism shot down by the sharp crack of his rifle at the end of the stalk. I know it’s possible. But not for us, not here. We stay with the tracks until they meander into impenetrable reprod, and unable to follow, we reluctantly give up the chase. This deer, at least today, has reached safe haven.

  It’s a long hike back. Uphill, rough, and no longer eased by the rush of adrenaline we had on the way down. By the time we reach the truck, I am sweat-soaked and chilled from the cold wind. “Man, that was a good hunt,” Sweeney says, then adds, “but I guess you can’t eat good hunting.” We laugh. It feels good to climb into the truck and sit down. It feels even better when the engine warms up enough to turn on the heat. Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be this year. Going out on the last day expecting to bring home a buck is a sure sign of either optimism or ignorance. And I think we’ve already established what kind of optimist I am.

  The back way off the mountain is more a random collection of gaps between trees, monster potholes, and washboard turns than road. Around a sharp, descending bend, a clogged culvert overflowed during the last big rain, creating a nearly impassable washout. The road’s too narrow to turn the truck around, so I walk ahead to guide Sweeney as he picks his way through the gullies and rubble. When our path resembles something close to a road again, I climb back in, and we rattle and bounce downhill through grainy, failing light. It’s getting dark early these days.

  Heat blasts from under the dashboard now, warming my feet and lulling me into a drowsy half sleep. We’re already making plans for next year. We’ll hunt together from Opening Day, really make a season of it. I wipe condensation off the side window and glance down an old, overgrown spur road. There’s a nice forked-horn standing at the far end, head down, feeding on grass growing through the gravel. Maybe the season isn’t over yet. “Did you see that?” I ask. “Yeah,” Sweeney says, “but if I stop the truck, he’ll take off.”

  “Okay,” I say, “just keep going slow.” Another 100 yards down the road, I grab the rifle, slide the door open and quietly roll out onto the muddy road. For some reason, “Ride of the Valkyries” thunders in my head. Sweeney keeps driving. Knowing the buck won’t want to move toward the main road where the truck just passed, my plan is to drop below the road, work my way back toward the spur, and come up right where he was feeding.

  Great plan. Only the hill below the road is a little steeper and the brush a lot thicker than it looked from up above. I step down into a mass of head-high salmonberry, trip over something and slide about thirty feet with thorns and branches tearing at me the whole way. On the upside, it’s a relatively quiet fall. And I end up about where I wanted. So far, so good.

  I regain my footing and attempt to bust brush silently back toward the spur road. It’s not easy. I take one step, bend branches and pull vines off my clothes, then another. Somehow, no twigs snap, and I remain vertical. But the pace is agonizingly slow, and it’s tough to quell the urge to hurry, to get there before the deer wanders away on its own. One step…pull blackberry thorns out of my neck…another step…pull blackberry thorns off my leg…

  When I finally reach the base of the spur road, I pause to catch my breath and plot the quietest path up the steep slope. There isn’t any kind of trail, but I can see a slight opening in the salal to my left, then a fern-covered clearing leading to a huge, rotten cedar log that angles up toward the road. From there, I should be able to see the deer.

  I make it through the salal and shuffle up through the ferns. At the downhill end of the log, I lie on my belly and start a weak imitation of the Marine Corp training crawl, elbows in the mud and my rifle held up in front of me. When I reach the top end – the last of my cover – I roll onto my side to get some circulation back into my arms and calm myself.

  I flick off the safety and come up over the end of the log, already raising the gun to my shoulder, and…he’s gone. I scan the brush and dark hillside in every direction, already knowing I’m too late. There’s a hollow feeling inside my chest where just moments before my heart was hammering. Was he really even there, or did I imagine the whole thing? I walk out to the main road in the murky light of late-autumn dusk.

  Sweeney’s waiting a quarter mile down. I get into the truck, and he starts for home. There’s not much to say. The season is over.

  The Sweeney house is filled with the delicious scent of slow-cooking venison. Mia has a magnificent pot roast from Sweeney’s Opening Day deer just coming out of the oven, and I gratefully sit down to dinner. Maren and Laine talk about school and friends and basketball. Mia fills Sweeney in on the day’s events. And I consume three helpings of succulent pot roast, mashing my potatoes into the braising liquid and cutting tender carrots with my fork.

  “Why don’t you take some of this deer home with you,” Sweeney says. “We have plenty, really.” I have to force myself to politely refuse. “Nah,” I say, “you need the meat, keep it, we’re good. Thanks, though.” Looking relieved, he excuses himself and goes outside to unload the truck. I have another helping of pot roast.

  On my drive home, I am haunted by the image of the buck standing there on the spur road. Next year, I tell myself. Next year.

  It’s late whe
n I pull into our driveway. I’m so tired, I sit for a long moment, not moving, listening to the tick-tick of cooling engine metal. I reach into the backseat to grab my gear, and hidden under my jacket I find a stack of packages neatly wrapped in butcher paper. I switch the dome light on and read the labels written in Sweeney’s hand: Roast. Shoulder steaks. Sausage. Stew meat. Backstrap…

  Inside, Stacy is curled up on the couch by the woodstove, deeply immersed in the latest composting literature. “Well?” she says, looking up, “how was it? Did you bring home the bacon?” I’m not quite sure how to answer.

  THE SIGNIFICANCE OF BIRDS III

  Running the boat home from fishing up north, I spot a single white egret hunting through high-tide marsh grass along the shore. I cut the motor and drift, the silence echoing through calm evening air. The bird stands motionless, watching the water, then slowly lifts a foot and takes a cautious, halting step, illuminated by warm light. My San Francisco grandpa – the quiet, dignified man who fed my early obsession with fishing trips to Fort Point Pier and visits to Steinhart Aquarium – is checking in.

  It’s another of my mom’s beliefs, formed by the sight of countless snowy egrets lining the road of her father’s funeral procession. Perhaps it wasn’t so unusual to see these birds along the Marin shoreline that day, and yet I have found comfort in the presence of egrets ever since. There is something in the egret’s serene, almost ethereal presence that eases my natural skepticism.

  My grandfather was an artist; a forager of spring fiddleheads and forest mushrooms; a poet who wrote a single, perfect haiku for every day he was held in the relocation camps. The day he was taken from his young family to another, distant prison camp, he wrote these words about his daughter, my mother:

  I’m leaving/But the suntanned child/Doesn’t know.

  The last time I saw him, I was still a young boy. He was fading then and, I’m sure, aware that the end was near. I sat next to him in the darkened living room, the air scented with camphor and green tea, as we went through the treasured box of arrowheads and spear points he was leaving me. They were artifacts he’d found 35 years earlier while pacing back and forth behind the camp fence in Bismarck, North Dakota; a connection to the original foragers. I remember from that day, a small cowlick had sprung free from the back of his neatly slicked-down hair, a plume; feathery, white, ethereal. His transformation had already begun.

  FIREWOOD III: PROCUREMENT

  Windfall: An unexpected, unearned, or sudden gift, gain, or advantage.

  “There’s a madrona down on Lovgren,” Stacy says, coming in the door after dropping Skyla off at school. I’m at the kitchen counter, blearily eating breakfast, trying to wake up. I’m only half paying attention, absorbed in thoughts of my full day ahead. There’s a rapidly approaching work deadline, a phone conference at eleven o’clock, and I’m considering putting the boat in the water to fish the afternoon tide.

  “There’s a madrona down, and it’s a big one,” Stacy repeats, nearly shouting. Suddenly I remember hearing wind in the trees last night. Now it’s starting to make sense. A big madrona? I gulp down the last of my cereal, throw the saws and cutting gear into the car, and hit the road. Along the way, I call to postpone my phone conference and try to calculate if I can still make my Friday work deadline. There’s no way I’m passing up a madrona. I press down on the gas pedal, tormented by visions of wood poachers from all over the Island converging on “my” tree like iron filings to a magnet.

  The tree is indeed a big madrona, lying across the road in a tangle of broken branches and leafy twigs. Better yet, it has fallen from an empty lot (no homeowners to deal with), and there’s nobody else here yet. I can hardly believe my good fortune. Of course, there’s the small matter of a severed power line dangling in its branches, but you can’t get bogged down in details on the brink of a major score. There’s a guy from the power company working from a cherry picker down the road. He says go ahead, they’ve already cut the electricity, but be careful around the wire anyway.

  I duck through the smaller branches to mark the beefy lower limbs and telephone pole-thick trunk in 16-inch lengths with my marker stick and pruning saw. Then I fire up the big saw, a battlescarred Stihl 36 with a brand-new 24-inch Oregon bar, and step in to start cutting. I remind myself to stay clear of the power line, and then decide I really ought to stand back and take a closer look at the whole tree. As my dad likes to say, hurrying only makes bad things happen faster. I need to slow down, check all the angles, and see where the pressure lies on the trunk. Almost every downed tree, no matter how straight it looks, is somehow sprung in one direction or another. Last thing I want to do is get the saw stuck in a pinching cut or get knocked on my ass by a sudden release of tension.

  As I’m standing there with the saw idling in my hand, the first vulture arrives in a beater Ford pickup. “Hey,” he calls over the rattling saw, trying to sound official, “This isn’t your property, is it?” “No,” I say, thinking, Too late, sucker. Nice try. But he’s not giving up. “Well…is this your tree?” he asks, still attempting to bluff me out of the picture. “It is now,” I say and turn to start cutting.

  Two hours later I’m still cutting sections off the main trunk, and there’s a nice stack of 16-inch rounds piling up behind the car. Another truck pulls up. It’s the Big Lebowski, right down to the ratty bathrobe and scraggly beard. “Nice tree,” he shouts, standing in front of me, slurping the remains of whatever’s in his coffee cup – White Russian, no doubt – off his mustache. “That your wood stacked on the road?” he shouts. I shut down the saw and flip up my safety visor. “No,” I say, “I was just cutting it up so you could fit it in your stove easier.” He lowers his sunglasses and glares at me with bloodshot eyes for a long moment. Uh-oh. Might have bitten off more than I can chew. “Ha!” he says at last, slapping my shoulder with his knuckles, “Good one, bro.” Then he shambles back to the truck and drives away in a cloud of diesel exhaust. The Dude abides.

  That’s how it is this time of year. The jet stream, recharged by our cooling northern hemisphere, drives brawling storms in from the Pacific. The storms topple trees, and you have to be prepared to drop everything and get there quick if you want to take advantage.

  Anyone who lives in a house surrounded by trees has a love-hate relationship with these autumn winds. We depend on the big blows for our firewood supply, but they also mean extended power outages (power goes out on the Island whenever someone sneezes, goes the old joke) and sometimes sheer terror.

  A month after Weston was born, a ferocious “100-year” storm tore through the Northwest. Our house was still under construction, so we – a newborn baby, a mother recovering from emergency C-section, a restless three-year-old girl, a crazed 20-year-old cat that howled every night, and me – were living in the small outbuilding that now serves as my office. At dusk, the wind started out of the south, like water rushing over rocks – a soft but rising white noise. In a matter of hours, the air accelerating through tree branches had taken on the ominous rumble of a waterfall. Small branches snapped and crashed against the roof. By midnight, we were engulfed in the deafening roar of a 747 powering off the runway.

  Weston slept through it all, perhaps an early indication of his future talent. Skyla stirred but never fully woke. Stacy, in a haze of Percocet and postpartum hormones, tossed and turned, waking once to groggily ask, “Are we going downstream?” The old cat and I stayed up, howling through the night. At least one of us was terrified. With each big gust, I would hear the crack and pop of splintering wood nearby and hold my breath, waiting for the ground-shaking impact of massive trees crashing to earth. At first, I worried for our almost-finished new house, then the building we were in, and finally, after a particularly close call, us. I considered loading up the family and hauling ass for open ground, but it occurred to me that in most stories I’d read about people killed by falling trees, the victims were in their car. Clinging to that dubious logic, I sweated it out through the night, fear burning in my g
uts.

  Meanwhile, in some part of my brain entirely detached from reality, there was a growing joy – giddiness even – over all the wood that would surely be mine if we could make it through the night. Of course, we survived. Trees crashed down on houses throughout the neighborhood, but thankfully nobody was hurt. And in the week that followed, I cut enough prime wood to last nearly two years. Windfall.

  So I spend a good portion of every fall hoping for wind but dreading it at the same time. Last night was perfect: no property damage, no power outage, no fear. And now, this sweet madrona. I stuff my old Montero with heavy rounds until the springs bottom out, then make a quick trip to unload, worrying the whole time that someone might grab the rest of my pile while I’m gone. Two more trips and I’m done, my treasure safely stacked on pallets at the bottom of the driveway next to the big fir I scored last week. Did I mention I love madrona? If I can get to the rounds while they’re still green, they’ll split easily and – who knows – might even dry enough to burn by the time it gets cold winter after next. Do we have enough? I doubt it. We could use a little more wind. But not too much.

  ANOTHER WORLD

  My only brother’s first child was born two weeks ago, on Halloween. It’s reason for celebration, and reason enough to pull me from the insulated comfort of Island life into the real world: Brooklyn, New York. Might as well be another planet. Which makes sense, since my brother, after surviving a childhood tortured by my fish obsession – including countless long, rainy days spent waiting in the car with our mom while I fished – sought a different kind of life as soon as he was able. A successful artist and fully committed New Yorker, my “little” brother is all grown up, comfortably at home in a world I can barely comprehend. And now he’s a father. It’s been a long time since we’ve hung out together, and there couldn’t be a better reason. I think I’m up for it.