The Wrath of Angels

3





They would never even have found the airplane had it not been for the deer; the deer, and the worst shot of Paul Scollay’s life.

As a bow hunter, Scollay had few equals. Harlan Vetters had never known a man like him. Even as a boy, he’d had a way with a bow, and with a little proper training Harlan believed that Paul could even have been an Olympic contender. He was a natural with the weapon, the bow becoming an extension of his arm, of himself. His accuracy wasn’t merely a matter of pride to him. Although he loved hunting, he never killed anything that he couldn’t eat, and he aimed to despatch his prey with the very minimum of pain. Harlan felt the same way, and for that reason he had always preferred a good rifle with which to hunt; he didn’t trust himself with a bow. During archery hunting season in October he preferred to accompany his friend as a spectator, admiring his skill without ever feeling the need to participate.

But as Paul grew older, he came to prefer the rifle to the bow. He had arthritis in his right shoulder, and in a half dozen other places too. Paul used to say that the only major part of his body in which he didn’t have arthritis was the one place where he would have appreciated a little more stiffness, if the good Lord could have seen His way to answering that kind of prayer. Which, in Paul’s experience, He never did, the good Lord apparently having better things with which to occupy Himself than male erectile dysfunction.

So Paul was the better shot with a bow, and Harlan the superior hunter with a rifle. In the years that followed, Harlan would muse upon the likelihood that, had it been he who took the first shot at the deer, none of this business, for good or bad, would have happened.

But then they had always seemed opposites in so many ways, these two men. Harlan was softly spoken where his friend was loud, dry where he was obvious, driven and conscientious where Paul often seemed aimless and unfocused.

Harlan was thin and wiry, a fact that had sometimes led drunks and fools to underestimate his strength, even though only a strong man could have carried a grief-stricken boy for miles across rough, snow-covered ground without stumble or complaint, even in his seventies. Paul Scollay was softer and fatter, but it was padding over muscle, and he was fast for a big man. Those who did not know them well had them pegged for an odd couple, two men whose diverse personalities and appearances allowed them to form a single whole, like two matching pieces of a jigsaw. Their relationship was much more complex than that, and their similarities were more pronounced than their differences, as is always the case with men who maintain lifelong friendships with each other, rarely allowing a harsh word to pass between them, and always forgiving any that do. They shared a common outlook on the world, a similar view of their fellow man and their obligations toward him. When Harlan Vetters carried Barney Shore home on his back, the beams of flashlights and the raised voices guiding him at the last to the main search party, he did so with the ghost of his friend walking by his side, an unseen presence that watched over the boy and the old man, and perhaps kept the girl in the woods at bay.

For after Barney Shore had spoken of her, Harlan had become aware of movement in the trees to his right, a roving darkness obscured by the falling snow, as though the mere mention of her existence had somehow drawn the girl to them. He had chosen not to look, though; he feared that was what the girl wanted, because if he looked he might stumble, and if he stumbled he might break, and if he broke then she would fall upon them both, boy and man, and they would be lost to her. It was then that he called upon his old friend, and he could not have said if Paul had truly come to him or if Harlan had simply created the illusion of his presence as a source of comfort and discipline. All he knew was that a kind of solace came over him, and whatever was shadowing them in the forest had retreated with what might have been a disappointed hiss or just the sound of a branch surrendering its weight of snow, until at last it was gone from them entirely.

And as he lay on his deathbed, Harlan wondered if the girl had remembered him, if she had recalled him from that first day, the day of the deer, the day of the airplane . . .

They had started late. Harlan’s truck had been acting up, and Paul’s was in the shop. They’d almost not headed out at all, but it was beautiful weather and they had already made their preparations: their clothing – their checked Woolrich jackets, their wool pants from Reny’s, and their ‘union suits’, the one-piece garments of underwear that would keep them warm, even when wet – had been stored overnight in sealed bags of cedar to mask their human scent, and they had eschewed bacon and sausage patties in favor of oatmeal for breakfast. They had food in sealed containers, and each carried a bottle in which to pee as well as a flask from which to drink. (‘Don’t want to go getting those two mixed up,’ Paul would always say, and Harlan would laugh dutifully.)

So they had pleaded like children for Harlan’s daughter to allow them to use her car, and she had eventually relented. She had recently returned to live with her parents following the break-up of her marriage, and spent most of her time mooning around the house, as far as Paul could tell. He had always considered her to be a good kid, though, and thought her an even better one after she handed over her car keys to them.

It was already after three when they parked the car and entered the woods.

They spent the first hour or so just jawing and giving each other the pickle, heading for some old clearcut that they knew which now had second growth timbers beloved of deer: alders, birches, and ‘popples’, as men of their age tended to call poplar trees. They each carried a Winchester 30-06, and moved softly on their rubber-soled LL Bean boots. Harlan had a compass, but he barely glanced at it. They knew where they were going. Paul carried matches, a rope to drag the carcass, and two pairs of household gloves to wear while dressing the animal and to protect against ticks. Harlan had the knives and shears in his pack.

Harlan and Paul practiced what was known as ‘still hunting’: not for them the use of stands, or canoes, or groups of men to drive the deer onto their guns. They relied solely on their eyes and their experience, seeking traces of buck sign: the rubs where the bucks were drawn to smooth-barked aromatic trees like pine and balsam and spruce; the deer beds where they lay down; and the desire lines that the deer used to traverse the shortest distance between two points in the woods, thereby conserving their energy. As it was now afternoon, they knew the deer would be moving to low ground where the cold air would drive scents down, so they walked parallel to the ridge lines, Harlan seeking trace on the ground while Paul kept an eye on the surrounding woods for movement.

After Harlan came upon red hairs caught on some blades of grass, and signs of big deer rub on a mature balsam, both men grew silent. The hunt drew on, the urgency of it growing as the light dimmed, but it was Paul who caught first sight of the deer: a big nine-point buck, probably weighing close on two hundred pounds. By the time Paul spotted him the buck’s tail was already raised high in alarm, and it was preparing to run, but it was only thirty feet away from him, if that.

Paul went for the shot, but he rushed it. He saw the deer falter and stumble as the bullet struck, and then it turned and fled.

It was such a spectacular miss that he would scarcely have believed it if he hadn’t witnessed it with his own eyes, the kind of misfire he usually associated with neophyte hunters from away who fancied themselves as wilderness men even while their fingers still bore the inkstains of their office jobs. He’d known more than one guide who’d been forced to finish off a wounded animal after his client, or ‘sport’, had failed to find the mark, the sport lacking the energy, the guts, or the decency to follow the trail of the wounded animal in order to put it out of its misery. Back in the day, they’d kept a blacklist of such sports, and guides were discreetly warned of the risks of accompanying them into the woods. Hell, Paul Scollay himself had been among those who’d been forced to track a wounded deer and finish it off, hating the suffering of the beast, the waste of its life force, and the stain that the slow manner of its dying was destined to leave upon his soul.

But now he had become just such a man, and as he watched the agonized buck vanish into the dark woods, he could barely speak.

‘Jesus,’ he said at last. ‘What the hell was that?’

‘Ham shot,’ said Harlan. ‘Can’t be sure, but he could go far.’

Paul looked from the rifle to his fingertips and back again, hoping that the blame for what had transpired might be found in damage to the sights, or a visible weakness in his own hand. There was nothing to be seen, and later he would often wonder if that was the sign, the moment when his body began to fail, when the process of contamination and ruination commenced, as though the cancer had sprung into being in the seconds between squeezing the trigger and firing the bullet, and the error had been caused by his body spasming minutely in sudden awareness of the first cell being turned against itself.

But all that came later: for now, all Harlan and Paul knew for sure was that they had caused a mortal injury to an animal, and they had a duty to end its suffering. A pall had been cast over the day, and Harlan wondered how long it would be before Paul went hunting again. Not that season, certainly. It wasn’t in Paul’s nature to return to the woods and prove that the miss had been a one-off. No, he would brood over it, and consider his gun, and practice some on the range at the back of his house. Only when he had racked up bull after bull would he consider aiming once again at a living animal.

The buck left a clear trail for them to follow, dark red blood and panic excrement splashed on bushes and leaves. They moved as fast as they could, but both were older men now, and the pace quickly wore on them. The buck, disoriented and in agony, was not cleaving to any known trail, and it seemed to be making no attempt to cut behind them to familiar ground. Their progress slowed. Soon they were bathed in sweat, and a low branch gave Harlan a bad scratch to his left cheek that bled into the collar of his shirt. It would need stitches, but Paul pulled a couple of adhesive strips from the first aid pack to hold the cut together, and eventually it began to clot and the bleeding stopped, although the pain made Harlan’s eyes water, and he thought that there might be a splinter buried in the wound.

The woods grew darker, the branches meeting above their heads to cut off the sunlight. And then the clouds came, and what little light there had been was suddenly obscured, and the air grew colder around them, all warmth now gone so quickly that Harlan could feel the sweat cooling upon him. He examined his compass. It told them that they were moving west, but the last known position of the sun gave the lie to it, and when he tapped it again the needle shifted position, and west became east, and after that the needle didn’t spin exactly, not like it did in those fantasy films that they showed at the movie theaters in summer, but it refused to remain fixed.

‘You keep that with your knife?’ asked Paul. A knife could throw off the magnetism of a compass.

‘No, I never do.’ As if he’d make that kind of amateur error.

‘Well, something’s up with it.’

‘Ayuh.’

Harlan and Paul knew that they were heading north, though. Neither of them suggested that they should turn back and leave the buck to its fate, not even as the day died, and the foliage became denser, the trees older, the light dimmer. Soon it was dark, and they resorted to flashlights to guide them, but they did not give up on the animal. The blood was not drying out, which meant the injury was fatal, and the buck was still suffering.

They would not leave it to die in pain.

Ernie Scollay interrupted the tale.

‘That was my brother’s way,’ he said. ‘Harlan’s too,’ he added, although it was clear that his focus was on his late brother. ‘They weren’t going to give up on the buck. They weren’t cruel men. You have to understand that. Do you hunt?’

‘No,’ I said, and I watched as he tried to hide a kind of smugness, as though I had confirmed a suspicion he had of me and of my innate city softness. Then it was my turn to add something – ‘Not animals.’ – and maybe it was petty, but there was some small pleasure to be derived from watching his expression change.

‘Anyhow,’ he continued, ‘my brother never wanted to see a living thing suffer, animal or human.’ He swallowed, and his voice broke on his next words. ‘Not even himself, at the end.’

Marielle reached out her right hand and placed it gently upon Ernie Scollay’s knitted fingers.

‘Ernie is right,’ she said. ‘You should know, Mr Parker, that they were both good men. I think they did the wrong thing, and their reasons for doing it weren’t wholly justified, not even to themselves, but it was uncharacteristic of them.’

I said nothing, because there was nothing to be said, and they were moving ahead of themselves. They were no longer talking about the buck, but what came after. All I would have by which to judge these two dead men was the tale itself, and that was not yet ended.

‘You were telling me about the buck,’ I said.

It was standing at the edge of a clearing, swaying on its legs, blood and froth at its mouth, the lower part of its hide soaked in red. Harlan and Paul couldn’t figure out how it had kept going for so long, yet it had barely slowed until the last mile or so, when they at last started to catch up with it, and now here it was, seemingly dying where it stood. But as they drew closer it inclined its head toward them, and then back in the direction of the clearing. The trees were so thick at either side of it that, if it had the strength to do so, it could only go on or come back in their direction, and it seemed torn between the two choices. Its eyes rolled, and it sighed deep in itself and shook its head in what Harlan thought was almost resignation.

With the life that was left to it, the buck turned and ran at them. Harlan raised his gun and blasted the animal in the chest. Its momentum took it onward even as its forelegs collapsed beneath it, and it came to rest barely inches from its killers. Harlan thought that he’d never felt worse about an animal, and he hadn’t even fired the original errant shot. The buck’s strength, its desire to survive, had been enormous. It had deserved to live, or at least to die a better death. He looked to his friend, and saw that his eyes were wet.

‘It came right at us,’ said Harlan.

‘But it wasn’t charging us,’ said Paul. ‘I think it was trying to run away.’

‘From what?’ asked Harland. After all, what could be worse than the men who were trying to kill it?

‘I don’t know,’ said Paul, ‘but it’s the damnedest thing.’

‘The damnedest thing,’ agreed Harlan.

But it wasn’t the damnedest thing.

It wasn’t at all.