TRACKS
The Original Essay, Written in 1993
It was one of those early November days when winter is a certainty yet the memory of summer still
clings in warm fall golds to the Aspens and willows bunched in bright clumps on the hillsides and in the hollows. The first snows had whitened Idaho's majestic mountains, driving the big bucks down from their summer haunts in the rugged, windswept high country. The land and sky were brilliant and deer season was at its peak. It was the best time of the year.
It was, in fact, the closing day of deer season. The snow reached just to the bottom of my knees as my son, Beau, and I set out to hunt one of our favorite mountain haunts, 21 miles from home. The hard crusted snow made it an effort for me to lift my foot out of the hole that I broke with every step. As I struggled uphill behind Beau, my legs trembling with the strain, my breath ragged, I envied the ease with which he climbed the hill; I became aware that the snow only came to mid-calf on his long, strong legs. Stepping in the tracks he made was much easier than making my own, even though I had to lengthen my stride to match his prints. I slithered and floundered along behind him as best I could, trying to be quiet and keep snow out of my gun-barrel.
Now and then Beau would turn, eyes filled with the tolerant pity I had begun to notice in his regard of me, and lend a hand to drag me over some log. As his red vest rose and fell before me, my mind slid away to another day, very much like this one, a decade ago—many footsteps ago—though it doesn't seem it could be so long a time.
The snow wasn't quite so deep that day, the country not so high nor steep, but to the little blond
five-year-old boy, struggling along in his mother's determined tracks, the world must have appeared an endless succession of cold, white, kid-swallowing drifts. I vividly recall his noisy
progress, exasperatingly slow in step but loud in vocal protest when he fell too far behind. As I heard yet another fleet, flown stag crash away unseen through the timber I thought, "I will never get a deer. I will never even see a deer!" I knew there was nothing louder in all the wild woods than the crunch of those little Buster Brown encased feet on a brittle, brown Balsam plant. Beau's noisy presence was so distracting that more than once I caused a well-concealed whitetail to break cover at the sound of my own scolding voice!
How small Beau was that day—that year! How many miles I either bullied him or carried him along. How tireless my legs and arms seemed to be such a short time ago! How many tracks we made down those fall-clad hillsides in a season when I never counted the seasons ahead or behind or thought of the tracks we were making through time. In those days I watched only for the flash of
quicksilver in the sunlight, a fresh track in the snow or damp earth, and I wanted nothing more—or less—than the glory of a successful hunt and a prized buck for the winter larder.
As it turned out, I shot first buck in Idaho the year that school became more of a priority for Beau than mid-week deer hunting trips with mom. That was the turning point in time for me; no longer burdened with my small, complaining shadow—like a cat-bell hung around my neck—I began to fill one or another of my tags every fall. The seasons blurred together into memory of yellow leaves and an uncountable succession of tracks: lone, single tracks down the snow-dusted, fall-swept Idaho hillsides. As the years passed, I found my enthusiasm for the fall season had shifted and my imperative drive to bring home a dead deer, shot by me alone, had changed into a contentment with contemplative, musing treks through the Autumn wildlands. My trail of tracks covered less ground, strayed less frequently into rough, steep, or unknown territory, and reflected a much more sedate pace.
My fall shadow, who once struggled in my tracks, grew sturdy and tall. The marks we had scratched on the kitchen doorway, pencil tracks tracing Beau's trail from small boy to young man, passed up all of our own marks, one by one. The advent of High School brought football, Driver's Ed—heaven help us—Hunter's Ed, and back into my fall hunting excursions, another set of tracks.
So it was that I came to be struggling along in Beau's long, deep tracks, up a perpendicular mountainside, through giant snowdrifts, over monster ponderosa deadfalls; panting, moaning, and amazed. Yes, amazed, at the height of his square shoulders, at the tireless pace he set; amazed at the shift of the set and sequence of our tracks through the snow, not just that day or any particular day, but over and through the years.
The hillsides remain the same. The same scattered gold of the Aspen breaks, the same first caress of winter white, the same sharp sting of piney cold, the same fresh hoofprint in the trail; the same quicksilver flash in the trees. But our tracks, my son's and mine, have changed, and changed again, and will change again, at least a few more times before winter sweeps down to fill them in so smooth and white that no one will know we ever passed a season here.
A Hunter's Tale
A year 2000 response to “Tracks”
There was a voice crying in the wilderness and it was mine. The wilderness was the vast writing landscape where writers journey; yet for a long, long, long time the portion of this place I frequented was devoid of human response. My writing was not audible.
Then, one day I went hunting with my son, Beau. I had never done this before. In the past,
Beau went hunting with me. Once, in faded frames of fall, we hunted down snow-deep hillsides, back up which I had to bully and drag his complaining, small, self. Then his legs were too short, and he was too inconsequential in the wilderness to be anything other than resistant. Fear shaped his view of the overly-large world: fear that I would leave him and a bear would eat him; fear I wouldn't take him with me at all, and the baby sitter would eat him; fear of the unknown.
But the day Beau took me hunting, our roles changed. Beau was suddenly tall, taller than I.
Tall and broad, his vest and red plaid shirt stretched on his wide shoulders, and bobbed in front of me like a beacon in the endless white. His long legs climbed the snowy hill, seemingly unchallenged, while I panted and sweated, slithered and floundered behind him wondering if I would live through the experience. What had changed? Everything.
My perspective of how I fit in the world shifted forever and I was thunderstruck. Neither Beau nor I got a deer that day, but death hovered in my heart like an arrow. It was not the hunted that died on that fall-draped hillside but the hunter. My own mortality rolled over me like volleys from a cavalry troop. The first barrage buckled me to my knees beneath my inevitable demise; the second
volley came more as painful, single shots—horror—regret—anger—defeat—jealously—and finally, sorrow. I was dead, but it still hurt so I cried.
I railed against the unfairness. Beau was not the one who grew too fast. It was I who grew too fast. I wanted to yank back the falling curtain and scream, NO!--we haven't begun yet. But the certainty of endings kept sliding down like snow, filling in our tracks, inexorably removing even the rumor of our presence.
What I found that day was not fear, as had Beau when he saw the size of the world through his four-year-old eyes. What I saw that day was a world without me in it. It was not a place I wanted to know. I fell in love with my world again. I began to whisper love songs to this Autumn world in my prose. Perhaps if my words were sweet enough, I would be granted a stay of the inevitable. Perhaps I would look through the eyes of a four year old again and find wonder and fear. And just perhaps,
someone would listen.
Who will hear these whispers? When I am no longer there to be dragged over another log as we make our way up a perpendicular hillside, chasing an elusive hart, will Beau listen to the wind and hear my voice? Perhaps our time together will only echo in his heart. Or perhaps, as happens with our feelings toward those who age before us, he will become impatient, and then forget how it was. But he will have my stories. If the voice is sweet enough within those pages, perhaps the words will stay—with him and my grandchildren, with my friends and readers—and I will not leave after all.
The day Beau took me hunting I found my voice crying in the wilderness and I took it home. And when we passed from the mountain, the snow came down, smoothly filling in our tracks so no one ever knew we walked there.
Fishing Indian Creek
Across vast prairie a train slants away;
I hear it whistle at Indian Creek Bridge.
I cannot sleep for fish dreams,
glittering smolt like tears on a stringer.
You stepped across pools sailed with golden leaves
each rock a metronome for years clouded
over a creekflow of small wishes,
your reflection sunken like colored stones.
If I were to angle this hole alone, would Fall be mirrored there?
Or the reflection of hard blue sky unbroken by a snaking flyline?
At breakfast, you reached across this table
to open my starving fists
and place a gasping cutthroat in my left palm,
a story in my right.
Brilliant fish flutter in my throat,
slippery prey with secret voices.
When we were young, you and I collected treasures
from a crush of sand and stood at the flood’s high line
to shorecomb the wasted—by afternoon, the true nuggets
had slipped out through the gaps in the wicker creel.
Bootsoles separate each bare step from cold sand
grained from bones into a long shore where storms treat nothing kindly.
Fishermen are superstitious of their souls
if something that sings is netted.
I dip the net into the pool
but can only catch my face.
Darkfall drapes the prairie like a shawl. My voice cannot walk
Indian Creek alone, my fingers cannot rewind the unspooled line.