High Hunt. David Eddings

and telling lies.

      I guess it was Jack who raised the whole damned thing. He was talking about some broad he’d laid while he was on his way down to Willapa Bay to hunt geese.

      “… anyhow,” he was saying, “I went on down to Willapa—got there about four thirty or five—and put out my dekes. Colder’n a bastard, and me still about half blind with alcohol. About five thirty the geese came in—only by then my drunk had worn off, and my head felt like a goddamn balloon. Man, you want to see an act of raw courage? Just watch some poor bastard with a screamin’ hangover touch off a 12 gauge with three-inch magnum shells at a high-flyin’ goose. Man, I still hurt when I think about it.”

      “Get any geese?” I asked.

      “Filled out before seven,” he said. “Even filled on mallards before I started back—a real carnage. I picked up my dekes, chucked all the birds in the trunk, and headed on back up the pike. I hauled off the road in Chehalis again and went into the same bar to get well. Damned if she wasn’t right there on the first stool again.”

      And that started the hunting stories. Have you ever noticed how when a bunch of guys are sitting around, the stories kind of run in cycles? First the drinking stories—“Boy did we get plastered”—then the war stories—“Funny thing happened when I was in the Army”—and then the hunting stories, or the dog stories, or the snake stories. It’s almost like a ritual, but very relaxed. Nobody’s trying to outdo anybody else. It’s just sort of easy and enjoyable. Even McKlearey and Jack called a truce on the eyeball business.

      I guess maybe the fire had something to do with it. You get a bunch of guys around an open fire at night, and nine times out of ten they’ll get around to talking about hunting sooner or later. It’s almost inevitable. It’s funny some anthropologist hasn’t noticed it and made a big thing out of it.

      We all sifted back through our memories, lifting out the things we’d done or stories we’d heard from others. We hunted pheasant and quail, ducks and geese, rabbits and squirrels, deer and bear, elk and mountain lions. We talked guns and ammunition, equipment, camping techniques—all of it. A kind of excitement—an urge, if you want to call it that—began to build up. The faint, barely remembered smells of the woods and of gun-oil came back with a sharpness that was almost real. Unconsciously, we all pulled our chairs in closer to the fire, tightening the circle. It was a warm night, so it wasn’t that we needed the heat of the fire.

      “You know,” Jack was saying, “it’s a damn shame there’s no season open right now. We could have a real ball huntin’ together—just the bunch of us.”

      “Too goddamn hot,” Lou said, pouring himself another beer.

      “Not up in the mountains, it’s not,” Mike said.

      “When does deer season open?” Sloane asked.

      “Middle of October,” Jack said. “Of course we could go after bear. They’re predators on this side of the mountains, and the season’s always open.”

      “Stick that bear hunting in your ear,” Mike said. “First you’ve got to have dogs; and second, you never know when one of those big hairy bastards is gonna come out of the brush at about ten feet. You got time for about one shot before he’s chewin’ on your head and scatterin’ your bowels around like so much confetti.”

      “Yuk!” Sloane gagged. “There’s a graphic picture for you.”

      “No shit, man,” Mike said. “I won’t go anywhere near a goddamn bear. I shot one just once. Never again. I had an old .303 British—ten shots, and it took every goddamn one of them. That son of a bitch just kept comin’. Soaked up lead like a blotter. The guys that hunt those babies all carry .44 magnum pistols for close work.”

      “Hell, man,” McKlearey said, “you can stop a tank with a .44 mag.”

      Mike looked at him. “One guy I talked to jumped a bear once and hit him twice in the chest with a .300 Weatherbee and then went to the pistol. Hit him four times at point-blank range with a .44 mag before he went down. Just literally blew him to pieces, and the damned bear was still trying to get at him. I talked to the guy three years later, and his hands were still shakin’. No bears for this little black duck!”

      “Would a .45 stop one?” I asked.

      “Naw, the military bullet’s got a hard jacket,” Mike said. “Just goes right through.”

      “No, I mean the long Colt. It’s a 250-grain soft lead bullet.”

      “That oughta do it,” Jack said. “Just carryin’ the weight would slow him down enough for a guy to make a run for it.”

      “I’ve got an old Colt frontier-style stored with my clothes and books in Seattle,” I said, leaning over and refilling my beer mug.

      “No kiddin’?” Jack said. “What the hell did you get a cannon like that for?”

      “Guy I knew needed money. I lent him twenty, and he gave me the gun as security—never saw him again. The gun may be hot for all I know.”

      “Ah-ha!” Sloane said. “Pawnbroking without a license!” He giggled.

      “It’s got a holster and belt—the whole bit,” I said. “I’m going to have to pick up all that junk anyway. I’ll bring it on down.”

      “I’d like to see it,” Jack said, “and Sloane here knows about guns—he takes in a lot of them in pawn—he ought to be able to tell you what it’s worth.”

      “Sure,” Sloane said, “bring it in. Maybe we can dicker.”

      “Hey!” Mike shouted suddenly. “Shut up, you guys. I just thought of something.” He leaned forward, his slightly round face suddenly excited. “How about the High Hunt?”

      “Are you kiddin’?” Jack demanded. “You really want to try the ‘Great White Hunter’ bit?”

      “What the goddamn hell is the High Hunt?” McKlearey demanded harshly.

      “Early high Cascade Mountains deer season,” Mike said, his eyes gleaming in the firelight.

      “—In some of the roughest, emptiest, steepest, highest country in the whole fuckin’ world,” Jack finished for him.

      “It’s not that bad,” Mike said.

      “Aw, bullshit!” Jack snorted. “The damned boundaries start right where the roads all end. And do you know why the roads end there? Because there’s not a fuckin’ thing back up in there, that’s why. Man, most of that country’s above the timberline.”

      “All alpine meadow,” Mike said almost dreamily. “It gets snowed in so early that nobody ever got a chance to hunt it before they opened this special season. Some of the biggest deer in the state are up there. One guy got a nine-pointer that when four hundred pounds.”

      “Eastern count, I’ll bet,” Jack said.

      “Eastern count my ass. Full Western count—the number of points on the smallest side not counting brow tines. Eastern count would have gone twenty—maybe twenty-one points. That was one helluva big deer.”

      “And the guy got a hernia gettin’ it out of the woods.” Sloane giggled.

      “No—hell, they had horses.”

      “… and guides,” Sloane went on, “and a wrangler, and a camp cook, and a bartender. Probably didn’t cost more than a thousand a week for two guys.”

      “It’s not all that much,” Mike said tentatively. “I know a guy—a rancher—who’ll take out a fair-sized party real reasonable. You could get by for fifty bucks apiece for a week—ten days. Food extra, of course. He’s tryin’ to get into the business, so he’s keepin’ his rates down for the first couple years.” Mike’s voice was serious; he wasn’t just talking. He was actually proposing it to us as a real possibility. His face had a kind of hunger