Deliverance (10 page)

All night the owl kept coming back to hunt from the top of the tent. I not only saw his feet when he came to us; I imagined what he was doing while he was gone, floating through the trees, seeing everything. I hunted with him as well as I could, there in my weightlessness. The woods burned in my head. Toward morning I could reach up and touch the claw without turning on the light.

          I
KEPT WAKING
, and waking again, but when I was alive for good, the screen wire of the tent-front was gray and steady. Drew was deep in his sack, his head away from me. I lay with the flashlight still in one hand, and tried to shape the day. The river ran through it, but before we got back into the current other things were possible. What I thought about mainly was that I was in a place where none — or almost none — of my daily ways of living my life would work; there was no habit I could call on. Is this freedom? I wondered.

I zipped the sleeping bag down and rolled out, holding my breath, my own heat rising from me and fading away as I crawled free, with one quick look upward through the owl-hole. I pulled on my tennis shoes and bent toward the river sound, then stood up.

It was oddly warm and still and close, and the river was running with a heavy smoke of fog that moved just a little slower than the current must have been doing, rolling down the water in huge bodiless billows from upstream. It hovered
at the bank while I watched, and overflowed, and in its silence I realized that I had been waiting for it to make a sound when it did this. I looked at my legs and they were gone, and my hands at my sides also; I stood with the fog eating me alive.

An idea came to me. I went back to my duffel bag, got out a two-piece suit of long underwear and put it on; it was almost exactly the color of the fog. My bow was backed and faced with white fiber glass, usually a disadvantage in green or brown woods but a very good thing now. I strung the bow, leaning on the live weight and resistance, took an arrow out of the bow quiver and went around behind the tents. The fog was seeping up over the canvas, swirling a little with the motion of deep water around Lewis and the others. It went back into the woods up what looked to be a long thin draw or little ravine, and I followed it, giving up my idea of waking Lewis and concentrating on being quiet. I couldn’t see far ahead, but I knew that if I stayed in the draw, all I would have to do to get back down to camp, even if the fog got worse, would be to turn around and come back down until I practically — or actually — stumbled over the tents. I concentrated on getting into some kind of relation to the woods under these conditions; I was as invisible as a tree.

At first I didn’t have any idea of really hunting. I had no firm notion of what I was doing, except walking forward carefully, away from the river and into more and more silence and blindness — for the fog was now coming up past me and thickening straight back into my face — and carrying a bow and a nocked arrow and three other arrows in one hand and fingering the bowstring with the other. It
tingled like a wire in my right-hand fingers, giving off an electric current that came from the woods and the fog and the fact that hunting and pretending to hunt had come together and I could not now tell them apart. Behind the tents, before I had got into the woods, I had figured that since I had the equipment to hunt and knew to some extent how to use it, I might as well make some show of doing what I said I had come for. All I had really wanted was to stay away a reasonable length of time, long enough for the others to wake and find me gone — I thought of just sitting down on the bank of the ravine and waiting for half an hour by my watch — and then walk back into camp with my bow strung and say I’d been out taking a look around. That would satisfy honor.

But now not; not quite. I was really looking and really listening, and a good many things came together in my legs and arms and fingers. I was a good shot, at least up to thirty-five yards, and the visibility I had was not going to be anything like that in the next half hour. I could do it, if I came on a deer; I felt certain I could, and would.

The fog was still heavy, but the draw-bottom began to climb, and as I went upward there was more light, first light through the fog and then things through the fog — leaves and twigs. The walls of the ditch — which I now saw was what I was in — were not as high now, barely to my shoulders, and I could see levelly along the ground into the woods a little way on both sides. Nothing moved, and there was also the quiet of nothing being there, though I did my best not to make a sound in case there was. The wet ground helped me; as far as I could tell I caused very little sound
to come into the place, and thought perhaps that technically I didn’t make such a bad hunter after all, at least for a little while.

Now I was walking up what was hardly more than a sunken track, caved in on both sides, with the last rags of mist around me. I knew I had better not go much farther or I might lose the ditch. I stopped to turn around. There was nothing in any direction I hadn’t already seen.

I started back, still looking as far off as I could into the woods rising slowly up to eye level right and left. The mist began to roll into my face in thin puffs. I was beginning to worry about walking right off past the tents into the river when to the left I saw something move. I stopped, and the fog rose exactly to my teeth. About fifteen yards from me, right at the limit of my vision, was a small deer, a spike buck as nearly as I could tell from the shape of his head. He was browsing, the ghost of a deer but a deer just the same. He lifted his head and looked directly at my face, which from his angle must have seemed like a curious stone on the ground, if he saw it. I stood there, buried to the neck in the ditch, in the floor of the forest.

He was broadside to me; I had shot a thousand targets one-quarter his size at the same distance, and when I recalled this — when my eyes and hands got together on it — I knew I could kill him just as easily as I could hit his outline on cardboard. I raised the bow.

He brought his head a little higher and lowered it again. I pulled the string back to the right side of my face and began to steady down. For a moment I braced there at the fullest tension of the bow, which brought out of me and into the bow about three fourths of my own strength, with
the arrow pointing directly into his heart. It was a slight upshot, and I allowed for this, though at the range it wouldn’t matter much.

I let go, but as I released I knew it was a wrong shot, not very wrong but wrong enough. I had done the same thing on key shots in archery tournaments: lifted my bow hand just as the shot went. At the sound of the bowstring the deer jumped and wheeled at about the time the arrow should have gone through him. I thought I might have hit him high, but actually I had seen the orange feathers flick and disappear over his shoulder. I may even have touched him, but I was fairly sure I had not drawn blood. He ran a few steps and turned, looking back around his side at me. I jerked loose another arrow and strung it, but my heart was gone. I was shaking, and I had trouble getting the arrow nocked. I had it only about halfway back when he took off for good. I turned loose anyway and saw the arrow whip badly and disappear somewhere above where he had been.

I was heaving and sweating as I drew in the fog and let it back out, a sick, steaming gas. Like that, I went downhill, part of the time with my hand at arm’s length in front of my face. I saw the tents — one of them, then another thing like it — as low dark patches with something structured about them, clearly out of place here.

Lewis was up, trying to make a fire with wet twigs and branches. As I unstrung the bow, the others came out too.

“What about it, buddy?” Lewis said, looking at the two empty slots in the quiver.

“I got a shot.”

“You did?” Lewis said, straightening.

I did. A spectacular miss at fifteen yards.

“What happened? We could’a had meat.”

“I boosted my bow hand, I think. I psyched out. I’ll be damned if I know how. I had him. He was getting bigger all the time. It was like shooting at the wall of a room. But I missed, all right. It was just that little second, right when I turned loose. Something said raise your hand, and before I could do anything about it, I did it.”

“Damn,” Bobby said. “Psychology. The delicate art of the forest.”

“You’ll get another chance,” Drew said. “We got a long ways to go yet.”

“What the hell,” I said. “If I’d hit him I’d be back in the woods now, tracking. He’d be hard to find in this fog. So would I.”

“You could’ve marked the place you shot from and come back and got us,” Lewis said. “We could’ve found him.”

“You’d have a time finding him now,” I said. “He’s probably in the next county.”

“I guess so,” Lewis said. “But it’s a shame. Where’s my old steady buddy?”

“Your old steady buddy exploded,” I said. “High and wide.” Lewis looked at me.

“I know you wouldn’t have, Lewis,” I said. “You don’t need to tell me. We’d have meat. We’d all live forever. And you know something? I wish you’d been up there and I’d been with you. I would’a just unstrung my bow and watched you put it right into the heart-lung area. Right into the boiler room. The pinwheel, at fifteen yards. What I was really thinking about up there was you.”

“Well, next time don’t think about me. Think about the deer.”

I let that ride and went to drag the stuff out of the tents. Lewis finally got a kind of fire started. When the sun began to take on height and force, the mist burned off in a few minutes. Through it the river, which we could hardly make out at first, showed itself more and more until we could see not only the flat of it and the stitches of the current but down through it into the pebbles of the stream-bed near the bank.

We had pancakes with butter and sorghum. After we finished, Lewis went over to the stream to wash out the cooking stuff. I pulled all the air mattresses out on the ground, unscrewed their caps and lay on each in turn until the ground came up to me through it and I was lying on the last sigh of air I had pumped into it the night before. We rolled the tents, wet and covered with leaves and pieces of bark, and lashed them into the canoes. I asked the others if they thought we might team up differently this time, for I was afraid that Lewis in his impatience might say something unpleasant to Bobby, and, since Bobby suddenly seemed to me on the edge of exasperation with himself for coming, I thought it would probably be best if I took him on. Drew would not have laughed, or laughed in the right way, at the cracks that were Bobby’s only means of salvaging his civility, and I figured I would.

“How about it, tiger?” I said to Bobby.

“OK,” he said. “How far can we get today, do you reckon?”

“Beats me,” I said. “We’ll get as far as we can. Depends on the water, and how many places we have to walk through.
Everybody including the map says there’s a gorge down below here, and that sort of bothers me. But there’s nothing we can do about it now.”

Bobby and I got in and shoved off, and right away I could tell I was in for a hard time. I was not in awfully good shape myself, but Bobby was wheezing and panting after the first hundred yards. He had no coordination at all, and changed the canoe from what it had been with Drew’s steady, serious weight in front to a nervous, unstable craft that seemed bound and determined to do everything wrong, to get rid of us. I was sure that Lewis was disgusted with Bobby, and just as sure that I would be, also, before much longer.

“Easy,” I said. “Easy. You’re trying too hard. All we want to do is hold this thing straight. We don’t need to be pulling our guts out to get there. Just let the river do it. Let George do it.”

“George ain’t doing it fast enough. I want to get the hell and gone out of this goddamned place.”

“Ah, now. It’s not all that bad.”

“It’s
not?
Mosquitoes ate me up last night. My bites have got bites. I’m catching a fucking cold from sleeping on the fucking ground. I’m hungry as hell for something that tastes good. And I don’t mean sorghum.”

“Just steady down a little, and we’ll get there… when we get there. It’s not going to do your cold any good to dump in this river, you can bloody well bet.”

“Fuck it,” he said. “Let’s get on with it. I’m tired of this woods scene; I’m tired of shitting in a hole in the ground. This is for the Indians.”

After a while he settled down a little, and the back of
his neck lightened its red. We dug a couple of strokes for every twenty-five yards, and the river moved us along. But I thought that the chances were pretty good, with my high center of gravity and his nerves, that we would spill before the day was out, especially if there were any fast stretches with lots of rocks. With the equipment and with Bobby and me, who were at least fifty pounds heavier than the other two, we were riding far too low in the water. We had too much stuff with us for the way we were teamed, and I signaled back to Lewis to pull over to the bank. He did, and we wallowed alongside the other canoe and tied up.

“Getting hot.” Lewis said.

“Hot as the hinges,” I said.

“Did you see that big snake back yonder?”

“No. Where?”

“He was lying up in the limbs of that old oak tree you went under about a mile and a half back. I didn’t see him till you were right under him, and he lifted his head. I didn’t want to make any fuss; thought it might make him nervous. I’m pretty sure it was a moccasin. I’ve heard of them dropping in boats.”

“Shit fire,” Bobby said. “That’s all we need.”

“Yeah,” said Lewis. “I can imagine.”

“Can you take on some of the stuff in our canoe, Lewis?” I asked. “We’re awful low and logy.”

“Sure. Go get the cooking equipment and the bedrolls. That ought to equalize us, just about. You can also let us have about half the beer that’s left.”

“Happy to. Everybody’s going to need something to cool off with, today.”

“Why do it just with beer?” Lewis said, unbuttoning his
shirt. “It’s shallow and slow here. I’m going to get wet.”

I transferred the bedrolls and beer and the primus and other cooking equipment to the other canoe. Lewis was already in the water naked, booming overhand down the current with a lot of back showing, like Johnny Weismuller in the old Tarzan movies. He swam as well as he did everything else, and outran the current easily. Then he came back, his eyes glaring with effort at water level. I shucked off my coveralls and dived in, and so did Drew.