Winter Run (15 page)

Jessie abruptly stopped fanning, and Luke’s eyes settled sharp on Charlie. Sarah, feeling the mood, looked up at the boy’s pale face, with Luke’s old felt hat shading his forehead. And then Jessie, her chiseled face taut, not smiling and the fan not moving, said, “Is that why you telling this boy this story, old man? So he can set on some dam all night long, listening
and watching for something that ain’t going to happen, thinking them hound voices got something to say that he got to hear? Is that it?”

A shadow passed across Luke’s face. And then was gone. “I reckon so, Jessie,” he said, smiling again. “I reckon so.”

The hunting was good that winter. Charlie, who would be thirteen the following summer, went on Saturday nights. He and the hound, Sarah, grew close. He would let the tailgate down on the truck and put his hand through the wire mesh in the hound-box doors, and she would lick his fingers and wiggle while he smiled and called her name.

Several times they chased a coon. It had been roughly a decade since the coons had suddenly disappeared. It was in the fall of the first year of the war. Not one had been seen since. Until now. After the first one, when the hounds treed, the men shone the flash-lights into the tree to be completely sure what was up there. On the occasions when a coon’s wide-set eyes and masked face looked down on them, the men
cheered. And the coon was let alone to run another day, and breed at the season’s end.

One night Luke Henry told Charlie in his matter-of-fact voice what had happened those ten years ago when the coons disappeared. “We killed ’em all off. It was greed. Just too much running.”

Here he paused, looking backward. Then went on quietly, “They sure do run good. Give the hounds fits. And taste good, too. They got faces. Not like a possum. A possum looks like a witch. The coon is your friend.”

After that, each night had a special sense of anticipation. Would this be the one when again they would meet the face of their friend, the coon? By chance, each time they did, Charlie was there and wanting to climb the tree to get a closer look at the coon’s quizzical face. But Luke told Charlie just what a mature boar coon could do to
his
face with the long claws in the shape of hands. They had begun to see prints of those hands again last summer along certain creek banks where the crawfish hunting was good.

Only once during the whole winter had they run a fox. She was a gray vixen who came off Quail Hill one night and ran into the swamp below the lake. But not before they had seen her in the light of their big flash-lights. She was heavy with young, and her body was the gray-speckled color of guinea hens with red guard hairs stretching from her long nose to her hips. She was a contrast in color. She was much larger than the red foxes Charlie had seen—and very beautiful. She simply disappeared.

“She got a den in there somewhere,” Luke said. “Likely in a hollow tree. Most times when a gray goes in, the hounds won’t say nothing when they tree in the ground. They just don’t like running a gray for some reason. She’ll have her young in there. Probably never see her again. Grays are funny. They don’t want to run. They stay out of the way. Some people say they’s a cat cause they climb trees sometimes. But they ain’t. Got feet just like a red …”

Charlie wanted to pursue the subject. He wanted to pursue every subject. But Luke didn’t have anything more to say about gray foxes. We called them red-sided grays. They were a mystery.

By the end of the season, when the hunting stopped to let the creatures produce their young, Charlie, after a fall and winter of endless questions and yearnings and outbreaks of enthusiasm, had got it. In spite of the talk—and without thought—he had begun to understand the need to be with hounds.

If an outsider had asked why he liked it, Charlie would have given the standard hunter’s response to the question. It would have been staged in imitation of Luke. Charlie would turn his head aside, look at the ground, and say, in a deferential voice, with just the right inflection, “Oh, I just like to hear the dogs run.”

Then he would glance up to see the approval on Luke’s face at the handling of the secret—and the confusion or downright derision on the face of the
questioner. It never seemed to go any further. The “why” was never asked.

Actually, for most of us, Charlie’s explanation was almost the answer, leave out the mystery. Nobody would starve without possums to eat, and it cost money to feed hounds, not to mention the aggravation to wives and mothers. But everyone agreed it was grand to hear the hounds’ voices on a cloudy winter night. Very few people had hounds anymore. Luke was the only one in the area, leaving out the hunt club, which kept a big pack of hounds for the people to follow on horseback during the day.

And so the season ended. Summer came and Luke, to the total disgust of Jessie, bought three Plott hounds.

“What in heaven’s name”—Jessie thought a lot about heaven when it came to hounds—“do you need with three more dogs in that pen, Luke?” she demanded.

“You know I need three fast dogs to chase the coons now they coming back,” he replied, looking suitably guilty. “Plenty of scraps from the school to feed three more hounds. Maybe a bear will come down out of the mountain. You know Plotts will tree anything. I got to be ready …” The conversation went around in a circle, utterly predictable, as was the outcome.

So the new hounds arrived. Big brindle-colored dogs with ears Charlie thought too short, and hard expressions on their faces, unlike Sarah who was soft and loving. The first Saturday night they dug out of the pen and proceeded to go on a rampage through
the whole countryside, running a fox clear from Owens Mountain to the edge of town and back. Half the village heard at least some part of it. Luke came for Charlie first thing and Gretchen let him go. She knew Luke was in a fever to get back in touch with the hounds.

“When I left ’em, they was on the other side of Owens Mountain,” he said, letting the old truck careen around the country roads. Just as they turned onto Owens Road, Luke slammed on the brakes and leaned out of the window. “Listen, Charlie, they’s heading for Silver Hill. That fox is aimed for town. Been years since a fox run all the way to town.” So they rushed to Mill Creek Farm to intercept them. Sure enough, here came the hounds. Headed straight for the little mountain at the edge of the town. And so it went, crossing after crossing. Twice they arrived soon enough to see the fox coming through. Luke drove his old truck like a maniac.

Charlie was beside himself with joy. “How do you always know where the fox will run, Luke? How do you know?” His exuberant questions came insistent and unrelenting.

Luke started to sum up his answers at one point, saying, “My daddy told me about one time …” But the story was too long to tell in the middle of this hunt, so he dropped it. For once Charlie was too engrossed in the present to pursue the past, so he let it go, too.

It went on most of the night—the two loops
around Owens Mountain, then six miles to town, six miles back, and two more loops around the mountain before the fox had had enough and gone to ground.

The next evening there was a rehash of the hunt at the store. Luke’s brother, Fred, allowed as how he never heard such awful hound voices in his life. “They sound like feists to me, Luke. Yip-yippin’ along. But Lord, they are fast. I never heard hounds run through country like that. It’s a wonder they didn’t catch that fox. Would have, too, if it hadn’t of been that old dog fox from the other side of Owens Mountain—but they sure don’t sing! No sir, they don’t sing.”

Luke worked on the pen. He put cinder blocks all along the base of the wire to keep the hounds from digging out. They tried, but couldn’t. It looked like the answer. Finally he put them in with the other grown hounds. Summer went on, and then August, and time to start thinking about hunting when the weather broke.

On a particularly sultry afternoon—sultry in a way only central Virginia on an August afternoon can be—Matthew Tanner and Charlie were working on the old pasture fence halfway up the lane to the burnt-out summerhouses. Charlie, who had just turned thirteen, spent all the time he could with Matthew, who knew the things about the country and farms that Charlie almost desperately needed to know.

The fence was pitiful. It seemed to be held up by honeysuckle and multiflora rose vines. The cows worked every inch of it looking for a weak place where
the wire had come loose from the locust posts. When a cow found one, she marched right through. And then here came the rest, like buzzards congregating at a dead animal. Out and gone. Then Matthew would have to find Ellis Breeden, who rented the pasture, to come and get the cows back in before they ruined the gardens. And then he’d have to patch the fence.

“Why doesn’t Professor James build a new one, Matthew?” Charlie asked. “Doesn’t he have enough money?”

“Oh, he got plenty of money. It ain’t that. It’s just that”—and here there was a pause—“well, you know him and Miz James don’t have no children. And when they die, the farm goes to the university.” Here Matthew picked up speed as if to get it over with. “And the university ain’t going to farm seven hundred acres. Which means the place will get cut up … So it don’t make no sense to build new fences if it ain’t going to be a farm.” Matthew was almost out of breath from the unaccustomed onslaught of words. He looked sidewise at the white-haired boy next to him, almost in guilt, as Charlie, of course, asked, “Why?”

Sarah’s high voice saved Matthew from the answer—hers and those of the other twelve hounds who were with her, running wide open in the August oppression. The sound was coming from behind the summerhouses, from Joe Stephens’s farm and, from there, Owens Mountain.

“Lord, they done escaped again!” Matthew caught his breath. “But I don’t hear the Plotts. Do you, Charlie?”

Charlie by this time was beside himself at the daylight sound of the hounds’ voices, and at Sarah carrying the hunt in the heat, though the other deeper voices were right with her. They headed for the lake.

“No Plotts in there,” yelled Charlie with his usual confidence. “I know all those voices.” It was true. He did know all those voices.

Matthew and Charlie raced to the other side of the road and clambered over the risky fence in time to see the pack burst into view from the mature oak forest at the top of the hill. Running as if it were a cold winter night when your breath makes steam in front of you, not cotton in the lungs. They both looked down the long meadow toward the lake, searching for the quarry—from the pace, necessarily a fox. Nothing else except a deer could run in front of those hounds like that without being caught in the first field. They would have seen the deer. But where was the fox?

“Do you see him, Matthew? I don’t see nothing,” asked Charlie, lapsing into the speech of his companions, which Gretchen disapproved of and would not countenance in the house. This was of little matter to Charlie, who quickly developed two different languages—one for home and the other for the rest of the time, even though Matthew tried to back up Gretchen.

“Don’t talk like that, Charlie. I don’t see nothing either. Must be in this heat the fox got a good lead on the hounds. Maybe scent ain’t holding.” He studied the woods edge next to the lake, expecting to see the pale flame of a red fox melt into the swamp.

But there was nothing. The hounds came across the field still running hard in spite of the heat and disappeared along with their voices into the swamp. Then silence. Just nothing!

“Where—,” began Charlie.

“Hush a minute, Charlie. Hush! There be a loss. We’ll hear ’em again in a second.”

But they didn’t. Not for five minutes on Matthew’s Little Ben pocket watch. And suddenly there was an urgency to know, a suspense like the thickening of the air before an August storm. Matthew felt it, and Charlie was in a knot. The tree line into the swamp was suddenly a barrier before another world. A world that had swallowed up Sarah whole, not to mention the other hounds.

“We got to find Luke. Come on, Charlie! I think he’s down to Stevens Crossing lining track. Ought to be just about finished by now. Come on!”

“No! Let me stay and look. You go. I’ll walk down the cow path in the swamp. Maybe something awful has happened. And Sarah … !” And Charlie started down the hill at a run, jumping clumps of broom sage, his arms flung out, already hollering for her, “Sarah! Sarah!”

Matthew turned toward the truck. The boy would be all right. There were no bears in that swamp. And you couldn’t see foxfire at three in the afternoon in August. So he went on off in search of Luke.

• • •

Luke knew right off what had happened. There was a little pond in the swamp. And when the hounds crossed it, almost swimming, they sometimes shut up, even if they could still scent the fox on the water’s surface. Then at the road, where they would be at a loss for sure, their momentum would carry them forward, across, and into the little dip in the pasture just beyond the Mill Creek fence. So by the time they struck it off again and started throwing their tongues in the August heat, Matthew and Charlie had missed them.

Luke was immediately hot to go to the back of Mill Creek and catch the hounds as they returned from Locust Hill Farm, assuming they could keep the track going in this heat and the fox ran the right way. And he needed Matthew to help him because there were so many hounds.

“But Charlie …”

“Charlie goin’ to be fine, Matthew. He’ll just plow around in the swamp. No harm.”

“A cottonmouth—,” began Matthew.

“You know there ain’t been a cottonmouth seen around here in years, Matthew.”

So off they went to Mill Creek. And sure enough, next to the huge manure pile at the back of the farm, they paused, and here came the hounds, running hard, but their voices sounding muffled in the thick, hot air. The fox emerged from the woods with his tongue hanging out and ran right over the top of the steaming, rich-smelling mountain of horse manure.

“Now we’ll get ’em. Watch what happens when they try to track across that ‘mountain,’ Matthew. That fox fooled ’em this time! They won’t be able to smell a lick on the manure pile. And by the time they cast around it, we’ll have ’em. That was a young fox. He’s had enough. He goin’ home to the den he was born in cause he still don’t know the country.”