Winter Run (16 page)

It was Luke’s nature to explain every hunt in detail even if the listener knew perfectly well what was going on, which of course Matthew did. Sometimes the explanations were an aggravation, but often there was some new bit of news to be gotten from the tenth rendition of a repeat occurrence at some stage of a hunt. The stories were difficult. It was hard to think that any one person could explain the whole thing—like scent and all the habits of dogs, let alone foxes. And because Luke was sure everyone wanted to know all there was to know about everything connected with hunting, at times he did tend to go on too long.

The hounds came out of the woods exactly on the fox’s track, but when they hit the edge of the manure pile, they stopped short, as if they had run into a solid wall and not the edge of a manure pile. So when Luke called, they all raised their heads and started to wiggle and smile, as if saying how strange it was to see the men there—but nice, too—and what’s next?

“Grab ’em, Matthew. String this bale string through the collars. We’ll just have to tie ’em in the truck since we ain’t got the hound boxes.”

Sarah was next to Matthew, panting so hard her
whole body shook. It looked like her tongue would drop out of her head. Suddenly she went rigid all over and fell to the ground, and her eyes rolled back in her head. She was breathing with her mouth shut. Luke was busy tying the other hounds in the truck.

“Luke!” Matthew yelled. It was completely unlike him. Matthew Tanner just didn’t yell. At least not often. And when it happened, it almost always had to do with Charlie.

Luke jumped down from the truck and sat on a log next to the truck with the beautiful little bitch in his lap, talking to her, telling her that it would be all right, that she was just having a running fit, that in the heat it happened sometimes with young hounds. He told her he would give her some worm medicine because some said it was worms what caused it. She would be all right in just a minute he said, in a tone of voice loaded with concern, even though he had seen it many times. They almost always came back—almost always.

“Oh my Lord. What would Charlie say?” Matthew said, thinking out loud.

But before he could pursue this totally unacceptable notion, she started to come back, and five minutes later she was okay. Panting again like a normal, overheated dog.

Matthew had to drive so Luke could stay in the back of the truck and be sure none of the hounds could jump out and strangle himself on the bale string.

They parked the truck under the huge old beech tree next to the dam so the hounds would be cool. We called it the loving tree because generations of young people had carved their initials in its soft skin. After a drink in the pond, the hounds didn’t fuss against the ties because they were exhausted and happy to be in the shade.

But where was Charlie? They had half expected to see him walking up the lane to the big house when they drove in. It was five o’clock. Gretchen would begin to wonder, although in the summer when Charlie was with Matthew, she never worried much.

Matthew hollered a few times. They started across the north edge of the swamp, through the deep, open woods that separated the home pasture of Silver Hill from the swamp. Almost at the gravel road, they stopped and Matthew yelled again. This time Charlie’s raspy voice came back. “Here I am! Here I am!” he called over and over, not scared, but flat, like he was telling the air where he was.

The edge of the swamp was like the edge of a pond with almost no water in it. But it was deep in mud and swamp plants and dead oaks that could not grow in such a place. When Charlie emerged, the men almost burst out laughing. He had no shoes—as was his summer policy. A raggedy Sunday shirt that Gretchen had cut the sleeves off, and blue jeans, with one knee out, were covered in muddy swamp water. His blond hair was a beacon, because he refused to wear a hat.

“Did you find the hounds?”—this in his most urgent
voice. “Did you find them?” Smiling just a little. Three times before Luke could get a word in edge-wise.

“Sure we found ’em,” replied Luke. “What you think, Charlie? You know I know hounds and how the land lays? Sure we found ’em.”

There was a pause in the summer air.

“What did you find, Charlie?” Matthew asked.

Suddenly the smile dropped from Charlie’s face. And the men stopped, too, because with Charlie you never knew.

“Tell it, Charlie,” demanded Matthew, almost harshly. “What happened in there?

Charlie glanced from one to the other. And then in his softest voice, he said, “I found her! … In the middle. On a little island—”

“Who, Charlie? Not Sarah. She was with us. Start from the beginning. What happened?”

“I ran down the path through the middle of the swamp, hollering for Sarah, because I thought she would come if she could hear me. Halfway through, I thought I heard something struggle in the swamp. Off to the left. So I went in. But I couldn’t find anything. So I kept going. It’s deep in there, Matthew. Sometimes I almost had to swim. I wondered about snakes. But I didn’t see any. So I kept going. Then there was a little island in front of me. About two feet higher than the swamp. With a big oak in the middle of it and a huge old, dead locust lying on the ground. I came up from the water about level with the land.

“And she was there. Lying on her side, head up, looking at me. Her ears were up and she was panting in the heat. I could see her nipples and the fine hair all around them wet where the babies had been suckling. I saw the eyes of three cubs looking out at me from the hollow locust tree.

“She scared me a little. But her eyes were just like you told me, Luke. They had straight up-and-down slits—like a cat’s. Not like Sarah’s. I never …”

Later, at the store, after many tellings, the tale took on the quality of a painting—The gray vixen mother lying on her side with her young peering out from the hollow locust log, the blond-headed boy rising from the swamp like a character from a story, staring at each other. It was an unlikely scene made more so by the fact that no one had ever heard of a fox having a litter so late that the young would still be suckling in August. It must have been her second litter of the season, because back in January, when they had first seen her, she was heavy, too. But no one questioned the story. Charlie was serious about the truth in stories. He had seen his nursing vixen deep in that August swamp. No one doubted that.

“What did you do then, Charlie?” demanded Luke.

“Well, we looked at each other for a long time. Then I put out my hand. I had the palm up, like you taught me, Luke, so she wouldn’t be scared. And then …”—looking for words—“and then … she …”

“What, Charlie? What did she do? Tell it!”

“She put her ears down, flat alongside her head.
Like when a puppy begs. And lowered her head like Sarah did that first day. She looked straight up at me, and for a second …”—still searching—“she was soft… we were friends.

“But then she reared up on her front legs and pulled her head back and looked at me the way the tan bitch did that day she killed the doe. I couldn’t put my hand out any further …”

Charlie’s gray eyes were wide. “That’s what happened. She pulled her head back … That’s all … It was time to go.” The three of them stood still then, in the August heat with the mourning doves’ incessant cooing.

Until Luke burst out, “Where the hell do you reckon the Plotts got to? They’re the ones must of dug out. Do you reckon they went off toward Whitehall on a deer? Come on here! We got to get these hounds home and go after them Plotts.”

He was already heading for the truck.

The problem began with Sarah. The black-and-tan bitch would wiggle all over and lick his hand when he came to the hound pen or approached the hound boxes and called her name. In the open she would actually come to him when he called. Even Luke had to head the other hounds off before he could catch most of them. When the hounds were loose, they wanted to hunt, not stand around with humans, but almost from the beginning Sarah would come when Charlie called. The men actually referred to her sometimes as “Charlie’s bitch,” but she wasn’t. After each hunt she loaded up in the hound boxes with the rest of the pack and went home to Owens Mountain, to the pens next to Luke’s log cabin.

Charlie mentioned this to Matthew only once. His
answer was short. “She belongs in the pen with the hounds, Charlie. If you had her home and loose, she’d hunt twenty-three hours a day, only stop to eat a little. In a month she’d be skin and bones and ruined.” Charlie knew what Matthew said was true. He never brought it up again. But he had that look in his eye that he had when an idea got hold of him. This conversation took place during the fall after Charlie had seen the gray vixen in the swamp.

Casting around for alternatives, Charlie began to look at Uncle Dan, the old English pointer, with different eyes. After all, in his own peculiar way the old pointer also had the gift of scent.

No one knew where Uncle Dan came from originally, but he came to the Lewises from out of their garbage barrel. The handling of garbage was primitive in those days. Most people had a fifty-five-gallon drum with holes in the bottom and sides punched with a cold chisel for ventilation. This barrel was usually kept somewhere out behind the house. The garbage was burned in the barrel. Actually, little else but the paper really burned, so every once in a while the barrel had to be loaded on a pickup and taken to the edge of the mountain behind Quail Hill and dumped right over. Eventually, as the population increased, this solution became a problem. But like a lot of things, we didn’t really know any better, so that is what happened. The Lewises kept their barrel in the old cattle chute halfway to the barn. It was convenient and you couldn’t see it from the house.

One Sunday morning that fall, Charlie’s father took the trash out to the loading chute to burn it. To his surprise the barrel was on its side and protruding from it was the hind end of a dog. Mr. Lewis let out a yell at the mess, and the dog backed out of the barrel. At this point Charlie, who had heard the yell and was coming to find out what was going on, rounded the corner of the loading chute just as the dog turned to look at them with apprehension, aware that they would be furious. One look at the dog told you that hunger’s pull had overridden fear, and he was in that barrel for better or worse.

This was no mutt. He was white—or had been—with liver spots and the square, domed head of the English pointer. It was also clear that this dog had been through hell and high water. The last six inches of his tail, which had no hair on it, gave him a certain possumlike aspect. His feet were splayed out with age and wear and tear, and his ears, while not exactly shredded, were certainly not intact. His hipbones stuck up in the air. We never did find out his story.

Charlie crouched to the ground, put out his hand, and made a crooning noise in his throat. The dog looked at Charlie and through some deep understanding of human nature realized that his ship had come in—that his nights in the cold and days of too little food were over. He had found Charlie.

His name was Uncle Dan. Charlie’s father named him right then but could not for the life of him figure out why. He just said the dog looked like an Uncle
Dan and that was that. So by the time the old dog got to the house that Sunday morning, he already had a name and Charlie had that look on his face. Gretchen tried to put her foot down. She was not going to let that awful dirty creature in her house. But she was too late. The men in her life had become silent conspirators. She did require, however, that the dog have a bath. This event took place in the old-fashioned bathtub in the Corn House’s one bathroom. Uncle Dan took one look at the tub full of water with steam rising from it and tried to put
his
foot down. He turned out to have amazing reserves of strength for an animal so skinny. When the washers and their subject emerged from the bathroom, the dog was clean but every square inch of the bathroom was wet. So were the washers. So were all the towels. And so on. Gretchen allowed as how it would have been easier for her to have done it herself. It sounded like trying to get Charlie to do certain chores.

Could the dog stay in the house? Of course not. Who knew whether he was housebroken? It turned out he was. Matthew opined that the old gentleman had too much dignity to make a mess in his living space, and after only a few days it was clear that the whole Corn House was Uncle Dan’s living space.

But there was the matter of food. Not the dog’s, the Lewises’. The following Sunday Gretchen put a cooked roast on the counter and went to the porch to ask Charlie’s father to come and carve. By the time they reentered the kitchen, Uncle Dan had the roast on
the floor and had miraculously consumed half of it. The dog looked up with not a trace of guilt on his face and was in fact outraged when Mr. Lewis heaved him out the door. A discussion ensued about whether to eat what was left. In the end the remaining roast was washed off and put in the refrigerator for sandwiches and the Lewises had macaroni and cheese for Sunday lunch. The logic of this compromise escaped everyone but Gretchen. But from then on, food—particularly, but not exclusively, meat—was never left alone with Uncle Dan. It just never crossed his mind that it was not fair game. And if you smacked him, his dignity was affronted, and none of the Lewises could stand to do that.

Uncle Dan showed no inclination to wander from his newfound heaven. It was as if the old boy had suddenly grown roots right out of his splayed feet. He would accompany Charlie to the barn but not on expeditions around the farm with the pony. When Charlie started away in any direction, Uncle Dan would go home to his place under the porch. His sailing days were apparently over.

But on one occasion that October Uncle Dan showed his real colors, his true vocation, the occupation of his youth. He and Charlie were crossing the overgrown garden patch on the way to the barn. Uncle Dan was flopping along behind Charlie. There was nothing out of the ordinary. It was just an October afternoon in Virginia. Then in an instant it all changed. The dog floated forward two strides, fluidity and power
in his movement. He stopped and went rigid all over—with his nose held level and his possum tail straight behind him. It was an electrifying moment. Charlie later said he was so startled that for a second he was almost afraid. Something utterly new had entered his world. He knew what a pointer was, but he had never seen one do it before. The world slammed to a halt. There they were. Now what? The dog gave him no clue. Charlie had the feeling that he could have gone home and come back the next day and the dog would still have been there. Charlie felt the burden of action shift to him. He realized that the dog was waiting for him to do something. Charlie knew the birds were in front of him. But they were invisible. How could the dog have known? He never even put his nose to the ground …