IT’S TOO CLOSE to the bone. This is not the way it’s supposed to go. Always before, our hunters have left quietly, in perfect chronology, as orderly as children filing out to playground recess, one at a time, each successive oldest passing through that door—as if leaving the camp house to go look around for something; one more hunt and then not coming back. Stepping through that door, and into the landscape of our memory. Old Howard—not blood related, but the man who owned and leased to us the deer pasture, stepping out quietly, in his late 80s. And then Old Granddaddy, a while later, in his late 80s. When it was his time.
The next two oldest, Uncle Jim and my dad, Charlie, began showing hints of mortality in their 70s—Uncle Jimmy, with a stroke, and Dad, with bladder and then prostate cancer 10 years ago, but both battling those things back, recovering, and still hunting, hunting on, and still with us.
My oldest cousin wasn’t supposed to step to the head of the line. He wasn’t supposed to cut in front of anyone. The oldest son of Uncle Jimmy, as I am Charlie’s oldest, he—his name was also Rick—and I were supposed to become the Old Ones someday. That was the model that had been presented to us. That was what we knew.
Rick was already in his 60s, but in my mind he is still a handsome, reckless teenager, burning with life; he is still young and daring, charismatic, and troubled. Did I say reckless? In my mind, he and I are both still young and vital, undiminished and uncompromised.
LIKE IT IS for all of us who have been gathering here once a year to hunt for a week—uncles, cousins, brothers, grandfather, nephews—the deer pasture is, was, Rick’s church. He was religious—he differed from me there—and was a minister, but he had this other church, too, as do we all. We’re old enough now that we have children who wander it, who hunt it that same week each year: the first of November. There are more bunk beds in the camp house now, more hunters, but no matter. The juniper of the thousand acres, for the most part, hides us, as it hides the deer.
But we see things, if not always each other, as we walk along the stony-bottomed creeks and pass between the rounded boulders and sit quietly beneath the oaks, hiding in a nest, a rampart, of broken limbs, remnants of where the old trees’ branches broke off, burdened by their own sweeping weight, their own excessive reach. We sit beneath such trees, motionless, hidden from the world in our camouflage, and watch raccoons trundle past, bobcats, armadillos, turkeys, and always deer.
This hill country hardscrabble was our heaven, the place where, when we were away from it, we were always working our way back to.
I grew up with him—I knew him for all of my 57 years—and I hunted with him 35 of those years, one week each year without fail. Thirty-five weeks, day and night, cleaning whitetails, cooking, doing the dishes, telling stories, fixing broken trucks and broken water pumps, nailing tin back on the roof after thunderstorms, listening to LSU and University of Texas football games, to Dallas Cowboys and Houston Oilers games. Thirty-five weeks—shy of a full year—of deer hunting with him, though always at the same time of year so that in some ways it would, and did, seem as if time remained frozen, until it wasn’t, and didn’t.
By all rights, we should have had a full year together.
AS RICK GREW OLDER, he slept later and later. Finding a whitetail deer became less of a concern to him. He talked a big game—pretended to be always on the lookout for “Ol’ Mossy Horns”—but as the years went on, he loved that bed. We’d have a campfire in the evenings, with the flat-topped silhouette of Hudson Mountain to the east, and watch the stars—always, shooting stars in that country. One night, long ago, one passed so close to us that we heard its ripping crackle, smelled its scorch—an amazement. Then, one by one, we’d drift back into the bunkhouse, lie down on our beds, and read. He’d fall asleep with the book on his chest and, later, begin snoring. For that reason, it was always a race to see who could be the first to get to sleep. Rick didn’t do anything halfway.
HE’D HAD TRAGEDY in his life. A car wreck in which his wife was killed. Another accident in which a jacked-up truck he was working on fell on his hand, crushing it. He was a doctor and surgeon, and couldn’t practice after that, but volunteered abroad for weeks each year. Another year or more of his life, I suppose, in the cumulative, spent doing that.
But about the deer hunting: As young men—boys, really—this Hill Country hardscrabble was to us a wild garden, a land of rattlesnakes, cactus, wild pigs, and giant granite boulders shaped by time into fantastic hoodoo forms: a clenched fist, an Easter Island visage, a rhinoceros, a hippo. We hiked up and down the water-smoothed slot canyons, swam in the deepest pools beneath sparkling waterfalls. From the first day, it was our heaven, the place where, when we were away from it, we were always working our way back to.
RICK WAS A MAN of enormous passions and appetites, which can be, of course, a precursor, a way of segueing into the fact that at different times of his life he had problems with the bottle. Actually, I guess it was always a struggle, and he was either winning, or losing. The last years of his life he was winning, and I’m glad for that.
I’m grateful I have no such challenges, grateful I don’t have to waste days, then years, owned by such a disease, and can instead—through the fluke of luck—sit quietly in the junipers and in the oak creeks, and listen to, and watch, the trickling, gurgling plates of gold water swirl past, fractals of gleaming water spinning; disassembling, reassembling. This last year—the last year we had him—I was sitting in the deep shade, the abiding shade, on a wicked hot day (gone, it seems, are the crisp November hunts of my youth), and as I watched, a male wood duck came drifting down that lane of gold light, his plumage wildly flamboyant, charismatic, outrageous; and yet, he, too, was seeking shade.
THE 1871 CLUB
