The Bird Hunter

The fall must have broken his collar bone. There was no other explanation for the protruding white knob pushing against his left cheek. What bone was there to kiss him now but the collar bone? That was the place she kissed. His wife Emily kissed him there when they made love. He was enamored with her lips on the cliff of him, and when she put her lips there, he knew she had never done such a thing to any man in the world but him, and he held her tighter in the nighttime because of it. When she got cancer over a decade ago, he knew it would be a long haul. Their acquaintance Alyson received the same diagnosis almost a year to the date prior. She was in full remission now, but Emily had been buried in the Idaho cemetery long enough for daises to bloom and wither half a dozen times.

He was a bird hunter. And when he walked the woods or the prairies, he walked in search of flushes - those wonderful flaps of wing suddenly thrust into the air by the birds of the uplands and the timber holds. Each flush was an explosion of the heart, the shrapnel of which reverberated not through flesh, but through time and memory. The lapping tongue of his old setter Elsa behind a woodcock, the panting huff of his lab Gus who died three years ago this September, and the footsteps of his two sons, light at first but now heavy as the snowfall in January. The impressions they followed were the ones he left behind. However, his sons weren’t with him now. His oldest Danny in the city running the Sunset Press, the small Minneapolis publishing house that laboriously birthed 10 to 15 novels a year. Little brother Chris in Texas, following his high school sweetheart Marni there on a nursing scholarship. He waited tables at the Horseback, a saloon commonly filled with ubiquitous drunks. He told his father he was going to be a songwriter. He told Allen his heart was in the music. Despite the track record, Allen believed him.

When Allen went hunting, he wondered how God picked his angels. The aspens didn’t tell him but they were nice to listen to. The dogs didn’t have any answers either, back when he had dogs anyway. But he kept searching. That’s why he went alone to the high country on October 17th, what would have been their 50th wedding anniversary. He hiked to timberline looking for chukar just a few miles outside of Salmon. It was the town he fell in love with when he took the editor job at the Salmon County Journal. It was the place they raised the boys in, making sure they cut their share of wood in the winters and lit the propane heater in the chicken coup before supper. And it was the home he held his dying wife in, damping her forehead when the pain came and tossing the bedpan when full. Allen didn’t know lung cancer could debilitate the bowels but he learned these things. The day after the first snow in 1947, her breath escaped the valley and ascended in much the same way grouse did after a hard point, straight up and away.

             It was the heavens he could see now, laying there surrounded by nature. It was nature he could count on to heal his spirit when one of life’s tragedies happened. But not now. Now the aspens could not reach out to him and pull him up. The cliff country could not support his injuries and heal them and set him free. No, now nature held the stoic face of pain, the harsh side of reality.

Allen hunted with a 12-gauge side-by-side Browning BSS. Now it lay next to him, slightly at an angle, the barrels pointing behind his head. Up high he could see the cliff he fell from. What a silly thing, Allen thought. He’d hunted that country for over three decades. He had chased a crippled along the edge, as he had so many times before. A single misstep and now this. He tried to calculate the height. There was nothing else to do. Nothing but swallow pain. Forty feet? Sixty? No, it couldn’t be that high, or I wouldn’t be alive, he thought. But then he felt the thicket underneath him and he remembered the branchy crash and he knew the only reason he was alive was because of the underbrush, the berry bushes, and the thistles. They saved him. So many times he had picked from their leaves their huckleberries and chokecherries and bittercherries, the latter unpalatable to humans but ravaged by game. He picked them anyway, scattering them aside his cabin on William’s Lake. He knew it was a bad habit to feed the wildlife, but he couldn’t help but bait the mule deer that clamored down from their cliff beds and invaded the valley floor at night. The huckleberries he made into bread loaves and pancakes, and the chokecherry he made into jam. He used the recipes Emily taught him but he also experimented with new ones, always looking for a keeper that might stick and find its way into his column. He’d been writing for the people of Salmon for thirty-three years. He would retire in May. And now, instead, he would retire from life. The fall didn’t kill him but nature would; that cold lover would swoop in the night and take his blood from him. It was late November and it was frigid. Not too frigid for an old man who walked strong in his sixties and carried survival items in his backpack, but too frigid for a man with broken bones and a pack out of reach. He felt them now, the throbbing agony of his appendages. He tried to get up. It was as if large men holding spears surrounded him, jabbing them into his shoulder and legs each time he moved, pinning him to the dirt. Night was coming. Maybe a storm. That would do it. A snowstorm would surely finish him off.

            Allen looked skyward and his circular tunnel of view caught a passing cloud and held it until it spun away. He watched a hawk fly over and he tried to guess the species but it flitted and faded and was gone. Why not? he thought. Why not meet Emily and hold her hand again? Why not find out if the creator made chukar or if it was the other guy? They had that trace of evil, those cliff dwellers. They teased you and ran from you and called to you from impossible vantages and when you hiked all morning and reached the precipice of meeting them and hopefully snagging one for dinner, they flushed. They flushed and sang their bully cries as they flew to the spot you ascended from. Then they teased you again with their high-pitched chuckles. It was an irony of wing and rock and life. Yes, maybe the devil made chukar to laugh at foolish men following brave dogs. The dog doesn’t know the possibility of failure, but the man does. And yet, he goes anyway.

All men follow dogs, Allen thought and he almost laughed before the pain reminded him. He would see his dogs too. That thought built water behind his eyes. He would see Gus and pet his head and the old lab would lick his hand and nestle his muzzle against his leg. And Elsa. He would see his Setter beauty again and she would curl beside his feet and stay, her love as sure as the cliff he fell from. But wait. He couldn’t go now, he realized. He had his sons. He wasn’t ready to say goodbye to his sons. And goddamnit, he was still enjoying life. Allen grew angry with his plight. He wasn’t an old geezer waiting on the mercy of death’s sickle blade. He was a man who still loved the world and he hadn’t written enough about her and he hadn’t touched enough grouse wing or held enough rainbow trout just yet. Fight began to build in him. He edged himself onto his right side and let out a long burst of agony as he felt his shoulder crackle out of place. He rolled onto his back again, and his cheeks were tight and high on his face like they were trying to meet as one flesh in the middle of his eyes. He breathed deeply. He looked upward again. He tried to think of what to do.

            Then something in the air, some foreign sound. Some thud and clunk against the dirt that broke the long wind that had been swooshing in and out of his ears. Was it an elk? A bear? That would be fitting, he thought. A damn black bear would come and eat him alive. He’d become one of the fatalities he wrote about every year, some urbanite escapee ignorant in mountain terms caught alone in bear country, some tourist that wanted to experience the west like it was novel, some naïve college grad who thought bears were all for show and touch and snuggles. He would become the headline.

Old Man Eaten by Bear After Falling from Cliff.

Old Man Eaten by Bear After Chasing Stupid Birds in Stupid Country.

Old Man Dies After Thinking He Could Still Live the Wild Life.

Old Man Dies After Falling on the Trail.

“Old man dies,” he said out loud.

The trail. It was a trail he was laying on now. But how, he thought? Then he remembered. The cliff wrapped south toward the lake outlet and it reached a high overlook and beneath it was the trail. He’d fallen from the outcrop and now he lay directly on the path. The details came into his head like bees working the hive and he remembered where he was in small holes of recollection. Then the thumping sound overtook him and an aroma hit his nose and it was sweet, almost strawberry, and before he could guess, words along with it.

“Oh my god!”

The voice chilled him like a cold wave.

“Oh my god, are you ok!”

Then it was all around him, this strange body from nowhere. It was a she. Her long hair danced on his face, blocking the fading sunlight and then the sun was in his eyes again as the woman brushed her hair back and then it was blocked again and the woman seemed to be so close to his face he could smell her breath. Strawberry, like a flood, only strawberry. Then chaos and words and a flurry of hair in his face.

“Oh my god, sir are you ok! Are you ok!”

“I’d be ok if you’d get your goddamn hair out of my face so I could see. I’m not dead for Christ’s Sake. But now I’m suffocating,” Allen barked.

The words surprised him. But there was no time for cordialness. The pain was too much, and the hair was too much in his face. It had been peaceful looking skyward and now he was being assaulted.

“Oh.” The head retreated. “Well excuse the hell out of me. I guess I’ll just leave you on this trail to rot.”

            The woman rose.

“Wait. Wait I’m sorry,” Allen said. “I’m sorry. Please. I’m in quite a lot of pain.”

            The woman remained. She seemed to be studying him, questioning her next move. Still, Allen could not make out her face. The sun was in his eyes, even more than before and now he wished he wouldn’t have snapped at her, but the pain was too much.

“Please,” he said again. “I’m sorry.”

His voice trailed with desperation.

“Alright,” she said and began to kneel. “But I could always leave you, ya know. I could leave you here to the bears.”

            Now for the first time, Allen saw her face as she knelt low enough that she blocked the sun. Her hair was light blonde, no almost white. From age. She was older but vibrant, he realized, and very beautiful. Her nose pointed sharply and her eyebrows were tight to her eyes and her chin was austere and her lips thin. Her eyes were a vivid green and they smiled at him.

“I hear they like old men,” she said as she leaned beside him.

            He caught something else about her. An accent. Something southern. Maybe Texas. I shouldn’t be this lucid, he thought. This calm. I should be panicked. After all, I could die. But he wasn’t panicked. That was never his nature. He was a man who accepted his surroundings and didn’t get in a hurry. And he had lived his life among the tenacity of the mountains and it had instilled in him a platitude of adventure. It wasn’t uncommon for men to fall in this country. It wasn’t uncommon for them to die.

“I don’t think they’d like the taste of this one,” he said. She looked at him.

“Meat’s too tough.”

She giggled a little and then her eyes looked him over and her face straightened.

“You fell,” she said.

He nodded.

“What hurts?”

She was serious now. Her face was deep and concerned and the reflection gave Allen hope, that kind of hope that recognizes strength.

“Shoulder’s out. Maybe the collar bone.”

The woman reached and put her hand on the top of his left shoulder, caressing the green Filson jacket. She touched something obtrusive, and Allen winced.

“Yep. Christ almighty. I’d say something’s broken there. Better not move. What else?”

“My legs,” he said. “My right one especially.”

Allen saw her look down and he studied her eyes for some sort of tell. He knew how to read faces and interpret meaning. He had done it with his staff at the County Journal for years. When he read one of his pieces aloud, especially one in which he tried to fly above the terseness of the associated press, one in which he tried to inflict a bit of whimsical grace, something flighty, perhaps bordering the poetic, he studied the faces of his staff. They never used the correct words, but their faces told him if it was flighty and off-putting or if it was straight and true. The readers of Salmon did not want poetry.

“Well, your right one’s broken sure as shit and your left one looks ok but God only knows.”

Allen smiled. He liked her.

“What shall we do,” he asked. “Cash it in?”

She turned back to him and saw him smiling.

“Oh, I don’t’ think it’s that bad just yet, old timer. You’re gonna have to live.”

“Fine by me,” he said. “I’ve grown rather fond of it.”

            Allen had time to replay her face while she went for help. He remembered the feeling as her feet pounded the trail. She was running. And fast. Nighttime came and he knew she had failed to get cell service at the trailhead. She would have had to drive back to town. Maybe she could have flagged someone down. But they wouldn’t have service either, most likely. She would have stopped at a cabin on Williams Lake and insisted on a landline. But most of the inhabitants were gone for the year. Allen was one of the only full-timers. There was Mr. and Mrs. Doring. But they were probably in town for dinner. It was Sunday and Tom liked to hit the Mexican joint for carne asada tacos, their weekly special. There was Mr. Thorp. But he didn’t care much for strangers. He probably wouldn’t answer the door, even if it was a pretty woman. He wouldn’t do any harm to her, Allen convinced himself, but he wouldn’t do any good either. He’d hide in the closet until she was gone, his old Winchester tight in his hands, the Winchester he was so proud of, the buffalo gun he’d shown Allen once - a rare glimpse into the private life, an honor among hermits.

            So, it may be a while, Allen thought, the pain still there. It had settled into a kind of constant push or rather Allen had settled into a kind of acceptance. No, he wouldn’t die just yet. He would see his boys, thank God. If he could only get them to travel. That was the biggest challenge. They never came to see him. And there it was, that phrase uttered by every parent and grandparent whose children fly the nest to follow cloud dreams. Regardless of visits, the words are used. He never comes to see me anymore. She just doesn’t come around. And now he was using it, a man who tried to avoid clichés like rabies. Now he was infected. He laughed at himself. Surely this would do it, he thought. And then he knew it would. His boys loved him and when things got serious, they were there.

They stayed for a month after Emily died. Danny had the affairs in order before the headstone was chosen. Allen didn’t have to worry about a thing. And Chris. Chris played the guitar every morning. He picked and strummed and scribbled notes in his green, wire-spine notebook and he sipped the coffee and they talked about life as the sun rose over Williams Lake and the broken country all around it. Allen missed that perhaps more than anything, his son strumming notes and scribbling words to go with them, Danny concentrating on the Salmon County Journal at the breakfast table reading his father’s work, admiring it. If only the world was built that way, Allen thought. If only the world was built in such a way that men could stay together and sons didn’t have to find their own routes. But then there’d be no new paths, Allen realized. There’d be no new trails to fall onto.

            It was black now and the stars were overhead. It was cold. Allen tucked his hands deeper into his pockets and constricted his body. The icy air helped the pain somehow. Instead of a needlepoint stab, it was a washing bath. The cold alleviated the agony by distributing frost across all nerves, the numbing dunk of mother nature. But too much and he would die like so many others in winter. Hypothermia claimed more lives each year than bears or rivers or bullets. His pack. Where was his pack? His pack had food and a sweater and a firestarter and a space-blanket.

Damnit, I should have had her grab it and put it within reach. That woman. What was her name? Did she tell me her name? What was she doing here? Where did she come from?

Allen’s mind began to go dark. The nighttime came, bringing terrorful suspicion along with it.

She’s in on it. She’s not coming back. She was a trickster. A schemer. I saw it in her eyes. No. No, what’s happening? Why am I thinking that!

Then he knew. The first sign of hypothermia was the mind. It went weird on you. You couldn’t trust it once it got too cold. From all the articles he’d written and all the survival stories and all the old-time gossip, that was the number one rule. The mind went first and it took you to hell with it. The men that lasted in the mountains when the shit hit the fan were the men who kept their minds from icy water.

            Then thumping sounds. This time surely a bear. Allen prepared to be eaten alive and his mind ran with fear and then the strawberry smell and hope. The thumping became an army of thumping. More feet, not just strawberry owners. Then the lights. A laser show of flashlights as the white beams danced across the darkness. She was the first one beside him. The silver woman knelt and behind her was help and Allen’s mind was still shady but he knew somehow that it would all be ok. All because of her.

“See,” she said. “I knew you weren’t a weenie.”

“You came back….”

  And then the world was black and the strawberries were gone.

He awoke on a Saturday. Two days after the fall. He knew where he was when he saw the painting. The curtain was open halfway, and he could see into a light blue hallway and across the hallway was a long oak desk and no one in front of the computer on top. Behind the desk, on the long wall, was a painting. It was a mountain goat on the edge of a massive crevice. It was about to jump from one side to the other and it eyed the horrible gap and its hooves stood on the edge of certain death. At the bottom of the painting, a single word. Faith. Allen knew he was in Lemhi Regional Hospital. He had written several pieces about it, had interviewed several doctors and nurses and patients. The spray pilot that crashed for the third time last year. Harry Swindle. A local legend people said couldn’t be killed. He drank Red Grouse scotch and sprayed the crops in the valley, sweeping and dodging the steep mountainsides like he was a pilot for the Blue Angels at the state fair. Allen wrote a piece called, Meet Harry Swindle - The Evil Knievel of Salmon, Idaho. He interviewed him in his hospital bed. It wasn’t the same one he was in now, Allen thought, but it might be the one next to it. Or maybe just down the hall.

            He knew the staff. Tucker Samson, the longtime surgeon and golfing buddy in the summers. Alisa Meyers, the head nurse and babysitter to Danny and Chris on more than one occasion. Sarah Knowles and Jackie Benson. The secretary and the head of human resources, both members of the PTA, both of whom he’d talked to countless times at high school basketball games and flea markets and even the Pint – a local watering hole where all walks gathered for cold drinks and hot food. John Thompson, one of the janitors. He’d been there for as long as Allen could remember. He recalled the funeral of John’s wife. Old age, not cancer, but just as certain. He’d shaken his hand in the line of death condolences and the hand had been shaken again when it was Emily’s funeral, this time Allen on the other side and John saying nothing, only smiling and squeezing as if there was more he could say with pressure and eyes.

Faces of his life were there in those halls and offices and if they weren’t, they were connected somehow to the ones that were. He had walked those halls many times before and he had seen that painting and he had held on to the word. Faith. The mountain goat would jump, and he would make it. There was no doubt. He’d seen them do it, both south of town in the Lemhi range and north toward the continental divide. He had watched them walk the mortality rope with confidence and grace. Now he must do the same. A little dramatic, he accused himself, but he knew deep down he was lucky to be alive. He was in one of his stories. He was the one lying in bed to be interviewed. He wouldn’t let anyone else write it, he thought. That was his job.

“Feeling better?”

She was standing beside him. He didn’t remember her walking in. She hadn’t walked in. The voice came opposite the door. The chair. She was there when he woke up and now, she was standing. The silver woman. The full white light of the hospital illuminated every inch of her face and Allen’s eyes left the mountain goat painting and went to the words. His eyes focused on her mouth first, as if his journalistic side had been forever programmed to follow the source. Her thin lips pursed in a comforting bend. Her nose was above it, sharp and dignified. Her green eyes were deep and heavy, and her hair was a different shade, almost blonde in the fluorescent shine of the overhead lamps. Allen lay silent, staring at her. Everything tumbled in his head. The bird he shot, the fall, his boys, her smell.

“Well,” she said, “Did the fall take your tongue?”

“Hi. Ahh…”

“Susann.”

“Susann,” he repeated, memorizing each syllable.

“You were in pretty bad shape.”

“Were?”

“Well, at least you’re wrapped pretty now.”

            He looked at himself. His right leg was covered halfway in a cast and his left thigh was wrapped with bandages and his ankle too. His shoulder was secured in a sling and his arm was folded so that his hand lay next to his chest, just under his right breast.

“Son of a bitch,” he said. “I look like a damn mummy.”

“Well, we can take ya back and put you in the tomb if you like?”

“No, that’s ok,” he laughed. “I think I’d rather stay here. For now, anyway. But ask me again after a week of their Salisbury steaks.”

            She made a short but unmistakable high pitch laugh. She stood looking over him and his mind focused a little sharper and his face changed and he looked very grave. He turned to her.

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for…”

“Oh, it was no trouble,” she interrupted. “It’s what I do, ya know. Spend my days rescuing old geezers from mountain trails.”

He smiled but did not laugh.

“Well, at any rate. This old geezer owes you.”

“I’d say a dinner or two’s a good start.”

He looked up at her surprised.

“I’ll be back at six-thirty. The nurse said you like the Mexican food place on main street. You rest now. Here’s my number if something should come up. Otherwise, I’ll see you soon with tacos. Get some rest.”

            She handed him a torn magazine corner with her phone number on it. Allen realized she’d been holding it the whole time. He started to say something, but she was already walking away.

“Wait…”

She turned, smiling a curious and arrogant smile. Something in Allen’s gut told him to say nothing, to only smile and nod. There was a calmness in the air. Maybe it was the drugs, he would tell himself later. But then, in that moment between a man and a woman and a circumstance thrown at them by mountains, he only smiled and nodded. She winked at him and turned and walked away. Allen regarded her as she went out of sight. She was tall. Tall and very beautiful.

For the next twenty-three years, they were never seen apart. They took up fly-fishing. Spring, summer, late fall, and even a few winter days. They could be seen holding hands as they strolled, Allen on the right always because that was the side closest to the mountain and subconsciously, he wished to protect her from it, that rock monster that almost took his life, that devil that played cupid and played it well. Twenty-three years they made it together. He died first. Heart failure at 83. Three months later she stopped waiting to join him. The only love of her life, she wrote in her bedside diary, a high school habit she carried on. Susanne never married. She went to Idaho on a whim at 62 because she’d never been out of Texas. She was a strong woman and she dated men and left them when they ran out of use or became too banal for her interest. Allen held it. He held it on the trail, that day she found him and he held it forever afterward. They fed each other huckleberries along that trail. The chokecherries made good jam. They picked bittercherries in the spring. Unpalatable to humans but they picked them anyway. They watched the mule deer clamor down the hillsides and pierce the red fruit and they made love in the shadow of Williams Lake and they held each other every night and watched every sunrise because they knew good things died and to be thankful for it all regardless.