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Show Deer Hunt 7 "Yeah, why'd she go in there?" wondered Harry. Dog yelled, "Let's scare her out! she'll just die standing there." He picked up a baseball-sized rock and hurled it. Not a baseball. The rock plopped fifteen yards from the deer, enough to startled into frantic action any wild creature. She didn't move. We threw another, another, another - a frenzy of throwing and yelling. She didn't move. I saw not a quiver, not in an ear, a tail. She stood immobile, head hanging nearly to the snow, snow as if cement wrapped around her knees. How long, I wondered. How long. Why? She could have walked around the snow. Or did the will simply die before the ragged body stopped its mindless motion dead? Or did she feel the snow before the snow imprinted on her mind, and then at that she sighed indifferently, "at last." Dog, his left hand raised before his face, his index finger curved in trigger fashion, his right hand out to hold invisible the stock, said, "Wow! If I had Dad's 30-06 I sure could get her. Pow Pow!" But we alive and the day still burning. And many magpies. And too many dead deer. The area here lay generally sloping up, but nearly flat. It seemed to have been a final gathering, resting, dying place. Everything here, except for snow, lay in browns and greys. Brown earth, leafless scrub oak, grey deer dead. Only the magpies in ravenous black and white protested our invading their house at death and dinnertime. We oozed through soggy earth beneath a bank of snow, where rivulets crept cold apd uncomfortable into my spring sneakers. We squished around the snow to firmer earth. "When will spring arrive up here?" I thought, maundering in my mind, I think, of trivial things to grasp some sense, some locus for my soggy feet. |