Deadfall Read online

  Moving quickly now, he came down off the ledge and the small mountain that supported it and moved into the trees. He bounded over bushes and blowdowns, ducked under branches, and pushed off of trees as he careened past. Having located his prey, there was no need for stealth until he drew closer, which he did faster than he had expected. Nearing the meadow where the caribou were grazing, he slowed. His feet became more sensitive to the noise potential of the brush under them; his eyes found passages around reaching fingers of tree limbs, beds of dry leaves, soil that concealed twigs as brittle—and loud—as snapping bones.

  Attuned to the wind, he headed diagonally away from his quarry, hoping to come at them against a breeze. When he finally made it to the clearing, no animals were visible. He glassed the area, disappointed. Then a shadow shifted beyond the meadow, where the forest picked up its march north. Dapples of light, shades of blackness moved too steadily to be caused by mere wind, and he panned with them until they coalesced into a caribou.Though the caribou was the only animal in the deer family in which both male and female grew antlers, the monstrous rack on the head of this animal told him he had found a bull. It was moving deeper into the woods. Hutch knew he had to move parallel with it until the woods came together and he could approach under the cover of trees.

  Two hours later he stood on a game trail with fresh tracks. He followed the spoor pessimistically, remembering that caribou were fast travelers and hard to pursue. Before long, he lost the tracks. Reversing, he found where the caribou had veered off the trail. He moved into the brush to follow it. The caribou’s movements through the virgin wild puzzled him, since most game followed the paths emblazoned by thousands of animals that had come before. Then he stepped into a clearing and had his answer.

  Before him rose a thirty-foot-high sloping wall of golden sand and ashen dirt. It was an esker, a twisting serpentine ridge formed by meltwater streams beneath the ice of retreating glaciers. Sometimes called animal highways, eskers allowed wildlife to travel great distances quickly. He saw the tracks of his bull climbing diagonally to the flat top of the esker. The ground had crumbled under its hooves, forming an almost perfect flight of steps. Hutch had no hope of catching the animal by following it. He pulled out his map and found the esker and his current position. The esker weaved for several miles in a mostly eastern direction before arcing north and petering out.

  Examining the terrain along the esker, Hutch thought the caribou was heading for a meadow at the confluence of two streams about a mile distant. The esker would take the caribou away from the spot before bringing it back. By heading straight for this meadow, he thought he could arrive there first. Lying in wait for a fast animal was always better than trying to overtake it. Hutch returned the map to its pocket and jogged back into the forest. High up, a hundred chickadees chirped to themselves. Despite their apparent numbers, he rarely witnessed one perched on a branch or flitting between trees. They were masters at hiding. Not so good at keeping quiet.

  As much as he enjoyed the victory of a successful kill, he realized again the pleasure of pursuit. Moving through the trees the way an animal would, spotting their killing grounds and beds exhilarated him. He loved the fragrance of trees and moss and the dew as it misted off the leaves. His boots trod silently over the soft cushion of needles and sphagnum and crunched over dead branches. As he moved, he found himself falling into a familiar pattern in his breathing and the movements of his legs, arms, and body. Getting from one point to another in the woods became effortless, automatic, as though he’d done it every day of his life. Shadow and light, which at first had fooled him into seeing branches and leaves and obstacles in his path, forcing him to weave and duck and expend energy, once again became only shadow and light. Now he leaped when there was something to leap over and dodged when there was something to dodge. His breathing seemed to become harmonious with the woods and the wind. In this state, Hutch’s mind wandered. He imagined parts of the wilderness he could not see: animals darting away before he approached, others watching him from a distance—all of them accepting him as part of their world.

  The troubles of home seemed far away. Perhaps because of this, he was able to think about them without the familiar, paralyzing grip of panic and grief. Only nine months ago, his life had seemed as David’s was—fantastic with a capital F. Picture a Hallmark card depicting a couple walking hand in hand through the surf, a pair of happy children running ahead. Add some credit card debt, make the beach a mountain trail, the couple a little older—you get the idea. Then Janet had slammed him in the head with a baseball bat.Well, not really, but it felt that way. Instead of “Louisville Slugger,” the bat she used read “Petition for Dissolution of Marriage.” She had left it on the breakfast table beside a sectioned cantaloupe and a glass of cranberry juice.

  She’d taken the kids to school and hadn’t returned. She had not answered her mobile phone until after two o’clock that afternoon, providing Hutch plenty of time to go out of his mind.

  “Talk about out of the blue,” he’d said.

  “Hutch,” she had replied, insanely calm, “it’s been a long time coming.”

  She’d launched into a litany of Hutch’s offenses: too much time at work, too little affection at home, too committed to his friends—that’s the term she used, “too committed.” The grievances had taken him by surprise. He’d kept regular, maybe even fewer-than-normal hours on the job. He’d often left little notes and gifts around the house professing his love for her. And he had certainly not seen as much of David,Terry, and Phil as he would have liked.

  Of course, she’d had an answer for everything: he’d disappear into his home office for “at least an hour” after the kids had gone down, his notes and gifts were a poor substitution for genuine feelings, and he’d be with his buddies mentally when he wasn’t with them physically. She had not wanted to try any of his solutions: counseling, changing his job, changing everything, separation. He’d felt he couldn’t win, and of course that was true: “The heart in ascension is blind to faults; in decline, it’s blind to reason.”

  He’d found out later through a friend that she had been seeing another man since well before her grand slam to his head. No wonder she’d been so unwilling to work it out. She had been swept up in the affections of a man who had been free to focus on romance—flowers, poetry, long gazes into each other’s eyes—without the anesthetizing grind of daily life—getting the kids to soccer practice and violin lessons, calling AAA for a tow when the car craps out, planning for retirement. He had heard that to some women even the dangers of illicit affairs heightened the experience, as though equating it to riding with the Hell’s Angels or kayaking Tibet’s Tsangpo River. More like trying to catch a bullet with your teeth, Hutch had thought.

  Despite the revelation, he had continued to love her through the divorce. He had admitted there were things he could have done to express his love more and to limit outside distractions. He’d begged, pleaded, and generally behaved like a teenager who had become invisible to his first crush. When she asked him to move out, he had agreed. That had been his biggest mistake. In attempting to finagle sole custody of Logan and Macie out of the deal, she’d claimed that his moving out constituted abandonment. He’d made his second biggest mistake upon hearing that: he’d displayed anger in court.

  Now she had temporary custody, and he could see his son and daughter only five hours, once a week—under court-ordered supervision. It was as though she’d deliberately aimed her venomous arrows at the softest part of his heart. She used to tell her friends that he was a loving and attentive father. Suddenly, she could not tell enough people how terrible he was. As though emerging from a cocoon instead of a marriage, Janet had become a different person from the one he’d known for fifteen years. But her metamorphosis had not resulted in a butterfly but a beast. She was devious and cruel. She lied to the courts and her own kids. He sometimes wondered if her attacks were an attempt to make him hate her as much as she had apparently grown to hate him, so
she could get on with her life without the guilt of watching him suffer. If that were the case, it had worked. He still loved the woman he had married, but not the woman she had become.

  The loss of his wife and children had taken its toll on the perpetually reticent but upbeat John Hutchinson. In a fit of self-pity worthy of a country music award, he had declared Sting’s ode to divorced dads, “I’m So Happy I Can’t Stop Crying,” his favorite song and played it ceaselessly for five hours.

  A few months ago David had pointed out that his columns had taken a dark turn.While continuing to profile heart-of-Colorado archetypes, his articles’ emphasis slowly shifted from triumph over tragedy to the tragedy itself, from the Phoenix to the ashes. One column chronicled the saga of a woman who’d been injured when a police cruiser in a high-speed chase had crashed into her car. Sheer determination had gotten her through years of physical therapy and college to become a choreographer for the Colorado Ballet Company. The accident had robbed her of her dream of becoming a ballerina, but not of making valuable contributions to the field she loved so much. Hutch’s column consumed an inordinate amount of ink describing the extent of her injuries and the culpability of the police department. The woman’s inspiring achievement became a mere footnote. In another column, a rancher’s valiant and successful efforts to secure more state funding for mountain-road safety after his son was killed by a falling boulder became a heart-wrenching dirge of the family’s grief.

  “Write a book,” David had suggested. “Get it out of your system.”

  Hutch had not believed he had a book in him, especially one that was either sufficiently direct or sufficiently dark to purge his angst. That’s when he had the idea for this trip. Experiencing his friends and facing himself in a place without guile or unreasonable demands seemed like just the thing. If he returned to Denver with a chip the size of Canada on his shoulder, his prognosis would be hopeless. He’d have to resort to drastic measures—moving to the Keys or something. Of course that would distance himself even further from his children, geographically and emotionally, but he was beginning to wonder if trying to stay in their lives was a lost cause. And at the rate she was going, Janet would have them completely poisoned against him within the year. As he had finally realized about his marriage, perhaps it would eventually dawn on him that his relationship with his children was gone as well.

  He didn’t want that. He’d rather lose his arms and legs. He simply did not know how to fight anymore.

  14

  Forty yards ahead,sunlight pierced the gloom. It came first in slanting rays; beyond that lay a consistency of brilliance that indicated Hutch had reached the meadow. Craning his head around, he tried to peer into that openness, but the land there must have sloped away. All he could see were hazy mountains in the far distance. Cautiously, he crept forward, like a cat on the prowl. His eyes flicked from the open space beyond the woods to the land directly before him. He watched for twigs or dry leaves that would give away his presence.

  A clump of bushes between two trees shielded his approach. Maybe they were chokeberry trees; he was never very good at identifying flora. Near the bush, he crouched lower. When it seemed he would step right into its branches and leaves, he lowered himself to his knees.

  He pushed one hand silently into the bush and levered the foliage down. The meadow lay before him, but not the caribou.

  Either he had guessed wrong about the animal’s destination or he had arrived before it. He waited. A noise came to him, faint and so foreign to the area he could not be sure he was really hearing it. It was an engine, something big like a truck or a powerful ATV. It revved once or twice, then rumbled steadily as though it was idling or cruising slowly. Then it cut off. Must be a road up here somewhere. Maybe hunters from Fiddler Falls. He thought the vehicle had been far off, the rolling hills amplifying and distorting its sounds. He listened more intently, yet heard nothing but the wind through the trees.

  He slipped the bow off his shoulder and studied its simple beauty. Sixty inches long and two inches wide, it was made of laminated walnut. It was cocoa in color, with a black grain pattern. The center part of the bow, called the riser, was straight and shaped to fit a hand. Above the handgrip, a nub of wood formed an arrow rest, over which the shaft of the arrow slid when being drawn back or propelled forward by the string. Above and below the riser, limbs arced toward the shooter. Each tip curved away from the archer, giving the bow its name: recurve.

  A bow’s power was described in draw weight. A twenty-pound draw was good for children shooting at paper targets, but the arrow would never generate enough velocity to penetrate an animal’s hide and muscles. Hutch’s bow required sixty pounds of pressure to pull the string back to full draw. His arrows flew fast. The arm strength necessary for recurves forced users to learn instinctive shooting: all the aiming took place before drawing back on the string. When it was time to fire, they would quickly pull the string back to the jawline and immediately release, giving their muscles no time to shake under the strain of the draw weight.

  This was different from compound bows, which used pulleys and cams to alleviate the strength needed to hold the string at full draw. Compound shooters aimed after drawing and stayed at full draw until the best shot presented itself. But compound bows tended to be noisier than recurves, alerting the animal to the hunter’s presence, and they were nearly impossible to restring in the field. Once Hutch switched to a recurve, he wondered why he’d ever used a compound.

  The bowstring itself was made of Dacron fiber. It ran from the upper bowtip to the lower bowtip. Near the center of its length, Hutch had clamped a small copper ring. To nock an arrow, he put the Vshaped notch in the end of the arrow, near the fletching or feathers, below this ring so the bowstring ran through it.

  Mounted to the right side of the riser, opposite the arrow rest, was a quiver. A soft rubber form gripped the aluminum shafts of eight arrows. Each arrow’s razor tip—called a broadhead—was pushed into a plastic cup containing rubberized grips. The arrows ran parallel to the bow’s riser, with the broadheads pointing skyward.

  Movement caught his eye. At the south end of the meadow, the caribou trotted out of the woods, into the open.

  Hutch froze, slowing his breathing, afraid to move even his eyes.

  The caribou came closer. Hutch heard a noise he had previously only read about: a clicking and popping of the animal’s leg joints, distinctive to this species. Intermittently, its hooves clopped against exposed rock. It huffed and snorted as it searched for a meal of lichen. One hundred yards . . . eighty . . . sixty. It was outside of his comfortable target range, though he had successfully practiced at that distance. The animal paused, looking around. It pawed at the ground and leaned over to nibble the grass.

  Meticulously, excruciatingly slowly, Hutch pulled an arrow from the quiver and nocked it onto the string. He leaned slightly to view the caribou between two branches. He had removed the middle three fingers of his right-hand glove so his fingertips could feel the bowstring and slide smoothly over it. Now he held those fingers on the string, two below the arrow, one above. He sighted along the arrow past its broadhead to the caribou.

  The animal stepped closer. It was beautiful, husky and muscular. It possessed a thick, powerful neck draped in a white scarf of long fur. Its body was dark brown. It wore beige socks. An antler rose from beside each ear, then split into a forward clump and a backward branch that climbed higher before fingering out. At their highest point, the antlers were a full three feet above the caribou’s head.

  Hutch avoided looking at the caribou’s eyes. Hunters believed animals sensed when other eyes lay upon theirs. Skeptics were new hunters who hadn’t tested the taboo in the field.The caribou lifted its head and sniffed the air. Then it trotted closer to Hutch and stooped to graze again. Forty-two yards: close enough.

  Hutch took a bead on the animal’s torso, just above its front leg where its heart would be.The tips of his forefinger, middle finger, and ring finger felt the pr
essure of the bow’s taut string. In one quick motion he pulled back until his thumb nearly touched the hollow in his jaw below the earlobe.

  Before he could release, the animal exploded.

  15

  The air boomed with the sound of thunder as the earth erupted. Dirt, sod, caribou billowed straight up.

  Hutch fell back, hitting the ground hard. He blinked, confused. High above, branches formed a canopy over him, blue sky beyond. Birds streaked across his vision. Smoke and dust blew past.The smell of ash and meat reached his nostrils. He lifted his head, seeing only the bush and the smoke rising beyond it. His left hand was holding the bow, but he’d lost the arrow.

  He rose to his knees again, parted the branches. Silt was still dropping. Along with it, his arrow thumped down in the meadow. It vibrated, then held still, a feathered marker halfway between Hutch and what was now a smoking crater.

  Larger chunks of earth and probably caribou rained from the sky.

  What appeared to be part of an antler landed behind him and spun off into the woods. A wave of warm air pushed through the leaves of the bush, washing over him. He squinted against it. Then it passed, and his skin cooled.

  A sound came to him. He flinched, expecting another explosion. It was the revving of an engine, growing louder. From the other side of the meadow, a large SUV roared into view.Moving fast, it reached the crater in seconds. Hutch recognized it as a Hummer, bright yellow and caked with a day’s worth of off-roading. A man sat harnessed into a chair in the bed of the truck.

  The Hummer braked at the crater. The man’s head flew forward, then back. The doors opened and people clamored out, laughing, hooting, hollering.