In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [101]
I am twenty, my father’s age when I was born. He, my brother and I sit in the pickup, parked somewhere in the Clearwater National Forest, drinking sweet tea from a thermos, waiting for dawn. Nearly a decade after moving to Lewiston, we have come back to hunt my fathers country.
It has been two years since I left home on graduation night, and we have barely spoken since. Two years on my own have given me the courage to believe that I’m independent enough to forge a new relationship with my father based on love and respect rather than on authority and obedience. I want to be welcomed into his home again. I want him to stay in the room when I enter to visit my mother. I want him to stop getting up from the table when I sit down. More than anything, I want a family that will not shun me.
I know that our truce will not come via apology—we both hold firm to the decision we made that day—and so I’ve found another alliance: I’ve asked him to hunt with me, to show me the land he knows. He logged it, punching through skidroads now grown over with chokecherry and alder. The thicketed draws, the stands of cedar, the meadows lush with tall grass and lupine are landmarks he lived by, familiar beyond simple memory. He has moved through this landscape, taken it inside of him, worked in the bone-deep cold of its winters, hauled from its heart millions of board feet. He has found the water sprung from rock and filled his hands with it, so cold it seemed molten.
I crave his intimate knowledge of the woods and want to show him what I have learned. I’ll point out the deep-cut track of a running deer (twin divots at the back—it’s a buck, then), name for him the birds that cross the sky (flicker, evening grosbeak, pine siskin, and that one you call “camp robber”—it’s really only a gray jay). Given the chance, I’ll prove my marksmanship, but not with the rifle I’ve carried for the last year. I’ve given the Winchester 30.06 back to him, cleaned, oiled and polished—a token of peace. Maybe here, I think, in the woods, we can come to some understanding of the ways we share.
Sitting next to him in the pickup’s cab, I feel light-headed and girlish, once again a visitor in my father’s territory, beset by the need to act properly, to show myself worthy of his command. I try to keep my arms and legs close, conscious of every brush of cloth between us. I try not to breathe too fast and give away my nervousness. Greg sits on my right, six-foot-three and solid, touched by the light coloring of our Grandfather Barnes—dark blond hair that will prove itself red as he matures, his beard and mustache the color of fox. Between the two men I feel both protected and diminished, the daughter, the sister, always in need of safeguarding. When the silhouettes of trees notch the horizon, we pull on our hats, savoring the last of the heater’s warmth before stepping out into the frosted morning air. My father checks for matches, drops a few shells into his shirt pocket. He turns a slow half-circle, squints at where the sun colors the clouds, smiles at us and heads for the cover of timber.
For a time, we keep to an old dirt road, then turn onto a game trail that leads us along the flank of a high ridge. My breath wisps out and evaporates, and I keep my eyes on the path, intent on keeping up. Already, my shoulder is numb with the weight of the Marlin—a lever-action 30.30, heavy and homely compared with my father’s Winchester. I swing it around, cradle it in the crook of my left arm.
My father is a tall man, long-legged and lean, unhurried and efficient in his movements. He keeps our pace steady, as though he has no intent of simply hunting but will lead us directly to where the deer stand exposed, stunned by our arrival into stillness. We should slow down, I think, listen. There might be bucks stripping alder only a few feet away. The farther we get from the rig, the farther we have to carry what we kill. The thought of half