Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [73]
“We can start by practicing. Where do you practice?” he finally asked, scanning the area from left to right.
“At a friend’s house. I set up a target behind her house.”
It was early afternoon and they might have an hour or two of strong daylight left.
“Show me where. Let’s go there,” he said.
“Give me a minute,” she said without hesitating, as if it were the most natural thing for him to request. She closed the door with him on the outside. She needed one more moment without looking at him, but this was wrong; she realized that her interpersonal skills were not up to par and she yanked open the door.
“Sorry. Come in. It’ll take me five minutes to get ready.”
He came in and stood in her kitchen with faded yellow and orange linoleum, aluminum strips around the chipped Formica countertops. She retreated to the bedroom, and every sound that she made clattered in naked disclosure throughout the house. Her scuffed steps in the bedroom, dresser drawers opening, a metal coat hanger clanging along an iron rod, the flush of a toilet, the ping of pipes as the sink faucet was turned on. When she came out of the bedroom, Hill stood in front of Caleb’s sculpture, a woman playing the saxophone, her upper torso tilted back in euphoria, her eyes squeezed shut in crinkled joy, her knees spread wide under the folds of a dress. Rocky wished the statue would press her knees together.
He turned slowly toward her. “I didn’t learn to hunt from men. It wasn’t like that. Whatever you’re thinking about hunters, I’m probably not it. I learned first from my grandmother, then later when she was gone, my father took over.”
Rocky rested her bottom on the arm of the couch. She wasn’t sure why Hill was telling this, but she knew that she wanted to hear him.
“Tell me,” she said.
“I learned to hunt early on with my grandmother, and she taught me smells and scat, and broken twigs. She refused to use a compound bow, said it was unfair to the animals. She said anybody could use a compound bow. She told me that if I learned to use a traditional bow, I’d understand the prey better. And I’d understand myself better.”
Rocky pulled one knee up and wrapped her arms around it. “My Italian grandmother taught me to make ziti. That feels a bit tame in comparison.”
Hill put the archery gear on the counter. “She taught me to find deer scat, dried in neat little piles of pellets, and to put it on a flat stone and grind it with another stone until she had a fine dusting of powder which she put on our boots, jackets, and our hats. It masked our scent. She taught me to construct a hunting stand.”
“What exactly is a hunting stand?” asked Rocky.
“They’re different, depending on what you’re hunting and what weapon you’re using. She was a bow hunter, so hers was a small platform of roughly bound branches about fifteen feet up in the lower branches of a tree, a place to wait for deer traffic. She taught me to wait in complete silence when I was ten years old. She claimed that she had never wounded a deer; all of her kills had dropped to the floor of the forest within seconds. It was the surest place to shoot from, both for the hunter and for the sake of the deer.”
Rocky pictured young Hill and his grandmother, covered with dried deer poo, unseen and undetected by the flickering nostrils of the deer that walked undisturbed beneath them until they selected their kill and shot the animals from above. Now Hill stood before her with his hunter’s weapons and she felt like both the prey and predator at the same time, covered with a scatlike covering of insomnia and longing.
Rocky stood up and tucked her hair under a fleece hat. “Let’s catch the last of the light.”
She was glad that they were leaving her house. They had already expanded so fully that the walls of the house were bending outward to contain them.
“I set up a target behind Tess’s house. I never wanted the dog to see me shooting. I didn’t want to scare him,” she said.
They climbed into his truck. “I came as soon as I heard your message. There’s a pile of unopened