This House of Sky - Ivan Doig [119]
September frost underfoot, a testing frost, the lightest dust of white on the broad bunchgrass crest of mountain. Dad handed me the single-shot .22, then the small box of bullets to put in my jacket pocket. I shook out a cartridge, barely longer than my thumbnail, clicked it into the breech. Carrying the light rifle underhand on the side of my body away from Dad, I started along the mountain slope beside him.
He had a hunter's voice, which could soften just enough not to carry far and yet be heard clearly. My own nosedived in and out of mutter as I answered him. He showed me herding sites remembered from three decades before, game trails angling up and across the summit like age-lines on a vast forehead, homestead splotches on the saged skirts of the valley far below us. In trade, I told him everything I knew of my half-year ahead, basic training at the Air Force base in San Antonio, a technical school probably elsewhere in Texas for the rest of those months. The first grouse caught us both in midstep as it flailed like a hurled wad of gray leaves into the air in front of us.
That must've been one of yours, I said.
And who's carrying the gun along like a crowbar froze to his hand? As ready and free a laugh as I could ever remember from my father. Ye could at least have throwed it at him.
In minutes, I shot the next grouse before it could fly. I handed Dad the rifle: Here, see if you learned anything from that. I put the bird in the sack he held out to me, followed it seconds later with the one he shot from the top of a log fifty yards away. I like to give mine a bit of a chance, ye see, instead of sneakin' up till I'm standin' on their tailfeathers.
The rifle traded back and forth, we each missed shots, made more. At midmorning and four birds apiece, we knew the hunting was over, but kept walking the mountainside. Right about over there, up over that little park ye see, Dad pointed. A time, there was a whole bunch, ten or twelve of us, ridin' back to the Basin from a dance at Deep Creek one night. Even Mrs. Christison, she was up in years, she was along with us. We got caught in a blizzard up here and all got lost off the road, the whole bunch of us goin' in a circle for about two hours. Finally we decided the best thing to do was just to sit down, wait and see if it'd clear up. We got off our horses—it wasn't cold; snowin' like sixty, but it was warm—and sat down on a bank there. After a while it let up and the moon come out so we could look around, and the whole damn lot of us were sittin' right square on the road.
At early noon, we sat on a silvered log and ate our sandwiches dry.
Ye leave ... when, day after tomorrow?
Yes.
Scared any of the plane ride?
Some. You know I'm like Grandma on that, leery about heights.
Unh-huh. His instant slant of grin. As the fellow says, what if ye get up in that thing and it comes uncranked up there?
Thanks a whole helluva lot for the idea.
I was up in one once, ye know. Nothin' to it.
Disbelief as if he'd said he'd once been to Afghanistan. When the hell was that?
When I was a punk kid about your age, at a rodeo or a fair or some kind of doin's. A guy had one of them planes with wings top and bottom, and he'd take ye up for a little ride. Angus and I bet each other five dollars about goin' up, and we're both so damn Scotch we didn't want to lose that money. I went first, I was the oldest. That guy turned that plane every which way, I'm here to tell ye. 'Well, how was it? Angus says. 'If ye see my stomach up there,' I says, 'bring it back down with ye.'
You're a world of encouragement. I pitched a stone at a snag below us on the slope.
What about after this Air Force business? Are ye gonna be able to look for a job out here?
I faced around to him slowly, as if the motion hurt. Dad, I don't think so. The jobs for me just aren't here. I think Tm pretty much gone from this country.
I figured ye were. My father's straight, clean-lined face broke open in a tearful gulp, the wrenched gasp I had seen all the years ago in the weeks after my mother's death.