The Hermit's Story by Rick Bass (the best ebook reader for android txt) 📕

for all of us when that deer leapt up and ran away. Only the baby was laughing. Her cheeks were rosy-red from the cold. She was clapping her mittens as we trotted along behind the hunter.

“How old is she?” one woman asked Martha as she ran alongside us.

The deer ran as if it knew where it was going; as if it had been in town before. It ran in a straight line, north, as if heading for the train station. Close to the mill, and close to the river.

The deer was starting to bleed more. We tracked the deer down to the end of Main Street and past the train station, across the railroad tracks and into the brush. It was headed for water, as any wounded animal will do.

Someone had a flashlight and turned it on as we hurried through the brush. Cold alder branches popped us. A few in the posse turned back, then: they had supper to cook, or bowling practice. Only about half a dozen of us kept on, having a strong interest in the way things would turn out.

The deer was losing more blood. How much blood did it have?

We found where the deer had slipped and had tried to rest for a moment, but it must have gotten back up when it heard us coming. If it had been my deer I wouldn’t have pushed it so hard, would have let it go off and lie down to rest and die in peace, and then I would have tracked it, but it wasn’t my deer.

He was going to push it all the way to the river.

There was no way the deer would be able to swim the river. The current was too fast, and the water too deep.

The tracks went straight out across the gravel bar, disappearing then into the dark river.

“He’s in heaven now,” a woman said. We were all breathing jets of silver puff-clouds. The mill’s whistle moaned for the day shift to get off.

“He was real” the hunter said, near tears. He turned to us. The black river behind him seemed to stretch forever, laughing, now that that warm deer was in its cold belly.

“Did you all see it?” the hunter asked. He lifted his rifle, brandished it. “I want you all to know I shot that deer,” he cried. “I did it, I was the one. For a while, I had it lashed to the hood of my car,” he said. “Me.”

Most of us looked away, disgusted. Maybe he had wounded that big old deer, and he’d probably even killed it—and maybe it was a record of some kind—but he’d lost it, too, and it’s a sin to waste meat.

“Shit,” said the woman who’d told us the deer was in heaven, “that doesn’t count for fuck. I used to be in love with my husband, too—my ex—but used to doesn’t count for shit.”

A hunter in Idaho, seventy miles downstream, saw the icy corpse go floating by and retrieved it—lassoed it and dragged it in. He built a fire and thawed it out, took the carcass in to be measured, and it was true, it was the third largest whitetail ever shot, but he wouldn’t give the deer back, so nobody got the record. We saw the picture of it in the paper.

There were some among us who believed the deer had not drowned when it hit the water, but had somehow swum that whole seventy miles, and then had drowned. In the long run it doesn’t really matter, the deer’s dead, but I’m one of the ones who believes he almost made it: that he swam that frigid river with his head, and that huge rack, out of the water, plumes of ice-rime ghosting from his nose, swimming through the lonely cold night; swimming for his life, his head held high: and he almost made it; almost.

…

We live in one of those places I did not build a road into. A place of wildness and mystery. Our little girl looks out the window on a winter morning and watches a family of otters playing on the river ice. There are elk outside, looking in the kitchen window, like missionaries who’ve come to visit. In my dreams, I think of our bodies as being the color of flames, because for half the year, it’s so cold that the only place we can make love is in front of the fire, so that our writhing bodies take on the color of the fire itself. The skin at the ends of our fingers splits and cracks from the dryness of the cold. Our eyelashes sheet with frost when we go outside to ski or snowshoe. Ravens float above us when we ski, as if lonely for company in the huge silences.

We’re shifting. I tend to be the effusive one now, prone to gushes of euphoria followed by torrents of despair, while Martha seems to have reversed and become the sane one, the steady one, the wise one.

The country behind us, through which we have traveled, and through which I don’t guess we’ll be traveling again: I can see it now, lying slightly below us.

Like so many of us, Martha loves the big predators, which are generally much more intelligent than their prey: the wolves, bears, and lions. She says that hunting is “the primary act of evolution that has most shaped the organic body we call intelligence.” That’s how she’s always talked, and I’ve gotten used to it. Her language, in its own way, carries just as much passion as that of a poet’s. It’s just that her passion’s hidden behind those awful words (evolution, and organic body of intelligence). It’s all held in. She’ll lay something like that on me, and I’ll say, “Oh, you mean the predators have evolved larger brains to hold all the different data, all the possibilities they need to factor in to hunt with—the wind, slope gradient, temperature, soil conditions, sun’s angle, moon’s phase, and all of