THE HUNTER OF LONE TRACTOR PLAIN

by Mark Holman

The Hunter turned his small all-terrain vehicle into the approach to a vast field split by a low grassy peak that extended a half mile ending at a slough hole. The raised hump that divided two areas stretched toward an old tractor sitting next to a tree’s broken and burned stump, just visible on the horizon atop a small island surrounded by cattails. The sky was blue with a handful of wispy clouds, the sun already dipping toward setting. On the island’s edge, the remaining bright yellow leaves of a tightly spaced grove of young cottonwoods shimmered and danced, reflecting the low sun in tiny flashes of light. On one side of the rise lay the unkempt yet uniform rows of a recently harvested field of yellow corn stubble stretching to the edge of the far horizon where the standing stalks of an unharvested field stood. On the opposite side of the berm, an area of wild-looking grassland stretched to the horizon in a raucous yet pleasing mix of a thousand shades of gold, red, yellow, brown, and black swaying in the gentle late afternoon breeze. The pleasant panorama, constructed from the season’s transient blend of light and space, gave everything a glinting gold-kissed hue in the low afternoon sun of late fall. The Hunter listened to the soft rustling of the grasses and caught a whiff of their pleasant dried smell. The only sounds were of the breeze, swaying plants, and the low hum of a combine somewhere past the horizon vibrating through the air. Judging by the dustiness of the skyline, the combine must be just a few miles away. Stepping off the machine, The Hunter turned to reach for a bolt action rifle in a case attached to the ATV. Holding the gun up in the air with one hand, he pulled a clip of shells from his pocket, snapping it into place. Readjusting a small backpack on his back, he slipped the rifle across his shoulder. As he stepped onto the rise, he looked out at the field of dried, swaying plant life, whose desiccated multihued stalks waved in the light wind of the crisp November day, making the pleasant scratching sound of dried grass swaying in the breeze. So much more enjoyable than the wind that whipped and lashed the vast field to and fro the day before when he had to lower his head into the wind to stay upright and keep windblown soil particles out of his eyes. How quickly something pleasant could turn tortuous by adding just a few miles per hour of wind or a few degrees of temperature. Today was good, though, and he would enjoy it. A nice day can wipe away worry about the past or the future.

The hump, created by the accumulation of soil atop an old fence line of indeterminate age, now buried and covered by a mix of plants, was a dull brown gleaming in the low sun that gave everything a gilded shine. At some point long ago, the soil presumably had come from the grassy field, like a carpet rolled up on one side of a room. Ignoring that wind had stripped a whole field of soil, past farmers had built a fenceline atop the buried one, like a new civilization building atop the remnants of an old one.

When the Hunter’s boss had bought the land from the old farmer, they dug up part of his pasture to plant corn but left the sandier part as grassland in a government program. To remove the fenceline, the Hunter had hooked a giant four-wheel drive tractor to one post with a chain before driving parallel to the fence. As he went, steel posts popped out like toothpicks, ending with a half mile of wire and posts bouncing and jiggling behind the machine like some insane land leveling contraption. Later, he had buried the pile of twisted wire and posts with rocks, picked from the field, as if trying to erase the human and geologic past to create something new.

The top of the hump provided an excellent vantage point to survey the relatively flat topography. He put his binoculars to his eyes and scanned the terrain in all four directions. If there were a deer within range, he could see it standing here. Spinning ninety degrees from the grassy field, he looked closely at the yellowish corn stubble that was just tall enough to hide resting deer. On the far edge of the horizon stood the unharvested cornfield, probably where they all were, he thought. But as the day waned, he knew they would be moving from the safety of the field toward the water of the old slough hole with its broken-down, crumbling tractor and shattered tree.

He pulled back the bolt of the rifle to move a shell from the clip into the chamber, and as he did so, checking to make sure the safety was still on. Slinging the rifle on his shoulder again, he began to walk the half mile atop the old fence line, following the game trail along its peak. The well-trod path was kept open by a proliferation of local creatures that used it as the fastest track to the shelter and aqueous salubrity of the slough hole. The ancient, timeless wisdom of life to find the easiest path between two points was worth heeding. Paths first forged by wildlife became human trails and then roads.

Just then, a hen pheasant, blending into the ground until he almost stepped on her, jumped up, giving him a bit of a start, the rapid fluttering of its wings creating musical notes with the air as the brown and black-flecked creature strummed its wings, then glided to the ground. The commotion of the hen had caused something to start moving in the grass ahead of him. An explosion of movement a second later, and a group of small gray and cinnamon colored birds with a smaller half-moon downward curve in their wings took flight, landing hundreds of yards into the deep grass of the field. Watching the small, elegant partridges land, he was now wondering why he hadn’t decided to bring a shotgun.

He thought briefly about putting away the rifle and pushing through the waist-high tangle of grass on one side of the rise or calf-high corn stubble on the other to chase up something. He quickly pushed the thought aside since stirring anything, let alone shooting, would disturb the peace of his primary goal for the day, the large whitetail buck he expected to see at the slough hole. All year he had been watching it move around the area while working in the fields, seeing it primarily at dusk around the slough hole. Besides, high-stepping corn stalks to avoid getting stabbed in the leg by the razor-sharp spikes or leg pushing through wind-tangled dried grasses interwoven with spiky Russian thistle digging into his legs and thighs wasn’t as appealing as a stroll and high vantage point of the accumulated windblown hubris of human manipulation of nature.

As the sun dipped low, he remembered how he had spied the buck moving slowly near the slough hole the previous day as he dumped the last hopper of corn from the field into the grain cart. Tomorrow, he would take the final truckload on the long round trip to Grain Terminal One, where it would become fuel for some of the machines that grew the corn in the symbiotic cycle of plants feeding machines and machines growing plants.

The crow of a cock pheasant, far off in the corn stubble, brought him back to the moment. Pushing aside the fantasy of bagging a pheasant, he looked ahead toward the broken and burned remnants of the great cottonwood on the small island. The jagged and scorched remains still stood taller than he did, and he was too young to remember when the tree was struck down by lightning years before. The charred, broken, and hollow remnants of the once great tree still stood high enough to be seen from the road, the charring acting as a preservative that had allowed it to remain for decades. He had heard it had once been the largest cottonwood in the region and had been a striking sight in late fall when its leaves glowed an iridescent yellow in the waning sunshine.

The old farmer, whose family had owned the land for generations before selling it to his boss, who farmed half the county, had allowed people to walk the cattle trail that used to run at the base of the berm to see the natural wonder. That changed the night a combination of wind and lightning took down and burned the old tree whose broken, charred, decaying ruin still held power to instill awe. Standing inside its hollowed shell, one could still reach with outstretched arms and not touch the sides.

Pulling his gun from his shoulder to be ready for a deer to jump up, he continued to walk, stepping high to avoid a burrow dug into the side of the trail. He had been keeping one eye on the ground analyzing the scat and tracks of the many creatures who used the path to get a feel for what things might be in the area. Walking over the burrow, he thought it might belong to the coyotes he heard yipping in the evenings after he had shut down the machines.

As one of the few raised areas in a mostly flat landscape, the old fence line, perforated with the burrows and holes of various creatures, served as a safe space for animals pushed to the margins of the fields by the constant human disturbance. It was common to hear the barking and yipping of coyotes at night. People said there was a time not so long ago that you didn’t hear coyotes. It was a time when the countryside had more people with more livestock, more guns, and more dogs. In a present that had given way to vast regions growing just a handful of plants and animals, the human environment had given way to one dominated by machines. In the handful of spaces where the machines weren’t, the wild things could thrive within chemically enforced boundaries.

He raised his rifle to his shoulder and glassed the slough ahead of him through the scope. As he slowly moved the eyepiece across the island in the center, he spied the buck he had been watching all year, ambling just between the rusty old tractor and the carbonized stump of the giant cottonwood. It stood there browsing the ground, unaware of him. Was this the moment he had been thinking about all summer? He wavered between pulling the trigger and letting the buck go to savor the anticipation for another season or just letting such a wonderful creature keep living. Aiming for a moment, he assessed that it was an easy shot. Quietly clicking the safety off, he held the rifle tightly to his shoulder, staring down the scope’s crosshairs to center the slowly moving deer. He tracked it moving through the high tan grasses that denoted the dryer land that followed the edge where the cattails signaled water-saturated ground and shallow water at the slough’s edge. Centering the crosshairs of the scope as it slowly walked, he aimed. When he was sure of a clear shot, he squeezed the trigger, and the gun let out a booming crack, recoiling hard against his shoulder. It always came as a shock to break nature’s relative silence with the violence of sound and action.

In a moment, tension transformed into the mixed joy of success and melancholic regret at striking and watching a fellow creature fall to the ground. He always wondered if he should say a prayer or conduct some ritual to honor the creature that had paid the ultimate price so that he could hang its horns on the wall and eat. He always came up empty since, in his world of cornfed consumerism, deer were resources like corn to be managed and harvested, not beings that deserved some reciprocity.

He arrived at the slough’s edge, where the buried fence line ran to the edge of the small island. Due to the frosty nights, It had lost its pleasant herbaceous smell, most evocative on still evenings as the fog settled over it. Stepping across the squat land bridge formed by the buried fence line barely rising above the cattails’ fluffy heads, he moved onto the tiny island. He looked at the old tractor, a heaping hunk of metal whose once bright paint was faded after decades in the sun and beginning to erode to spots of rusty roughness. The Hunter could see that the head was removed from the engine as if someone had attempted to fix it or salvage parts. Three carcasses, a plant, an animal, and a machine lay within feet of one another on the tiny island. For a moment he imagined the great Tree of Life broken, its four-legged fruit splayed on the ground due to the excesses of the dead tractor. In some parallel reality of the multiverse, the same tractor thrived next to a healthy deer and tree. A different world was only as far away as the imagination.

Stepping past the tractor, he leaned the rifle against its engine, catching a whiff of its pleasant fermented mix of old dirt, organic matter, grease, and oil that gave it the distinctive smell of forgotten old machines. Walking toward the buck, the Hunter noticed it lay on something higher than the surrounding shades of brown grass and still green leafy spurge. The deer lay on its side, legs splayed outward, looking peaceful. He kicked the tips of his boots as he walked and hit something solid just before reaching the deer. Removing his pack as he knelt, he felt the edges of something hard buried beneath season after season of layered dried grass, wrapping it tight like the arms of a wicker chair. Intrigued, he grabbed the deer by the legs and rolled it off. He pulled a short knife out of its sheath and began to slice the dead grass stalks that cocooned the metal in a tangle in various states of decomposition toward grass made humus at its bottom. Pulling the iron remains of an old walking plow from decades of slowly being buried and consumed by the earth, he stood it up in its natural position.

As he knelt, gazing for a moment at the unique find and catching his breath from the exertion, he noticed for the first time a sky crisscrossed by the tracks of aircraft contrails moving in every direction and others stretching from ground to sky of a type he had never seen. It was common to see the Air Force from nearby bases doing things in the sky. Watching them broke up the long days sitting on the tractor, but this was more than usual. For so much activity, it was still oddly quiet, just a low rumble, barely audible below the drone of the distant combine and the rustle of the remaining golden leaves of the small cottonwoods at the edge of the island. The display of looping contrails and rising rockets danced in a strangely quiet show across the dimming blue of the sky; shimmering, evanescent fluffy white lines breaking through the slow transition from blue to orange to darkness. A plastic bag caught in the branches of one of the small cottonwoods, fluttering in a chaotic unnatural way, fractured the trance of the almost silent ballet in the sky, his mind returning to the moment.

The setting sun spread light out in deep reds and oranges touched by wisps of purple, and the shadows of the tractor and the shell of the dead tree were getting longer. The relatively warm afternoon air had turned cooler, tinged with the touch of comfort that comes with the pleasant moment of the day’s completion between light and dark.

The lengthening shadows of the tractor and tree spurred him to work on gutting the deer. He began to cut open the chest cavity, regretting that he had used his knife to cut out the old plow. He pulled out a small sharpener and gave it a few quick strikes to refresh the blade. He sliced the chest cavity, splitting the pelvis and pulling it open to reveal the warmth inside, like turning on a small heater.

He began to pull the innards from their viscous attachments on the sides of the body cavity, using his knife to trim as he went, his hands warmed by the action. He pulled the guts out and dragged them to the side into a pile. The coyotes would eat well tonight, and that spot would sprout something new in the spring from the blood and fluids that soaked into the ground.

His hands warmed from the body of the deer, but feeling the chill because of his lighter dress; he decided to start a fire. Even though it was an unseasonably warm hunting season, whatever that meant anymore, the chill in the air was enough that he wouldn’t have to rush back and could hang the deer in the garage and pull off the hide before the body cooled down fully. So many things had been turned upside down by weather that no longer followed old rules, but this was a nice moment, and he would savor it.

Tipping the old plow back on its side so that it lay somewhat flat to form a fire ring, he gathered some dried fallen wood from around the old cottonwood stump. Breaking up tiny twigs, he made a small pyramid in the center of the half circle formed by the plow. Pulling a piece of crumpled paper from his pocket, he placed it in the center, setting it alight with a match from his other pocket. The flames quickly engulfed the dry wood, and he began to pile successively larger pieces onto the growing fire. Soon, he was collecting larger chunks pried off the broken tree by dragging uncut deadfall to the edge that could be slowly fed into the fire as needed. When he finished, he could grab the unburned ends and throw them in the little spot of open water at the center of the slough.

Reaching inside the body cavity of the deer, he cut out one of the tenderloins and rinsed it with water from a bottle in his pack. Shaping a makeshift skewer from a stick, he sculpted it quickly to clean the bark, offering fresh, clean wood to push the meat through. Using a relatively clean piece of the wood he had gathered, he cut the meat into cubes before skewering and placed them over the fire to cook, not directly over the fire, but off to the side to slowly cook, fashioning a makeshift spit from some sticks. He took out cans of spaghetti and beans from his pack, opening them with a small knife in his pocket. Pouring the contents into the small pot, he mixed them with a stick and set them on one side of the flame. He then walked over to the small rock pile and looked for something to use as a plate to put everything on. On the glaciated prairie, most stones were roughly spherical, lacking flat sides or sharp corners unless broken. He found a soccer ball-sized piece of granite with a flat side sheared off, possibly by striking the old plow long ago.

His little meal cooking and smelling good, he stopped and sat down on the springy cushion of grass and pulled a small thermos from his pack, pouring himself a cup of coffee. Taking a long sip, he stared at the deepening colors of the sunset laced with fluffy contrails and considered the present moment. The colors of the little fire almost matched those of the waning evening, crackling and glowing in shades of red, orange, blue, and yellow that blended with the sunset at its edges. The tip of the sun was disappearing, and the sky just had that slim edge of light along the western horizon tinged a deep orange, turning dark. The opposite sky was already beginning to show a few stars of the slow transition from day to night. The moon’s outline began to appear as part of the seamless daily handoff between the sun and moon.

The gentle cacophonies of insects and birds that made sundown so pleasant in warm months were gone in the frozen evenings, replaced by a new harmony of a few titering sparrows and the squawk of a crow in the nearby quivering grove of cottonwoods. Relaxing, he watched as the diminishing light at the world’s edge was slowly giving way to the new world of stars on the far edge of the heavens to his back—the daily ending of one world and the beginning of another.

Before long, the tenderloin skewer was sizzling. Taking it off the fire, he put it to the side to cool on the plate rock. It cooled fast on the cold stone, and he tested a piece chewing slowly. Next, he grabbed the pot with a glove and set it on the rock to cool. He took a bite of the mixed beans and spaghetti. As he chewed, he looked off in the distance toward the now dark, blood-red sky and the slim line of the remaining glow of the dipping sun. Enjoying the convivial moment by the fire, roasted venison, with beans with spaghetti, the sky flashed bright, and his vision went blank. Before his brain could even wonder what had happened, a wave so hot it incinerated all wondering washed over him. He never saw the impressive mushroom cloud curling upward in a mix of reds, oranges, grays, and blacks above the last sliver of the setting sun. The tractor stood as a silent witness, the only thing not made of earth left standing in a landscape that stretched as far as eyes could see if there had still been eyes to see.

People returned to the place long after the trees and grass started to grow again. In that place, new people began to call things by new names. The iron brick of the tractor, the lone landmark that hadn’t been burned away by nuclear fire, stood out in the terrain. To that lonely place, with its old tractor, revered as one of the magical feats of the mistshrouded past when machines transformed and consumed the world, they gave the name: Lone Tractor Plain.

The world moved on. The memory of what had come before carried on in myth, story, and fragmentary texts in an old tongue few could read. In this new world, the sun rises and sets, the stars and moon shine, the wind blows, and life bursts forth in every imaginable color. On Lone Tractor Plain, generations of life come and go, and the tractor endures; the tractor abides. l

MARK HOLMAN lives in Williston, North Dakota, where he enjoys writing in his spare time. This story is a prequel to “The Tractor and the Tree,” published in the 2020 Sense of Place issue.