New Southerner Literary Edition 2012

At this point I was genuinely alarmed. I didn’t want to be alone in such a big country.

“I think you need to put that bright jacket on,” Hob said. “It’s hunting season for everybody else, too.”

I put on my American Legion boxing jacket. Lightweight cotton, bright blue with yellow arms, it was cut out in the raglan style and had the outline of a boxing glove in soft deer skin sewn on the back. The night before Hob had insisted that I bring the jacket. He was more proud of the club jacket than I. Benny, my sparring partner, always managed to hit my ears, and even on this hunting trip, the small cracks in the skin of my ears next to my head stung slightly. Hob said when I got too big, the punches might hurt my brain, but in the meantime I would learn not to fear kids from town this way.

Hob laid out the hunting strategy. Each hunter was to follow the ridge of a separate, deep coulee in the direction of the river for about an hour, watching for game. The coulee would widen, and it would be intersected by smaller gullies and might be obscured by these scrub pine trees, but I was to try to stay on the main run, as Hob would stay on his. Then each was to come back up coulee to high ground again, picking a path in the bottom of the next-over coulee until he was out. If we didn’t find deer or flush them out that way, Hob would be surprised.

I followed the high ground along the edge of my coulee, carrying the leveraction rifle, exactly the kind you saw in Western movies. It was a heady feeling moving down toward the hidden river, carrying lethal protection. I liked the drama of it, but I knew it was unreal, that I really needed Hob to show me the correct feeling, but by the time I had gone 50 yards, I looked around to find that I had completely lost contact with Hob. Maybe he had unexpectedly gone down toward the bottom of the grassy top to take a leak.

You had to stand or work next to him a long time to know what the correct feeling was with Hob anyway. Nothing happened on my passage down coulee, no deer, except that there was increasing cover toward the river that lay far below, and if there were deer they would have been obscured by the trees and brush. I was in thick timber where tree trunks were obstacles when I got as far as I thought I should be going. I would have liked to walk back out on my own coulee that I already knew, but I picked the next one over as I was told and began to scramble down the steep bank of the gully for my turnaround.

Here I saw my first real sign of deer. Animals had pressed a foot trail into the bottom around rocks and trees. The wind didn’t blow at all, and it looked like there was forage, since the grass along the edge of the trail showed green here and there. A deer could have a nice time here. I followed the game trail delightedly, as though a deer.

Not far along the trail my eyes were drawn to a brown bundle high in thick pine overlooking the trail.

The thirty-thirty was heavy compared to a twenty-two, and I knew how powerful it was. I raised my gun. There was a sound of wild, enraged screaming, high-pitched tearing, in my head. A wounded mountain lion was presenting all its fangs and claws, blood running from its mouth in my mind’s eye, attacking its attacker. I lowered the gun with weakened, trembling arms that 63