So, for once, I’ll be a step ahead of him.
Scotland knows we need a deer, and he’ll be watching; I can count on that. I head back to the bedroom and pull the .243 from the gun rack.
On the porch, I sling the rifle over my shoulder and tuck a bullet in my pocket.
“You’re taking your rifle?” Finch asks.
The plan is I’ll hunt with the bow, but if Scotland happens to be in that little blind of ours, I’ll be able to see him through the scope. And if he’s there, I’m gonna fire off a round. Just one, not at him, but off to his left and into the bank. That ought to send a message. The message being: I know you’re there. Quit it.
“Won’t use it unless I have to,” I say.
We set off.
Finch is quiet and savvy in the woods, feet soft, lips pressed, and by that I mean she has a certain look where her lips are pulled taut and she is trying to keep the words from coming out. But also the way she moves, almost animal-like, and the way she is watching everything and listening and feeling it all. It’s in her blood, something inherent and primordial, instinctual, whereas I had to learn all of that. How to be quiet, how to move undetected, how to watch and see it all and also to wait. I remember Lincoln taking me out hunting for turkeys when I was a kid, the woods dark and still, and you had to be so quiet if you wanted to stand a chance, but I just couldn’t. Couldn’t be still or quiet. Too much to see and smell and take in, and I would pitch and shift, roll my ankles, anything to move. Not so with Finch.
Maybe it’s because she has been in the woods her whole life. In the beginning, I took a sheet and made a sort of sling to carry her around because there was work to do—food to get, wood to cut—and she had to be with me. Hunting, fishing, scouting, hoeing the garden, planting. She was there for all of it, strapped to my front at first, then to my back. When we were hunting I’d get a piece of birch, cut the bark off with my pocketknife, give it to her to chew on. That would keep her quiet, and it was probably healthier than those plastic things you see kids chewing on. Pacifiers. Cruel practice, if you ask me, shoving something into a kid’s mouth like that, just to keep them quiet.
Finch leads. It’s a bit of a haul to the valley, but knowing her, she could probably find her way in the dark, if she had to. We wind our way through a copse of jack pines, tall and spindly. A wind rushes through: an ocean sound. The trees lean, one creaks. There are no deciduous trees here, no leaves on the forest floor, an easy place to walk without noise. I nock my arrow, just in case we sneak up on something. A deer bedded down, a flock of turkeys, drumming into the air.
We step out of the pines and pause at Old Mister, Finch running her hand along the bark. I circle the tree, looking for any additional sign. Nothing. We head to a hollow, sparse and steep and punctuated by tall outcroppings of sandstone towering along the top of the ridge, gray and covered in lichen. Finch veers off course and scrambles up on one of the rocks before we descend. She spreads her arms wide and tilts her head, sun on her face. She does this every time, just looks, takes in the view. I wait, scanning the rocks for movement. There are dens all along the rocks, some small, some big. No doubt in my mind this place is full of critters, once the snow starts.
Finch slithers down off the rock, taking up the lead again. We descend, sliding a bit: it’s steep and in this part of the woods the ground is thick with leaves. At the bottom of the ravine, a stream, a trickle year-round because there’s a spring, higher up. Near there, a swath of walnuts. No other trees because they leach their toxins into the soil. Finch leaps across the stream and I follow her up the other side of the ravine toward the next hollow over. The valley. We slide along the top of the ridge before heading back down again. The river runs through this part of the property, so it draws in the animals and provides good hunting. Farther upriver are the maples, so in the spring, we’re there tapping the trees.
We have a treestand in a sycamore with wide and ambling limbs, a perfect and magnificent tree that Finch has christened the King of Trees. Which is a fitting name. It’s close to six feet in diameter, with a fat, round trunk that opens its long branches, broad and white and luminous on this December day. You can hear the river, deep and slow. You can see the bend where it hugs the wall of rock, carved over so many years of the water running its course. Come spring, the wetland will bloat, and the river will gush, a treacherous torrent with all the snowmelt. This time of year, though, it’s a soothing sound, hushed and peaceful. The sun will inch its way across the sky, throwing light over the valley, casting shadows, and we will sit with our backs against the King of Trees.