The Hunt Out of the Thicket

by John Morel Adler

Genres: Short Stories; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

This stunning book of short stories introduces the literary world to an author who writes of the outdoors with rare artistry and exactitude. John Morel Adler knows the woods, thickets, swamps, rivers, and coasts of his native Georgia and South Carolina Lowcountry. He knows its wildlife and its people. These tales of outdoor life are equally and simultaneously stories of what another writer about the Southern wilderness, William Faulkner, called "the truths of the human heart in conflict with itself," and they search keenly into the meanings of life and death, youth and love, time and change.

Release date: November 1, 2013

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 206

Sample

Seventeen days after the letter, he has found the buck. He has lived on the farm for twenty-one years, hunted it for eight, but never seen sign like this. It is needed, too, because of the letter. He really doesn’t know which will make him stay in the woods all day: the deer, or those carefully etched words. In his mind they linger, causing him to stand still and eye the brittle soybean stubble as if it were a stage set: “but you depend on me too much and I simply can’t be bound. You are too intense.”

It doesn’t matter, though, he says to himself, finding his careful gait, mashing his teeth. He hunts, walking slowly on the sides of his feet, keeping his upper body from jostling, the rifle slung on his shoulder steadied at the stock with his right hand.

Reaching the fringe of the field, he brings the gun into both hands, looks at the plantation of pines ahead of him, and walks through them to the swamp and the thicket.



It was there, in that silent fortress, that he found the buck. Just the day before, he came to it the same way he walks now: over the sandy hill of pines to where the swamp bottomed, and on the other side of a harrowed firebreak the bulb-based trees rose with a wet, cold air thick around their trunks.

Along that firelane he found its first sign: the rut, laid in the beast’s instinctive roamings as it left its trail for the does in the colds of October. Limbing saplings chest high, raking and scouring the bark with polished antlers, it had vented its passion. Then hastily, under clusters of low-lying myrtles, it had pawed the ground clean and squatted, urinating down its hind legs and at the same time hooking its antlers in the overhang, snatching the branches in its mouth and rubbing them over its aromatic tear ducts, finally popping them off to dangle and point to the claimed turf with the scent steaming off the cool earth and into the nostrils of the trailing does. And in the pawings, around those violent rubs were the prints spreading the loam, punched deep. From it all, he knew the animal, a picture moving high into his consciousness like a grandly fluid collage—the wide and stable rack, broad chest and bulging neck, streamlined in the flanks with the layers of muscle and bone and sinew connected so that it could cut a right angle turn at a full run within a body’s length.

He marveled at the sign for quite a while. Then he stooped and pinched up a handful of the soil in the pawing and smelt it. Vague, with the grit of the dirt, the strong smell of decay, there was the almost fetid odor, the musk. It made him feel somehow powered and incredibly alive; the air around him seemed wet and pure.

From that edge he then found the animal’s path, and followed it into the swamp. The lone furrowed strand of matted grasses wound back into the bottom where a knoll rose and the thicket of small pines, rimmed by several myrtles and low brambles, was blocked out, green, amongst the deciduous growth.

Like an alien he paused before entering. All sound, even the wailing of a chain saw two miles distant, was blanketed by the chill of the air. With his first step, a twig snapped under his boot, and the animal left. Without consternation, not even fast or flushed, it blew once (a nasal utterance welling in the bottom of the lungs, passing through its nose and mouth like a quickly mashed bellows) and was in flight, bounding deliberately out the other side, its hooves through the dirt on the edge of sound, like axe-strokes in clay.

He didn’t know how long he stood, staring. The excitement in his chest made his legs quiver. For some reason, there in the cold, he considered turning and, like the animal, leaving the woods, hunting only the fields and patches where the spikes and forkhorns, the “swamp rabbits,” toddled along with the does. That was one of the feelings he remembered from her, and, frozen there, the hesitation overtook him, drawing him back to the previous fall at college when he had met her.

Maybe he was in love with her before he ever met her. In a way this was true, because she (a wraith, at first, that later grew and materialized into her form—her watery, hazel eyes, small, upturned nose, straight sandy hair, and small body) was in a frequent dream-fancy he would have in his college days when he was alone or thinking about the future, realizing how unfulfilling it was to “plug” (as he called it at the time) a girl one week and then go for a month with no one, repeating the same drunken patterns over and over. The dream would come to him especially on those evenings when he would be on the road at dusk. It haunted him as he drove back to his little house up at school, with the color draining into the west and the cold air whistling through the seams of the vents.

He would be with her in front of a fire, winter, in a small cabin. Staring at the throbbing embers, he would notice the sap hissing and bubbling from the end of the green oak—all wrapt in the fluttering flames, the secure, steamy sounds. It was almost as if the darkness coldly creeping towards the hearth was warded off, pushed back into the corners by the warmth and the glow. He would sit with her late into the night, sipping the straight bourbon on crushed ice, covered with the cast copper warmth of the fire, the murmur of softly spoken words, and the inner-glow of the whiskey. Then they would love with the darkness held in the corners of the room.

So when she appeared, when he first saw her that night at the fraternity, where the loud talk and drinking and blaring jukebox were irritating and intimidating and had been for a long time, she began to fill this space in front of the fire. The more he talked with her, the more he caught the moistness of her eye and the way her mouth opened when she smiled, the more he smelt her clean whiskey breath, the more real this dream began to be.

One of the things that excited him was her love for the outdoors, and he listened that night as she told of how she skied and camped, had even been hunting and skeet shooting with her father. Then they had compared their homes, South Carolina and Colorado, and he had been drawn into her world with the excitement one has in discovering new turf. He imagined the high mountains peaked with dry snow, the gorges and passes, the valleys with streams lush in the summer. All was exotic, rich, expansive. When he looked at her talking with the slight glow of pleasant reminiscence on her face, she, too, seemed to possess those qualities.

When she told him how much she thought of hunters and hunting (just after he had described his winters in the woods after deer and duck and quail), he noticed that she was interested in him. The realization was like the warm flash of a flame brushing his face, and then they went outside and talked quietly about the outdoor fires and camping in the crisp coldness, waking in sleeping bags. Through it all he started to say to himself, “This is the one, this is the one,” excitedly, over and over until he was sure that she was saying it to herself, too.

The more he was with her, the more he realized that he was in love, that he was in the middle with it growing sumptuously around him. It was something he had never experienced before with such spontaneity, except when he was a child and used to watch his mother, under the hum and enveloping whiteness of the fluorescent light, cook Sunday supper for him, or when he would stand on the beach and watch his father fight a channel bass up and down the surf with his light spinner. At times, driving, after dropping her off at her apartment in the evenings, he would smile to himself with the music seeming to flow through his body, and say with a grin that grew with his word, “This is it, this is it.”

But the hesitation came one evening when he was in her room, only an occasional car sputtering by. She clicked on the light and had gotten out of bed as he grabbed both pillows and propped them beneath his head. His eyes traced the smooth furrow of her spine to her buttocks.

He patted her lower back and she caught his hand and held it. Then she stretched out her arm, picking up a flannel wrapper from the chair, slinging it around her, and tying the sash in one fluid sweep.

“I’ll be back,” she said, and in the glow of the bedside lamp, he focused on a black and white photo, low on the wall by her desk.

It was a shot of her on skis, leaning up on the poles planted in the ankle-deep powder, smiling with her face darkened, her hair blonde in relief, flowing. The clear focus seemed to make her look in place in the snow and sun. But as he leaned out of bed, he saw a dark-haired man in the background blurred in the haze of depth but still wide and powerful-looking. He could only make out a white smile on the broad face, but this person somehow seemed to be gazing at her. That was what made him stop, as if something inside had thrown a switch and generators were winding dismally to a halt.

When the door clicked shut, he swung around, pulling her close as she shed her robe. He switched off the light, and her hair dropped down over his face. She flicked it back, and as he saw the nebulous outline of her small nose, they were together, his tongue finding hers, the moist warmth seeming to start his pulse again.

“You know,” he said. “I haven’t, I mean I haven’t ever … I’ve never loved and I’m realizing that, well …”

“What?” she said, her hand on her side of his face, caressing.

“I mean.” He felt almost too vulnerable now. “I’m in love with you, big time, and, by God, I want you to tell me that if there’s anyone else anywhere. I mean I’d better get up right now and leave because I’m sinking, GODDAMN, I mean, I don’t want to get all googy-eyed and then have you run off …”

“No,” she cut him off. “There was, but there isn’t.”

And then they were together.

As he looked at the thicket, he felt himself shudder. Its blocklike form materialized once again. Imagining a fallen sweetgum as a barrier placed there by the animal itself, his blood-flow refilled him. “Go,” he said and then entered. Inside the passages and alleys were the signs of the rut too—the rubs bending the small trees as if the animal had been practicing, strengthening his neck and honing his horns in preparation for fight. Never had he seen such a beast. Following the network of gullied trails under the trees deeper, nervously fingering the trigger guard of the rifle, he came to where the trunks were wrapt and tangled with gray brambles and shriveling honeysuckle vines. There was a strange opening in them.

At first he really didn’t know what it was at all. Rocking his head from side to side, he squatted, finding the prints leading in and out—a tunnel! Then, dropping to his knees, he entered, pushing onto his stomach and snaking as the animal had. There were no more tracks, only bare spots and long streaks, where the knobs of the deer’s knees had scuffed the dirt. In the middle, he stopped, half-winded from the crawling but fueled by an intense curiosity. He could visualize the beast: first dropping to its knees, front and head bowing and hooking the antlers into the thick mat, then pushing, tearing, thrusting the neck back and forth, prodding its way through.

In all there were some twenty-five yards of tunnel. Near the end, it banked to the right, and during that stretch he stopped often, pulling off the barren blackberry vines as they raked across his hat and back, clawing, stinging his hands like nettles. Finally it opened into a small glade of tan wiregrass. He stood and saw the mashed pockets where the buck bedded and could bask in the open sun without fear. Stooping, his gun across his knees, he laid his hand on the spot, and it seemed to radiate a presence: a vague warmth. It was then, there, as he rose and looked at the morning sun streaming through the ground mists, that he said, “I have to have it, I have to hunt it.” There were no Becauses or Reas. . .