Mulak Reader - The Warning

I like this story as much as anything I’ve written. It’s a blend of science fiction and hunting, but since outdoor editors refuse to publish something about breaking the law—even when it’s a piece of fiction—I could never get it published. Their loss, your gain: Enjoy.

THE WARNING

His foot nursed the brakes to slow him down,

But the pedal floored easy without a sound.

He said "Christ."

It was funny how he had named the only man who could

save him now.

Harry Chapin

30,000 Pounds of Bananas

           There is open country along the road into Monson, dotted with dairy farms and woodlots. On an October afternoon I drove by Tommy's old house along that road, but didn't slow down as I passed. Tommy had died four years earlier. I wish I had known him better. He was 15 years my senior—almost old enough to be my father—but even so we had been friends in a casual sort of way. I put him into a story a while back and sent a copy to his widow, but when I saw her later she objected that I had Tommy drinking a beer, and of course, he never drank.
          Yeah, okay. I guess she missed the point that I liked her husband and miss not having him around.
          As I drove beyond Tommy's house I spotted a cock pheasant. The late afternoon sun was on the bird's breast, making it appear more purple than russet as he strutted haltingly along the road edge. In the characteristic chicken-like manner of all pheasants, he seemed to be pondering whether to walk out in front of my speeding truck or turn and retreat back into the cornfield. I slowed. The cock was as likely to do one as the other.
          Although folks do it all the time, I've always thought that blasting-away at roadside pheasants is bad form, especially when there's a barn and a farmhouse and a highly visible row of posted signs on the opposite side of the street. But maybe I could make him fly to someplace where blasting-away might be more acceptable. Maybe. It would be fun to put the dog on him, even without the gun.
          I pulled over. There wasn't another car in sight. Before I could get the door open and let Hazel out, a hen bird that had been lurking unseen 20 feet into the corn took off, doubling back across the road and right through the farmyard. She was followed by the roadside cock, who in turn was followed by another hen and two more cocks that had been sitting invisibly in some weeds on the opposite side of the road.
          Five birds. Hmm.
          As much as I like pheasants, it is a fact that they regularly bring out the worst in an otherwise good hunter. Me, for example. Big and noisy and gaudy, they seem to be a totemic symbol of all that's grand in the world of hunting: a real trophy, the possession of which makes a statement about the sort of man who is good enough to own it. Unfortunately, this totemic symbol also has several bad habits, not the least of which involves stupidly strutting along the roadside as trophy-less bird hunters drive past.
          I knew all this, but who am I to tempt fate? Hens are fair game in my home state, so there were five legal pheasants within walking distance. Admittedly, they had piled through that farmyard and flown onto posted land, but I should at least try to get permission to chase them.
          I shut the engine off and walked up to the farmhouse, tucking in my shirt and smoothing down my hair in a futile effort to look presentable. I put Hazel at heel. Sometimes, in the eyes of landowners, a bird dog makes me look like a gentleman hunter out of a Norman Rockwell scene rather than a trespasser on the prowl.
          A tabby cat sprinted away as I climbed the worn steps. When I knocked on the door, a voice inside yelled out, "What do you want?" It was not a good omen.
          "I'd like to talk with you, sir." I felt like a Jehovah's Witness.
          "Well, open the goddamn door."
          I did. What I saw in that moment actually made me feel sorry for every door-to-door salesmen that ever peeked inside a house: The farmer, an old man with thick glasses, was in the bathroom across the kitchen. He had his pants down around his ankles and was sitting on the pot.
          "Yeah?"
          "Hello." I looked sideways at the doorjamb. "I'd like permission to hunt the land behind your farm."
          "How many of you are there?" He evidently thought the door was still closed because he continued to shout.
          "Just myself and my bird dog." I glanced at Hazel. She was just finishing a bowl of cat food left by the door.
                   "I don't give a damn. There ain't nothin' back there anyways."
          "Thanks." I still examined the peeling paint of the woodwork. "If I get something, I'd be glad to offer you a bird. I’ll stop back on my way out."
          "Yeah, sure. I don't give a damn."
          I tried to close the door as I backed out, but the latch wouldn't catch. I pulled, ineffectively, then
pulled again. The door sprung ajar each time I let go of the knob.
          "Just close the goddamn door!" The old man yelled from inside.
          I yanked hard and pulled off the doorknob. "Excuse me. I seem to have... um..."
          "Oh, for Chrissakes..." the door slammed closed, pushed from the inside. The latch clicked. I put the doorknob next to the empty cat food bowl and walked back to the truck. Some situations are best left for later.
          I eased off the road behind a dilapidated outbuilding that seemed to be held together by three yellow 'No Trespassing' signs. More out of habit than from any sense of what was to come, I parked so that my truck couldn't be seen from the farmhouse window. I put Hazel at heel and climbed over the rusted wire fence and walked across a pasture that had been grazed down to the roots.
          I hadn't been here before, at least not since they had put up the posted signs. Once, years ago, Tommy had taken me back here somewhere so that I could put my dog on a couple released pheasants. At the time I was in contention for a small-time championship, and the dog needed a warm-up for an upcoming shoot-to-kill trial. Tommy had helped me out. He always had access to pheasants; he used to raise them in some makeshift pens behind his house for a local sportsmen's club. That was the sort of cipher that was Tommy: a generous friend when you needed him, than unheard from for months on end.
          The late afternoon sunshine that had so recently illuminated the roadside rooster’s breast feathers now cast long shadows from the few scattered ash trees along the pasture's edge. We crossed a stonewall without tripping on the barbed wire along the top and walked by the multiflora rose tangle where Hazel would later point the pair of hens. The ground here was lower and wetter, and had been taken over by juniper and huge thorn bushes with muddy cow paths worn among them.
          I glanced back at the old barn and farmhouse, now well behind us, and calculated that we had traveled a distance of roughly one pheasant-flight. An overgrown stonewall separated the pasture from the brushy hillside beyond. I told myself that at least one of the roosters had to be in the thick stuff along the wall.
          Hazel seconded the motion. She slowed as she digested the signals on the breeze. There was a moment when she seemed to lose the scent, but after some running and backtracking she pointed for a moment, then went soft and moved ahead again. People who are not hunters think the only way a bird dog tells you something is by pointing, but Hazel's message said a great deal about the artful dodger who was trying to hide from us along the stone wall. She had another quivering point that quickly melted. She moved ahead, then, with a third time finality, stopped in an abrupt freeze-frame, looking hard into a juniper at her left.
          I walked in front of her and flushed the bird. There is nothing in the world of sport that is more glorious than a pheasant's flush against a clear autumn sky. I might have even let the bird get out a bit farther than my twenty should be asked to reach, but he fell heavily at my shot, the sound of which brought a second rooster blasting straight up, cackling obscenities and spewing a white stream in his wake. This bird turned back toward the swampy pasture, and when I fired the second barrel he fell out in the mud.
          Hazel brought him in, then burrowed into the thick stuff and brought the first bird out into the sunlight, and all was right with the world. Bird hunting is replete with disproportionate pleasures: Some shots you work for, others surprise you. Then there are these: not difficult, but treasured because everything is so perfect.
          "Which one of these is the roadside rooster?" Hazel looked up at my question and smiled her open
mouthed dog's smile, but if she knew she wasn't telling.
          I stood for a minute pondering what to do. I did, after all, now have a legal limit of two pheasants. But there were three more close-by. Although I have never made a big deal about bag limits, I am not normally a greedy sort of guy. What I am, by way of definition, is a grouse hunter—albeit one who occasionally dabbles with pheasants. And this particular dabbling had turned out well. Enough is enough, I told myself. I put the birds in the game pocket of my vest and headed back toward the truck.
          At least, that's what I started to do.
          But then, from the far edge of the pasture, a cock crowed. It sounded loud and immediate and contained all the name-calling and sarcastic laughter that is in every rooster pheasant's crow. Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward: I reloaded and turned toward the sound of the third rooster.
          The light breeze had shifted and cooled, and even though the forecast had been for continued clear skies, the horizon featured a thick line of oncoming clouds. Most of those jokes about weatherman are not far from the truth, I remember thinking.
          Hazel stopped. I followed her stare to where another hunter was approaching across the sidehill. I changed directions and started along the barbed wire fence, figuring the fellow would pass, but he sought me out. I had been thinking of Tommy earlier, so I was doubly surprised when I saw this fellow close up: He looked a lot like I remember Tommy looking, except that he was much younger—not more than 25 or so.
          "Hello." he called.
          I waved. "Hi. How're you doing?" He had no bird dog, but carried an old beat-up pumpgun, and, damn, he REALLY looked like Tommy. I stopped and leaned on a cedar fence post, and after a minute's small talk in which I avoided mentioning the remaining three birds, I said, "You must be related to a fellow I used to know. You look like a younger version of him. He used to live up there." I pointed back towards the road and Tommy's old house.
          "Oh, you must mean Tom Kulig. You're not the first guy to say I could be him." He grinned just like Tommy used to. "I see you've got two birds already," He said. "Be careful. There's a warden around."
          I twisted a loose strand of wire on the fence post. After a moment, I said, "All the game wardens I've ever seen have a shine on their shoes. They're not coming out here in the swamp to look in my game bag. If I get another bird, I'll just breast him out."
          The young fellow glanced away, exactly like Tommy used to, then looked at me directly. "This guy is different. He's not like the other wardens. He'll set a trap for you, then catch you red handed." He paused to see if I'd say anything to that, then added, "Like I said, be careful."
          I know an exaggerated story when I hear one, I remember thinking. I wished the kid good luck and started off again. Funny, but he even had a big mole on his cheek, just like Tommy. It was amazing. Maybe Tommy used to fool around with one of the neighbor women, but he had never seemed like that sort.
          I took off my sunglasses and put them in my pocket. The clear afternoon had rapidly clouded, and the day was now noticeably darker. I assumed the cock I had heard would have been on the edge of the pasture, but once we cleared the alders Hazel wanted to start up the hill. She held her head high, working a trace of a scent on the air. And even though the Tommy-look-alike kid had just come from that direction, I followed my dog.
          Half way up the hillside we crossed a tumbledown wire fence and entered what had once been a stony pasture: The swamp maples had grown tall and had shaded out everything beneath them until now it was just rocks and tree trunks. Maple leaves were swirling like red snowflakes on the wind of the fast approaching front. Hazel slowed to a deliberate walk, then pointed solidly.
          I circled wide in front and waited. When I happened to look in the right spot, the bird was crouching close behind an angled boulder. As defiant as cock pheasants seem when flushing, caught on the ground beneath a hunting dog's point there is nothing they resemble quite so much as a frightened chicken. No sooner had I seen him than the bird must have figured that the jig was up: In the blink of an eye he was in full flight, coming back at me through the forest of verticals. I pushed the barrels in front of his head and pulled and then put the gun down to watch him fall. Instead the bird flew on, passing above my right shoulder, and I turned and took the going-away shot with the tight barrel. I held beneath the bird and kept the muzzles moving but the cock kept going downhill, curving left and then vanishing behind some foliage.
          Was I dreaming? I'm not such a good shot that I never miss, but I am good enough so that when I do I usually know why. And I knew that I had centered that bird. Twice. But the cock was gone and I was left wondering if he ever had been there in the first place. I looked around and nothing was different: There were no telltale feathers on the wind, and Hazel wasn't saying much. I might just as well have imagined his flight.
          A drop of rain struck my forehead; the front that was moving through was about to dump a cloudburst on us. But the bug had bitten me, and I desperately wanted another crack at that rooster. I'd have to hurry. I remember thinking, even then, that I was involved in some action that was still not quite defined: As if some act, already accomplished in the future, was itself reaching back to the present, dragging me forward to complete it. I quickly retraced my steps back downhill, reloading as I went. Hazel followed.
          I raced along the bird's line of flight, curving left and out into some alders until I came abruptly to the edge of a brook. It was raining in earnest now, big shirt-soaking drops that created a series of splashes in the water as I looked for a place to cross. Uncharacteristically, Hazel hung back. "Come on, Hazel! What's the big deal?" Impatiently, I waved her ahead. "What’s a little rain?"
          On the other side of the brook my rooster pheasant scooted out from under a deadfall. He favored one leg as he crossed a grassy area. Ah-ha, so I had hit the bird after all. "Hazel! Dead bird! Fetch dead!" I pointed across the brook as I gave her the command.
          She looked at the bird, then at me, then backed up a few steps and sat down. I had never seen anything like it from her. "Hey! Fetch dead bird!" This time I yelled.
          She stared at me for a long moment, then did something I have never seen her or any other setter do before or since: She lifted her head and gave out with a long, mournful howl. It was a primitive sort of sound that seemed to come not from Hazel but from another time, a time ten thousand canine generations before. My hair actually stood on end.
          It would be tempting to say I began to realize right then and there what was going on. From this distance, that would seem obvious. In truth, the only thing that was becoming clearer was that things were becoming less and less clear. I had lost my sense of self-control, and would have to wait and see what I would do next.
          My pheasant, in the meantime, could be seen slinking away through the alders. There were two rocks in the brook where I could hop from one to the other and be across. As I stepped out onto the first, Hazel howled again. I can see myself even now, balanced on that rock in the downpour, yelling at her. "Come on, Hazel. This is stupid. That’s our crippled bird over there, for Chrissake."
          Then I heard myself say it out loud: "Come on, cross over with me."
          She howled on.
          More than anything else, wisdom is caution. That's supposed to be a motto of mine. But it wasn't caution that made me equivocate about not going after the pheasant. There were too many things happening that weren't making sense. I was in my invincible thirties back then, yet I felt a panic that I hadn't felt in years. I was suddenly very scared.
          I didn't cross the brook.
          Through the falling rain Hazel and I retraced our tracks, still very visible in the mud despite the downpour. Immediately, I began chiding myself: What kind of moron gets spooked by a missed bird and a reluctant dog? What’s the matter with me? I nearly had myself convinced to turn around and go find that last rooster when I came to barbed wire fence where I had talked to the kid: I noticed my own footprints, with a little rainwater in them. And Hazel's. But none from the Tommy-look-alike. I found the place where we had stood, even the broken strand I had twisted around the post as we talked, but the mud where he had been was undisturbed.
          Another man might have muttered a prayer at that point. There is a lack of something in me—If I
cannot see or taste or feel something, I cannot perceive it as real. Nothing is unreal to me, and that Tommy-look-alike kid had stood right there in the mud while we talked. I suddenly felt as if I might come apart, as if nothing more substantial than my skin was holding me together. I might have questioned my own sanity, but like the rooster pheasant 15 minutes before, I knew only that the jig was up. My singular thought was to get out of there fast.
          I set a straight-line course back to the truck. As I hurried I felt a tightening at the base of my throat and an unpleasant lightness in my feet, and I feared I might break into a run at any time. The rain began to let up, and ahead of me Hazel had come back to life and was hunting, trying to coordinate her casts to my race-walk pace.
          I was nearly across the juniper pasture and had the truck in sight when the sun reappeared. The front had passed and there was a growing patch of blue in the west. That's when I noticed that Hazel's bell had gone silent. Without stopping, I yelled for her to heel, but of course she didn't break her point. I went to where she stood.
          My fright was bordering on panic. When I took her collar to lead her away there was a clatter as a pair of hens took wing. Against the dark eastern sky, caught by the horizontal sunlight of late afternoon, it was a lovely chance for a double. I remember that the shadow of one bird passed for an instant across the second, and then they were gone, flying out toward the hillside beyond the swampy pasture. Maybe the most telling part of this whole story is that I recoiled from the sight of those two pheasants in the air—I actually pointed my gun away from the birds, fearing it might go off inadvertently.
          I got back to the truck and sat for a long while, waiting for peace. I felt like a character in a John Fowles novel. Then I remembered I had told the old man I'd stop back and offer him a bird. I was soaked to the skin, of course, and as I walked to the door I wondered what I'd tell him.
          A woman answered my knock.
          "I was hunting your farm, and I earlier told an elderly gentleman that I'd see him on my way out."
She looked at me for a long moment before she spoke. "There's no old man that lives here. I don't let anybody hunt back there. I've got signs up. If you were on my land you were trespassing."
I forced a smile. "No, really, there was an old guy with thick glasses. He was sitting... Well, he told me I could hunt out back."
          "If somebody told you that, you've got the wrong house."
           No. This was the same porch: The doorknob had been replaced, but the cat food bowl still stood empty next to the mat. "Okay," I said. "I just wanted to say thank you." I was watching myself, and saw a man under stress behaving admirably.
          "You've got the wrong house," The woman repeated.
          I drove away, my knuckles white on the steering wheel. I felt the way I do when I pick up the mail but don't have my glasses with me. I needed to sort through what had happened, but just couldn't do it right then. And I feared that when I did, I was going to learn some things that I didn't want to know.
          All that happened more than a few years ago. I've never gone back. Hazel is 14 now, and hasn't hunted in two seasons. When she mutters in her sleep I wonder if the same eerie stuff that darkens my own dreams also clouds hers.
          There was nothing mystic about the two roosters. Both were hard hit. I braised them with sherry and mushrooms and got indigestion, but that was more from too much red wine than any mystic interaction.
          But since that October afternoon I've re-lived that day hundreds of times in my mind, searching for meanings: The brook, the sudden storm, the bulletproof pheasant, the young Tommy, the warning. I still search. For the most part, I think I've reached the same conclusions you have.
          I just can't figure out who that old man on the pot was.

This site was last updated 09/22/06