I'm not sure that this qualifies as a "hunting" story but it won the Erskine Caldwell Award for Short Stories and I thought that there might be a few folks who might enjoy it.


Refuge

It’s almost thirty five years to the day since my folks moved out to the farm on a permanent basis. Though my father and step-mother are over a decade dead, the kids all long gone to live their lives, the farm hasn’t changed much. To this day it’s still a beautiful place, almost pastoral.
The farmhouse stands alone on the hill overlooking the Conoquenessing Creek, the barn about fifty yards off to the right. The summer kitchen is right where it should be, ten or twelve steps from the kitchen door. The screen house, where you can sit on a summer evening and not get eaten alive by the mosquitoes, is situated midway between the barn and the summer kitchen.
The farm, long a dream of my father's, had been a weekend project for several years. He bought the place, 500 acres, an ancient, empty farmhouse - sixteen stall barn - summer kitchen and springhouse for $28,700.00; he paid in cash. The structures were sound, roofs solid, electrical and plumbing mostly intact and working, even the windows remained unbusted. The house, after two hundred years of sheltering farmers and their families, needed just about everything else.
The livingroom, dining room, and hallway floors were covered with worn thin, floral printed, sheet linoleum. When we started ripping it out we discovered an amazing, astonishing fact. Under “them flowers”, as my father insisted on calling them, were sixteen more layers of linoleum. Six inch nails held in place the most recent layers. We guessed, by the dates of the newspaper carefully spread under the linoleum, the last layer had been put down in 1948.
The whole house was like that. Every job that needed done, that when you started looked almost easy, straight forward and logical, turned into a task that required some part, or fixture, or size of something that hadn’t been made in a couple of decades or a hundred years. My father thought that making the old house livable and pretty would take only a summer. As our neighbors would teach us to say: Twern’t that way a’tall.
It took years of weekends and vacations for the work to get done. It was a long time before the family could live on the farm full time. For all these years the closest neighbors kept an eye on the house. Perched alone on a hilltop, like a chicken on an old oak stump, the house was hard to miss. Easily seen from the hard road an interloper would have to drive over a quarter mile on Hart Road, our dusty in summer, frozen, rutted and icy in winter, private driveway, to reach the house. With half the eyes in the valley watching, it wasn’t easy to sneak in there and steal or damage anything.
Sunday nights, when it got too dark to keep working, we’d drop our tools, pack up, leaving everything where it was. The next Friday night it’d be right where we left it, ‘cept when friends came out during the week and worked at whatever it was we were doing. Over the years a passle of friends, and folks due to become friends, stopped to give a hand with never so much as a how-de-do. It was like that back then, out in the country.
While we worked, or took time off to sit and look out over the fields that ran wild with burdock, locust, stunted pines, milkweed, wild strawberries, blackberry tangles, and gorse for which we had no names, we’d see the white tailed deer, turkeys, pheasant, rabbits, squirrels, groundhogs, and every once-in- a-while, a horse or pony that’d busted loose from somewhere. These creatures became our own. They were a part of us as surely as the land that we would reclaim to meadow and field someday soon. They were not for sport, nor to be shot to fill up the larder; these creatures were a part of the farm. The farm was a place of refuge to them as it was to us. Without them the farm would be somehow less gracious, less a place we could call home.
My father's second family, in which I played the role of first born and laborer, but of which I was not an integral part, moved in in late March. The house, outbuildings and grounds were now restored, complete, beautiful. The farm, to anyone with eyes to see, offered hard proof of what could be done with sweat, stubbornness, and the willingness to scrounge until you found a replacement part from the years when the farm was in her glory. To give my father his farm we’d searched for needed artifacts high and low. The man at the town dump came to know us all by our first names. We’d bring him a little bottle of Southern Comfort and he let us dig around to our heart's content.
As was his way, my father planned a big shin-dig for the 4th of July; a bar-be-cue with half a steer, a roast suckling pig, kegs of dark beer, home-made potato salad and all the fixin’s. As he said “The whole **** valley’s invited so we had better not run short of food or beer.” Sarah, my step mother, made sure that there was enough coffee to float a small boat right nice. Farmer's wives and daughters drink a bunch of coffee.
The band that played just down the road at Donnie's Pleasure on Friday and Saturday nights, mostly men that worked other jobs or farmed for a living, had been hired and were tuning their instruments. Electricity was unnecessary; these men played the instruments that had been handed down by their grandfathers and fathers. The banjo player and fiddle player were brothers. They spoke only while playing. A family feud of some sort that went back too far for our knowledge had broken them apart. They had married sisters. We had our suspicions, but no more. The mandolin player, Johnny, wore green lizard-skin boots, he smiled at all the women from under a well waxed handlebar mustache His mandolin was a Gibson, trimmed in mother-of-pearl, that had been passed down him by his grand-daddy. Frank, the town cop, played the upright base. His mother, Big Mo, named after the Missouri river that had drowned her daddy, played the accordion. She played loud and true, even with arthritis turning her fingers inside out. When the music got country raucous, or her hands hurt too much for the accordion, Big Mo doubled on spoons and washboard. Big Al, a Texan by way of Rhode Island, played anything he could get his hands on; guitar, banjo, mandolin, even saxophone. He played them with skill. Anyone with interest could blow on a jug or slap spoons together. There would be no lack of bluegrass tunes and some Cajun foot stompin' music. Later, after dinner and the lights strung in the apple, peach, plum, and pear trees were glowing yellow, a few polkas would get our blood moving. In turns the old timers would waltz their wives and unmarried, widowed, or abandoned daughters across the lawn.
The party, or shin-dig, was running along fine, kids were everywhere and where-not they were supposed to be. The better behaved girls were sitting quiet in their nicest dress-up clothes. The boys were in the barn loft, climbing out onto the barn roof, gathered in the small corral next to the barn trying to ride one of the unbroken horses that my father had bought only a few days before, or sitting with their favorite girl. The older kids were trying to cadge a beer or two from the adults. The adults were all talking and a few were even dancing when the dinner bell, an old cast iron bell we’d found in an abandoned one room schoolhouse, started clanging and folks started lining up for the feed.
We’d built and put out sixteen, eight foot long, wooden, picnic-like tables and set-up a thirty foot long serving table with saw horses and rough oak planking. At the first clanging of that old school bell kids came out of the woodwork like locusts. Shirt-tails untucked, hair full of straw, mud on their good shoes, they grabbed bottles of Nehi from the galvanized laundry tubs full of block ice as they ran past. The line to the serving table was already getting long and they didn’t want to miss out on a single bite. Adults were allowed to go first into the line as long as they were quick about it. Some of the littler kids, allowed more leeway than their older brothers and sisters, crawled under the table. As their parents or grand-parents passed they held their plates up high. The adults piled their plates up for them as they walked down the table filling their own.
None of the kids needed or wanted a place to sit at the tables. As soon as their plates were full, they sprawled in the grass, wiped the cold Nehi bottle across their forehead, and proceeded to eat like it was the first good meal they’d seen in a month of Sundays. The adults crowded the benches placed around all four sides of the tables. Our family members had the honor of serving the adults whatever meat, in whatever state of doneness, they asked for. Rare beef was easy; the pig was only offered well cooked. Even medium well done steer was hard to come by. The steer was getting eaten up so fast that there just wasn’t time for the bed of oak coals to get the job done. Lots of folks asked for half a bar-be-cued chicken, some wanted smoked kolbassi, and a few seemed singularly fond of the smoked, slow roasted turkey that we’d made in our own smoke house.
Just about everybody was seated when my father decided that he was going to say a blessing over the food and the farm. He was not a particularly religious man, ****, he hadn’t a religious bone in his body, but he knew that our neighbors were mostly church going people. He wanted them to be comfortable. He also liked to be well liked, even by people that he couldn’t bear to be around for very long.
My father was a good speaker. He’d owned his own business and had done business with some of the wealthiest people in the city before he retired to become a gentleman farmer. He was almost famous for his jokes. He had always been tall and handsome. He stood close to the top of the front yard. After it quieted down real good, he bowed his head like a good Christian: “God, you have blessed our farm with good food and good neighbors...”, one of the girls sitting in the grass next to the meadow began screaming. Shrill, screeching screams came from a stack of hay bales that had been claimed by the girls and little kids, caught on and spread like fire in tall, dry grass. His benediction unfinished, my father looked up, so did everybody else. Less than a hundred yards from the barn, right at the edge of the mown field, we could see the front half of a white tailed doe. She was straining to pull herself free of the deep weeds. Her eyes were wide, white, they looked terrified. Her hind quarters were stuck in the dense thicket, there was blood running down her neck and back.
As we stood or sat, frozen for that split second that only people that have been to war know, she dragged herself into the open. Several wild dogs, twisting and tearing, hung on her hind quarters. She floundered into the open meadow of close-cut emerald green grass, was quickly overwhelmed by the pack. As she fell under the thrashing mass of dogs, her fawn, all knobbly knees and still spotted hide, burst from the deep grass. The fading protective coloration hadn’t thrown off the noses of the dogs. The pack split, fifteen or twenty wild dogs ran the fawn down. In the middle of the meadow they tore the fawn apart. Most folks don’t know that deer can scream, but they can. The doe and fawn screamed for their lives then went silent. Shock sets in fast and most prey animals die painlessly, if brutally, like lucky men in battle.
Farm women, hardened by years of killing chickens, ducks, turkeys, and hutch raised rabbits, turned their faces away, held their hands over their ears. Men started standing up, then sat down, helpless, their rifles and shotguns were at home. Children were crying and my father had blanched white, his eyes looked sunken, helpless and hopeless. Years later he looked like this again, but he was dead then. A few of the dogs heard the commotion and looked our way, some of their tails went down and they slunk away into the weeds while looking over their shoulder. Some looked guilty, scared, like farm dogs caught eating eggs.
Most of the dogs glared at us. One of the pack ran toward us snarling and baring her teeth, I could see her full teats almost dragging on our earth. She stopped short and ran back to get her share of the meat. She snapped at the other dogs, they moved away. She was a big *****, part shepherd I guessed. I wished I had my revolver at my side or a rifle in my trunk. I was now as helpless as my father, at least this we had in common. My brother, Mark, reacted best. He grabbed a handful of cherry bombs, started lighting them and throwing them at the dogs. Other men joined him and the dogs dragged parts of the deer into the thickets. There they could finish their meal in peace.
It quieted down and the kids were herded away from the meadow. Women congregated in the kitchen, overflowed into the dining room and living room. The men stood in clumps talking, looking out of the corners of their eyes for anything that could be used as a weapon. I walked into the meadow with my brother, Mark. We crept silently toward the thickets. When we heard snarling we backed off and waited. We didn’t know why we waited.
Our farm, our family, our friends, and our living creatures had been violated by the wild dogs. We were afraid to walk down to the Conoquenessing Creek after dark. Sarah didn’t walk alone to the summer kitchen, only a dozen steps from the kitchen door, after dark. My father bought a shotgun and a box of shells. He was a very poor shot. I waited three weeks before I spoke to him about my plan. He was sitting in his big easy chair in the den when I decided I wouldn’t find a better time or place to talk about the dogs.
“Pap, I’ve got a plan. These dogs aren’t gonna get gone all by themselves. We’re gonna have to do something about them before they take one of the colts or kids. We’ve got no choice but to get rid of ‘em as soon as we can. City folks keep droppin’ off their dogs out here on the farms when they don’t want ‘em anymore, this pack is gonna get way too big for anything to be left alive in the whole valley.”
He looked up at me from under his bushy, reddish brown eyebrows and then looked back at the newspaper that was spread out in his lap. “ I know you know about hunting, shooting a deer every year like clockwork, going to Africa and all that, but these are dogs, dogs like Pooch over there; they can’t be just killed off easy as you please.”
“Pap, these are not just like Pooch. You ever seen Pooch kill anything? Nope, they aren’t like Pooch at all. These are wild dogs, not house broken old pups like Pooch. They’re just doing what they need to do to eat and keep their pups from starving. They’ll eat you or me as soon as any other meat they can find. The rabbits are almost all gone now. When’s the last time you saw a flock of pheasant or a herd of deer like there used to be?”
He held up his hand, in defense or benediction I do not know. He was frozen for a few moments, seconds, before he shook his head and spoke. “I guess you’re right. We need to do something, and you’re the hunter in the family. Can we make sure we’ll get ‘em all?”
The plan was simple. Our neighbors would help. Our friends who hunted deer could be counted on, and friends who got back from Viet Nam alive would show up if needed. In two week’s time I had recruited thirty eight riflemen and five shot-gunners.
On Saturday morning we bushwhacked the field as best we could, cut the weeds back to a few inches of the ground with the tractor. Saturday evening we staked out a lamb in the middle of the newly-cut field. With twenty cars lined up with their lights aimed at the field, we waited for dark. The riflemen were all armed with good rifles topped by scope sights; each of us carried a powerful flashlight. We sat in colorful, plastic-webbed lawn chairs next to our cars, boxes of ammunition open on each hood. Several of the men carried revolvers or pistols. The car windows were open so that we could reach inside and switch on the high beams without moving from our chairs. The mosquitoes were eating us alive; the screen house looked almost like heaven. I thought of those two deer, the doe and her fawn, and of how many deer had been run down and consumed to feed the pack for the past few weeks. The moon was waning. It shed little light, but the white lamb could be seen as a light blur against the dark field.
We waited in sweating silence. Knowing we were going to kill our adrenaline kept us all wide awake. The biggest problem you run into when you’re shooting dogs with high powered rifles is that bullets fired by these rifles are meant for much larger game, game the size of white tailed deer, or larger. Because dogs are smaller than deer, the bullets would go right through the dogs with lots of piss and vinegar left over. Where the bullets would end up was anyone’s guess so we made sure that there was a clear field of fire. There were no houses or livestock anywhere near where a stray bullet might do harm; every single bullet should strike, ultimately, on our own land.
The men with the shotguns waited behind the house. Their job was to cut off the pack if they tried to retreat over the hill toward the creek. Each rifleman would fire only three shots, then would stop to reload. While we were reloading, the shotgunners would run like wild men through the field with their flashlights on. They would have to shoot every dog that they saw, then drive the rest of the pack back into the cut field where the riflemen could take another crack at them. This was the dangerous part. For the shot-gunners to be safe from the second round of rifle fire, they had to get their shooting done and run over the edge of the big hill that ran along the field next to the Conoquenessing Creek. Until they were well over the edge, they were in mortal danger of rifle fire. The riflemen had to be sure that they couldn’t see any light from the shot-gunner’s flashlights before they started shooting again. The shot-gunners were the guys that had to have courage, or didn’t own a rifle with a scope.
My father was inside the house. He busied himself with making coffee and sandwiches that would be eaten when the shooting was done. It was his farm, but he was a poor shot. One of the neighbors, as he was leaving that night, said this to me: “I don’t want to say nothin’ bad ’bout your Pap, but he’s all hat and no cattle.” Later that year he started shooting a rifle. He learned the hard way, wouldn’t let me show him a **** thing. He almost cut his eye out when a scope on a .30-30 jumped back and bit him, but he was always a stubborn son-of-a-***** that’d never admit his sons could teach him anything.
I was the regulator of the group of riflemen. Nobody would fire until I let off the first shot. This was my plan; I had better get it right the first time. Second chances to kill off a whole pack of wild dogs don’t come around easy. My eyes were weeping from the concentration of looking through the big scope on my rifle. I could see the lamb was getting nervous, but this lamb had been raised with farm dogs, there was no reason for her to know that these dogs would kill and eat her. She didn’t know that she was bait, as likely to get shot as one of the dogs. The numbers on my watch glowed in the dark, a mistake that I would never have made in Africa. It was almost ten thirty when the first dogs crept into the field.
To a hunter, watching predators is entrancing, enthralling. The pack had flankers out to either side of the lamb. The big shepherd ***** was in the center of the pack, she was moving toward the lamb on her belly. She moved as silent as a shadow. I wondered how she could move so easily and silently with her teats hanging down on that sharp-ended, freshly cut stubble. I scanned the field with the scope; there were thirty nine dogs that I could see. I held the crosshairs of the scope on the shoulder of the shepherd ***** and waited.
I had practiced the move dozens of times. Leaning my right shoulder against the car, I could reach into the dashboard, flick on the headlights, and have my finger back on the trigger in less than a second. My crosshairs wouldn’t move even an inch. As the ***** stalked, closed on the lamb, my right arm slipped silently into the car. My index and middle fingers were on either side of the headlight switch. The ***** was only five yards away from the lamb. I couldn’t wait any longer; I couldn’t let the pack tear the lamb apart as it had the deer. I yanked back on the headlight switch and my headlights lit-up the night. A split second later the ***** exploded like a fresh, hot watermelon dropped off of the barn onto concrete as my bullet expanded on her shoulder joint. She died much faster than the fawn had. Twenty other sets of high beams joined mine as the rifles blasted again and again and again. Dogs were yelping, lying dead, or dragging themselves, gut shot or crippled, toward the safety of the hill overlooking the Conoquenessing Creek. The shot-gunner's flashlights stabbed like crazy fireflies into the field, the hollow boom of shotguns echoed across the valley. The riflemen reloaded and waited. No dogs reappeared in the field; the shot-gunner's flashlights came straight for our line of cars. We emptied our rifles and put them on the car seats or roofs. It was almost over. Every adult dog was dead and gone.
Early the next morning we started the hunt for the pups that the ***** had been nursing. Finding the trail that the dogs had used was easy for men that hunted for their food; it ran along the steepest part of the hill that overlooked the Conoquenessing Creek. In the shale and rock deposits left by the ice age, eaten away as the creek dug its deep channel, we found the dens, high up and dry, with a predator’s view of the creek and our neighbor’s fields. There were snakes, a few pine rattlers, as always. We let them be and poked long locust branches into the dark holes until we heard a noise that could only be pups whining. My littlest half brother, Garth, crawled into that hole and dragged those needle-teethed pups out one at a time. He wore heavy, leather welding gauntlets to protect him from the pup’s teeth. He stuffed them into a big burlap bag one at a time. We took them back to the farmhouse. From a long way off we could see my father on the porch; then he disappeared inside. When he came back outside he had his new double-barreled 12 gauge shotgun broken open, hanging from the crook of his arm.
Garth stopped cold, then ran up to him: “Can’t we keep them, dad. They’re only pups, and they ain’t done nothin’ bad. We could train ‘em to be good hunting dogs I’ll bet.” My father stuck out his hand and Garth handed over the burlap sack. My father wrapped the burlap around his hand, keeping the neck of the bag closed tight. He walked slowly down the yard, then behind the barn. Garth ran inside and up the stairs toward his bedroom; I sat down on the porch steps and waited. The shotgun boomed hollow, and boomed hollow again, the echoes bounced down the valley, crashed like July 4th thunder into each other. My father used up the whole brand new box of shotgun shells. The echoes ran the valley, then died in the meadow where the lamb cropped grass.

Bluesman