The Blizzard

The long, cold, dark winter had fallen over the rolling, snow-draped prairies and glittering ice forests of Iowa. Eighteen fluffy inches of snow had descended on the Great Plains during the last twenty-four hours. The temperature was zero. Lakes and rivers were frozen over. A vagrant wind blew flurries of snow like white smoke and rushed through the temples of giant evergreens which surrounded the abandoned granite quarry where I sat. It was the first day of hunting season, and my first deer hunt alone. I had been sitting for hours as snow accumulated on my heavy white jacket and atop my gray wool cap, waiting for first light, waiting for sunrise, but dawn arrived slowly during winter. I sat with my back against an ancient, gnarled cedar. Absolutely still. Totally silent. My Remington 700 bolt-action seven-millimeter rifle rested across my knees. My breath formed frozen-vapor ghosts in the cold air. I was situated where the forest terminated at the edge of a long-forsaken quarry. During its previous decades of abandonment, the quarry had gone wild with tall grass and trees. The quarry was divided by a swift, tumbling stream which had not yet iced over. Now, the eastern sky was losing stars to a thin sliver of purple light expanding along the horizon. I shivered, for during the night, the cold had insinuated its way inside my clothes. I clenched my teeth to keep them from chattering. I willed myself to be absolutely still. It was something I had to work at, something taught to me by my father, that stillness, that calm, that pure tranquility of the moment. You have to earn the animal you’re hunting, son, my father always told me. So I was motionless in the unforgiving cold. I was earning my first buck. You see, my father always said, you can’t simply shoot the animal. Shooting is the easy thing of it. Anyone can sit up in a tree stand, drinking hot coffee from a Thermos, comfortable and warm with their battery-heated socks, and wait until some yearling doe with a couple points prances into view and then level the muzzle of their cheap Wal-Mart rifle and jerk the trigger and hit her in the guts and then find her in the next county, still alive, bleeding out, her eyes glistening with pain. That’s not hunting, son. That’s cruelty. My father possessed no tolerance for weekend city hunters, or for the cruelty of a sloppy kill. My father believed in the purity of an ethical hunt. A wounded animal was an unforgivable sin, he believed. And pity the man who incurred my father’s wrath on that matter. I had on several occasions watched my father reduce grown men to tears after he berated and scolded them for their stupidity and incompetence while they slovenly tracked down their wounded animals. My father was not a man of pity. He was harsh and merciless with his admonishments. And you never spoke back to my father. Ever. He had a cold stare and an unwavering force of will which could crush a man’s resolve in an instant. I was not kidding when I said I had seen my father verbally bludgeon grown men to tears. My father was a force of nature. You earn the shot, my father said, and you always kill cleanly and quickly. That’s true hunting. So I was earning my buck this morning. Through the snow-draped boughs of the cedar beneath which I sat, I could see a well-worn game trail paralleling the stream running through the quarry. The quarry was situated deep in the heart of the Monarch Palisades, at the nexus of old-growth hardwood forests, corn and soybean fields, and creek bottoms, which created a patchwork of ideal whitetail habitat. At dawn and again at twilight I knew the deer would filter through the quarry, one by one, columns of them, sometimes in small groups, often a buck and his harem. Yesterday, at dusk, I counted forty-seven deer coming through the quarry, returning from feeding in fields of cut corn stalks now yet plowed under. Two or three were good bucks. I hoped for a big ten-pointer this morning. But secretly, though, I had come for Spook—old Spook, the biggest buck in the forest, with his toughest battles behind him, a local legend, but still a forest lord. Spook, the rumored progeny of another legendary buck called Ghost, a rare albino whitetail who many claimed still roamed the forests. Although after thirty or forty years of Ghost stories, I had my doubts. I suspected talk of Ghost was just the old-timers telling stories at the town square diner. But Spook … Spook was occasionally still seen by hunters and hikers with enough frequency that I suspected maybe, just maybe, Spook was still haunting the forests of the Monarch Palisades. Spook was a specter glimpsed at the edges of fields at twilight, or in the emerald murk of the deep forests, or bounding through the spangled sunlight rippling above the streams, then gone in the shadows. Spook limped because some foolish city hunter had hit him with a .30-06 bullet in the rear flank a few seasons ago. The bullet was still in there somewhere, I supposed. Spook had bled out enough to kill any normal buck. But Spook was tough. He was a survivor. And he was smart and wily and vigilant. Spook would be alone, if he came. He didn’t have a harem. He was too old to constantly fight off the strong young bucks during the rut. Yet Spook still had a few breeding seasons left. Spook could intimidate a lot of those young bucks with his presence and the dimensions of his antlers, and the does came to him one by one, so he could pass on his genes. Nature’s way. But his harem days were behind him. Spook would come this morning. I knew it. I felt it. I had always possessed an intuition about the natural world and its secret rhythms, ever since I could remember. No weekend city hunter would get old Spook. He was mine. I was in my third hour of sitting in the freezing-cold darkness. I was earning Spook. I’d spent too much time in the forests this autumn, learning his habits, following his tracks to determine his haunts and patterns, and shooting paper targets on the range. And at four a.m. this morning, I had walked across the old footbridge over the Monarch River which separated our backyard from the vast tracts of the Monarch Palisades Forest. Then I slogged through the deep drifts of unmarred snow, into the ice forests. I sat all morning with snow accumulating on my jacket and wool hat, in the cold darkness. When the wind whorled the snowflakes against my face, I sat still. When frost formed on my eyelashes, I sat still. I was so cold and wet now I felt only marginally alive. But I stayed focused on the empty quarry. Spook would appear there soon. I felt it. The sliver of purple light on the eastern horizon expanded into a cobalt blue smear. I watched three does and two young spikes walk through the clearing, confident and lazy, unaware yet that hunting season had begun. They ambled along the trail toward the deeper forest, where some lucky city fool would probably shoot them, or they would survive, by chance or luck. I sat completely still beneath the cedar as the blue smear of light in the east yielded to red. Waiting. Earning my trophy. At the moment of dawn, Spook suddenly appeared like a mystical lord of the forest. I was unsurprised. I’d known he would arrive. Spook was a magnificent buck, with a perfect rack of glossy black antlers. Every few steps, Spook stopped and looked around. He was cautious. On this morning, Spook didn’t need the crack of a supersonic bullet to tell him hunting season had begun. Old Spook knew. You couldn’t fool him. He hadn’t lived through a lot of hunting seasons by being reckless. He’d survived the determined efforts of a lot of hunters to kill him. Somehow, the great buck instinctively realized his status had changed. Then Spook looked directly at me.