The Great Elk Hunt

This is the story about the killing of a great animal. That animal lived alone and lived for itself, usually in places where others couldn’t see it.

The mountains surrounding the basin were nestled in snow and the rivers heaped themselves into lakes wherever the valleys pleased. The streams were quieted in ice when November came and the North breathed through December until there was nothing but brittle beauty by February. It was a lonely place and not very well suited for hikers, especially those who were alone. Wolves prowled the lowlands, often in search of lone elk, if they were fortunate enough to find one. That night, however, there were no wolves in the basin, only a hunter who was walking alongside the dark vein of a stream. He was about forty years old with a handsome, weathered face and rather sad brown eyes. And he was exhausted.  

When the hunter arrived in the basin the stars were casting silver in the east, yearning to spread into the west, and a swirl of clouds gathered by the horizon and applauded the mountaintops with shadows. He was still a few hundred yards away from the cabin he was looking for when he heard an elk call in its haunting trill, and looked up. There was a herd of them gathered farther up the slope on the other side of the stream. Some of the males raised their heads and continued to meekly send their trumpet-like calls, a sound which is impossible to imitate. The hunter had his rifle slung behind his back but didn’t draw it out; he didn’t even think to. The elk could see him and he could see them. There was just enough light left to provide the view of their gentle eyes, black jewels beneath spreads of antlers.

They stood in belonging to the ground beneath them. Since it was so dark, they almost seemed to be a part of the mountain itself. But as the hunter continued walking the herd suddenly retreated in a chatter of hoofbeats. He watched them cross a sward, the chatter turning into faint thunder, and then the silence resuming in full after they dropped out of view.

The hunter lit his lantern. Its glow illuminated the snow in front of him but blinded him from the mountains. He raised it above his head and thought to himself, Do elk always stay in their herds? What about the bulls? They seem to be protectors of their own but at the same time are sometimes known to to travel by themselves.

The minutes were clocked by the crunch of snow and the overhead stars had already conquered the heavens.

Where the hunter was only few had gone; perhaps only those who built the lodge years before. No one could possibly know who that may have been, but one might guess it was done by ambitious gold miners or maybe a hermit, a retreatist. The hunter remembered the conversation he had had with the gentleman at the trailhead. He was an older man who was going to hike alone for a full week, with curious eyes which didn’t, to the hunter at least, look particularly human.

“There’s a cabin, rumor has it, up in one of the Northern basins,” he had said. “I heard it from an old college buddy who used to explore these parts of the Rockies. Probably a shot in the dark, but who knows, maybe you’ll get lucky and run into it.”

“Thanks for the tip” the hunter replied. “I know there’s elk range up there.”

“There is, I hear. Herds and herds of them.”

After they had parted, the old man murmured under his breath, “Wolves too. Packs and packs of them.”

And the hunter, peering ahead of him, realized had found both the cabin and the elk. A shot in the dark indeed.

He trudged through the drifts leading up to the doorway of the cabin and took a moment to explore the walls. There was no denying the structure was old. The planks of wood were battered, even scarred in places, although nothing about it suggested weakness. He lifted the latch on the door, pausing after the haunting creak of the hinges, and stepped inside with his flood of lamplight leading the way. Inside the air smelled like animal leather and whiskey and coffee grounds; there was a bed in the corner with a New Mexican enchantment blanket laid over it. One of the windows had a chair sitting underneath it with whittling carvings scattered on the ground. The room was very still, although wind whistled through its many cracks and sometimes made the carvings roll.

The hunter let his pack fall from his back and on the bed, and setting the lamp on the window sill, he sat down on the lonely chair and breathed.

“I found it,” he muttered out loud. It did seem a miracle. The cabin was tiny and the basin had been going on for the past two days. He’d about given up hope after nearly freezing to death in the upper altitude. The cabin was warm. There was even a woodstove with a bundle of wood next to it, freshly cut. A pile of parchment and a pen lay on the coffee table in the middle of the room, but there was nothing written down. The hunter thought to himself: “It’s almost like this place was prepared for me.” His exhaustion overwhelmed him; he tumbled into bed after kicking off his boots. He fell asleep just moments after he wrapped the New Mexican enchantment blanket over himself and dreamed of a lone bull elk in the basin.

It started snowing early the next morning shortly before the hunter woke up.

The first thing he did was step outdoors to test the temperature. The blueness of imminent dawn draped over the basin and the last of the stars twinkled in the west. It was cold; he ran his hands down his beard and felt particles of ice already forming on their tips.

“Coffee,” he muttered, and hurried back inside. He heated up water from the stream on his Giga stove, admitting the audacity to pray that he would have enough propane to last him another week in the mountains. “By grace of God, if you’re still God,” he whispered to himself. The stove hissed and the water boiled.

After the coffee he cleaned his gun while warming his toes by a leaping fire in the woodstove. The noise comforted him, almost signifying another presence in the room. Then it made him uneasy, because the room began to feel somewhat like a home, a childhood haven. He stood up. He wanted nothing of that haven and continued to clean the gun standing up.

After the gun was sleek and he had finished off his canister of coffee, he looked out the window to see the bands of clouds subside and permit the sunrise to apply strokes of purple, pink, and crimson upon the upper crags. “This is it,” he said. “I can’t waste a single day.”

If he would actually hunt, he’d have to make a considerable journey that day; he’d have to offer up a lot of energy. So he included his plump bag of jerky in his pack after scarfing down a couple of strips. The saltiness made him want elk meat instead and reminded him of his need for water. He filled his thermos to brim from the mountain stream. He had granola bars--good. He even, to his surprise, discovered a twinky. A little forgotten gas station treat that he will eat as celebration once he’s brought down the elk. By then it must have been around eight in the morning; the elk would be beginning to roam the basin, hopefully, at that hour in a pilgrimage for water. The hunter heaved a deep breath. His worn boots were fastened, the pack was securely on his shoulders, and he had the muzzle loader cradled in his arms. Walking out the door he began traipsing northward through the snow.

Only a few minutes later, although the hunter was satisfied with the morning beauty, the enlivening air, and the crunch of hard snow, he also felt a sense of desolation. He sensed that the whole valley was the palm of a great hand and he was just a mite traversing its ridges, being studied under an inquisitive eye. When you’re alone, it often seems like that’s the time you’re least alone, the hunter thought. Solitude is only awareness.

He had passed a copse of trees on his way into the basin the day before. Next to it was there was another lake that collected the tributaries: a place where elk could thrive. It was probably about a two mile hike to reach it, if he recalled correctly; and also as he recalled, this was the direction the elk herd had started running the night before.

He reached a windswept portion of the basin where the snow lay thin and the grass poked through like stubble on a tired man’s face. Walking grew easier there. The hunter could breathe with ease and his footsteps became powdery and silent. A few minutes passed.

Then, unexpectedly, he heard the clean trill of an elk. The call was brief and could have even been mistaken for gusts in highlands. The hunter stopped to listen, found everything shrouded in silence, and then encountered a different sound entirely, one that couldn’t be mistaken. It was the sound of howling wolves. From beyond the cusp of the basin’s horizon the figure of an enormous bull elk appeared to be quickly followed by a dancing assembly of timber wolves.  The hunter dropped down to his knees and clutched the gun, breath suspended, and watched the grim procession draw nearer. The elk was kicking at the leader of the pack with its hind legs, head lowered to establish the threat of its antlers. About a dozen wolves were close on its tail, big, fast, and powerful runners steadily catching up and causing the elk to veer from side to side. Within thirty seconds it was within shooting range. It swayed just a few degrees to the hunter’s right.

The rifle was already loaded. He drew a bead on the elk--it staggered--wolves went for its throat with precision but failed to bring it down. Then the elk seemed to inherit a bolt of strength and separated itself from the wolf pack, kicking up a shower of snow in its wake. It, and the wolves behind, were heading obliviously straight towards the hunter. One hundred yards, then four seconds later, fifty. He froze in place. What was the use of running? All the more likely that he would be seen and the wolves might switch their preference of prey. But he forgot his terror when he realized that never before had he seen so large an elk with so grand a spread of antlers. And never had he seen such large wolves, not even in photographs. The muscles on their shoulder blades showed themselves with every step they took. They had eyes of anger and could be heard making guttural snarls.

Regardless of how impressive the elk, it was clearly desperate and exhausting itself. Its dark eyes widened to disclose their rims of white and its mouth gaped open in efforts to feed its lungs with oxygen. How did it come to be alone?  Such a magnificent beast shouldn’t die by itself, and so gracelessly at that, the hunter thought.

The hunter laid down on his stomach, feeling the cold of the snow through his layerings,  and trained the rifle on the approaching elk. Still he seemed to be invisible to them, to the point that he thought he would be trampled and wondered if he was going to die. But they never reached him. Without warning, the elk collapsed through ice and crumbled to the ground like a knife sinking into skin. It had fallen through a frozen stream obscured by snow and pretending to be ordinary ground. The elk crashed on its side in a tableau of breaking noises and the hunter had to guard his face with his gun as he was sprayed with snow, water, and blood; the elk struggled to stand up but it was clear that at least one of its legs were broken. The water rushed into a black little pool, seeping around the body of the elk and startling the wolves, though only for a moment. After receding a couple of feet they leaped on their fallen prey in so much eagerness that one of them was injured by an antler. They swarmed and teared and struck, their bodies becoming a single and ravenous unit. All of this occurred only twenty feet away from the hunter. Dear God, they are all bigger than me, he half prayed.

The elk continued to resist. It shook some of them off by tossing its head and giving off angry snorts. Vapor fumed from its nostrils.

“Leave it alone,” whispered the hunter. “Leave it alone…” He did feel something like pity for the animal. However, he was also envious. This elk, he had promised himself the second he saw it, belonged to him.

It was useless for the elk to retaliate any longer. The monsters had overwhelmed it like a tide.

Hands trembling, the hunter placed his finger on the trigger, and when the elk’s heart was vulnerable, though it was only for a split second, fired. The blast issued a cloud of smoke and the hunter closed his eyes the second he pressed the trigger. His ears rang, muting the world: silence and blackness. When the smoke cleared away and the hunter looked up again bleary eyed, the wolves had all scattered and the elk was left stock still, alone. A trail of blood ran down and mingled with the water. Its head was resting on its side, elevated by the antlers, and the one visible eye seemed to be trained into the hunter’s with clouded deadness. The hunter took his jamming rod and powder and reloaded the muzzle loader, keeping his eyes trained on the diminishing figures of the wolf pack as they fled across the basin.

He fired the rifle after the wolves to ensure they wouldn’t return, and then knelt down next to the dead elk, settling a hand behind its ear. He was still shaking and his heart was beating up into his throat so his words come out brokenly.

“You are a big one….” He almost expected a reply, or one last breath. Its body was warm and was splayed out some twelve feet in length with the broken leg mangled and steeped in blood and water.

The excitement came and vanished and the nature of the basin was solitary and passive all the same.

He could smell the warm blood coming out of the elk’s open wound alongside its fragrance of wilderness. Wind rolled down unpleasantly. Midmorning had yet to arrive and the basin was grey and cloudy again. With the elk dead at his feet and his boots submerged in bloody slush, the hunter felt as if he had both killed the elk and saved its life. It was dead but not mutilated. Not eaten up.

When he looked up, the cabin was a dark point against the sweeping curtain of the mountains.  Pursing his lips he bent down and ran a hand down the body of the elk so his palm was slightly wetted by its blood. This is, he thought, a tribute of respect. Giving the animal a nod of condolence he shouldered the gun and started walking away. He wouldn’t look back because he knew that deadness fared poorly from far away especially when surrounded by the aura of living mountains. He would return, hopefully before the wolves, to butcher it properly.

He reloaded the muzzle loader again as he went along, searching the basin for any sign of wolves. Although he spotted none he did hear some of them howling in the foothills. They could very well return to the carcass by nightfall. The hunter ate a good amount of his jerky on the hike back even though he was not very hungry. All the while he kept an eye on the cabin as he began to suspect it held a distant familiarity beyond the one night he had spent inside of it. A tendril of smoke made a blue line from the chimney, transparent and yet secure in its hue. Strangely, the door was wide open. The hunter had remembered closing it distinctly. He cast a glance behind his shoulder. Pale emptiness, supervised by mountains. The palm of a hand, holding him.

He reached the cabin some minutes later (though it felt like hours) and entered with a near expectation to see someone sitting in the chair, but there was no one. What he did find was the pile of parchment noticeably disturbed, perhaps by the breeze coming through the open door? The hunter bent over the paper incredulously. The top three pages had been written on and the ink was fresh. He spun in his tracks toward the open door, then tossed his head into the open air. “Who’s there?” he shouted. An elk trilled sorrowfully in reply somewhere up the hill.

The hunter waited in place for a moment, discerning no other tracks other than his own leading up to the doorway. Another round of wind came about, forcing him to close the door and bolt it shut. He collected the New Mexican enchantment blanket and wrapped it around himself, then turned to the papers. Their faces were still visibly wet with ink. If I am sincere, he thought to himself, I’m far more frightened now than when I was when the elk and the wolves were charging me. Far more afraid.   

Again he stooped over them, picking up the top page so the blood on his fingers left faint marks on the surface.

It was a letter addressed to him and sent from:

Elias Fortner, your Father.

-What in the hell….he murmured.

Before he could question anything further, he found himself reading the letter from top to bottom without reserve. The woodstove was still warm as he read.

Dear Son,

This morning I was remembering the day you were born. It was a snowy one outside. Could barely get to the hospital it was so bad. You don’t remember that day of course (and if you do, God gave you a heck of a memory) but the reason I write this is because, as your father, that was one of the best days of my life. Still is. Seeing you show up in my arms bawling like hell and once they cleaned you up and gave you to your mother, something wonderful happened in my heart that I won’t forget. My love for you was four times the amount I thought it would be, and I knew I was going to love you a lot. But not only that. My love for your mother went up about four times too, or a hundred times, boundlessly...it is as if the more life that shows up in the world, the greater capacity there is to love. And I kept loving you son, although there were times it may not have seemed like it. With so much life and love in the world, it’s sad to say that there’s a good amount of anger, greed, and pain as well...too much, if you ask me, things we all have in us deep inside and can’t quite seem to fix. You know that the days I was the saddest and the angriest were those following the death of your mother. Sorrow, of course, is natural, but as the months went on I let the natural course take on a form of bitterness, which I know often spent on you and your brother. Please forgive me for this. Trust that I love you and always have. That is the main purpose of this letter, to remind you of how I feel for you as my son, but I write also to ask you to come home. I’ve not seen you in so long, and the last time I did you were not yourself. Come home son. There’s nothing keeping you. I don’t want to be the pack of wolves on your tail. I never ever was and never meant to be. I’m your father and I miss you.

-Yours, Elias Hampton Sr.

“I’m not the pack of wolves on your tail….” Thoughts untangled in his mind, escaping their jungles. -I thought you hated me. I thought I failed you as a son. I thought retreating was what I deserved. I failed. I failed. I failed.

He laid the letter down and then selected the next one. This one was from his brother.

-The man I wished I could be like and wanted to become, he said.

Dear Brother,

You once said to me: “I am the worst person in the world so far as I know. Some people have committed a dozen murders in their lifetime, with guns. I’m fortunate if I only commit that many each hour of the day, with thoughts. Yes, I am the worst person I know.” To a degree I understand what you meant, friend. And it has made me think during the past few years since I’ve last seen you. I truly believe the world will never be good until every man on earth has said what you have, until each person admits that he or she is the worst person yet to walk the earth. Until then, we will lie, we will seek power over one another, we will kill each other. But brother, though you were right in knowing your faults, you did make the mistake in remaining there. You let it lead to self hatred. After that conversation you started keeping to your room. I heard you weeping in there once, even; you talked in your sleep about your failures as a man, as a friend, as a human being, as God’s creature. You mourned over Constance, claiming the pain you caused her was unprecedented and it might have been better if you had never been born. Brother. If you were here I’d ask you to look deeply into my eyes just to take them off of something other than yourself. And I don’t say that pretentiously. But the only way to freedom is to forget. Guilt is not the passage to grace. What are regrets but an ingrown self….I don’t mean to preach, but  you can’t expect to find the answers inside yourself, from your own rationality or emotion….these are meant to point outward. You have retreated into the valleys all alone for far too long, hunting something that you think you need to kill off single-handedly. You are only hunting yourself.

I love you brother. I pray you will come home soon.

-Justin

-You are only hunting yourself. Hunting yourself.

Without pausing the hunter drew out the final letter, taking a few moments to study the name. Constance. Constance Fortner. He had not seen nor heard nor thought of that name in a very long time, but the memory of her came with ease and he knew he had not even slightly forgotten what she had looked like, how she had talked, laughed, or cried.

Dear lover,

It’s very late at night but I don’t think I’ve been more awake. I hope this letter doesn’t alarm you, since it has been a long time since we’ve spoken. Something urged me to take up the pen. I don’t know what. A mental image came to my mind when I was trying to sleep: the hill and the tree and the moon and the music. Do you remember? It was somewhere by your house, a little knoll by the water where it was perfect to listen to the crickets and look at the stars. God what a beautiful spot. But I don’t bring it up to be sentimental. You should very well know that I’m not like that. But the hill by the water reminded me painfully and sweetly of you, and I had to get these words into your hands no matter where you are now, whether you’re married or not, whether you’re alive or not….I hope you’re alive, but it’s a crazy world and anything can happen to people you no longer hear from. It was in that place where I can remember I was being myself, and you were being yourself. We had command of our words. Every syllable was laughter, a treasure and a delight. We talked for hours, looking up into that night sky, after swimming. You have to know what I’m talking about. Very few people in this god forsaken life have or ever will be fortunate enough to experience it. Surely you remember it. It is that man, among so many that come through my eyes every day, that I miss, that I ask to come back. To at least come back from the dead, to show yourself, to at least appear to your own family. You didn’t turn your eyes inward that night and call yourself a failure. You weren’t afraid to be wrong, and neither was I. I remember that night because I remember you. Am I being dramatic? Do I feel too deeply? It is very late, like I said...look I’m starting to write ellipses…...there’s more……..there’s the spaces of history……..dot, dot, dot, minute after minute after minute…...civilization after civilization after civilization…...life after life after life…...and yet I continue to be convinced that in this mess we all matter more than all the little dots combined. Do you trust me?

Constance

For minutes, which may have been hours, the hunter sat without motion. Solitude and silence were still fixed in the room, but now there was a haunting; being alone only means being aware and this had never been an ordinary journey into the mountains. It had been a deadly entrance into the past. “I am not the wolves on your tail….” The hunter rose to his feet, eyes blank and breath shallow. “I am not the wolves on your tail.” For whatever reason and from whatever power, the door had opened again. Snow blurred the open space in the doorway, yet through its curtain, the hunter detected movement. Elk were running across the basin.

Before he had given thought to what he was doing, the hunter was in the open and running through the storm back to the spot where he killed the elk. It seemed like the only rational thing to do after reading the letters, to revisit the fresh carcass, to look at it and apologize to it, because that dead body felt like him to a degree, shot dead through the heart and bleeding out in a cold basin. Who was running toward him? His old lover? His aged father, his weeping brother... He had ran away from his herd and preferred a quick end instead of being eaten up by the wolves. Signs of the elk had disappeared in the snow, but he may have been running shoulder to shoulder with them for all he knew.

-Dear God (if you’re still God) something terrifying suggested itself in my heart of hearts….that maybe, just maybe….with the miracle of the letters and the incident of the lone elk and the wolves…..I am not alone and this is a very strange valley.

Some distance from the carcass he stopped in his tracks at the sight of the herd of elk intimately surrounding the dead body. The animals had their heads raised heavenward and were offering up their mournful trills in unison. It sounded like music. Music with letters and notes and tears, music that sounded suspiciously like a call to come home, like asking the dead body of a son, a brother a partner, to come back to life. Calling with that trumpet-like trill so impossible to imitate. The hunter listened without going a step farther. He didn’t need to hear, see, touch, or read anything more. He was the great elk and he was its hunter.