The Hunt
By Jonathan Haeber

I shouldered a 30-caliber with the barrel pointed to the sky. The day was sweltering, and my expectations of bagging a kill were low. Flies buzzed around me; one landed on the tip of my Winchester. For a second I thought of pulling the trigger and sending the fly a mile into the sky, but I decided that I might as well salvage the fear of the few deer that walked in the forests around me.

It was not an average Oregon day. Average in Oregon would mean that the rain would be dropping. The deer always came out in the rain.

But today the sound of crunching dry leaves from last fall season and the clutter of fluttering grasshopper wings was all I could hear. Granted, there was the occasional logging truck with jake-brakes, pummeling through the sultry air of August, but those were all extraneous noises to me. I wanted to separate myself from them. I wanted to become primal and backtrack 300,000 years of human evolution. I was the predator. I would get my meat, even if it meant blasting that fly into the troposphere.

Below me, the burbling creek murmured its own language. Water cascaded through riffles of bedrock as mayflies shat their offspring and cutthroat trout ravenously ate the pregnant insects.

I should've gone fishing, I thought.

It was the type of day that one could see both the moon and sun in the same sky. Luna was pale in comparison to the dark blue behind it, and tonight it would offer up its light to the wilderness for the nocturnal killers: the wolverine and bat; the owl and coyote.

Poachers were the biggest threat these days. The Weavers, a destitute family down the road subsisted on-and bragged about-sacking 40 deer in a single year. They never ate the whole deer. When I saw a decaying carcass in the forest with only the back strap gone, I knew it was the work of the Weavers. Empty cans of Keystone strewn along the gravel roads signaled the same. They drank when they hunted. They drove when they hunted. They were most effective at night, when they could disorient the creatures of the forest with 50,000 candle-power spotlights and subsequently fire from the roof of their Ford like corpulent businessmen on the back of a jeep in the African hunt.

I continued walking, infuriated with the Weavers. It was because of them, that I couldn't bag my legal limit this year.

To my left was an old cabin from the Oregon gold rush days. A cougar once made it his home and guarded the front as if the inside was strewn with the treasures of the past and he was the chosen guardian of these relics. The last time I saw the cat was years ago; the Weavers may have shot the thing, simply out of malice or fear of competition.

I walked inside, out of curiosity. It was my first time in the building. Not surprisingly, there was the skeleton of the cougar-- missing a skull. The skull was most likely taken to the trailer of the poachers, mounted on a crest of white oak, and displayed as a testimony of conquest. I could envision the puke green carpet of the Weaver's living space, the cougar's face covered with the dust and detritus of the room, forever imprisoned in the house of criminals.

The cabin contained old mining apparati, an oxidized iron bed frame from the late 1800s, and mason jars full of pickled pigs' feet. A cast iron stove sat in the corner, the only warmth offered in the cold, desolate, and dangerous world of Oregon's pioneer landscape. A framed daguerreotype sat above the stove; a photo of a Chinese man, shovel in hand.

They called them Celestials back then. This was a Celestial's cabin. He may have worked for the Hydraulic mining outfit upstream, where Chinese laborers, discarded when the railroads no longer needed them, took up work as ditch diggers. The China Ditch, they called it, a massive 33-mile network of waterways that fed the frenzy for gold. They lived off of the scarring of the land because they had to. They were fastidious in mining, keeping gold that other hasty miners had missed.

Above the daguerreotype was a shelf. On the shelf were bullets and opium jars. I popped off the glass cork of one and smelled the unmistakable pungent odor of poppy milk. What was it like to be imprisoned by the lazy hand of opium after a day of ditch-digging? It must have been bliss.

It was late afternoon; the sun had switched places with the moon, and this was when the best hunting would occur. The deer always came out before sunset. The 'golden hour,' it was called. I continued walking up the sedimentary rock of eons and searched for my quarry. I'd never gone this far before. The jake-brakes of the logging trucks were inaudible from here. The nearest road was miles away, but people lived in these mountains. Some were crazy; some had illegal operations; others came up there to die. The aged man who called himself Lazarus was in those hills. He once came down to my place asking for some copper piping. Apparently the man had a distillery somewhere in the forest. He had it there since prohibition and was so disconnected from the outside world, that he thought his mash was selling because it was illegal. It was really selling because of the active marketing of his friend, who gave Lazarus half of the profits, but never revealed the truth about prohibition to him.

Lazarus' friend brought his mash back by the barrel. He'd fly in on his ultra light airplane and haul the barrels back to town. He labeled each bottle with the original brand name: Lazarus' Snake Oil--Guaranteed to Kill All the Bugs in Your Body. The labels were even in their original font, "Goudy Catalog." They were cured in a diluted form of acid to make them look yellowed and aged. Lazarus whisky was selling because the maker was frozen in time, the brand remained the same, and people missed the past. That's what his friend never told him.

As I walked through the forest, I thought of that insane old man and hoped that I would stumble on his distillery. I needed a drink after a long fruitless hunt. Instead, I stumbled upon another operation: a marijuana Mecca. Acres of cultivated hashish sunbathing in the backwoods of Southwestern Oregon. There were hunters on this land other than me, but these hunters had AK47s and UZIs. They were a radical group of loonies, weary of law enforcement and kids who came out into the woods to pilfer their crop. They knew that the feds were after them; if they saw me, I would be meat.

In the distance I saw a doe. I couldn't legally bag her. She sauntered onto the field of ganja and began to nibble on the hemp. Her favorite part was the bud and she tore through the crop like it was the field of ripe clover back at my farm. There, during the off-season, deer seemed to bask in a bacchanal of laziness and love with nothing to fear.

That doe in the field of green leaves had much to fear but didn't. She gracefully walked into the crosshairs of the AK47 and saw her predator. She clumsily stumbled around in a stupor, but couldn't make a decision on where to run. She received bullet-after-semi-automatic-bullet as if it were her destiny. Her spasms subsided, and she fell to the ground, full of death and THC. All I could think of was how lucky I was to not be on the receiving end of the automatic weapons.

I laid myself down, belly-first, and looked straight at the rifle-wielding sentry. He was a pale and skinny man with long, braided hair, wearing a necklace of deer ears. He wielded a pair of polarized sunglasses, to see through the haze better. His primary purpose was to kill the pot-partaking deer, and he had the countenance of a killer. He was a vet, just like me. Unlike me, he was still in the mode. He was still in Vietnam, and I was a potential Charlie.

I was good at being stealthy; hunting turkey taught me that, since turkey are the most challenging of animals to hunt. They are also among the most perceptive. The sentry sensed my presence. I couldn't tell if he was looking straight at me, because of the glasses, but his head was pointed there, and he stood in silence, as still as a Grecian statue. He raised his barrel and pointed the scope at my forehead from a distance. He took off his glasses, and I could perceive the white of his eyes magnified through the end of his scope, blinking in disbelief. I had my barrel pointed at him; he had his at me. The moment was a twisted mixture of Old West gun-slinging, Vietnam-era shell shock, and modern-day hunting machismo. It was a stalemate, and both of us knew it.

We lowered our guns, and he returned to his victim, delicately filleting the ears and stringing them up, then quartering the deer and hanging it in a tree. I slid away mentally turning things over in my head, and walked down into a canyon.

Well, Lazarus did live out in those woods, in a watershed called Deadman Creek. He had pots of potatoes and kettles. A stack of freshly cut Douglas fir sat along the edge of his cabin. The man said he ate potatoes in almost every meal: hash browns, fried potatoes, mashed potatoes, baked potatoes, and potatoes au-gratin. He was glad to see me. I had some peanuts and carrots in my pack that he devoured. He gave me a tour of his operation, and showed me something special.

"You see this here?" He said, pointing at a shroom in his hand. "This is an alcohol cap, also known as Coprinus atramentarius, a rare mushroom that has mind altering effects when consumed with my private reserve."

The man had obviously had too much to drink, but I kept listening.

"It leads to enlightenment. It is the Northwest's peyote." He glanced at my carrots. "I'll trade one for three carrots."

I thought, what the hell, and gave him the three carrots. I usually used them as deer bait, but the golden hour had since surpassed.

"Aren't you forgetting something?" He queried, gesturing at a bottle of his whisky grasped in his hand.

The tricky old bastard duped me. I gave him the rest of my peanuts for his bottle, and started shuffling away.

"Old man: One more thing," I said, masticating half of the alcohol cap. "Prohibition is over. Ask your friend for a bigger cut," Swigging from my new antique unlabeled bottle.

I never did shrooms before, and I didn't expect to that day. I dismissed the old man's bantering as crazy talk, and never thought the mushroom would do what he said. I just hoped he didn't poison me.

Strange things happened to me soon after I drank the old man's snake oil. I saw colors I didn't know existed, and things from my past that I had hoped never did. But there they were, inevitably rushing through my mind.

I saw the boy outside of My-Tho, reaching into his shirt for a package as I emptied 50 caliber bullets into his abdomen. I saw the boy's package of fruit torn apart by my lead-a package that was supposed to be a gun, or full of explosives. Red was the color I saw most-the red of my friend's hands as he held his stomach and winced in pain, disgorged and dismembered after stepping on a Bouncing Betty. I carried him away, but he couldn't make it. He no longer carried any of his gear, only half of his intestines. I carried him, until he expired.

At dusk, the moon seemed green with envy as the sun dipped behind the pines red with the rage of a dying man who couldn't let go. The night would soon blanket the landscape for all except the nocturnal hunters and fleeing prey. I would make it back before dark, or be one of the two. There were still 20 minutes of legal hunting time, but time was a weak law in the world of my psychosis. Nothing made sense anymore; it was beautiful and ugly, colorful yet dull.

I walked along the China Ditch, a vestige of the bygone era when men hunted for inanimate things. When life was squandered for things more tangible: opportunity, family, food, and opium. The water still ran in places along the ditch. The dense forest became darker by the minute. It was then that I felt drawn to a clearing. I lay down in the grass, a place where deer bedded, and pointed my Winchester at the moon. A fly landed at the tip of the barrel, and I shot.

In my mental state, everything passed, frame-by-frame, and I saw the fly buzz away at the exact instant the smoke and bullet discharged from the gun. Then something happened that I couldn't explain. I was the bullet, flying towards the moon. I looked behind me and saw myself miles above the land, above the laws, above mortality. And I saw everything-the Chinaman's cabin, Lazarus' still, the plot of hashish. Everything was below me, and the moon was ahead.

My trajectory slowed and I began dropping, back down to the earth, the law of gravity took me, down towards the moving lights on a gravel road; I fell twice as fast as the speed of sound, and I came at full force towards the Weavers' truck. Sitting on top of the hood was old Weaver himself aiming his gun at another deer, and I hit him.

And we both expired.