Pre-contact Indigenous Hunting Story - The hunt

The creek had no name. It cut cold and narrow out of the hills, running over gray basalt ledges before it widened into a gravel bar where two red alders had fallen across each other and held the debris of three floods in their arms. The men were over before first light, steppingstone to stone without speaking, their breath rising white into the dark. The water smelled of iron and wet moss.

The cold came up through their feet and did not leave.

Four of them. One older man who moved like he was part of the hillside. Two in the middle of their lives who knew what they were doing. And a younger one — still learning what his feet were for.

The younger one stepped on a branch.

The crack of it went up the canyon like a thrown rock. The older man stopped walking and went still — the way a boulder goes still — and waited the length of time it takes for a deer to decide whether it heard something or dreamed it. The two middlemen looked at the younger one with the patience of men deep into a bad morning. The younger one mouthed words that were either an apology or a prayer. Possibly both.

They moved on.

The forest above the creek was Douglas fir and tanoak, the firs tall enough their first branches were forty feet up, the light between them gone. Sword ferns dripped. Oxalis covered the creek margin in small bright patches the size of a man's palm. A kingfisher worked the water above them — short, hard bursts, a sound like a stick dragged across a fence — and then was gone.

Deer had been here. The older man crouched at a soft patch of soil near the water's edge, pressed two fingers into a track and held them there. He pointed up the slope toward a shelf of manzanita and pressed his palm flat: slow, low.

The younger one went slow and low. He went so slow and so low he nearly walked into a fir trunk the width of a man's chest. One of the middlemen caught his shoulder an inch before impact. The younger one nodded. He had absolutely seen the tree.

They found the game trail along the shelf — old sign and fresh, a doe by the stride, coming down to the creek each morning, same hour, same line through the manzanita. The older man went wide to circle upwind. The two middlemen settled into brush blinds where the trail bent around a boulder, disappearing into the brush like they had never been. The younger one was placed behind the big fir with instructions delivered entirely through hand signals that he interpreted as: stay here, be quiet, do not ruin this.

He stayed. He was quiet. He did not ruin it.

She came down the trail twenty minutes later.

A black-tailed doe, fat from the tanoak mast, neck thick going into the rut, moving through the gray light like she owned the watershed, which she did. She came careful, stopping twice, reading the air. Found nothing. Walked into the gap between the boulder and the creek bank.

The older man had been at full draw for thirty seconds.

The release was a breath out, the string gone from his fingers. The bow was short, sinew-backed yew shaped over months — not a pretty weapon, a working one, laced with glue made from boiled salmon skin, scarred from use. The arrow crossed the gap and passed clean through her chest and buried itself to the fletching in the far bank.

She ran into the sword ferns, crashing hard, then less hard, then not at all.

The four men pushed into the wet ferns to where she lay. Her sides moved. The older man crouched beside her, drew his knife, and cut her throat, and the blood came dark into the cold soil and steamed.

He waited.

Then he spoke to her.

Not loudly, and not for the others. The words were for her and the hillside, the cedar, the firs, the creek running below. He thanked her for coming down. He told her what she would carry into the winter — how many mouths, how many nights. He told her she had lived well. The firs dripped. Nobody moved until he was finished.

The younger one had tears cutting lines through the grime on his face. He still found the killing hard to stomach. He averted his gaze towards the manzanita, jaw set, not blinking.

The older man did not look at him. He cleaned his knife on the wet grass, handle first, and held it out.

The younger one took it. The older then went to retrieve his arrow, the obsidian was broken and a new one would need take its place.

The work took time. Dressing a deer in November light, hands going numb, until the does body cavity warmed them, steam rising off everything, the smell of blood and grass and gut. The two middlemen worked through it without stopping. It took them no time, either one of them could have done the whole process in utter darkness. The younger one who was beside them and learned. The older watching their surroundings. There was always danger lurking in the shadows.

They slung her on a pole cut from a straight alder and headed down the tributary. The thought of a warm fire and dry clothing helped each of them pick up the pace. By the time they hit the crossing the afternoon light was already failing. The creek had risen with the day's rain, the stones slicker than they had been in the dark. One of the middlemen slipped, twisting his ankle and came up with a word that stopped the other mid-step. The older man walked ahead and said nothing.

The younger one crossed clean — stone to stone, quiet. The walk home would take longer now. Warmth would have to wait. The younger took over carrying the doe. The injured man said nothing until they arrived at the village.

The village smelled of alder smoke and wet cedar when they arrived. Children ran first, shoving each other to see what was on the pole, giggling and pointing. Women pushed through next, eyes on the doe — the hide, the fat, how far she would carry them before the rains closed in. The older man put her down in front of the headman's house and gave his report in flat words — he told the headman where the trail ran, how the wind sat, where the arrow went, the injury.

The headman looked at the doe. He looked at the older man. He nodded once.

That night the people ate. The younger one sat near the fire. He kept looking at his hands — still dark under the nails where the work had gone, no matter how long he had scrubbed them in the creek.