Peter's father all at once grows tense at his ears, at his back. Peter grows tense at his. His father lifts each foot slowly and gingerly as he goes up the knoll. Peter lifts each of his feet the same way. They hardly move at ail at last. Father's deer rifle is at the ready. Peter's gun is, too. The ancient apple trees rise gradually Out of the earth, and their gnarled trunks begin to appear. Peter's eyes burn. Peter's heart stands still.
Peter's father all at once grows tense at his ears, at his back. Peter grows tense at his. His father lifts each foot slowly and gingerly as he goes up the knoll. Peter lifts each of his feet the same way. They hardly move at ail at last. Father's deer rifle is at the ready. Peter's gun is, too. The ancient apple trees rise gradually Out of the earth, and their gnarled trunks begin to appear. Peter's eyes burn. Peter's heart stands still.
His father springs forward. Peter springs with him. His father's rifle leaps to his shoulder. What was a patch of sere brown grass below an old apple tree comes alive with branching horns, and goes off bouncing, a broad white scut showing, in long leaps for life and the safe spruce woods below. And beside his a narrower scut bounces. A long line of fire from Father's muzzle. A line of fire from Peter's. Smoke fills Peter's eyes. Maybe the two flying patches of white made the woods. Maybe they didn't. The two menfolks run down the hill.
There in the waning light, just short of the tumbling wall and safety and the dim woods, lies the grass-patch with horns, nose to earth, crumpled and quiet. And just over the wall is the other, a young buck, down on his belly his head still up. His eyes are wide Open with fear and hurt. And Father has to finish the young deer off.
Just for a split second Peter feels more like crying than anything else. Hut the shout he has in his throat comes out, as the buck's eyes go our and his head sinks. Peter throws himself, all trembling with shame and joy mixed crazily together, upon the body of his first deer, and grasps his prize to his thumping heart.
It is the peak of one of the mountains of life, and the breath comes slow and hard in Peter's chest.
Among brothers and sisters with wide eyes that night in the kitchen Peter tells how he brought down his first deer, how easy it was, and how he never had a bit of “buck fever” but got the leaping deer just back of his foreleg. Uncle Timothy pats Peter on the back and tells him he will soon be as good a shot as his father and keep them all in venison every season.
Next noon it is Peter's venison the family eat for dinner, a well-browned haunch of dark meat baked in the oven in a thick blanket of bacon from the farm's pigs. Peter has the first piece of all, buttressed about with potatoes he dug himself last month, browned almost as deep as the deer meat. The boy hunter sits on the top of the world. And. at the moment, love seems like a little thing beside the glory that is making Peter grow a whole inch while he eats.
The menfolks go often to the woods now to fill in the gaps of their tame meat with wild. For this seagoing farm happens to lean hard on the woods everywhere, and it is fed not only from the ocean and the vegetable garden but from the spruce and maple thickets as well. Uncle Timothy must get his deer, and he does, after three days walking and great agony in his bunions, Uncle Cephus gets his, without much walking at all, for being a seaman, he studies the wind, sits down, and lets his buck come right up to him. The line in the shed lengthens, and the lost creatures of the woods hang by their heels in the frost.
Mother is chopping her last and best mincemeat, from the stringier and tougher meat of the deer and from the wild apples that came home to the farm by boat over the sea. She stews the deer meat and drains it. Then the girls chop it into the halved apples. The whole house smells of orchard and woods. Raisins and orange peel go into the chopping trays and are worked into the brown mash. The great rocks are filling up with savoriness in the cold cellarway.
Uncle Timothy's orbit has shrunken, and it hugs the fire in the kitchen stove now. The others go to the woods and the bay. to bring down new game, but Uncle Timothy, now he has his deer, takes his annual ease, looks at the cold outdoors, and puts another stick of oakwood on the lire. The Stealthy winter creeping through the dark spruces is deep in Uncle Timothy's bones now, and he grows as sluggish as a bear meditating on his long winter sleep. He grows bearish in his manners, too, and he is a hard man to get a word out of from morning till night.
Pinterest
