Winter Run Page 12

  Charlie wanted to pursue the subject. He wanted to pursue every subject. But Luke didn’t have anything more to say about gray foxes. We called them red-sided grays. They were a mystery.

  By the end of the season, when the hunting stopped to let the creatures produce their young, Charlie, after a fall and winter of endless questions and yearnings and outbreaks of enthusiasm, had got it. In spite of the talk—and without thought—he had begun to understand the need to be with hounds.

  If an outsider had asked why he liked it, Charlie would have given the standard hunter’s response to the question. It would have been staged in imitation of Luke. Charlie would turn his head aside, look at the ground, and say, in a deferential voice, with just the right inflection, “Oh, I just like to hear the dogs run.”

  Then he would glance up to see the approval on Luke’s face at the handling of the secret—and the confusion or downright derision on the face of the questioner. It never seemed to go any further. The “why” was never asked.

  Actually, for most of us, Charlie’s explanation was almost the answer, leave out the mystery. Nobody would starve without possums to eat, and it cost money to feed hounds, not to mention the aggravation to wives and mothers. But everyone agreed it was grand to hear the hounds’ voices on a cloudy winter night. Very few people had hounds anymore. Luke was the only one in the area, leaving out the hunt club, which kept a big pack of hounds for the people to follow on horseback during the day.

  And so the season ended. Summer came and Luke, to the total disgust of Jessie, bought three Plott hounds.

  “What in heaven’s name”—Jessie thought a lot about heaven when it came to hounds—“do you need with three more dogs in that pen, Luke?” she demanded.

  “You know I need three fast dogs to chase the coons now they coming back,” he replied, looking suitably guilty. “Plenty of scraps from the school to feed three more hounds. Maybe a bear will come down out of the mountain. You know Plotts will tree anything. I got to be ready …” The conversation went around in a circle, utterly predictable, as was the outcome.

  So the new hounds arrived. Big brindle-colored dogs with ears Charlie thought too short, and hard expressions on their faces, unlike Sarah who was soft and loving. The first Saturday night they dug out of the pen and proceeded to go on a rampage through the whole countryside, running a fox clear from Owens Mountain to the edge of town and back. Half the village heard at least some part of it. Luke came for Charlie first thing and Gretchen let him go. She knew Luke was in a fever to get back in touch with the hounds.

  “When I left ’em, they was on the other side of Owens Mountain,” he said, letting the old truck careen around the country roads. Just as they turned onto Owens Road, Luke slammed on the brakes and leaned out of the window. “Listen, Charlie, they’s heading for Silver Hill. That fox is aimed for town. Been years since a fox run all the way to town.” So they rushed to Mill Creek Farm to intercept them. Sure enough, here came the hounds. Headed straight for the little mountain at the edge of the town. And so it went, crossing after crossing. Twice they arrived soon enough to see the fox coming through. Luke drove his old truck like a maniac.

  Charlie was beside himself with joy. “How do you always know where the fox will run, Luke? How do you know?” His exuberant questions came insistent and unrelenting.

  Luke started to sum up his answers at one point, saying, “My daddy told me about one time …” But the story was too long to tell in the middle of this hunt, so he dropped it. For once Charlie was too engrossed in the present to pursue the past, so he let it go, too.

  It went on most of the night—the two loops around Owens Mountain, then six miles to town, six miles back, and two more loops around the mountain before the fox had had enough and gone to ground.

  The next evening there was a rehash of the hunt at the store. Luke’s brother, Fred, allowed as how he never heard such awful hound voices in his life. “They sound like feists to me, Luke. Yip-yippin’ along. But Lord, they are fast. I never heard hounds run through country like that. It’s a wonder they didn’t catch that fox. Would have, too, if it hadn’t of been that old dog fox from the other side of Owens Mountain—but they sure don’t sing! No sir, they don’t sing.”

  Luke worked on the pen. He put cinder blocks all along the base of the wire to keep the hounds from digging out. They tried, but couldn’t. It looked like the answer. Finally he put them in with the other grown hounds. Summer went on, and then August, and time to start thinking about hunting when the weather broke.

  On a particularly sultry afternoon—sultry in a way only central Virginia on an August afternoon can be—Matthew Tanner and Charlie were working on the old pasture fence halfway up the lane to the burnt-out summerhouses. Charlie, who had just turned thirteen, spent all the time he could with Matthew, who knew the things about the country and farms that Charlie almost desperately needed to know.

  The fence was pitiful. It seemed to be held up by honeysuckle and multiflora rose vines. The cows worked every inch of it looking for a weak place where the wire had come loose from the locust posts. When a cow found one, she marched right through. And then here came the rest, like buzzards congregating at a dead animal. Out and gone. Then Matthew would have to find Ellis Breeden, who rented the pasture, to come and get the cows back in before they ruined the gardens. And then he’d have to patch the fence.

  “Why doesn’t Professor James build a new one, Matthew?” Charlie asked. “Doesn’t he have enough money?”

  “Oh, he got plenty of money. It ain’t that. It’s just that”—and here there was a pause—“well, you know him and Miz James don’t have no children. And when they die, the farm goes to the university.” Here Matthew picked up speed as if to get it over with. “And the university ain’t going to farm seven hundred acres. Which means the place will get cut up … So it don’t make no sense to build new fences if it ain’t going to be a farm.” Matthew was almost out of breath from the unaccustomed onslaught of words. He looked sidewise at the white-haired boy next to him, almost in guilt, as Charlie, of course, asked, “Why?”

  Sarah’s high voice saved Matthew from the answer—hers and those of the other twelve hounds who were with her, running wide open in the August oppression. The sound was coming from behind the summerhouses, from Joe Stephens’s farm and, from there, Owens Mountain.

  “Lord, they done escaped again!” Matthew caught his breath. “But I don’t hear the Plotts. Do you, Charlie?”

  Charlie by this time was beside himself at the daylight sound of the hounds’ voices, and at Sarah carrying the hunt in the heat, though the other deeper voices were right with her. They headed for the lake.

  “No Plotts in there,” yelled Charlie with his usual confidence. “I know all those voices.” It was true. He did know all those voices.

  Matthew and Charlie raced to the other side of the road and clambered over the risky fence in time to see the pack burst into view from the mature oak forest at the top of the hill. Running as if it were a cold winter night when your breath makes steam in front of you, not cotton in the lungs. They both looked down the long meadow toward the lake, searching for the quarry—from the pace, necessarily a fox. Nothing else except a deer could run in front of those hounds like that without being caught in the first field. They would have seen the deer. But where was the fox?

  “Do you see him, Matthew? I don’t see nothing,” asked Charlie, lapsing into the speech of his companions, which Gretchen disapproved of and would not countenance in the house. This was of little matter to Charlie, who quickly developed two different languages—one for home and the other for the rest of the time, even though Matthew tried to back up Gretchen.

  “Don’t talk like that, Charlie. I don’t see nothing either. Must be in this heat the fox got a good lead on the hounds. Maybe scent ain’t holding.” He studied the woods edge next to the lake, expecting to see the pale flame of a red fox melt into the swamp.

  But there was nothing. The hounds ca
me across the field still running hard in spite of the heat and disappeared along with their voices into the swamp. Then silence. Just nothing!

  “Where—,” began Charlie.

  “Hush a minute, Charlie. Hush! There be a loss. We’ll hear ’em again in a second.”

  But they didn’t. Not for five minutes on Matthew’s Little Ben pocket watch. And suddenly there was an urgency to know, a suspense like the thickening of the air before an August storm. Matthew felt it, and Charlie was in a knot. The tree line into the swamp was suddenly a barrier before another world. A world that had swallowed up Sarah whole, not to mention the other hounds.

  “We got to find Luke. Come on, Charlie! I think he’s down to Stevens Crossing lining track. Ought to be just about finished by now. Come on!”

  “No! Let me stay and look. You go. I’ll walk down the cow path in the swamp. Maybe something awful has happened. And Sarah … !” And Charlie started down the hill at a run, jumping clumps of broom sage, his arms flung out, already hollering for her, “Sarah! Sarah!”

  Matthew turned toward the truck. The boy would be all right. There were no bears in that swamp. And you couldn’t see foxfire at three in the afternoon in August. So he went on off in search of Luke.

  • • •

  Luke knew right off what had happened. There was a little pond in the swamp. And when the hounds crossed it, almost swimming, they sometimes shut up, even if they could still scent the fox on the water’s surface. Then at the road, where they would be at a loss for sure, their momentum would carry them forward, across, and into the little dip in the pasture just beyond the Mill Creek fence. So by the time they struck it off again and started throwing their tongues in the August heat, Matthew and Charlie had missed them.

  Luke was immediately hot to go to the back of Mill Creek and catch the hounds as they returned from Locust Hill Farm, assuming they could keep the track going in this heat and the fox ran the right way. And he needed Matthew to help him because there were so many hounds.

  “But Charlie …”

  “Charlie goin’ to be fine, Matthew. He’ll just plow around in the swamp. No harm.”

  “A cottonmouth—,” began Matthew.

  “You know there ain’t been a cottonmouth seen around here in years, Matthew.”

  So off they went to Mill Creek. And sure enough, next to the huge manure pile at the back of the farm, they paused, and here came the hounds, running hard, but their voices sounding muffled in the thick, hot air. The fox emerged from the woods with his tongue hanging out and ran right over the top of the steaming, rich-smelling mountain of horse manure.

  “Now we’ll get ’em. Watch what happens when they try to track across that ‘mountain,’ Matthew. That fox fooled ’em this time! They won’t be able to smell a lick on the manure pile. And by the time they cast around it, we’ll have ’em. That was a young fox. He’s had enough. He goin’ home to the den he was born in cause he still don’t know the country.”

  It was Luke’s nature to explain every hunt in detail even if the listener knew perfectly well what was going on, which of course Matthew did. Sometimes the explanations were an aggravation, but often there was some new bit of news to be gotten from the tenth rendition of a repeat occurrence at some stage of a hunt. The stories were difficult. It was hard to think that any one person could explain the whole thing—like scent and all the habits of dogs, let alone foxes. And because Luke was sure everyone wanted to know all there was to know about everything connected with hunting, at times he did tend to go on too long.

  The hounds came out of the woods exactly on the fox’s track, but when they hit the edge of the manure pile, they stopped short, as if they had run into a solid wall and not the edge of a manure pile. So when Luke called, they all raised their heads and started to wiggle and smile, as if saying how strange it was to see the men there—but nice, too—and what’s next?

  “Grab ’em, Matthew. String this bale string through the collars. We’ll just have to tie ’em in the truck since we ain’t got the hound boxes.”

  Sarah was next to Matthew, panting so hard her whole body shook. It looked like her tongue would drop out of her head. Suddenly she went rigid all over and fell to the ground, and her eyes rolled back in her head. She was breathing with her mouth shut. Luke was busy tying the other hounds in the truck.

  “Luke!” Matthew yelled. It was completely unlike him. Matthew Tanner just didn’t yell. At least not often. And when it happened, it almost always had to do with Charlie.

  Luke jumped down from the truck and sat on a log next to the truck with the beautiful little bitch in his lap, talking to her, telling her that it would be all right, that she was just having a running fit, that in the heat it happened sometimes with young hounds. He told her he would give her some worm medicine because some said it was worms what caused it. She would be all right in just a minute he said, in a tone of voice loaded with concern, even though he had seen it many times. They almost always came back—almost always.

  “Oh my Lord. What would Charlie say?” Matthew said, thinking out loud.

  But before he could pursue this totally unacceptable notion, she started to come back, and five minutes later she was okay. Panting again like a normal, overheated dog.

  Matthew had to drive so Luke could stay in the back of the truck and be sure none of the hounds could jump out and strangle himself on the bale string.

  They parked the truck under the huge old beech tree next to the dam so the hounds would be cool. We called it the loving tree because generations of young people had carved their initials in its soft skin. After a drink in the pond, the hounds didn’t fuss against the ties because they were exhausted and happy to be in the shade.

  But where was Charlie? They had half expected to see him walking up the lane to the big house when they drove in. It was five o’clock. Gretchen would begin to wonder, although in the summer when Charlie was with Matthew, she never worried much.

  Matthew hollered a few times. They started across the north edge of the swamp, through the deep, open woods that separated the home pasture of Silver Hill from the swamp. Almost at the gravel road, they stopped and Matthew yelled again. This time Charlie’s raspy voice came back. “Here I am! Here I am!” he called over and over, not scared, but flat, like he was telling the air where he was.

  The edge of the swamp was like the edge of a pond with almost no water in it. But it was deep in mud and swamp plants and dead oaks that could not grow in such a place. When Charlie emerged, the men almost burst out laughing. He had no shoes—as was his summer policy. A raggedy Sunday shirt that Gretchen had cut the sleeves off, and blue jeans, with one knee out, were covered in muddy swamp water. His blond hair was a beacon, because he refused to wear a hat.

  “Did you find the hounds?”—this in his most urgent voice. “Did you find them?” Smiling just a little. Three times before Luke could get a word in edge-wise.

  “Sure we found ’em,” replied Luke. “What you think, Charlie? You know I know hounds and how the land lays? Sure we found ’em.”

  There was a pause in the summer air.

  “What did you find, Charlie?” Matthew asked.

  Suddenly the smile dropped from Charlie’s face. And the men stopped, too, because with Charlie you never knew.

  “Tell it, Charlie,” demanded Matthew, almost harshly. “What happened in there?

  Charlie glanced from one to the other. And then in his softest voice, he said, “I found her! … In the middle. On a little island—”

  “Who, Charlie? Not Sarah. She was with us. Start from the beginning. What happened?”

  “I ran down the path through the middle of the swamp, hollering for Sarah, because I thought she would come if she could hear me. Halfway through, I thought I heard something struggle in the swamp. Off to the left. So I went in. But I couldn’t find anything. So I kept going. It’s deep in there, Matthew. Sometimes I almost had to swim. I wondered about snakes. But I didn’t see any. So I kept going. T
hen there was a little island in front of me. About two feet higher than the swamp. With a big oak in the middle of it and a huge old, dead locust lying on the ground. I came up from the water about level with the land.

  “And she was there. Lying on her side, head up, looking at me. Her ears were up and she was panting in the heat. I could see her nipples and the fine hair all around them wet where the babies had been suckling. I saw the eyes of three cubs looking out at me from the hollow locust tree.

  “She scared me a little. But her eyes were just like you told me, Luke. They had straight up-and-down slits—like a cat’s. Not like Sarah’s. I never …”

  Later, at the store, after many tellings, the tale took on the quality of a painting—The gray vixen mother lying on her side with her young peering out from the hollow locust log, the blond-headed boy rising from the swamp like a character from a story, staring at each other. It was an unlikely scene made more so by the fact that no one had ever heard of a fox having a litter so late that the young would still be suckling in August. It must have been her second litter of the season, because back in January, when they had first seen her, she was heavy, too. But no one questioned the story. Charlie was serious about the truth in stories. He had seen his nursing vixen deep in that August swamp. No one doubted that.

  “What did you do then, Charlie?” demanded Luke.

  “Well, we looked at each other for a long time. Then I put out my hand. I had the palm up, like you taught me, Luke, so she wouldn’t be scared. And then …”—looking for words—“and then … she …”

  “What, Charlie? What did she do? Tell it!”

  “She put her ears down, flat alongside her head. Like when a puppy begs. And lowered her head like Sarah did that first day. She looked straight up at me, and for a second …”—still searching—“she was soft… we were friends.

  “But then she reared up on her front legs and pulled her head back and looked at me the way the tan bitch did that day she killed the doe. I couldn’t put my hand out any further …”