Old Dance on the Killing Ground

Thus the principle which inspires hunting for sport is that of artificially perpetuating, as a possibility for man, a situation which is archaic in the highest degree: that early state in which, already human, he still lived within the orbit of animal existence.--Ortega Y Gasset

I shot him. I shot him nine times with the .220 Swift. I hit him every time, and every time the bullet splattered on his outside. One time I hit him in the face and took away his lower jaw and still he didn't die. He just bled and began to snap fruitlessly with half a face at his own dragging guts.--Robert Ruark

It is eight A.M., Monday, February 19, 1973--George Washington and Eric Whitehouse's birthday. Outside, the temperature is zero degrees and the sky is hard, clear blue. Inside, Web Keefe is cooking breakfast. He hobbles around the small kitchen on a cane, pouring orange juice, getting out silverware, frying eggs. He is a big man with gray hair and a bad hip who doesn't look his 63 years. He has the same loose, unlocalized look of strength and the same sort of tough, shrewd face that John Wayne has. Which is maybe why his voice surprises as it does. Web's voice is a pliant, nasal croon: an old woman's voice.

He is owner-manager of Wild Hill Hunting Preserve in Ely, Vermont. Because of his hip and his age, he does the domestic chores. Tough face and all, Web is the one who buys the food, makes the beds and cooks the meals. In the living room, his partner, 28-year-old Bill Richter, is doing his part of the work: man-talking with the paying customers. He throws Jim Whitehouse's rifle up to his shoulder. It is a set-triggered over-and-under Heym, built in Germany. The bottom barrel is 8mm x 57mm; the top is a shotgun barrel that shoots 16-gauge solid-lead Brenneke slugs.

"Nice," says Bill. "It's good to have that slug backing you up with these boar. . . ."

"Bill," croons Web from the kitchen. Bill listens, stock to jowl. "Bill . . . could you give me a hand with these plates?"

Bill and Web go way back--22 years back, to New York, when Bill started school in the Westchester County system, where Web was a superintendent. Web liked the blond German kid's style: the way he enjoyed fighting bigger boys and loved contact sports (he was all-state in football and a state-champion wrestler in high school). During the summers, Web ran a boys' camp in Ely and extensions of it in Montana and Canada; and as soon as the boy was old enough, he took him up to work at the Canadian camp. Bill devoured most of what there was to learn there about the wild country and how to hunt it. Then, hankering after grizzly and caribou, he got a pilot's license and a job as a hunting guide in Alaska for a while. In the meantime, he and Web had gone into business. In 1959, they drove to Tennessee in a truck and brought oack nine Russian boar to Vermont. With the boar and $15,000 worth of fence, they figured on starting the first commercial hunting preserve in New England. But problems developed. They had no preserve permit; and the town of West Fairlee, spooked by visions of mean big pigs chuffing up front yards, voted the importation of boar illegal. Web and Bill had to execute the animals. Shortly afterward--with some help from the governor--the town changed its mind, the game commission gave them a permit and Wild Hill preserve was in business.

Web's breakfast is eaten at two tables by a picture window. The house, a lodge for hunters in the winter and Web's home in the summer, stands at the top of a hill overlooking undulant Connecticut River Valley country. At the bottom of the hill by the road is a large pen with hay spread on the snow near its center. Grazing peacefully in it are a couple of dozen sika and fallow deer, dainty, tiny-hoofed ruminants from Asia. Down the road is a similar pen full of Russian boar. These are Wild Hill's stock in trade. As he eats, Eric studies the penned deer through the window. He has just finished fixing a 1.5-to-6 variable Zeiss scope to a beautifully crafted 7 x 57 Ferlach rifle. Today is his 15th birthday. He is a quiet, chubby boy with a vulnerable face. His father and his older brother Jimmy are here for boar. Eric is supposed to kill a fallow deer, and the biggest thing he has ever shot at before is a rabbit.

Web leans back in his chair, eying Eric's brother. "Now, remember, if you get a shot, make sure you do the job." Jimmy looks back at him: 17, dressed in a pair of moosehide pants his father has given him. "A wounded boar is your boar," says Web.

"That's right," agrees Bill.

Jim Whitehouse, Sr., rises from the table. An oil-company executive nearing 50, he is a likable man given to piercing looks and crisp hunting talk that glints with specifics: velocities, reticles, trajectories. Before moving to Connecticut, he lived and hunted in England and Germany, where he bought the eccentric set of guns he has with him and the moosehide knickers and Tyrolean hat he wears. He and his sons arrived last night for a two-day stay. This is his first American preserve hunt and he's not sure what to expect. He is sure that he by God wants Eric to get a deer on his birthday and that he wants a couple of boar heads for mounts. When asked why he picked a preserve to introduce his sons to hunting animals, he says, "I wanted them to get a sure chance on dangerous game. The wild hunting's too iffy." That's another thing Whitehouse is sure of. He needs none of Web and Bill's prepping to convince him that wild boar are mortally dangerous. He doesn't need the story about the hound thrown 30 feet in the air, ripped open from throat to tail, nor the ones about how many times Web and Bill have been attacked and cut. He believes.

He examines the .44-magnum Smith & Wesson that Bill carries in the woods strapped to his leg, the short arm that would be responsible for stopping any charging animal that he and his sons were unable to stop. It is a chunky, formidable weapon, capable of putting a bullet through an automobile engine block. Whitehouse seems pleased with it, just as he is obviously pleased with the man who totes it. For nobody ever looked more like a hunting guide is supposed to look than Bill Richter does. With his blond curls, his clear blue eyes and Tab Hunter features, with his fullback's build and strong smile, he looks like a lot of things ought to look, including German lieutenants in World War Two movies.

Whitehouse hands the gun back to Bill. "Tell me," he asks resonantly, "you've done a lot of hunting--what's the second most important thing you take into the woods?"

"Well," says Bill, considering, "it would depend on where I am. . . ."

"Toilet paper, my friend," booms Jim. "Toilet paper."

Everyone is standing now, pulling on boots and gloves. Web wishes the boys luck and the group files outside behind Bill, who has put on an old duckhunting hat and a patched parka but no gloves. Eric, who is last in line and who will see blood running from an animal's nose for the first time today, wears a skinning knife at his hip.

• • •

There are nearly 1000 commercial hunting and shooting preserves in this country now. Every year there are more. Basically, they are all state-licensed businesses where pen-raised birds or fencedin game is kept or released on private land for hunters who pay, often through the nose, for whatever they shoot.

What they shoot and what they pay can vary considerably. Some preserves deal only with upland game birds--pheasant, quail, chukar partridge, etc.--that are raised in pens and stuck under bushes just before a hunt. Others get into ducks: tame mallards, usually, which are made, in a variety of ways, to fly over shooters in blinds. The going rate at these places is two to ten dollars for an upland bird and five to ten for a duck.

Then there are the big-game preserves like Wild Hill. Most of them maintain a combination of native and distinctly nonnative animals in fenced acreage of varying size, say from 100 to 75,000 acres. A place called Hunter's Haven East in Walland, Tennessee, for instance, has 455 acres behind fence. There you can hunt black and brown bear, Russian boar, mouflon, Barbados and aoudad sheep, sika, fallow, red and axis deer, elk, goat and turkey. Only five of those animals are anything like native to the United States. The rest are known in the trade, appropriately, as exotics. They are the romance of preserve hunting, animals you used to have to be Hemingway to shoot, and that's where the money is.

Let's say you happen to have always had a craving for a go at black buck--a medium-sized black-and-white antelope with spiraling horns, a native of India and one of the most elegant of all plains animals. Well, all you have to do is pack it on down to the Y. O. Ranch in Mountain Home, Texas, and you can shoot all the black buck you want for $750 a crack. There are more black buck there than in all of India, where they are now protected. (Or there used to be. Severe weather in 1973 killed many of them. They won't be hunted again at Y. O. until 1975.) For $1000 at the Y. O. Ranch, you could kill an ibex or a snow-white ram or, for less (continued on page 178) Old Dance (continued from page 120) money, a number of other animals representing four continents, all under the "no kill, no pay" system that virtually all preserves employ. At other places around the United States, you could hunt American bison, nilgai, Corsican ram and Himalayan tahr. And there are herds of eland and oryx being readied for consumption. Himalayan tahr? Nilgai? Yes . . . well, they come from game-park surplus, mostly, these exotics, and are trucked around the country on demand. Of which there is more and more and more.

Among preserve people at this point in the history of American hunting can be sensed a heady, evangelistic faith that they are the future. And things do seem to be fun tiding toward them. Game-supporting public land, the little of it that is left, has a clutch of grim projections facing it, including Paul Ehrlich's that the country will have to build a city of a quarter of a million people every -10 days for the next 30 years to accommodate all of us. Many wild-game species are dwindling toward disappearance. In addition to these depletions of natural resources, the swelling popularity of preserves indicates that the nation's hunters could be running low themselves on the stamina, learned skills and patience that wild hunting requires. It is stunning how many things a man hunting pheasant, say, on a preserve doesn't have to do. He doesn't have to own or find the land, or get permission to hunt it. He doesn't have to buy or train a bird dog. At some places, he doesn't even have to bring a gun. He doesn't have to learn the cover or anything about the habits of pheasant. He doesn't even have to clean and pluck his birds, for must preserves will swap him wrapped and frozen ones for his.

"Emphasize to all who ask that the net cost of bagging a big-game animal at a club such as yours is certainly no greater than the cost of a hunting trip to some distant point on public lands, and it is far less painful. Further, who can assure the hunter of the positive presence on public lands of the game he is after?" advises P. C. Christiansen, a preserve owner, in a paper given to an association of owners--all smiling, one imagines, as they listen to this cheerfully logical response to any possible quibbling over value. The animals, the birds are here, seems to be the position, painlessly and immediately available to anyone who can pull a trigger, some of them animals you used to have to travel weeks and spend thousands to get to.

But there is more to it than that, more to the widespread and increasing attraction of preserve hunting than just the absolute certainty of the presence of game and the ease with which it can be killed. If that were all it took to satisfy hunters, there would be more enterprises like the one Roger Caras, the naturalist, tells about--a kind of reductio ad absurdum of preserve conditions. Caras learned about a farmer in Maine who gathered up black-bear cubs in the spring and raised them. When they were large enough, he placed them in individual cages where sportsmen came, money in hand, to shoot them through the bars.

The successful preserves know something much deeper about the American hunter than that farmer did. And they have found intricate ways of getting to it.

• • •

[Killing] is, as I discovered yesterday, a question of art. When it is difficult to kill the thing, when skill and achievement come into it, I find that the killing is worth while. --T. H. White

All hunters are the same people.--Ernest Hemingway

The preserve is a 1500-acre tract about nine miles from the house. Strictly out in the country. The road leading into it is completely hidden from the blacktop by a bank to make it as inaccessible as possible to poachers, with whom Wild Hill is constantly at war. Bill Richter take! us in in two groups by snowmobile and there are signs all along both sides of the road, saying, Deputy Sheriff Patrolled, Warning: Wild Boar and this little masterpiece of theater: Danger: Trespassers May Be Eaten. Bill, it happens, is a deputy sheriff.

A mile or so into the woods, the road ends at a chinked-log lodge, where hunters stay during the spring, summer and fall. Located dramatically beside a small lake full of rainbow, brook and Kamloops trout (they couldn't resist an exotic here, either), the lodge could be a stage set: It is the archetype of all hunting lodges.

A pair of moose antlers hangs above the door. On a wooden fence, a few impressive jaws of boar bleach in the sun. Inside, huge beams muscle-across the ceiling and stone fireplaces yawn at either end of the main room. The interior seems "done," by some decorator who specializes in hunting camps. Old leather furniture, hand-hewn coffee tables, Franklin stove, copper pots, stuffed ducks, shell belts, a bear-trap ashtray, iron cots, coonskins, moose calls, a skunkskin hat, deerantler gun holders, boar tusks, mounted brook trout and walleye, a whole stuffed bobcat on a limb and, hanging on the high log walls above the fireplaces, the baleful heads of goat, deer, caribou, fox and boar. On a wall by the door is a photograph of Bill and Fred Bear, the bow hunter, crouched beside a dead caribou in some high, windy-looking country.

Jim Whitehouse and his boys look around and handle things silently in the reverent semidark, like baseball fans in Cooperstown. This, by God ... now, this is what you call a hunting lodge.

We don't start walking until almost ten--boar, says Bill, don't start to move until it warms up--and by then the temperature is in the 20s. It is a windless, cloudless day, as perfect as an egg. The sun is warm and snow is falling from the evergreens when we start, each fall making a brilliant dust that hangs against the sky. Because of a recent thaw and freeze, the snow is crust under four or five inches of new powder and we walk without snowshoes, north along a trail behind Bill, with low white-spruce country on the left falling beyond the trout lake to a stream bed and high ridges on the right. Merlin couldn't conjure a better day or place for hunting exotics.

Within a quarter of a mile, Bill turns off the trail and we follow him east up one of the hillsides to an open hogback and along it in the sun, seeing deer tracks. He walks slowly, looking back often at Whitehouse and stopping to scout whenever Jim seems tired.

"You can smell them this time of year," he says at one pause, mysteriously, for no one is sure exactly what it is he can smell. "It's a musky smell you can pick up a hundred yards away."

Whitehouse and the boys look around, noses lifted. Then, when Jim has his breath, we go on, continuing uphill in a slight southern curve, along ridges and through old Merino-sheep meadows now overgrown with pine. Bill points out some old sika-deer tracks, longer and narrower than a whitetail's, and the twin, intimate tracks of a pair of fisher cats.

Around 11 he finds a boar track, which, perfectly sersibly, looks like a pig's. "Boar track," he says, kneeling to it and running the back of his hand across it to tell its freshness. And then White-house and the rest of us learn what we are doing. We are looking for a "run," one of the arbitrary paths that boar decide to follow through the woods. This is not one. This is simply a single boar's track in the snow, looking very much like a pig's. Bill ponders for a moment, eyes squinting. The deer, he reckons, are now in the hemlock.

We head upward again, getting near the ranges of the Catalina goat and mouflon sheep, two other exotics Wild Hill maintains, which are yarded on the highest meadows and not hunted in the winter. On this Vermont hillside now, a creature with scales and horns growing out of its chest could appear and every one of us would just watch it, nodding, and wait for Bill to tell us what it was.

He stops at the edge of a cornice overlooking a bowl of thick birch, evergreen and beech, and beyond it the valley where the lodge is. In a moment, White-house pants up and sits in the snow, breathing raggedly. Bill looks at him. "I think we've gone far enough," he says. "We'll just sit here and watch this little bowl for a minute. See if we can pick one out." He crouches like Deerslayer, tail just off the snow, right forearm lying across his left knee, his duck-shooting cap pushed back, squinting from the lip of the cornice into the mat of trees below. There is no movement down there, yet the suspense is palpable. A raven caws over his left shoulder. Snow falls from a hemlock in a bright shower. The instant seems choreographed.

"What, uh, do they look like?" asks Jimmy Whitehouse.

"They'd look black from up here. Most are really a brindle. Some are black and a few are a sort of silver color."

Whitehouse edges up to the cornice beside Bill and sits with his rifle across his lap, peering into the trees for something black.

Sus scrofa, the animal they are looking for, has been hunted for one reason or another since the Stone Age. On the wall of a cave in Altamira, Spain, is an energetic portrait of a boar done 15,000 years before Christ. And testifying to some strange intimacy primitive man must have felt with the beast, a mature male skeleton has been discovered in the Neanderthal burial ground on Mount Carmel, clutching the jawbone of one to his chest. The European variety was introduced into our Smoky Mountains in 1912 and he is now rife in those hills, where he is known affectionately as "Roosian" and has distinguished himself by killing and maiming more hunting dogs than any other game animal.

Physically and temperamentally, a truly wild boar is, without doubt, a fierce piece of work. A big male is deep through the chest and narrow in the hams, is maybe three feet high, five feet long and weighs around 350 pounds. He fights with amazingly quick thrusts of his head, using two curved lower tusks that can be as long as seven inches and sharp enough to pare a fingernail. The Greeks, who hunted him with great verve and feared him above the lion, waxed at length about the boar's ferocity. And in Europe during the Middle Ages, along with brown bear and something called an aurochs, he was classified as "black game," the hunting of which was known as heroic and reserved for royalty. One of these four animals, at various times and places, was singled out for its deepest blackness to be hunted by the king alone--to play a sort of allegorical Devil to the king's Force of Good. This graced animal, this game of kings, was always Sus scrofa.

After about five minutes of watching the timber, Bill looks at his watch and suggests we start back down. Web will have lunch waiting. We go down much quicker than we went up and come out on the trail to the lodge a couple of hundred yards from where we started up the hillside, completing a pleasant two-hour circle. We walk back to the lodge along a line of the seven-foot, mesh-wire fence with electric bottom wire that contains the preserve: in single file, at leisure, like hikers on Mount Katahdin.

Back at the truck, Jim Whitehouse is worried. As Bill hides the snowmobile in the woods, he wonders just what the story is here. All morning without even seeing a boar or a deer? It occurs to him that Eric's birthday has only a few hours to go. He can't help but wonder just how set up this deal is after all. And he is determined for his heart's sake not to walk up any more mountains like the one this morning.

Web will assure him at lunch that they will see some boar this afternoon; that it would be disappointing to see them right off. But just then, standing by the game-empty truck, Jim is as meatless and forlorn as Hemingway in the green hills of Africa after weeks of no kudu. Or as any Australopithecus after a fruitless drive of mammoth.

• • •

That citizen was likely the first creature ever to use weapons to kill other animals. And though he lived some 2,000,000 years ago, certainly owned no moosehide knickers and used a fisted rock instead of a $1500 rifle, there is connective tissue between Australopithecus and Jim Whitehouse. Between him and all of us who hunt.

Its necessity to survival cut away before history began, the sport has repeatedly been judged, both by those who hunt and by those who don't, against this very good reason for not doing it: It hurts and kills to be hunted, and no creature should have the right to impose suffering and death on another creature for pleasure. In recent history, particularly in America, the judgments have been more frequent and more severe, leading to what is now one of the country's truest polarizations, between those 15,000,000 to 20,000,000 who hunt, killing animals and birds they don't have to kill, and those who believe with a vengeance that they shouldn't. To the latter group, many of whom don't know a rifle from a shotgun, a hunter seems as dated and useless and ugly a thing as a souvenir Luger. He is suspected of political savagery, feeble-mindedness, sadism, and of unconsciously confusing his gun with his penis. And he is almost automatically assumed to belong to that segment of hunters who are lawless, cow-shooting despoilers.

That sort of thinking can make a man self-conscious. In defense, hunters have tended either to simply yell back at the pinko fag creeps or to try to rationalize something that just feels good and that has, at best, a tenuous rational basis, by muttering about the millions they spend on conservation or harvesting game crops . . . or how animals don't feel pain, anyway.

The best of the rationalizing is found in the work of the formal hunting apologists, thoughtful men who hunted and wrote about it--Edward, the second duke of York, Turgenev, Ortega y Gasset, Ruark, Hemingway. They are the true hunting moralists, preoccupied with doing the thing the way it ought to be done and ritualizing and romanticizing variously as they go. The composite picture they paint, in books such as Ortega's Meditations on Hunting, of what the Good Hunter is, or ought to be, looks something like this: He is a big man with an easy grin and unlimited endurance and skill, who knows calmly that we are all, animals and men, born to die, and that nature itself is cruel. He wants the game he hunts not to be too plentiful or easy to find and he demands of it a full set of working instincts to match his own against. He considers himself just another predator in the scheme of things, like a bobcat or a lynx, taking no more than he can eat and renunciating the part of his superiority that could allow him to poison a trout stream or shoot his animals from tanks. He is a natural, alert man, in a comfortable bond of wood smoke and dogs and aching muscles with others like himself, knowing and loving what he hunts and recapturing as he does it the innocence of his unconscious past . . . something like that.

It makes an image hard for even carping pinko fags to knock. An image that the beleaguered modern hunter can fit himself into and be proud of. That's the way he wants to look. No one, after all, wants to be a shooter of bears in cages. But between the idea and the reality falls this bitching little shadow. More often than not, the modern hunter is, in fact, a man who works eight hours a day indoors, a little skinny on endurance and skill, with little time and less wind. He would like to trail that caged bear like a Cree Indian and dispatch it with a bow and arrow, but he can't. To paint himself into that portrait--to justify his hunting to himself--he often needs someone to give him the numbers.

And, as it happens, there are people around who can do that. Not quite, of course. They can't really make him into something he isn't. But by taking out a few of the hard parts, they can make him feel like that something for a few hours or days. Magic is the word. And there are people around who can get it for you wholesale.

• • •

The greatest enemy of hunting is reason. --Ortega Y Gasset

One shot, meat. Two shots, maybe. Three shots, heap shit. --Ernest Hemingway

Jim Whitehouse would like to do only this kind of hunting, he is saying. This way you get away from all the slobs in the woods. These preserve people can cull out all the bad animals. The thing is controlled. And you know you're going to get game.

But he doesn't look all that sure.

We are back in the woods at 2:45 after a big lunch, following Bill down the little path from the lodge again. There is a noticeable digestive droop to things.

This time, instead of turning uphill to the east, we go through the preserve fence into the thick spruce woods. The walking is harder in here than on the hillside--there is more loose snow and every fourth or fifth step breaks through the crust. Bill stops at the edge of a little stream that runs from the south end of the trout pond and waits for Jim and Eric to catch their breath. Jimmy, the taller and thinner boy, has had no trouble keeping up and he seems a little bored at this point. He puts his eye to the Hensoldt Wetzlar scope on his rifle and sweeps it in an arc across the woods in front of us. It is not a boy's gun. It is an 8 x 57 Mauser with set triggers. When the rear trigger is pulled, it sets the front one so that the slightest pressure fires the rifle.

"We want to look for trails in here," Bill says. "If we find a trail, we'll find them in here." He tells us that he killed a boar just down the stream a couple of days ago and that he knows there are fallow deer around, feeding on the balsams. He is visibly different from this morning--his expression a little less polite and vague. He looks to be fixed on what he is doing now. "And, uh, you'll want to be a little quiet from now on," he adds.

We walk south, crossing and recrossing the stream on a lacework of snow bridges and stumbling often in the drifts. About a half mile down the stream, Bill stops again in a small clearing. Fifty feet from where he is squatting is a bloody wallow in the snow. He takes a deep breath and looks around. We seem to have arrived.

Very businesslike now, he takes Eric across to the east side of the stream and down a blood-spotted path, past two or three bright piles of frozen animal innards. About 500 yards into the trees, the path opens into a kind of amphitheater, where he tells the boy to stand beside three big pines. "You see where the clearing crosses the brook there?" He points to where the path crosses a snow bridge, leads up to a gentle rise, then levels off and disappears into the spruce. Eric nods. "Well, you keep an eye out. Sometimes they come through there." Eric nods again. "Good hunting," says Bill and he touches him on the back. Eric nods and watches him melt into the trees.

Whitehouse and Jimmy are put on stand where they are and told to watch south along the stream bank. "I'm going to run around in the pucker brush and see what I can kick out. You guys don't move unless I yell," Bill tells them. Then he disappears and there is a palpable drawing down of the moment over Whitehouse and his son.

It is four o'clock and darkening fast in the heavy woods. After we can no longer hear Bill, there is no sound but the occasional pop of a freezing limb. With nothing to look at but the encircling spruces, with the coming on of night and the silence and the knowledge that there are, well . . . boar, black game, out there--it's a little spooky is what it is.

In ten minutes, Bill is back. He moves Whitehouse and myself halfway up a little hill where boar have been making tub-size wallows in the snow and positions Jimmy just downhill from us to the left. Then he leaves again after whispering this new information: "Now, if you shoot one of a pair or a group. freeze. Just freeze, because if the rest see you, they might charge."

"I wonder," muses Whitehouse after he is gone, "why he didn't think to mention that before?"

For minutes we crouch in the snow, looking at the wallows and into the blankness of the trees, watching the closing down of dark. We are surrounded here by Jimmy and Eric and Bill--all within easy shooting distance in these blind woods: a disquieting realization--and also by a heavy, tangible presentiment of animals: animals present and past, living and dead, rising out of gut heaps. Exotic animals. With sight failing like the light, a sense of countless unseen presences develops--a sense of the woods as crowded with hunters and hunted, of perceptions straining toward one another through the tissue of air; aurochs behind trees, ears cocked; listening nilgai and bison and oryx; Australopithecus crouching somewhere with a hafted stone: Duke Edward drawing a bow in a tree blind. Mystery develops. The woods seem bansheed. Whitehouse and I listen for other things listening.

Then there is a shot, splitting the quiet like an ax. "Eric," whispers Jim. In a few minutes, there is another shot and then a third. Jim talks excitedly. "He's got a gun shoots straight as an arrow. If he was on him, he got him. That kid will be sitting on top of the world. . . . You know, this is the way you keep kids close to you--out of the house, away from the cocktail parties--" A fourth shot interrupts him. "That's four shots," he says, looking puzzled.

The deer came out of the woods on the trail and stopped about 75 feet away. It was a little six-point fallow that would dress out to about 60 pounds. Eric raised his rifle and pulled off the first shot, missing it cleanly. The deer moved a few feet forward and gazed at him. The second shot caught it in the gut just behind the rib cage. The deer stood still. as before, and then knelt, slowly, so that it was just visible over a little ridge of snow. Eric shot a third time and the deer didn't move. He looked at the animal. his mouth open and trembling and all the color gone from his face. "I think it's dead but doesn't know it yet," he said finally.

Then Bill Richter appeared in the spruces and yelled for Eric to come on.

"This is the part I don't like," Eric said. As he crossed the stream. the deer stood up, blatting, and walked about 15 feet into a clear patch of snow. Then it knelt again.

Eric joined Bill by the deer. He cradled the rifle in his arms. "What should I do now?" he asked, watching the deer. The deer was trying to hide itself by digging with its forehooves in the snow.

"Shoot it." said Bill.

The deer stood up slowly and looked at Eric and Bill. It turned a slow 180 degrees and began walking directly away from them toward the woods.

"Now would be a good time," Bill commented.

Eric raised the rifle and pulled the trigger, but the chamber was empty.

"Better hurry up, Eric," said Bill softly. "You don't want him to get into the woods."

With the deer about 15 feet away, Eric reloaded and shot, putting the bullet up the deer's rectum and killing it.

"Good hunting." said Bill. He shook Eric's hand. "How do you feel, fella?"

"Fine." Eric said. "That's my first big game."

Jim Whitehouse is happy. He is sure his son has bagged a fallow on his birthday. He just hopes it was a good head and a clean kill. As it is five o'clock by the time Eric's shooting stops, he doesn't think we will see any boar this afternoon. But they have tomorrow for the boar. We stand and shiver in the tightening cold and wait for Bill.

It is nearly 5:30 when I hear some-thing that sounds at first like snow falling from boughs and then like brush being cleared. It fades, then grows again, and Whitehouse is on his knees when it materializes into a pair of boar, one behind the other, cracking through saplings downhill along a lane in the trees. making chuffing pig noises, looking blunt and huge and black against the snow.

They are maybe 50 yards away and coming at us when Whitehouse shoots--"chances his throw," as the Spanish have it, and chances it nicely. The lead boar drops in place, its left hind leg kicking. already dead. The second one stands and stares. For more than two minutes, the hind leg kicks, the second boar stands without moving--grieving or confused or looking for us--and Whitehouse whispers, "Freeze," litanylike, through his teeth. Then the standing boar whirls like a black cape and is gone over the hill.

At that moment. Bill yells to us from a few feet away, spectrally present again at the moment of truth. "Good shot," he says. "Now you want to go up careful."

We go up carefully and abreast of where the boar lies, snout in the snow and a quarter-size bullet hole between its eyes. Dead, in the almost full dark, it looks now like only a large black pig.

Whitehouse yells for Jimmy. Then he lifts his boar's head by an ear. There are no tusks. "It's a sow," he says. "The other one must have been the boar."

"It's a sow. But it's a nice sow," says Bill. He looks diversely harried, as a stage manager. Kneeling, he runs a forefinger experimentally in and out of the hole in the animal's skull, bringing out pieces of bone and brain. "Head's all broken up," he says. "But it won't hurt the mount."

Jimmy comes up now, his riflle slung on his shoulder, and bends over the boar as Bill begins to gut it with his boy-scout knife. We are all watching him work. Whitehouse is smoking and Jimmy is sitting in the snow when the second boar bursts out of the woods again. He is within ten yards, coming down and slanting across the hill. In a blur Jimmy is up, his gloved right hand fumbling on the rifle for the set trigger. The rifle fires once while it is still at his hip and the bullet kicks up snow ten feet from Richter.

"Take off that goddamn glove," his father shouts at him.

Jimmy heaves the rifle to his shoulder and runs with it like that at the boar, still gloved and firing as he goes, Bill, White-house and I scattering behind him. "Take off the glove," his father yells again.

On his third or fourth shot, Jimmy hits the animal. It rolls behind a dead tree and is running again when it comes upright and then is gone into the trees. "I got him. I got him, didn't I?" Jimmy says, turning to Bill.

"Well, you hit him, all right. But it's too dark to look for him now. We'll let him stiffen up and come back tomorrow with the dogs."

"Whitehouse comes over and puts his hand on the boy's shoulder. "You just got a little excited is all. A little buck fever. . . ."

It is night now and a wind is rising. Bill finishes gutting Jim's boar, puts a rope around its snout and hoists it up into a tree.

By the time he finishes, Jim and Jimmy have both relaxed and are enjoying themselves, letting the finished day spread through them like a drink. The birthday deer, one boar in a tree and one in the bush, stiffening up--not bad for two hours' hunting. Bullet right between the eyes. Eric's mother is going to be pleased as punch. And after this morning, all of it coming at once like that. "Old Eric really earned his bones today, didn't he?" Whitehouse says.

"Sure did. That's a wonderful boar."

"Well, it's a sow, but it's got good size. The one you shot must have been the boar."

"Let's take it easy going out. I'm a little bushed," Jim says to Bill as we start picking our way back through these black, occupied woods, leaving the boar dangling like a totem from a spruce. "You've got just that little touch more stamina than I do. . . ."

"Yeah," says Bill. But right now, it's hard to tell. Right now, Bill Richter looks exactly like what he is--a man who has put in a hard day on the job.

• • •

It took Ring, a hot-nosed mountain cur and a silent trailer who doesn't begin baying until he sees his animal, about five minutes to find the wounded boar's scent. He found it just on the far side of the trout pond and within ten minutes, he and the other dog had found the boar. From where we stood near the stream, we could hear the deep oval barking uphill and to the west and working toward us. It's a sound the Good Hunter loves; a sound Ortega y Gasset claimed is to hunting what polyphony is to music, raising the sport to its most complex and perfect form.

But nobody here seemed to be paying any attention to it. The object of it, after all, was a wounded goddamn wild boar. who, stiffened up or not, could tear somebody asshole from elbow. As the baying got closer, coming downhill directly at us, no one could quite figure out what to do with himself. I mean, do you hunker down, or climb a tree, or what? Those dogs are bringing the thing right down here. . . . There were no instructions from Bill and he had slipped off somewhere in the woods again. But Jimmy knew what he was supposed to do: He was supposed to kill the boar, and he moved manfully in front of the rest of us, gloveless this time, to do that. It was considerably easier to feel brave once the animal finally appeared, rooting dolefully and without conviction at the two dogs, who were managing to bay and snap at the same time. In the light of day. driven by two small dogs, the boar looked hopeless and tractable as a sheep.

Jimmy waited until he had a clear shot and shot the boar in the head. It fell dead without movement and the dogs commenced to growl and pull at it. In its neck, there was a ragged hole big enough to put your fist into where Jimmy had wounded it the night before.

In a book about hunting, Hemingway writes about "the elation, the best elation of all" of killing off a wounded and dangerous animal. Maybe that's what Jimmy Whitehouse felt. It was hard to tell.

The boar was another sow, weighing around 200 pounds and with a pair of tusks that barely reached its upper lip. We got a long look at this one while Bill was dressing it, scooping handfuls of red, blue-gray and purple interior into another gut pile among the spruces. It is a hard animal to sentimentalize, but there is beauty in the deep chest and narrow hindquarters and dainty hooves, and in the stiff brindle hair that makes a long, bristling ruff down its neck. Curious about what they find to cat, these wild boar, when there is three feet of snow on the ground, I took the stomach from Bill's pile and opened it with a knife. What they eat, apparently, is hay. Who knows where they find it?

Jimmy and I dragged his boar out of the woods and sat on it in the snowmobile road, waiting for the others to bring out the one in the tree. The torn pink tissue around the boar's head wound, like a small shell crater under one ear, was still jerking. From where we sat, we could see the lodge up the road, looking like a hunting lodge out of Disneyland with its chinked logs and moose antlers. Even the woods around it looked staged--the sign between us and the house saying Dancer: Trespassers may be eaten, referring to horrid-looking but friendly things with signs on their chests saying Boo; out there in those plaster of Paris trees. Also out there somewhere wound be the Hunter who lives in the Lodge: a big man with an easy grin.

It was 11 o'clock. After they got the other boar out. Bill would take us and the two animals by snowmobile back to the truck and then back to the house, where he would hang the boars and the fallow deer from the roof of a shed for pictures. And Whitehouse, pleased as punch with everything, would arrange for the butchering of his animals and for the making of their heads into mounts. Then he would take his sons and the liver of Eric's deer in a Baggie and go home.

The night before, after a lot of strong male talk about women and boar and the European hare and roe deer Jim had hunted in Germany; after grace was said and Jim made a birthday toast to Eric, congratulating him on his deer and calling the killing of it the happiest event of Eric's life next to being born and having him for a father, Whitehouse had told me that whether the dogs found the wounded boar or not the next day, he was happy. He knew they would get a second boar. And he didn't mind at all the $900 he was spending. His kids were having a real experience. He would be back, maybe next time to try for those whatsis goats up in the high country.

"The thing is . . ." he said. "the thing is, you always get what you pay for at a place like this."