A Thousand Deer by Rick Bass

Author:Rick Bass
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2012-04-19T16:00:00+00:00

COLTER’S CREEK BUCK

One year, having returned to Texas for the Christmas season, I went back up to the deer pasture for what had once been a more common event in our family, which we called “the second hunt.” In the old days, my grandfather and his sons had spent many New Year’s Eves at the deer pasture, making a second hunt and welcoming the new year in that manner; though perhaps understandably, subsequent generations of us, somehow seeming to possess less leisure time have found ourselves hard-pressed to accommodate such an indulgence.

Beyond the icing-on-the-cake nature of going back a second time, the second hunt carried with it as well a cachet of wildness, in that New Year’s in the Hill Country was often when the fiercest, most inclement weather passed through, yielding occasional freak snowfalls—one of the rarest of rarities, and offering us the seldom-experienced opportunity to try to track our quarry in the slushy snow for those few hours before it melted. (More frequent were the violent and beautiful ice storms, which dragged down phone and power lines and shellacked the entire Hill Country with single-digit temperatures and cast a sparkling diamond glaze over every rock, tree, and road, and gave the juniper-tinged air an even sweeter taste than usual: ice-scrubbed air so fresh and clean, at those temperatures, that it seemed to reach farther into the lungs, providing more oxygen, more sustenance.)

It was the same year that I had brought my amazing bird dog down to Texas with me—Colter, a liver-colored German shorthair pointer, a great ground-covering big-headed sweet long-legged bomber of a hound with nitroglycerine running through his veins—so that I could travel the state south to north with him, hunting bobwhite quail in the brush country down near Corpus Christi and in the highlands up along the Colorado River. It was such a good year for quail that there were even large coveys of them in the Hill Country, and in my young man’s way, it was my intention to hunt them at the deer pasture, during my second hunt, before continuing up into the country on the upper Colorado.

In my mind, it was wonderfully rich and simple, if not excessive. I would hunt deer in the late afternoons and foggy, icy early mornings, then come back to camp midday for a warming meal and a fire, and take Colter out into the russet tallgrass to look for quail. It was dove season, too, and if I was lucky, I might have a chance to gather a few doves for dinner. Then I would return Colter to his kennel, put my shotgun up, and head back into the hills with my rifle, to sit on a rock ledge in the waning of the day to watch for deer. It was the year that my mother had died young after a long illness, and I have no doubt that in addition to my youthfulness, it was my relationship to the natural world, which was to say at

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