Where the Road Meets the Woods

There was too much moisture in the air. There was the distinct sensation of drowning each time he breathed in and there were gray clouds covering all the blue in the sky. The woods were sparse along the hills with boulders showing their backs from under the soil. The brown boulders looked like half buried sleeping giants. The ground was wet from dawn dew and a light rain the night before. It would rain again soon, the clouds and the moisture in the air told the boy as much. But it was cold, too cold for the amount of moisture that there was in the air.
         
The boy heard that funny noise that marked the arrival of his hunted quarry. Comical and light-hearted, it came through the trees and seemed to have no point of origin except the air about the boy’s ears. He slouched down to the ground for no other reason than to amuse himself and make himself feel more like a hunter. The ground was wet and so became him. The water crept through the fabric of his clothes like a million small bugs and came into shocking contact with his warm skin underneath. He half expected steam to rise out from under his shirt where the freezing cold dew touched his burning hot skin. He’d run the three miles from his home carrying the old rifle and the cartridges and now he was very hot and tired in the cold wet weather.
         
But this was where the road met the woods and nature met man. The boy had raced his way to where he had heard the nest was, carrying his rifle all the way.
         
He didn’t move as he laid low in the wet spring grass that had started to grow in the woods near his house. He smiled and felt like a real hunter, a real man. His father had warned him about the gun, he’d said carrying a gun around will change a man, for the worse. What does a father know? The boy knew how the rifle had changed him, it had made him only better. The rifle was next to him in the decomposing fallen leaves of winter scattered amongst the shoots of the new grass of spring. The boy laid in perfect harmony with both seasons as did his rifle next to him. Carrying a gun around will change a man and the things around him.
         
The boy slithered forward on his belly clawing his way through mud and decomposing foliage, moving closer to the sound that had been calling to him all morning. It didn’t sound so formidable or noble as a bear’s roar but it was still the call of the boy’s prey. The wild turkey is not the same bird you put onto your table at Thanksgiving. It is still a wild creature, something that must be hunted and killed. Something the boy’s father had forbade him from ever doing for fun or pride’s sake. His father was a fool and the whole town knew it, why would the boy listen to a fool?
         
It was not too distant, over the hump of this hill and behind that great boulder it had made it’s nest. The boy’s father had pointed it out on the drive home from the city. Three miles from home and the boy remembered it’s exact location. He had returned with his rifle and was going to kill it. The boy felt bad for his father, he was such a coward sometimes, the man was afraid of killing a turkey. And he’d once been such a great hunter, but old age will take anything from you.
         
The boy got up onto his knees and paused to listen and scan the wood. His knees sank down deep into the mud and made him feel uncomfortable, but he was a hunter now, a man, he would ignore such trivial things. He heard it again and wondered what the turkey was calling to. But as he got to his feet still crouching low as though it would somehow make him harder to detect he suddenly realized that the turkey was calling to him, as it always had been on the firing range his father had built behind the house. His father had told him the only bullets expended were to be expended on the firing range until the day came when they would hunt for their own food. But a boy cannot be expected to be heroic and brave on a firing range, no athlete ever got to be famous by just practicing.
         
He picked up the rifle from the dying leaves left on the ground from the year before and felt that surge up his spine, that old feeling that nothing could touch him, he felt power. This is what his father had meant when he said carrying a gun around will change a man. He pushed up over the hill and took a knee at the crest to look down at the beige-pinkish boulder sticking out of the topsoil. It was as big as the tool shed on his father’s land. It was behind there that the sound came from. The cartridges were dully thudding against one another in his front jacket pocket.
         
He smiled and felt the surge up his spine again and shook slightly in excitement, he was grinning widely now. He looked older when he smiled in the grim manner that he always smiled, but still he wasn’t more than thirteen years old. He sat down in the damp ground with his back against a dead looking tree to quell the excitement and calm himself. He’d never killed anything before. He sat down and turned the bolt on the breech of his rifle and then pulled it back revealing the magazine and the chamber, the magical innards of the man-made killing machine. He smiled again while he opened his front breast pocket and reached in feeling the old sweaty feeling of the cartridges, which reminded him of the way pennies felt. He grabbed a handful and dumped them into his lap. They smelled funny and he liked the way they felt in his fingers. He pushed them one by one down into the magazine until it was full with five rounds. He put the rest of the shells back into the pocket and buttoned it up again, he didn’t know why he’d brought so many rounds, he thought he’d only need one shot.
         
A prick and sharp pain at the back of his neck made him stand up quickly. Reaching around his neck he felt another small insect bite and then he felt them crawling on his neck. He swiped them away and smashed them getting the ones that had crawled down his back and up into his hair. He dropped the rifle momentarily to kill them all and only when he was sure they were all dead did he pick up the rifle again and looked towards the boulder. What else had his father once told him, never rest your back against a dead tree in the woods, the stinging ants that had made their home in that dead tree had crawled all over him and bit him several times before he got them. Maybe his father was right about some things, but not the rifle.
         
Creeping down the hillside he imagined a Vietnamese machine gun nest hidden behind the boulder, he imagined this is how it had been for his father in the Vietnam war. He couldn’t let them know he was working his way around behind them and was about to flank them. He crouched, nearly doubled over, stepping slowly down the hillside pausing every now and then behind one of the skinny still wintry looking trees to look and listen for any signs of the enemy having discovered him. The turkey called once more before he reached the bottom of the hill and he imagined it as the soft cooing noises of the Vietnamese language, a conversational tone that told him he still wasn’t discovered.
         
At the bottom of the hill it was once again a time to be a serious man, not a daydreaming boy. He chambered the round in his bolt action rifle and raised the rear-aperture sight, which he wouldn’t even need really, he was going to be so close he wouldn’t even need much aiming, but he wanted to do this properly. He moved his hand slowly down the wooden stock of the rifle wondering just how far this weapon might take him, far enough if he lets it, he knows. It’s a wonderful thing he thinks. It’s the most wonderful thing he’s ever known. What did his father tell him of the rifle, it takes many years of age off of the hunter, just to fire one, and many millions of years of evolution off of the hunted. Even his father knew the good things about the rifle, it perplexed the boy then as to why his father would fear it so much. This had been his father’s rifle as a young man, it was an old rifle in design as well as in age but it was very good, why would any man who spent so much time with it as the boy’s father dislike it so much then?
         
But with a peculiar gobble, a different pitch than the previous noises made by this wild turkey, the bird stepped out from behind the boulder and was moving towards the road away from it’s nest. The turkey is not a very smart bird. Watching the ugly looking bird move out from its nest did something to the boy’s nerves, he wasn’t afraid but he wasn’t at ease either. He started to whistle and the bird, who must have known he was there all along, only eyed him as he strutted slowly away. The boy began to sing the words of the song he whistled very softly. It was a Christmas song. It was no hunter’s song and he searched for another more manly song he knew all the words to but came up with nothing, the only songs the boy had ever learned all the words to were Christmas songs. It didn’t matter so he stopped singing and whistling all together.
         
He moved forward towards the bird slowly and the bird picked up its pace significantly and the boy wondered how fast it could run. He didn’t know, he assumed a bird that couldn’t fly would have to be very fast to be able to escape predators. So he didn’t push the bird any further, not when to kill it right then would be so much easier.
         
“How stupid you are bird.” The boy told the turkey seeing behind the boulder and what the bird had abandoned in its nest. 
         
But the bird made no sign of understanding, it was slowly waddling away because it recognized a threat but not a severe one, the bird thought the boy was still too far away to be much of a threat. The rifle’s stock was worn and polished very smooth and slipped in his fingers a little before he got a strong hold on it. He aligned the sights very carefully placing the stub at the end of the barrel in the notch on the rear aperture and setting the bird’s jerking head on top of the aligned sights. It was easy, just like the moving targets his father had set up on the firing range.
         
Standing as he was wasn’t the best way to take the shot, he would have preferred laying down or on one knee but he was already ready to shoot so he didn’t change it. He steadied the rifle and took one deep breath. He made his last final minute adjustments after his deep breath and then following the head in his sights he slowly squeezed the trigger. There was the tiniest of clicks as the trigger engaged the firing mechanism and in that second there was a huge blast. The shock of the exploding gunpowder moved down to the butt of the rifle as the thirty caliber bullet was spat out of the front of the barrel and the butt of the rifle slipped from his shoulder and fell under his armpit as he had not had it placed properly in the crook of his shoulder. There was a loud sound of alarm from the turkey. A thin veil of smoke obscured his target but not the fact that he’d missed.
         
He felt anger nearing rage bubble up inside of him. The funny thing is he knew it was his mistake but all the animosity that he felt he felt towards the dumb bird. He dropped the rifle’s butt from his armpit down to his hip as the barrel swung up inches from his face. He ran past the thin veil of smoke as he saw the turkey start off moving quickly, unwounded and he hated the damned bird. He kept running as he worked the bolt on his rifle, freeing the empty shell and pushing a new round into the rifle’s chamber. He grimaced as he ran after the bird that had taken off towards the road. Hunting’s not supposed to be this hard for me, he told himself running after the bird.
         
This time he made no mistakes as the bird slowed on the embankment up towards the road. The embankment started to form about one hundred yards from the road and went up, vertically speaking, about twenty-five yards and the fat turkey was having difficulty getting up the steep grade. The boy took a knee below the embankment less than fifty yards away with the perfect vantage point. He had a great shot of the bird as it went up the sloped embankment. He looked back at his shoulder and carefully placed the rifle’s butt into his shoulder and steadied it straight, he knew he could still afford to miss the bird once more and still get it on the third shot, but he wasn’t going to miss again.
         
This time he didn’t even aim for the head, it had been foolish of him to try and get a head shot in the first place. But carrying a gun around for any amount of time will change anyone. He carefully aimed and fired feeling the butt slam back into his shoulder solidly and the jerk of the rifle was minimal. He heard nothing after the report of the rifle except a buzz in his ear, but he knew the damned bird was dead. He got up to his feet and moved through the smoke to see the bird laying comically strewn about, slowly sliding down the embankment of the road. The bird died only a few yards from where the boy’s father had pointed out the nest to him. He ejected the shell from his rifle and it had cooled on the cold wet ground before he was able to bend over and pick it up. He put it into his pocket to save, it was the shell from the first thing he’d ever killed, even hunters get sentimental sometimes.
         
He walked up to the wild turkey remembering from his history class how Benjamin Franklin had once wanted the wild turkey to be America’s national bird instead of the Bald Eagle. The boy thought it funny now, why would anyone want such a dumb creature to represent them in any way? The bird was so easy to kill and then he wondered why the Bald Eagle was more endangered of extinction than the wild turkey was, nature is funny, he thought and couldn’t make anymore out of the thoughts than just that. Nature is funny.
         
Then he felt extremely bored and unsatisfied with his kill. He shot it three more times with the three remaining cartridges in his magazine trying to make it more interesting but the gore that resulted wasn’t any more interesting to him, the kill had been more exciting than the gore. He had thought it would be different. It just wasn’t how he’d imagined it, he thought there would have been more satisfaction in the kill.
         
“Maybe I’m not killing big enough things.” He said aloud poking the uninteresting dead bird that died right where the woods met the road. He jabbed it a few more times with the barrel of his rifle before he dug a small hole for it next to the nest and pushed it in. He then covered the dead bird, leaving a trail of blood and feathers all the way from the road embankment to the bird’s hole. Even after burying the bird one foot stuck above the ground and a few blood soaked feathers clearly marked the bird’s grave. He didn’t really care anymore, part of him was trying to conceal this from his father, but he didn’t think his father would ever come down there, so he didn’t even know why he buried the bird, but he did it as a precaution just in case while driving on the road above his father might see the murdered bird down the embankment. That’s what the boy knew his father would say about the bird, it was murdered, he would say if it was killed for no other reason than the hunter’s amusement than it was murder. The boy couldn’t care less about what his father thought, the whole town knew he was halfway to crazy.
         
Then something about the scene looked incomplete to the boy and it wasn’t the haphazard way he’d concealed the evidence. It was the nest full of the eggs the bird had been abandoning. It was the eggs that no longer belonged there. He dropped the butt of his rifle into the nest three or four times and all the eggs were crushed. He did it lazily and without much thought and no malicious intent. He regretted it as soon as he’d done it, it got his rifle all sticky and gross. He wiped it down as best he could with old leaves and new grass and then left to go home and give it a thorough cleaning.
         
“I just need to find better things to hunt.” The boy said as he left feeling very disappointed.   
         
By the time the boy got home he’d realized it was only a matter of time before his father went out to visit the spot near the road where the wild turkey had once had its nest. But really he didn’t care, everyone knew the man was nuts. What was that crazy thing he’d once said, carrying around a gun will change a man? Nobody takes anyone serious who takes a damned thing like a rifle so seriously.
         
                                              *    *    *    *    *
         
“You had to smash the eggs too?” The boy’s father asked standing on top of the boulder looking down on the wrecked nest.
         
“I eat eggs for breakfast,” The boy noted dryly wondering why his father looked so hurt.

And looking at the nonchalant young hunter all his father could feel was disappointment.