Last Hunter: An American Family Album

Chapter Eleven

94 will weaver while Rose slept, I began to write for the first time about growing up in Minnesota. Farm life. Trapping with my father . Hunting with uncles and cousins. The winter light, the changing of the seasons. I wrote because I was lonesome for the Midwest, and two of these sportsman sketches I turned into short stories. One piece was about the troop train that came through Minnesota farm country during World War II and stopped in small towns to pick up young men—including my uncle Jim. He once said that it was twenty below zero when he climbed aboard the unheated Pullman car; that the men crowded together to keep warm; that people waited in cars and trucks at country crossings to watch the troop train go by; and that when the train came east past the Weaver farm, all he wanted to do was jump off and go home. The second story was about deer hunting. When my grandfather Moffet was too old and dim of eyesight to make good use of his deer rifle, his sons (my father and uncles) relieved him of his gun. They gave it to one of the grandsons who could make better use of it. My story focused on my grandfather, who went hunting nonetheless. He sat in the field in his car with the engine idling most of the day, an old shotgun with a single slug at hand even though there was no chance for a deer. A story not about killing but about people. About family. With vague plans of writing and further study, I sent the stories to Stanford’s graduate program in creative writing . The director, Nancy Packer, wrote back to say she liked the stories and that while the Wallace Stegner fellowships had already been awarded, they could offer me a spot in the fiction writing group. “That was easy,” I said to Rose. the last hunter 95 In early September, she and I attended the fall semester start-­ up party for incoming graduate writing students. The event was held just off campus at the tidy, shrub-­ fronted bungalow of the fiction director. Rose and I arrived on time, which turned out to be early. However, the place gradually filled up with literary types, both faculty members and new grad students, including Raymond Carver, a bearlike guy with squinty eyes. He was greatly pleased to find that Rose and I were from Minnesota—he was from Clatskanie, a sawmill town in Oregon—and more so that I was from a farm. “We need more real writers here,” he said with twinkling eyes. I came to know Raymond well and to hang out with his merry band, but I struggled in the writing workshop. I was by far the least experienced writer in our group of ten, some of whom came from august literary families and were already publishing their fiction. Feeling the pressure (mostly of my own making), I gradually lost my voice. My way. I forgot the material—the land and woods and hunting—that got me there, but reminders came from surprising directions. In a class on Yeats, headed by the English poet Donald Davie, we were slogging through the poems and eventually hit Yeats’s “Wild Swans at Coole.” Some of the PhD-­ track literature students immediately seized on the symbolism of the swan, from Andromache through Baudelaire’s “Le Cygne,” and Mallarme’s reading of the swan as a figure of literary history. Discussion continued endlessly on the matter of the “virgin” swan and whiteness. I squirmed in my seat. I had a Tourette’s-­ type of need to blurt, “Let me tell you about swans!” But I didn’t. But I should have. During those years in California , my connection to the land receded almost to the breaking point. 96 will weaver Intermittently I made attempts to stay in touch with hunting and guns, but they were clumsy and unsuccessful. My sister and her family lived in the Santa Cruz Mountains off winding Highway 17, which ran south from San Jose to the beach at Santa Cruz. Rose and I often drove up for the weekend to hang out and babysit my two nieces and a nephew. Connie and Don were living large—had a big house, hot tub, Porsche, and even their own limousine. Rose and I were happy to watch their kids, Shari, Lisa, and...