THE PALE LIGHT OF SUNSET: SCATTERSHOTS AND HALLUCINATIONS IN AN IMAGINED LIFE

Arrow in the Light - 1992

258 1992 Arrow in the Light There is an arrow in the light. It is a flickering shaft that dances through the golden glow of late afternoon in the far mountains, cutting a graceful arc toward a target that it never hits. It snaps past the deer and disappears, lost in the depths of the shadows and the forest floor. The deer raises its head, curious at the strange sound, the muffled hissing that an arrow makes as it drags its fletching through the air. But the deer never sees the arrow. And it never sees me. And I do not shoot again. I stand quietly behind some brush and watch the deer as it searches for food at the edge of a stand of timber. I blink my eyes, and at the end of the blink the deer is gone, instantly, quietly. I never see it again. I don’t know why I never hit the deer. I can hit other targets with my arrows—old paper cups, bits of dead wood, clumps of grass—but I never hit the deer. Chaser tried to explain it to me. If you kill the deer, he said, the hunt is over. And for you the game is in the hunt, in the process, in the journey, in the stalk, in your mind. You don’t want it to be over. It The Pale Light of Sunset 259 is important to you that things stay in balance, that the deer stay in the forest, that the arrow stay in the air. You are most alive when the arrow is in the light. Oh, you wouldn’t mind too much if you actually killed the deer. You are, after all, a hunter. But you won’t kill the deer. For years, I do not believe that. I am, after all, a hunter. When autumn comes to the mountains of West Virginia and the air turns to a pure, cool liquid that flows across my face and into my chest; when the turning leaves paint the high ridges with color that caresses my eyes; when the fragrance of the moist forest floor drifts magically through my mind and stays there, to be renewed year after year with the coming of another autumn . . . When autumn comes, I become a hunter. It starts early for me. As a child I live with my family in a small cabin at the edge of a tiny clearing, deep in the woods of West Virginia. My father hunts—not for sport, but to put meat on the table. I follow him, thrilled that he will take me, terrified of the sound the old shotgun will make when he snaps it to his shoulder. After a while, I do not fear the sound. It is just a part of living, of finding food. I grow. Too large, some say. But I grow and I follow my father, my hair shoved up under an old wool hunting cap, hands hidden in mittens that one of my uncles had left at the cabin years before. And then one day he leans the shotgun against a tree as we stand silently at the edge of a clearing, just watching and waiting, for turkey, maybe. My father looks at me and I realize that he has to look up. Up. Somewhere in there, some time, I have grown taller than he. Taller, I say in my mind. And he hears me. He takes up the shotgun and places it in my hands, so carefully, so quietly, and steps slightly to the side, out of the way. Lee Maynard 260 I am the hunter now. I never get over that. And I never get over West Virginia. For years, when autumn comes I get on a motorcycle and head east, riding deliberately, dropping from the Rocky Mountains down onto the high plains and onto the Great Plains and then across the rivers and through the stands of hardwoods that began to appear, and coming, eventually, to West Virginia, and to Chaser’s old house at the upper end of a small valley where the greenbriers grow thick enough to make fences, and the black walnuts are there for the gathering. I have hunted in other places, but it is never the same. For years, when autumn comes, I can think only of West Virginia. And, besides, Chaser’s crumbling old farm is one...