Last Hunter: An American Family Album

Chapter Seventeen

146 will weaver I sat for many minutes—possibly ten—listening to the murmur of the night nurses as they passed outside the door. I was blank with grief, but I did not want to lose this moment . They were minutes out of time. Finally I went to tell the nurse. “He’s gone,” was all I could muster. Somewhere in William Faulkner’s writing is the phrase “a successful funeral.” My father’s was not. Or at least not fully so, what with his religious conversion perhaps not completely felt by him or by the two male preachers who presided . They seemed mostly interested in preaching to the assembled—did not even give a full account of my father’s life such as one would find in an obituary—and during the service I grew increasingly angry. I felt my father’s sharp-­ edged anger rise up against those cocksuckers, as he once called the preachers. But in deference to my mother I sat on my hands and made sure to hold my tongue afterward. After the interment, we gathered back at my mother’s house. Changed out of our funeral clothes. Drank coffee. Tried to relax. I was spent, but Connie, always the organized one, soon began talking about “getting things done while we kids are all together.” There was clear logic to her point— both of my sisters lived out of state, Judy in Nevada and Connie in California—but neither Judy nor I stirred or replied. “I know it’s soon, but what things could we do today?” Connie persisted. “We might as well do it now, because if we don’t, you’ll have to hire someone after we all leave,” she said, turning to my mother. My mother’s gaze slowly traveled among her children and young grandchildren, then rose upward, to the wall behind the couch. the last hunter 147 “There is one thing,” she said. “The taxidermy.” Lining the wood paneling were two deer heads, whitetail bucks, along with an array of pelts from my father’s years of trapping: one fine specimen each of otter, beaver, fox, and coyote. Beautiful, shiny furs along with two trophy bucks. “What about them?” Connie asked. “They should go,” my mother said, dully but resolutely. “They’ll only remind me . . .” Though of what she did not say. We all looked at each other; I was the only one in the family who hunted anymore. “Bud,” my mother said, turning to me and using my family nickname. “Sure,” I said, with a glance at Rose, who nodded ever so slightly. “We’ll take them.” “Well, let’s get them loaded up,” Connie said, beginning to bustle about. “I’ll do it,” I said sharply. For reasons not fully clear to me I didn’t want anyone—even my sisters—touching the pelts and mounts, most of which I had helped field-­ dress or skin and the rest whose provenance I knew, including the buck from The Cut. We pushed the couch aside and then I carried the pelts and mounts one by one to my car, which was already somewhat full of changes of clothes and leftover funeral food—plus I needed to save room for Caitlin and Owen. I laid the furs carefully below the rear window; the deer heads I arranged as best I could in the back seat. Later, with the antlers and glass eyes and polished brown noses looking out both side windows, and with Caitlin and Owen squeezed uncomplaining among the deer heads, we drove to Bemidji. We were a car crammed full of the living and the undead. 148 will weaver With my father’s passing there was a hole in the woods. An empty space. In a perfect world his place would have been filled by Owen. Some extended families are so rigid about the tenure of deer stands—the hereditary rights to The Ridge or The Oak Narrows or The Old Car Body—that hunting rights pass like the throne in a monarchy: when the king dies, everybody moves up one chair. But this was not our family because now I mostly hunted alone. I was the last hunter. There is something to be said for going solo into the woods. Complete freedom of movement. No one to think about or worry about. A full, undistracted immersion into nature. But in the end, hunting alone is...