I was careful not to touch anything with my hands. I raked leaves away with my boot, and there were the remnants of his own boots. The cancerous barrel of the rifle lay close beside him, the shells rusted solidly into the magazine. A young tree had grown up through him, between his spine and his ribs. And his billfold was there, and his belt with the tarnished green buckle, as was an old Case pocketknife that a careful deputy patiently searching finally uncovered beneath the leaves. There wasn’t much left of the deer horns beside his hand. The squirrels had been at them for the calcium.

The red lights and the blue lights winked for a long time on the road that night. I thought they would never get it over with. The next day I found out who he was.

Lucius Thaddeus Tarver. Black male, aged sixty-two in the year 1971. He had gone hunting one November day and his family had never heard from him again. They had found his truck a few days later, of course, and his family still had it. They had kept hoping through some of those years anyway. What I wondered was how long he’d been crying out, and how many men, like us, had heard and refused to listen. I came close to it. I don’t like to think about him lying there in winter and summer, with his bones exposed, wanting only the peace that six feet of dirt would finally bring.

But that timber’s gone now. There are millions and millions of young pines on it. That’s all you can see. Jim lost his marriage and Bobby’s not around much any more. I couldn’t keep the land by myself. Alvin is in New York anyway. I see him rarely. But I’m still hunting.

I found a little place of fifty-two acres not far from my house. I can drive up in there and be in my stand in five minutes. But I’m careful now. I carry hot coffee to my stand, and if it’s too cold outside, I simply don’t go. I’ve taken Mary Annie with me into the woods and showed her my stand. She knows the place where I will be. Each morning I go out, I tell her how long I will be gone. All the phone numbers she might need are written on the calendar. But she doesn’t really need them. You can almost set your watch by when I pull back into the driveway. I am always exactly on time.

And Another Thing

You hear things under people’s houses. You can hear them walking on the floor, hear them talking to each other, but strange, like they’re underwater.