That would come later. Maybe it wont come at all this time, he thought, as he had thought at this point each November for the last five or six of them. Maybe I will go out on stand in the morning too; knowing that he would not, not even if he took the advice and sat down under the driest shelter and did nothing until camp was made and supper cooked.
Because it would not be the fatigue. It would be because he would not sleep tonight but would lie instead wakeful and peaceful on the cot amid the tent-filling snoring and the rain’s whisper as he always did on the first night in camp; peaceful, without regret or fretting, telling himself that was all right too, who didn’t have so many of them left as to waste one sleeping.
In his slicker he directed the unloading of the boat—the tents, the stove, the bedding, the food for themselves and the dogs until there should be meat in camp. He sent two of the Negroes to cut firewood; he had the cook-tent raised and the stove up and a fire going and supper cooking while the big tent was still being staked down. Then in the beginning of dusk he crossed in the boat to where the horses waited, backing and snorting at the water.
He took the lead-ropes and with no more weight than that and his voice, he drew them down into the water and held them beside the boat with only their heads above the surface, as though they actually were suspended from his frail and strengthless old man’s hands, while the boat recrossed and each horse in turn lay prone in the shallows, panting and trembling, its eyes rolling in the dusk, until the same weightless hand and unraised voice gathered it surging upward, splashing and thrashing up the bank.
Then the meal was ready. The last of light was gone now save the thin stain of it snared somewhere between the river’s surface and the rain. He had the single glass of thin whisky-and-water, then, standing in the churned mud beneath the stretched tarpaulin, he said grace over the fried slabs of pork, the hot soft shapeless bread, the canned beans and molasses and coffee in iron plates and cups,—the town food, brought along with them—then covered himself again, the others following. “Eat,” he said. “Eat it all up. I dont want a piece of town meat in camp after breakfast tomorrow.
Then you boys will hunt. You’ll have to. When I first started hunting in this bottom sixty years ago with old General Compson and Major de Spain and Roth’s grandfather and Will Legate’s too, Major de Spain wouldn’t allow but two pieces of foreign grub in his camp. That was one side of pork and one ham of beef. And not to eat for the first supper and breakfast neither. It was to save until along toward the end of camp when everybody was so sick of bear meat and coon and venison that we couldn’t even look at it.”
“I thought Uncle Ike was going to say the pork and beef was for the dogs,” Legate said, chewing. “But that’s right; I remember. You just shot the dogs a mess of wild turkey every evening when they got tired of deer guts.”
“Times are different now,” another said. “There was game here then.”
“Yes,” the old man said quietly. “There was game here then.”
“Besides, they shot does then too,” Legate said. “As it is now, we aint got but one doe-hunter in——”
“And better men hunted it,” Edmonds said. He stood at the end of the rough plank table, eating rapidly and steadily as the others ate. But again the old man looked sharply across at the sullen, handsome, brooding face which appeared now darker and more sullen still in the light of the smoky lantern. “Go on. Say it.”
“I didn’t say that,” the old man said. “There are good men everywhere, at all times. Most men are. Some are just unlucky, because most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be. And I’ve known some that even the circumstances couldn’t stop.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say—” Legate said.
“So you’ve lived almost eighty years,” Edmonds said. “And that’s what you finally learned about the other animals you lived among. I suppose the question to ask you is, where have you been all the time you were dead?”
There was a silence; for the instant even Legate’s jaw stopped chewing while he gaped at Edmonds. “Well, by God, Roth—” the third speaker said. But it was the old man who spoke, his voice still peaceful and untroubled and merely grave:
“Maybe so,” he said. “But if being what you call alive would have learned me any different, I reckon I’m satisfied, wherever it was I’ve been.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say that Roth—” Legate said.
The third speaker was still leaning forward a little over the table, looking at Edmonds. “Meaning that it’s only because folks happen to be watching him that a man behaves at all,” he said. “Is that it?”
“Yes,” Edmonds said. “A man in a blue coat, with a badge on it watching him. Maybe just the badge.”
“I deny that,” the old man said. “I dont——”
The other two paid no attention to him. Even Legate was listening to them for the moment, his mouth still full of food and still open a little, his knife with another lump of something balanced on the tip of the blade arrested halfway to his mouth. “I’m glad I dont have your opinion of folks,” the third speaker said. “I take it you include yourself.”
“I see,” Edmonds said. “You prefer Uncle Ike’s opinion of circumstances. All right. Who makes the circumstances?”
“Luck,” the third said. “Chance, Happen-so. I see what you are getting at. But that’s just what Uncle Ike said: that now and then, maybe most of the time, man is a little better than the net result of his and his neighbors’ doings, when he gets the chance to be.”
This time Legate swallowed first. He was not to be stopped this time. “Well, I wouldn’t say that Roth Edmonds can hunt one doe every day and night for two weeks and was a poor hunter or a unlucky one neither. A man that still have the same doe left to hunt on again next year ——”
“Have some meat,” the man next to him said.
“—aint no unlucky— What?” Legate said.
“Have some meat.” The other offered the dish.
“I got some,” Legate said.
“Have some more,” the third speaker said. “You and Roth Edmonds both. Have a heap of it. Clapping your jaws together that way with nothing to break the shock.”
Someone chortled. Then they all laughed, with relief, the tension broken. But the old man was speaking, even into the laughter, in that peaceful and still untroubled voice:
“I still believe. I see proof everywhere. I grant that man made a heap of his circumstances, him and his living neighbors between them.
He even inherited some of them already made, already almost ruined even. A while ago Henry Wyatt there said how there used to be more game here. There was. So much that we even killed does. I seem to remember Will Legate mentioning that too—” Someone laughed, a single guffaw, stillborn. It ceased, and they all listened, gravely, looking down at their plates. Edmonds was drinking his coffee, sullen, brooding, inattentive.
“Some folks still kill does,” Wyatt said. “There wont be just one buck hanging in this bottom tomorrow night without any head to fit it.”
“I didn’t say all men,” the old man said. “I said most men. And not just because there is a man with a badge to watch us. We probably wont even see him unless maybe he will stop here about noon tomorrow and eat dinner with us and check our licenses——”
“We dont kill does because if we did kill does in a few years there wouldn’t even be any bucks left to kill, Uncle Ike,” Wyatt said.
“According to Roth yonder, that’s one thing we wont never have to worry about,” the old man said. “He said on the way here this morning that does and fawns—I believe he said women and children—are two things this world aint ever lacked. But that aint all of it,” he said. “That’s just the mind’s reason a man has to give himself because the heart dont always have time to bother with thinking up words that fit together.
God created man and He created the world for him to live in and I reckon He created the kind of world He would have wanted to live in if He had been a man—the ground to walk on, the big woods, the trees and the water, and the game to live in it. And maybe He didn’t put the desire to hunt and kill game in man but I reckon He knew it was going to be there, that man was going to teach it to himself, since he wasn’t quite God himself yet——”
“When will he be?” Wyatt said.
“I think that every man and woman, at the instant when it dont even matter whether they marry or not, I think that whether they marry then or afterward or dont never, at that instant the two of them together were God.”
“Then there are some Gods in this world I wouldn’t want to touch, and with a damn long stick,” Edmonds said. He set his coffee cup down
