“Get the dogs!” Boon cried. “Get the dogs! If he had a nub on his head, he had fourteen points! Laying right there by the road in that pawpaw thicket! If I’d a knowed he was there, I could have cut his throat with my pocket knife!”
“Maybe that’s why he run,” Walter said. “He saw you never had your gun.” He was already out of the wagon with his rifle. Then the boy was out too with his gun, and the other riders came up and Boon got off his mule somehow and was scrabbling and clawing among the duffel in the wagon, still shouting, “Get the dogs! Get the dogs!” And it seemed to the boy too that it would take them for ever to decide what to do — the old men in whom the blood ran cold and slow, in whom during the intervening years between them and himself the blood had become a different and colder substance from that which ran in him and even in Boon and Walter.
“What about it, Sam?” Major de Spain said. “Could the dogs bring him back?”
“We wont need the dogs,” Sam said. “If he dont hear the dogs behind him, he will circle back in here about sundown to bed.”
“All right,” Major de Spain said. “You boys take the horses. We’ll go on out to the road in the wagon and wait there.” He and General Compson and McCaslin got into the wagon and Boon and Walter and Sam and the boy mounted the horses and turned back and out of the trail.
Sam led them for an hour through the grey and unmarked afternoon whose light was little different from what it had been at dawn and which would become darkness without any graduation between. Then Sam stopped them.
“This is far enough,” he said. “He’ll be coming upwind, and he dont want to smell the mules.” They tied the mounts in a thicket. Sam led them on foot now, unpathed through the markless afternoon, the boy pressing close behind him, the two others, or so it seemed to the boy, on his heels. But they were not.
Twice Sam turned his head slightly and spoke back to him across his shoulder, still walking: “You got time. We’ll get there fore he does.”
So he tried to go slower. He tried deliberately to decelerate the dizzy rushing of time in which the buck which he had not even seen was moving, which it seemed to him must be carrying the buck farther and farther and more and more irretrievably away from them even though there were no dogs behind him now to make him run, even though, according to Sam, he must have completed his circle now and was heading back toward them.
They went on; it could have been another hour or twice that or less than half, the boy could not have said. Then they were on a ridge. He had never been in here before and he could not see that it was a ridge. He just knew that the earth had risen slightly because the underbrush had thinned a little, the ground sloping invisibly away toward a dense wall of cane. Sam stopped. “This is it,” he said. He spoke to Walter and Boon: “Follow this ridge and you will come to two crossings. You will see the tracks. If he crosses, it will be at one of these three.”
Walter looked about for a moment. “I know it,” he said. “I’ve even seen your deer. I was in here last Monday. He aint nothing but a yearling.”
“A yearling?” Boon said. He was panting from the walking. His face still looked a little wild. “If the one I saw was any yearling, I’m still in kindergarden.”
“Then I must have seen a rabbit,” Walter said. “I always heard you quit school altogether two years before the first grade.”
Boon glared at Walter. “If you dont want to shoot him, get out of the way,” he said. “Set down somewhere. By God, I — —”
“Aint nobody going to shoot him standing here,” Sam said quietly.
“Sam’s right,” Walter said. He moved, slanting the worn, silver-coloured barrel of his rifle downward to walk with it again. “A little more moving and a little more quiet too. Five miles is still Hogganbeck range, even if we wasn’t downwind.” They went on.
The boy could still hear Boon talking, though presently that ceased too. Then once more he and Sam stood motionless together against a tremendous pin oak in a little thicket, and again there was nothing. There was only the soaring and sombre solitude in the dim light, there was the thin murmur of the faint cold rain which had not ceased all day.
Then, as if it had waited for them to find their positions and become still, the wilderness breathed again. It seemed to lean inward above them, above himself and Sam and Walter and Boon in their separate lurking-places, tremendous, attentive, impartial and omniscient, the buck moving in it somewhere, not running yet since he had not been pursued, not frightened yet and never fearsome but just alert also as they were alert, perhaps already circling back, perhaps quite near, perhaps conscious also of the eye of the ancient immortal Umpire.
Because he was just twelve then, and that morning something had happened to him: in less than a second he had ceased for ever to be the child he was yesterday. Or perhaps that made no difference, perhaps even a city-bred man, let alone a child, could not have understood it; perhaps only a country-bred one could comprehend loving the life he spills. He began to shake again.
“I’m glad it’s started now,” he whispered. He did not move to speak; only his lips shaped the expiring words: “Then it will be gone when I raise the gun — —”
Nor did Sam. “Hush,” he said.
Is he that near?” the boy whispered. “Do you think — —”
“Hush,” Sam said. So he hushed. But he could not stop the shaking. He did not try, because he knew it would go away when he needed the steadiness — had not Sam Fathers already consecrated and absolved him from weakness and regret too? — not from love and pity for all which lived and ran and then ceased to live in a second in the very midst of splendour and speed, but from weakness and regret.
So they stood motionless, breathing deep and quiet and steady. If there had been any sun, it would be near to setting now; there was a condensing, a densifying, of what he had thought was the grey and unchanging light until he realised suddenly that it was his own breathing, his heart, his blood — something, all things, and that Sam Fathers had marked him indeed, not as a mere hunter, but with something Sam had had in his turn of his vanished and forgotten people.
He stopped breathing then; there was only his heart, his blood, and in the following silence the wilderness ceased to breathe also, leaning, stooping overhead with its breath held, tremendous and impartial and waiting. Then the shaking stopped too, as he had known it would, and he drew back the two heavy hammers of the gun.
Then it had passed. It was over. The solitude did not breathe again yet; it had merely stopped watching him and was looking somewhere else, even turning its back on him, looking on away up the ridge at another point, and the boy knew as well as if he had seen him that the buck had come to the edge of the cane and had either seen or scented them and faded back into it. But the solitude did not breathe again. It should have suspired again then but it did not. It was still facing, watching, what it had been watching and it was not here, not where he and Sam stood; rigid, not breathing himself, he thought, cried No! No!, knowing already that it was too late, thinking with the old despair of two and three years ago: I’ll never get a shot. Then he heard it — the flat single clap of Walter Ewell’s rifle which never missed. Then the mellow sound of the horn came down the ridge and something went out of him and he knew then he had never expected to get the shot at all.
“I reckon that’s it,” he said. “Walter got him.” He had raised the gun slightly without knowing it. He lowered it again and had lowered one of the hammers and was already moving out of the thicket when Sam spoke.
“Wait.”
“Wait?” the boy cried. And he would remember that — how he turned upon Sam in the truculence of a boy’s grief over the missed opportunity, the missed luck. “What for? Dont you hear that horn?”
And he would remember how Sam was standing. Sam had not moved. He was not tall, squat rather and broad, and the boy had been growing fast for the past year or so and there was not much difference between them in height, yet Sam was looking over the boy’s head and up the ridge toward the sound of the horn and the boy knew that Sam did not even see him; that Sam knew he was still there beside him but
