ADAM WILKS

Something So Desirable

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Something So Desirable

Powerful 8 Amp Hour 12 VDC rating for for max battery life and loudness.  Perfect for extreme cold weather calling, extended high volume calling such as waterfowl/geese or crows with optional High volume SP108 external speaker.  Twenty authentic calls for every season.  Kit includes handy carry bag with shoulder strap and belt loop carry provisions and automatic 12 volt charger with "red charging" and "green charged" indicator.  Guaranteed long life.

Dad's hand rattled even while he took his .300 off the front rack of the ATV.

That afternoon he'd tried to calm himself while we sighted the guns in; we breathed the same way, he and I.  We moved the same way, too.  We were excitable; it was hard to sit still for either of us.  With his new rifle, Dad painted a high fan of black spots against the day-glo orange of the 100-yard target.  These shots were seven inches from the bulls-eye, and the two of us blamed the hair trigger because it was a new gun.  Neither one of us said anything about his hands:  when he was shooting, Dad was as still as the picnic table under him or the hillside target in front of him.  When he handled single rounds of ammunition, or car keys, or sunglasses, it was like the stillness in his hands just wore off and he rattled in time with his F-350, which blared a satellite radio station called “Outlaw Country.”

My shots were to the right, but I could blame the scope because--save one shot--they packed together just fine.  I wasn't a great shot generally, but you could have covered my pattern with a half-dollar coin on that day.  I'd shot stray the one time because I panicked that I was taking too long between shots, which was true.  I was nervous; my father was a fantastic shot, generally.

Later that day, at about four o’clock, we walked away from our ATV and the trail across the top of a draw in the hill. It was already dark enough that I counted up the starlight-sodium lights of the other operations in the valley.  I'd met many of the other owners because of my mother; she's so gracious, and thinks so much about being a good hostess that it's a wonder she can keep herself up here with so few people, but she does.  She suggested that I wear my father's overalls--big, quilted things--fabulous, in her words.  She had said nothing about the gloves--a flimsy, white hunter camouflage, the same color as the rest of Dad's camo gear.  Even before pulling off one glove with my teeth, I knew that I'd see my blue fingertips, aching or fallen silent from a chilly ATV ride.  Against my better judgment, I flexed my fingertips and put my bare hand to my mouth, exhaled deeply.  The moisture clung instantly to my hand like barbecue sauce.  I wiped it away, replaced the glove, and continued to flex my hands as we walked to keep the pain away.

I fell in a badger hole before Dad could warn me about it.  I fell properly, at least, with my free foot in front of me.  The sounds I made fell to nothing in the cold air and the low hills, but in that quiet, everything echoed inside my head.

"A good way to break your leg."  Dad wasn’t whispering.  I wondered about being quiet, and whether there was any quiet left after the ATV ride.  Maybe coyotes heard things in the snow the way I did, which was to say that the sounds would die out instantly in the cold, seeking shelter inside my ears, staying warm inside until other sounds forced them out to fend for themselves.

I righted myself before Dad was close enough to help pull my leg free.  A trickle of something warm glued the quilted coverall to my shin, and I walked away from the hole, careful not to make a sound.  It was quiet all the way to the rocky draw in the hill where my father came close to me, whispered:

"I'm going to place the call in that scrub," he motioned to a large, tangled mushroom of weedy evergreen.  Dad hid me next to a large rock about the size and shape of a grown man curled up into the fetal position.  From there, Dad pointed again, "everything from there," meaning a low hill to my left, "to basically all of that."  He pointed to the poorly-hidden sun behind the faraway mountain range, and the dusky valley cut in two pieces by the surgical slice of a main road where a few dim lights clung like scabs.

Dad's steps were wide on the steep hillside, cautious enough to avoid the little scrub brush spears.  I lowered myself into place beside the rock and took my rifle from my shoulder, touching the stock to a stone elbow that would allow for at least some range of motion through the sight.  A distinctive still-life of rock and brush, stacked together in a tri-corner shape, sat in the valley thirty yards ahead of me.  I imagined a heart nested inside the brush and lungs flash-baked into the stone.  Through the scope, dark, furious stones jackrabbited across the glass, sagebrush blurs skirted around the edge of the scope, but avoided the reticule the way floating cereal sometimes eludes the spoon.

I pulled my eyes away and blinked at my intended target, which remained unthreatened in the distance, the imaginary heart and lungs blissfully unscrutinized.  The scope-blindness made me panic.  At the corner of my eye, my father loped up the hill toward me, heading to his roost just to my left.  He aimed his remote in one hand and mashed the remote like a gun or a wand.

The sound came immediately, and if I had to guess, it covered the whole valley.  The call was an electronic one that came pre-programmed with twenty or so different animal sounds designed to lure predators.  The sound the call made was a baby--a human baby--with the lungs and throat of a grown man.  It screamed, and then it screamed more.  Being electric, it didn't have any reason to stop, or any pause to consider that things might get better or that someone would come to tend to it.  It just screamed.  It screamed like it was being burned, or bitten, or having something horrible done to its arms or legs.  I wiggled my toes and rubbed my legs against one another under the quilted coveralls.  Ten minutes passed in this way before I worked the fingers from one of my gloves to make a tight fist in the glove's palm to keep warm.  Then another twenty minutes passed with me stuffing my hands this way and that to keep warm, and the baby screaming the same as it had the whole time.  At random intervals, the pace of the screaming or the tone would change for just a moment—perhaps only in my mind—but then changed back to just regular meat-and-potatoes screaming.  I moved my head slowly the whole time from side to side, imagining coyotes trotting carefree towards their dinners--wondering whether I could have even seen one if it appeared, and contentedly glassing rocks and brush on a far slope during spare moments.  The scope-blindness had gone.

Eventually, Dad made his way to me and, in a high, clear voice he sent me down to collect the animal call.  I made my way towards the sound and retrieved the device from the ground between a pair of thick branches of brush.  The device was about the size and shape of a walkie-talkie or an old cell phone, and had an on/off switch at the top marked with white letters but no illumination.  Beneath the switch were an array of buttons that selected the animal sounds the device could play.

One button was depressed more than the others:  "Wounded Foal."

We rode the rocky trails along grooves that comfortably pitched the ATV along worn tracks.  By that time, the moon was high and partly obscured by a cloud shaped like an unhinged wristwatch.  I thought about things that were at home for me in California.  I thought of California as my home, because I'd never lived at the ranch--not really.  And yet I had a bedroom in the ranch house my mother had decorated when they built the place.  The room had a queen bed with a dust ruffle, and a guitar I didn't know how to play, and a beautiful Indian drum that served as a table for the thick-backed easy chair beside it.  When I actually stayed there, my own possessions clashed and always seemed to clutter the room, regardless of how much or how little I brought with me.  My possessions were contemporary; everything in that room was antique.

My father slammed on the brakes and my eyes searched rapidly.  I saw the coyote even as Dad whispered to me to get off the ATV.

"You see him?"

"I see him."

The coyote was making his way at a fast trot, but taking a lazy angle away from us, as though we were drunks on a sidewalk and he was merely crossing the street to walk on the other side.

I heard a quiet clatter behind me as Dad put his hands on something strapped to the ATV, and the familiar scream of the electronic foal started up again.

I raised my rifle to shoot, but the scope was a muddy snowstorm.  I pulled my eyes back to look at the field unaided; watched as the coyote's pace slowed to a stop as the animal searched for the courage to investigate something so desirable sitting so close to something so plainly dangerous.  This rifle was familiar to me, and so I was ashamed--I couldn't get the scope to work.  I really couldn't.

"Right in front of you."

I raised the scope again, knowing it was useless; full of coal-colored ghosts; pulled my eye away to see the coyote resume a jog-step away from the ATV.

"I d'know.  My scope is fucked up."

We climbed back onto the ATV in the silence that emerged whenever the Wounded Foal finally Died; the engine purred my last sentence back to me the whole way back to the ranch.

In the garage, we parked the ATV directly under the washing machine-sized heater suspended overhead, and stripped off our camouflaged hats and gloves.  These we piled on an oak table next to the entrance to the mud room.  I collected the predator call and my father took our rifles from the rear rack of the ATV.  He laughed a good-natured laugh.

"Okay," he said, "there's the problem:  power on your scope was still turned up to 'Nine.'  We never dialed it down after sighting it in."  He said this without any animus in his voice--the victim of a perplexing but ultimately harmless prank.

We left earlier the next evening, just after a lunch of chicken soup and orange juice.  The sun was high in the sky, but the day was a milky gray one that made my stomach ache in protest against being taken anywhere.  We took the ATV further than we did that first day going for coyotes, and though my hands froze as badly then as they had the day before, they warmed easily enough when we climbed from the ATV, slung our rifles over our shoulders, and made for the third of a series of high hills in the distance.  My father and I said little, and when we spoke, we did it quietly--if only for practice.  I stepped cautiously and yoked my eyes to the trail in front of me, watching the snowy path for badger holes.  My eyes would wander every few minutes to the sun, to the southwest and Yellowstone, and to Dad.  He stared out in the distance the same as me, and we bobbed along together on our toes.  That was how my dad and I walked.

With an hour or so of sunlight left, we reached an open field of moonscape garlanded with odd pieces of brush.  Dad placed the call between a few rocks as we walked, and together we climbed a hill fifteen or so feet higher than the field.  The screaming started in earnest behind us.

"You probably should take this spot here," he pointed at a half-blind of brush, "and just stay prone.  That way we can cover everything."  He swung his arm from the shoulder with an open hand fanning the air in a presidential sort of way.  I crouched down, with my father too far away for me to ask whether "prone" meant just crouched or required me to lay flat with my belly on the earth.  I wrestled with this question in the setting sun; my legs wrestled with my torso, and then the ground, but every time I changed positions I did it as slowly as I could.  I listened critically for whether I was being noisy while I moved, but heard only the electric Foal in the distance, which never Tired or Coped or Accepted or Died.  Dad had charged the call's battery overnight so the Foal would stay Wounded.

My snow-motif camo glowed purple in the dusky light, but I wasn't cold in the least.  I had dialed down my scope's power to "six" and kept myself entertained by glassing whatever I pleased in the distance with my rifle resting on the large rock, imagining the desperate creatures that found this sound appetizing, my composed shots shaking the still crosshairs.

I thought I was attentive to the field, but only saw the animal when he was square in the center of my field of vision, walking lazily from my right--where my father was--towards my left and the wide valley below us.  In the dark and the distance, he was a tiny thing whose pace made him seem even smaller; made the field impossibly large and dangerous.  I felt sinking embarrassment for not seeing him sooner, but then focused on finding him through my scope, which was easier than I'd hoped.  I swore in my head when the animal stopped.

He wasn't a coyote.  He was a fox.  My father and I hadn't discussed the possibility of seeing foxes, and we certainly hadn't discussed whether they were fair or intended game for shooting.  Foxes were smaller than coyotes as a rule, and I imagined them too small to harass deer or cattle--which was the entire pretext of wasting an evening or two seducing and blasting them.  I followed him through the scope all the same.

There wasn't any excitement in the way the fox walked--like the coyote the night before, the fox kept his distance from the call--not seeing an animal to approach, perhaps smelling something dangerous close at hand.  From time to time he paused, and sat like a dog on command while he surveyed the hills where my father and I hid.  Through my scope, I saw him look in my direction; imagined him looking right at me.  In my mind, the fox was aware that I had leveled the crosshairs at him, and maybe he was as impressed and surprised as I was that my aim didn't wander at all.  We played a stillness game.

Go on, then, he seemed to say.

I knew already that I wasn't supposed to, that I wouldn't shoot.  My father could have fired at any time, especially as the fox propped himself up, tall and alone in the field, like a giant glass bottle someone had dragged out just for the purpose of shooting it to bits.  Dad left the fox alone; so should I.  I smiled in my head as I imagined playing dumb about the whole thing to my dad later on--being bewildered about whether to shoot a fox and deciding not to.  My decision, like his, would have been the right one.  The fox stayed for another ten minutes, and I darted my eyes between the rest of the field and the tiny body in the scope, which turned into a shadow and then to nothing as he escaped the weirdness and the screaming in the hills for the valley.

A coyote appeared about ten minutes after that.  He wasn't anything like the fox--he tore in, all confusion and hunger, as though he'd been imagining the taste of his quarry for the trek down from the high hills to the east; imagined so much, even, that he couldn't come to terms with reality—the empty field, the invisible prey, and so just went crazy in a twisting, running sort of way.  Every step seemed to disappoint him as he pounced expectantly through the field, hoping that the next and every shadow held something bleeding and defenseless.  He moved erratically across the field like a knight on a chessboard.  I imagined what he thought:

Here?  Oh, gotta be.  Gotta be... here?

My heart went out to him as he slowed his pace to match the confusion in the air.  We three—the coyote, my father, and I—listened to the screaming and the coyote gave in to his confusion for a moment, pricked his ears like a student who was particularly interested in a lesson, and stood with his broadside towards me.  He was trying to get a fix on the screaming sound.  I wondered whether he could smell us, even at all.  The cross-hairs needed to move to the left by about two inches of where I would have wanted to hit him, because I'd estimated him to be about fifty or so yards away.

Fifty yards was a good guess, it turned out, because I shot him just behind the shoulder and went through both his lungs.  My father hadn’t shot.  I didn't see the coyote as the bullet struck him because of the recoil, but I saw him in the field a moment later.  Gravity hadn't afforded him any fanfare or Old-West agony in the collapse.  Instead, he laid his body down uncomfortably at the edge of the ATV trail, with his head at the base of a sloped channel.  His body was bent at a funny angle, and kicked weakly with all four legs for a moment like a baby, trying to work the bullet out of his body.

I moved toward him with Dad, who was making a move to pick him up by the scruff of the neck.  Dad's hands weren't shaking now.  All I could think was I hadn't asked whether we'd carry him back with us on the ATV; whether we'd throw him away in the steel garbage lockup next to the garage before hauling him to the dump--probably on the same trip when my parents would take me to the airport.

"Took long enough," Dad said.  "He was out there for about twenty minutes before you shot."

"That was the fox," I explained, and told him what I'd seen.

"Shooting a fox would have been a bad idea," my dad said, "on account of your mother."  He was right:  she loved foxes, or at least thought they weren't worth shooting.  We both thought that.  "But," Dad said, "it was the same guy--coyote came out from there," he pointed to where the fox had emerged, and then described the fox's movements and the coyote's as one unbroken sequence of events, like describing a series of downs in football as a single, fantastically involved play.

I didn't think about my words before I said them:  "I know what I saw."

We tossed the coyote about ten yards from the trail.  Dad answered the question I hadn't asked, said quietly:  "Somethin'll get him soon enough.  Pr’y birds."  He spared me some dignity in my ignorance by saying this to no one in particular—to himself, to the dark, and to the somethings being called to a silent, peaceful dinner.

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