Goat Mountain by David Vann Read Free Book Online

breeze in the tops of the pines had increased, and this gave urgency to our movement. My father and grandfather and Tom gathered their rifles and shells, canteens and binoculars, dark jackets and hats. Voiceless shapes in that forest, each grim and intent, awakened from the shadows.
    We could have been any band of men, from any time. The hunt a way to reach back a thousand generations. Our first reason to band together, to kill.
    I was not allowed my rifle. Weaponless, an outsider on the hunt that should have been my initiation. I was so angry about this I could not have found a way to speak. I climbed into the back of the pickup and waited.
    The bed of the pickup cleared out now, and I could stand, my shoulders above that cab. We should have been hiking into the forest, stepping quietly, hidden by trees and looking for antlers or a twitch of ears or a patch of brown lighter than the background. Stopping to listen. But my grandfather had become something modern, an obesity pumped full of insulin and pills and unable to walk through a forest for miles. A thousand generations, tens of thousands of years, ended by him. Having to sit in a pickup and hunt with an engine, loud enough for every buck for miles around to hear we were coming. Unconnected to the ground, rolling on tires that snapped and popped and left a track that was foreign and unimaginable.
    I watched my grandfather as he gathered and shuffled, and it did not seem possible that I had come from him. All features fading from his face, receding, leaving only expanses of blotched flesh and wattle.
    My father sliding toward that same face, chin and cheeks loose. No word among the men, moving as silently as possible, all absurd since we were about to start the engine. They climbed into the cab with their rifles between their knees and pulled the doors shut carefully, no more than a click for each.
    Then the engine, and backing and turning around and we rumbled on down that road, and who cared what the road held. I couldn’t even look at it. Pointless hunt. I was the spotter, but I looked instead at the trees. The older forest and then the newer one, the open section of land that had been logged a few years after my birth, all the trees thin and individual, planted, the areas between filled with wreckage. Grasses and ferns and poison oak gone red with fall, looking like bunches of flowers, a junked landscape waiting to burn, all smaller limbs left behind by the loggers and decaying still, choking every pathway, making a false floor.
    I pounded the top of the cab with my fist and we lurched to a halt. The doors flew open and Tom was out the right side first, raising his rifle to his shoulder. Then my father out the left side, raising his rifle.
    Where is it? Tom said. Trying to whisper but hoarse and loud. Where’s the buck?
    I pointed to where the new forest rolled downward into brush and a lost part of the ranch we never hunted. We never found bucks this close to camp.
    What was he? my father asked.
    A big buck, I said. A three-point, I think, but he was leaping and moving fast into the brush.
    My father took off across that wasteland at a run. Tom on his right flank and me following. No foothold secure. Small limbs and sawed-off stumps and holes everywhere, but the top of my father floated as if on springs, facing forward exactly to where I’d pointed, looking for that buck. His legs and boots laboring beneath, unconnected.
    I looked back and saw my grandfather mired far behind, lost to the chase, and I smiled and tripped and went down hard into poison oak, greasy curse that would puff up along my face and neck and arms within a day, but I didn’t care. That was part of every hunt anyway. I was back on my feet and running hard, trying to catch up to the men. I wanted to whoop out loud, because I loved this. If they weren’t going to let me hunt, we’d chase phantom bucks into the worst hell this land could offer.
    Running straight into the sun, low