Читать книгу Never Cry Halibut. and Other Alaska Hunting and Fishing Tales онлайн

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I remembered when I was fifteen, my older brother, Luke, and I saw a nice fork-horn in this same draw. We were green—Luke missed twice, and I proceeded to shoot the ground in front of me. On Luke’s third shot, the fleeing deer stumbled then disappeared. With ringing ears, we looked at each other in shock. In our rush to find the deer, I fell down a steep slope toward a cliff but miraculously slammed into the one stunted tree growing from the edge. Luke chose a better route down, and together we stood in awe over his first deer.

Dusk was nearing as I crawled away from the two does and crept back to camp. A small deer flickered inside a maze of jack pines. A moment later, it was gone. I passed the rock where, when I was seventeen, my friend Orion had lined up on his first buck at just twenty yards. After panting for five minutes—the deer oddly unaware—he whispered, “Should I?” There was the bowl where I’ve spent hours with my dad and brothers glassing. There was the spot where I accidentally shot two bucks one foggy, rainy morning. There was the ridge where that spike had been bedded down two Septembers ago. There was the ravine where that little fork-horn had been at the edge of in late September. There was the bowl where, with my friends Jesse and Ed, I took my first buck when we were sixteen. Reid and I had taken many more out of the same spot since.