The Woman Who Married a Bear by John Straley Page B

household goods strewn down the street.
    â€œThe big mistake,” he used to say, sitting on a spruce stump, cradling his rifle on his lap, “is to blame nature. Nature is orderly. It is not necessarily benevolent but it has purpose. It is not God’s responsibility to bring you good luck. It is your business to pack everything you need and put yourself into the way of good fortune.” And then he would usually sit very quietly on his stump, blow a deer call, and wait.
    By the time he was thirty the Judge knew the name of every bird he encountered on his hunting trips—both the common and the Latin names. He carried field guides in his hunting pack, one for birds and one for plants. He carried Meditations on Hunting but I never saw him read it. He planned out every hunting strategy by numerical navigation, using the topographical map, a compass, and a six-inch ruler he carried with him in his pouch. The first thing out of the skiff, he would sit on a stump, smoke a cigarette, and plot a course. He figured the wind, the temperature, the moisture, and the time of day in relation to the time of year. Often, he would read through his journal from the previous year to try and reconstruct a pattern. The Judge hunted by intellectual calculation. The deer were his objective and he was plotting a conquest.
    The older he got, the more strategy he relied on: trying to foretell the deer’s patterns and call them to a precise place at a precise time. When he was younger he had broken through the thick tangles of salmonberry and alder to get to the top of the ridge by first light. He said that he used to rush the deer on the first day of the season as if he were in rut. But by the time I was old enough to go with him he was a flirtatious hunter: gesture, feint, and unspoken intent.
    I’ve always been a blundering hunter. The fact that I ever got a deer at all is a testimony to the fallibility of the species. The Judge said that I was good for the country because I was obviously culling the stupid genes from the pool.
    I would clatter around in the brush and with each step my boots would make a loud slurp while coming out of the mud. At first the Judge would wince when hunting with me, suffering to try and make me move quietly. Then he began to plant himself on a stump and send me off to circle around and hunt back on the game trails toward him. Most often I would be moving through the woods and hear the crack of his rifle ahead of me. I would stop for a moment and, almost in time with my own breath, I would hear the next, finishing shot. I’d shoulder my rifle and walk briskly on, glad I didn’t have to keep up the hunt.
    Once into the clearing I would usually find a buck hung on a low limb and the Judge, with his sleeves rolled up, wiping the last of the blood off his hands with a clump of moss. He would be smoking a cigarette, and as I’d come through the opening of the brush he’d turn and ask how I did. I would tell him I’d seen some sign but didn’t get off a shot. He’d look at me briefly, with that long stare, then jerk his head toward the deer and say, “Well, he won’t walk to the skiff himself.”
    It didn’t always happen that way. Once in mid-October, when I was a senior in high school, a buck turned back on his course toward the Judge and his high perch on the spruce stump. My rifle sling was frayed, and I was sitting on a fallen log trying to shorten it past the worn spot of leather. I imagine the Judge would have said I was “just half there.” I was thinking of the girl who sat in front of me in physics class and how her blouse hiked up off the small of her back so that I could see the walnut dimples of her backbone disappear down into her skirt. I might have been thinking about her breath in my ear as I fiddled with the stiff leather of my sling.
    When the buck snorted, my rifle leaped out of my hand and fell like a walking stick next to the tree.