The Deerslayer

Back in the late 1960's and early 1970's after I got out of the Navy, and began my return to college, I wrote a series of poems dedicated to, and about my grandfather, Earl Melbourne Carpenter. He was a rabble rouser, an artist, a home-spun intellectual, a radical, a communist, and quite the influence on me.


THE DEERSLAYER

The old man stood as still
as the shadow he hid in,
watching an ugly slash,
midst the tangled brush
with ancient hazel eyes;
once those of a Peredine,
squinting now,
grimly
behind ground glass,
staring long
at a wooded glen teeming with game,
creeks splashing with
big sunset-bellied fish,
air smoldering with the yellow jackets
of honeybees
careening over fat bunches of wild buttercups,
that no longer existed,
and had not
for many empty years;
waiting
for the scrub brush blacktailed dog-sized buck
his keen instinct dictated
must cross that naked spot
soon,
on that dying hillside swathed
in eleventh growth timber
and scavenger oak
and twisted thorny humpback seedlings.

There was no pristine silence
beneath towering brown barked giants,
no sibilant cries
from the black womb of the forest,
no forest,
as the old hunter
glanced at the tan ever-winding logging roads
on the sloping shoulders
of nearby mountains,
long without game
and truck tracks;
a look that saw
only nineteen axes buried deep
in a great tree,
far from the needle-mantled ground,
and the lumberjacks
who had thrown them
from the brow of a hillock,
bored with fighting a white man's fire.

He recalled the brutal strength
in the massive arms of those men,
tempured like ferrus
by swinging a stropped double-bladed axe,
or wrestlingwith a 12 foot jagged-toothed bucksaw
all the waking hours.
The bright flannel shirts
and red woolen underwear,
the huge breakfasts of burned pancakes and fatback
smothered in molasses syrup,
the bad clear whiskey,
and the gut-lonesome dreams
of womanless warriors.

He had been one of them,
slept in sawdust,
worked like a dray animal,
all lathered up and sweating,
his bronzed muscled torso
as hard as the axehead he swung.

A glimpse of a rusted pick-up,
battered, multi-colored, heavily laden,
parked at roads end,
flickered across his memory,
like when he was a small boy
in bibbed blue denim overalls,
playing hookey,
creeping off to a placid eddy
on the deep green Columbia,
wearing worn-out oversize hand-me-downlogger corks,
thrown over his shoulder,
the thistle-choked laces tied together,
the tongues flapping,
with bare calloused feet coated in mud,
carrying a green supple long willow pole,
some assorted fishing lines
tied as one,
tipped with a safety pin;
hearing the horses raising hell
on the farm above theirs
and looking up he saw
his first automobile;
a 1912smoke-bellowing puffing snorting thing
that banged and clattered along
over the deep wagon wheel ruts,
covering the driver with white alkaline dust;
until seventy years later,
when all Detroit chairots could be damned;
just drive them to road's end,
pile out of them,
grab a rifle,
some coffee, salt, and oats,
and beat the hell out of it with a sledge hammer,
slaying the soul
of the metal monster,
and turning your back on it,
and melting into the wildnerness
that once was,
and still was
in the mind of the old man
who was startled
by a sudden movement in front of him,
as a small three-point buck
burst into that naked spot,
and stopped for a moment of disaster,
as a 30-06 came up quick,
and the gun cracked and roared,
and the buck pitched forward,
a brain shot taking off half its skull,
and the old hunter heard
its short high bleat,
the death cry;
and the animal had called his name,
clearly.

The hunter froze,
then turned,
moving as if in a dream,
leavingthe bleeding buckdog
for the carrion birds
that perched in the thorn trees
patiently watching the deerslayer
struggle off into the gathering gloom.


Glenn Buttkus 1968