A Thousand Deer Read online

Records: I’m surrounded by all this life, is what I’m saying, and some days it feels like I’m that deer, threading my way through the forest, this forest that’s full of grace, and everything in it is safe, and yet everything is dangerous, too, and yet it doesn’t matter, none of it. It feels like everything is heartless but full of grace at the same time—and I still don’t know why I hunt, but it is enough to know that I enjoy doing it, and will continue doing it.

  It’s important not to overdramatize this. It’s as natural, and as heroic—for the deer—as is growing old, or being hunted.

  Being measured for records is meaningless—the oldest person, the biggest deer. Living and dying, and the in-between, is all that matters, and it’s all here for the taking.

  For me, I can’t separate any discussion of hunting from a discussion of my family. We’ve always hunted—my father, uncle, brothers, and I. We gather our food. We gather the years. We are a family of hunters, even those of us like Grandma Bass and Grandma Robson, who do not hunt.

  You wouldn’t think one’s eighty-eight-year-old grandmothers and deer hunting would have a lot in common—that they would be anything at all the same. But when I am out in the woods deer hunting, I find myself thinking about them a lot. The old ones. The things that have made us who and what we are.

  THE OTHER FORT WORTH BASSES

  First off, he smokes Viceroy cigarettes. They keep him skinny, like a bullwhip. He’s almost eighty-eight and clear-eyed.

  When Granddaddy was twenty-seven, he drove down from his home in Fort Worth into the Texas Hill Country, looking for some country to lease so he could deer hunt. He found the place he wanted by serendipity, or sixth sense, by just staying after it, wandering, looking, and all the while closing in on it. He found the place that would become his camp, and later my father’s and uncle’s camp, and my camp.

  There are two creeks, which eventually flow into the Pedernales River. We regard water on the deer pasture as even more of a miracle than it usually is. In the Hill Country, the blaze heat bouncing off all those boulders and canyons makes us, as well as the wildlife, prize the water in those creeks.

  Great live oak trees line the creeks, and scrub cedars blanket the steep hills. Shy deer and turkeys step through the dark cedars. Doves call. I’ve taken pictures along the creek of bobcats, foxes, coyotes, skunks, raccoons, quail, roadrunners, rattlesnakes. The deer pasture is a perfect mix of the rough (boulders, cacti) and the pastoral (small meadows, ponds, shaded creeks). We chase that mix of nature every year in November, when all the men in the Bass family gather to hunt the first week of deer season. From wherever we’re residing, it’s a tradition that we can count on, one we look forward to all year: Granddaddy, my father and my two brothers, my uncle and his three sons.

  Our family works mostly with the earth for a living, and always has. I’m a geologist, my father’s a geophysicist, Uncle Jimmy threads and sells drilling pipe, and Randy and Russell, his two youngest sons, help him run the business.

  Where once all the Bass men were bull ruffians, there’s hope for Bass men to come. We’re learning. There is hope. Uncle Jimmy’s oldest son (also named Rick) is, of all things, a gynecologist. And his specialty is difficult pregnancies—fertility. He specializes in getting women pregnant, is how we refer to it.

  I grapple with the earth, as a geologist, but I also write, and my middle brother, Frank, is a journalist. Not that writing is as feminine as gynecology, but it’s still a far cry from shoving drilling pipe down into the earth. My youngest brother, B. J., manages our dad’s ranch in South Texas, but plays tennis and the guitar.

  There are two outcropping rock formations on the deer pasture, one of which represents some of the oldest known rocks in the world. Cambrian dikes and sills flowed through the land roughly one billion years ago. These granite formations were buried by the Cambrian seas, which left a thick deposit of iron-rich red sandstones, called the Hickory Sandstone. The younger granite is not as enduring or resistant as the iron-filled Hickory Sandstone. The old granite decomposes and releases its nutrient-filled minerals back into the soil. The pink feldspar in the granite decomposes into nuggets and gravels that we call chat, which is a beautiful pink-rose color. It’s in the bottoms of all the creeks.

  A hundred and fifty years ago, so say the old journals of the area, the Hill Country was almost all grassland. Then cattle moved in. Without steady wildfires, cedar swarms everything, though we try to keep it cut back. But it grows fast and tries to change the face of the land, tries to change things. And we want to keep some meadows and grassland open, the way it was. Granddaddy, Uncle Jimmy, and Dad think it’s silly that we boys work to keep the cedar out.

  “Let it go,” they say. “Just let it go.”

  But we want those soft green meadows: all that grass. We want to bring some of the meadows back.

  There was a time, eight or so years ago, when Old Granddaddy was not so clear-eyed. He’d had a stroke at the age of eighty and we did not think he would make it another year. We thought that way for several years. Then he had surgery on the tendons in his wrists and hands, so that he could pull the trigger once more, and he learned to speak again. He got cornea implants that made his eyesight a perfect 20/20—better than any of ours. But he still smokes those cigarettes. He sits up in the granite boulders and, while hunting with the wind in his face, he inhales those damn Viceroys, which we won’t let him into the lodge with because none of the rest of us smoke.

  With the exception of Randy, who’s a poet these days, and my father, who’s becoming one, we’re all hunters. Randy and my father prefer to watch the deer rather than hunt them. But Old Granddaddy is neither a hunter nor a poet. From the old school, he’s simply a shooter. It’s what he knows—shooting deer on this land—and it’s all he’s ever done.

  There was a long dry spell, those years when we wondered if each year would be his last, when he didn’t get a deer—when he couldn’t even see a deer through the scope. Now it’s like the old days. He shoots two deer a year (my father takes one home, and Randy takes the other) because that’s the legal limit. It’s also how Granddaddy is, and there’s no need to try to change him, lecture, or judge him. If the limit were three deer a year instead of two, he’d shoot three. Not only do I not judge Granddaddy for being such an inveterate deerslayer, I am glad that he is. He gives our younger wanderings a dimension, a backdrop, and he gives us meat, too.

  The severity of Granddaddy’s sharp-eyed judgment, the harshness of sentence—the crack of his little rifle, a flat-shooting .222—contrasts nicely with the younger elements on the land. My brothers, Frank and B. J., or I will sometimes go off deep into the woods with a book in our coat pocket.

  But our family’s changing. The core of it’s the same, but other parts of it, like the land, are changing, and it’s a fine thing to see. Like in the evenings, when we sit around the fire and drink whiskey and talk about what each of us is doing, what has happened in the past year. We tell stories and listen, again and again, to the things that have happened to us in the past. We tell about the time that old Jack, the camp cook, picked up a pistol and shot a flying turkey.

  We talk about everything. And in the old days—the way-back—we used to drink too much whiskey at night by the fire. We keep pulling back the past, pulling it back in as if it’s attached to the end of a rope. Each year we sit around those campfires and strain to pull it all the way back in, like a bucket at the bottom of a well. Our intentions are to pull it in close enough to reach it, touch it, inspect it, feel it: to make sure it’s all still in good shape and that none of it’s missing.

  My father’s fifty-eight. I’m thirty-four. Soon it will be time for me to make my parents be grandparents.

  My father tends to Granddaddy—Old Granddaddy. He pampers him, helps him hike all over the rough country, lifts and cleans and carries his kills in to the cabin we’ve built. He fixes Granddaddy’s favorite meals—ham and biscuits with grits and red-eye gravy. Granddaddy eats these meals with a vengeance�
��leaning over the plate and shoveling the food in, eyes watering with the spice and pleasure of it.

  Granddaddy usually crawls into his bunk around midnight. The rest of us stay out at the fire until two or so. Russell, my youngest cousin, goes through his usual phase of mixed melancholia-and-pride, sounding as if he is a grandfather. What he sometimes does is enumerate his company’s successes until Randy, who’s been looking east, looking out at the stars, looking out at Hudson Mountain, says, “Aww, Russ,” or one of Granddaddy’s old rallying cries: “Russell, you’re the shits!”

  It’s just a phase, though, and we all know it. Russell will take a drink, look up at the night sky through the crazy sprawl of limbs above us, and he’ll sigh. He’ll be anchored, then, with Granddaddy and Uncle Jimmy and my father, Charlie, holding him down. Russell will stop talking of pipe sales, will stop speaking of Houston-town, and will no longer be the shits. He’ll just be looking up at the stars. Then Randy will belch and say, “That’s better, Russ.”

  It’s all a cycle, and I have little interest in the short-term. I think it’s the shits, too, when Russ starts talking about a single year. I want to talk about sixty-four years. And so do my uncle and father.

  What Uncle Jimmy, who has a fierce, almost weepy pride in this clan of boys and men, does when he’s in his cups at one or two in the morning and the thrill of all of us being together again consumes him, is talk about our family.

  There are several Fort Worth Basses in Texas, and my grandfather had nothing to do with any of the other Basses. Granddaddy ran a country gas station on the outskirts of Fort Worth, out toward the village of Crowley, for forty years. Aside from the annual deer hunt, he took one vacation a year, to go fishing in Colorado each summer with my grandmother, a schoolteacher.

  My father and uncle grew up poor—wash-clothes-in-the-bathtub poor, for a while. They married young, had children young—the web, the roots, beginning to spread—and then, after a long time, they were poor no longer.

  My father and mother had a tough go of it at the beginning, too—before my father learned how to plumb the earth, how to reach deep. They hung the clothes out to dry in the West Texas wind.

  My uncle, who has been spending too much time in Japan negotiating pipe deals, tells how the interpreters continue to ask him if he’s one of those famous Fort Worth Basses. They’re not talking about us, when they ask that.

  My father, a geologist as well as a geophysicist, says he’s been asked that question all over Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama. Wherever he goes to find the oil and gas fields he’s so good at discovering, they ask him.

  He just says, “No.” Perhaps he thinks about how it might have been if we were the wealthy Fort Worth Basses, instead of the other Fort Worth Basses, but I doubt it.

  Pride can be a rough thing. It’s not something easily eroded, nor is it easily buried.

  My father and uncle are asked this question wherever they go. And I’m sure that along with their reply is the memory of a dusty, lonely gas station on the outskirts of town. They say, “No, I’m not of ‘the Fort Worth Basses,’” and then they recall sitting in the station drinking a pop, playing, while their father—Granddaddy—sits behind the counter, waiting for business.

  We were raised outdoors, and it’s been the blessing of our life. My father didn’t have to raise me outdoors. He had worked hard enough and succeeded well enough to raise me and my brothers any way he wanted. He chose the outdoors just as Granddaddy chose this rough cedar country.

  Our legacy, our blessing, has been to grow up on the land and to take from it while giving back to it, too. We learned to give the land our memories and love, to give it back respect, to give it back everything—including, in time, our bodies.

  At the campfire last year, Uncle Jimmy talked to us about what it means to be a Bass. He went from son to son, nephew to nephew, and brother to brother, clasping his big hand on each of our shoulders—chewing his big cigar—as he talked to us not about the things a Bass does or doesn’t do, but about the manner in which they’re done. It has to do with being on the outside of the world rather than wrapped up in the center and noise of it.

  Granddaddy’s asleep in his bed by this time of night. But he’s not far away; he’s just inside the lodge. In his sleep, I like to think that he hears us: that some younger part of him hears what we’re saying.

  The stars flash and glimmer above us, the wind carries the smell of cedar. It’s a cool night in the fall, and the fire is warm. The wind creaks the rafters of the big lodge behind us, the one we built by hand over the course of one summer. Our lives seem to have everything to do with rocks, with the earth: with things that last. Cool night air slides down off the top of the Burned-Off Hill and washes our faces. It’s late. In the morning we’ll go out into the woods again and move across the land.

  My father taught me the boundaries and borders, the secrets of the deer pasture, and taught me how to hunt just as Granddaddy had taught him. Even now, I’m not remembering those old pictures of deer-gone-by, deer on the hoods of old jeeps, photos of past hunts before I was even born, but rather the sound my boots make when I’m climbing one of those sandstone ridges over on the back side and when I dislodge a pebble that rolls down into the canyon. I’m remembering the red rock canyons and the first time my father hiked with me back to Buck Hill and showed me the view.

  This is one of the ways to write about my father: to write about the land he has chosen to keep walking across, and our place on it as a whole—the net of us, my family’s men. If I had a choice—if I had to make one—I’d rather be in the woods than have money. I’d rather be happy than famous. If that were some kind of choice that ever needed to have been made, a long time ago, the men in my family decided to turn to the woods, rather than to the city, to spend more and more time in the woods, as much time as they could.

  The view from the tops of these ridges at the deer pasture lets you see damn near everything. How far? Since it is the nature of a family of geologists to measure things in terms of years rather than miles, that horizon off to the east—where the flat top of Hudson Mountain looms—is seventy-five years distant, and changing every year, moving away from us all the time, even though we chase it.

  I have to believe that we are gaining on it. It seems that we are.

  ON WILLOW CREEK

  I am now only thirty-five years old, and the land is more than a billion; how can I be expected to know what to say beyond “Please” and “Thank you”? The language of the Hill Country of Texas is not the language of pen on paper, or even of the human voice. It is the language of water cutting down through the country’s humped chest of granite, cutting down to the heart and soul of the earth, to a thing that lies far below and beyond our memory. Being frail and human, however, memory is all we have to work with. I have to believe that somewhere out there is a point where my language—memory—will intersect with the Hill Country’s language: the scent of cedar, the feel of morning mist, the blood of deer, glint of moon, shimmering heat, crackle of ice, scorpions, centipedes, rattlesnakes, cactus. The cool dark oaks and gold-leaved hickories along the creeks—the language of the Hill Country always seems to return to water. It is along the creeks where most of the wildlife is found.

  The men in my family have always hunted deer—hunting them in Tennessee, and before that, in Mississippi, and perhaps all the way back to the dawn of man, the first hunter—perhaps the link across the generations is completely unbroken, one of the few unfragmented systems or notions remaining in this century—The Basses hunt deer—a small thing, but still whole and intact.

  The land changes so much more slowly than we do. We race across it, gathering it all in—the scents, the sounds, the feel of that thousand acres. Granddaddy’s gone now; Uncle Horace, John Dallas, an old family friend, and Howard, from whom we leased the deer pasture—already I’ve lived long enough to see men in my family live long enough to cross that intersection where they finally learn and embrace the real language of the e
arth—the language of granite, the language of history—leaving us behind, the survivors, still speaking in terms of memory.

  We have not yet quite caught up with the billion-year-old land we love and that harbors us, but as we get older, we’re beginning to learn a word or two, beginning to see (especially as we have children) how our lives start to cut knife-like down through all that granite, through all that ancient sandstone, cutting deeper and deeper into the stone hump of the Hill Country, until we are like rivers and creeks ourselves, and we reach the end and the bottom, and we understand.

  Water. The cities and towns to the south and east of the Hill Country—Austin, San Antonio, Houston, LaGrange, Uvalde, Goliad—I could chart them all, thousands of them, for they are all my home—these towns, these cities, and these people drank from the heart of the Hill Country, the water in their bodies is water that has come from beneath the hills, the mystical two-hundred-mile-long underground river (it actually flows) called the Edwards Aquifer.

  The water is gathered in the Hill Country by the forces of nature, percolates down through the hills and mountains, and flows south, underground, toward the ocean. Everything downstream from the Hill Country owes a thank-you to the Hill Country. The water that we don’t drink or pump onto our crops or give to our livestock—that tiny part that eludes us—continues on to the Gulf Coast, into the bays and estuaries, where delicate moisture contents, delicate salinities, are maintained for the birds, the shrimp, and other coastal inhabitants that at first glance seem to be far away from and unrelated to the inland mountains.

  A scientist will tell you that it’s all connected—that if you live in Texas you must protect the honor and integrity of that country’s core, for you are tied to it, it is as much a part of you as family—but if you are a child and given to daydreaming and wondering, I believe you’ll understand this by instinct. You don’t need proof that the water moving through those shady creeks up in the wild hills and mountains is the same that moves through your body. You can instead stand outside—even in the city, even in Houston—and look north with the wind in your face (or with a salt breeze at your back), and you can feel the tremble and shimmer of that magic underground river, the yearning and timelessness of it, just beneath your seven-year-old feet, and you can know of the allegiance you owe it, in a way that not even the scientists know. It is more like the way when you are in your mother’s arms, or your grandmother’s, that it’s all tied together, and that someday you are going to understand it all.