The Buck -- Short Fiction by Cliff

In early November, the buck crested the ridge above a still green valley.

A perpetual restlessness – which had grown by degrees as the leaves gathered color – drove him down the hillside. He was a yearling and the air was scented by an unseen elixir and it was as though stopping would kill him, so he kept on, as he had for days.

Frost matted the grass in the valley. The buck would not have grazed anyway. A wind’s puff bent his neck. He angled to it, almost turning to go back the way he’d come, and he even bounded forward a few strides before settling back to his previous, relentless pace.

Below Sunset Memorial Park, on the same ridge above a small Washington town, Anise crouched to tie her blue trainers. The laces on the new shoes were slick and resisted a permanent knot. Anise is human, and she bundles conflicting strands of motivation together within her. On that morning, she had managed to align the strands neatly in a single direction, toward fitness, leading her up a winding blacktop drive to the graveyard.

Halfway up she roused two doe from their thicket. The doe bounced away, each on a slightly different tack, their black tails shining. They crossed the blacktop and went over the ridge and continued down to the valley.

**

Amanda gripped the plastic sheathing and squealed every time her mom pushed the swing. The sun shone brilliantly, but the breeze made her do it. She enjoyed how the air pushed her voice back and dried her mouth.

And she was turning three years old today, she was in the park playing with her mom, and she was going to spend the night at Grandma’s house. Grandma was coming to pick her up. Her Hello Kitty bag stood packed and ready on their car’s dashboard.

In the woods, the cabin was made of actual logs, not the fake veneer stuff that had come into vogue recently. Joe had built it himself when he was a young man. Now he sloughed his duffel bag onto his truck’s bench seat and slid in after it, casting his eye over the south wall’s chinking. It would need some repair before winter settled in.

He started the truck and put it in drive; then he slammed it back to park. He had forgotten to grab his .30-06 off the porch.

He did appreciate how the sun lit the southern valley. Jagged evergreens shone on the slope falling away from him, broken only by the town like a strange wart on the riverbank, and the glinting river. Past the river the hills and evergreens rolled up again and as he gazed a cloud swept over the far ridge, and he imagined its shadow felt as cold as he did.

**

Anise walked down from the graveyard. The sunshine and exercise had warmed her but her spandex had wicked away the sweat wonderfully, just as the label promised. She felt invigorated and in love. The lithe deer, the rolling vista, the dancing ditch flowers – all together had created a joy, which she had discovered happened frequently on her walks, but that she had missed for years, sealed up for her job by glass and steel.

Thrilling, the day ahead came back to her. She remembered that she was to pick up her granddaughter that morning. It was her birthday, and Anise had promised that she could stay overnight. Earlier she had thought to go home and meet her daughter at the park with the car, but wouldn’t it be lovely to share a walk with Amanda? To teach her the joy of it so that she wouldn’t miss out for as long as Anise had?

Later on, downtown, Joe left the shop. He had stocked up on cartridges. It was a little bit late in the morning, but he figured he would head out – the drive would be beautiful anyway. But then, as he crossed in front of his truck and felt the heat pushing out of the grill, he saw a woman on the corner. She waved across the traffic at a younger woman and a little girl in the park, and he had never seen someone beam the way that she did. It seemed that her light would outshine the sun.

He spied a wooden bench, angled just so on a rise in the park, and he saw pigeons there and now the woman had crossed the street and joined the other two in a delighted group. Perhaps if he went to sit on that bench, he might be included, if only for a moment.

It was early in the season, after all; he would hunt his buck another day.

**

In the green valley, the buck had paused when the doe came down from the ridge.

He had found the elixir.