On the River Styx: And Other Stories by Peter Matthiessen
He finally tuckered out, Traver told himself. The man done give ol’ Traver up. Traver too spry for him.
The idea restored his confidence a little, and he chuckled without heart. He was still hungry, and he had no idea what his next move should be. Remembering the white man’s face, he did not really believe he had given up the hunt, and this instinct was confirmed, at daybreak. The boat appeared again, and the white man met it, but he did not come out of the cabin. He stepped into the clearing from the yaupon on the other side. Traver had almost approached that way the night before. The light in the window had only been another trap.
Traver fought a wild desire to bolt. But he controlled himself, squeezing great fistfuls of earth between his fingers. He watched the hunter walk slowly to the beach and, resting his rifle butt on the silver roots of a hurricane tree, speak to the boatman. They were silent for a time, as if deciding something. Then the hunter shrugged, and shoved the boat from shore. It backed off with a grinding of worn gears. He returned to the cabin and came out of it a minute later. He had a cooked bone, and he pulled long strings of dry meat from it with his teeth. Traver stared at the lean yellow-brown of his face, the wrinkled neck, the faded khaki clothes and high cracked boots against the soft greens of the trees and the red cassina berries. He stared at the bone. The man tossed it out in front of him, then tramped it into the ground and lit a cigarette. Breathing smoke, he leaned against the cabin logs and gazed around the clearing. Traver caught the cigarette scent on the air, and stirred uncomfortably. The man flipped the butt into the air, and together they watched it burn away upon the ground. Then he shouldered the rifle and went back to the woods, and once more Traver followed.
Who huntin who heah? Traver tried to smile. Who huntin who?
The fear was deep in him now, like cold. He started at every snap and crackle and cry of bird, sniffing the air for scents, which could tell him nothing. There was only the stench of rotting vegetation, and the rank sweat of his fear. He crept along closer and closer to the ground, terrified lest he lose contact with the hunter. In his heart, he knew there was but one course open to him. He could not leave the island, and he could not be killed. Both prospects were unimaginable. But he could kill.
Man, you in de swamp now. It you or him, dass all.
But he could not make himself accept this. He supposed he could kill a black man if he had to, and a white man could kill him. But a black man did not kill a white man.
Man, it doan matter what de color is, it just doan matter now. You in de swamp, and de swamp a different world. Dey ain’t nobody left in dis heah world but you and him, and he figger dass too crowded. When ol’ Lo’d passed out de mens’s hearts, dis heah man hid behind de do’. A man like dis heah man, you let him run where he de law, and he kill you if you black or white or blue. He doan hate you and he doan feel sorry. You just a varmint dat got in de way, dass all.
But Traver doubted his own sense. Perhaps this man had nothing to hide, perhaps he was hunting legally, perhaps he would do no more than remove Traver from the island, or arrest him—how could he know that this man, given the chance, would shoot him down?
And yet he knew. He could smell it. He doubted his instinct because he hated what it told him, because he wanted to believe that this man also was afraid, that a man would not shoot another down without first calling out to him to surrender.
Man, he ain’t called, and he know you heah. He quiet as de grave. And you take it in you haid to call you’self, you fixin to get a bullet fo’ you answer.
AGAIN THAT MORNING, he was nearly ambushed. This time a rabbit gave the man away. For the first time, Traver lost his nerve entirely. He ran back east along the island and stole out on the marsh, crawling along the dike bank where he had killed the coon, persuading his pounding heart that food was his reason for coming. But he knew before he got there that the raccoon would be gone. Black vultures and an eagle rose in silence from the bank, and there was a flat track in the reeds where an alligator had come and gone, and there were blue crabs clinging upside down to the grass at the edge of the ditch. In the marsh, the weak and dead have a brief existence.
Traver was shifting his position when a bullet slapped into the mudbank by his head. Its whine he heard afterward, a swelling in his ears as he rolled into the water and clawed at the brittle stalks of cane across the ditch. A wind of teal wings, rising out of Dead Oak Pond, blurred his racket in the brake. He crossed a reedy flat and slid into a small pool twenty yards away. The echo of the shot diminished on the marsh, and silence settled, like a cloud across the sun.
Then fiddler crabs snapped faintly on the flat. Where he had passed, their yellow claws protruded, open, from the holes.
But he knew the man would come, and he tried to control the choked rasp of his breath. And the man came, picking his lean way along the dike, stopping to listen, coming on, as Traver himself had often done, tracking crippled ducks for the plantation gunners. Against the bright, high autumn sky, the hunter’s silhouette was huge.
Traver slipped the rabbit club from his belt.
The man had stopped just short of where Traver had lain. He squinted up and down the ditch. Though his face remained set, his right hand, wandering on the trigger guard and breech, betrayed his awareness that Traver might have a weapon.
He came a little farther, stopped again. He seemed on the point of calling out, but did not, as if afraid of intruding a human voice into this primeval silence. He bent and scratched his leg. Then, for a moment, scanning the far side of the dike, he turned his head.
Traver, straightening, tried to hurl the club, but it would not leave his hand. He ducked down and out of sight again. He told himself that the range had been too great, that the chance of a miss, however small, could not be taken. But he also knew he was desperate enough to have thrown it anyway, in agony, simply to bring an end to this suspense.
There was something else.
The man descended from the dike, on the far side. Almost immediately, he sank up to his knees, for there came a heavy, sucking sound as his boots pulled back. The man seemed to know that here, in the black resilience of the marsh, his quarry had him at a disadvantage, for he climbed back up onto the dike and took out a cigarette. This time, Traver thought he must call out, but he did not. Instead, he made his way back toward the woods.
Traver cursed him, close to tears. The hunter had only to watch from the trees at the end of the dike. Until dark, Traver was trapped. The hunter would sit down on a log and eat his food, while Traver lay in the cold pool and starved. The whole world was eating, hunting and eating and hunting again, in an endless cycle, while he starved. From where he lay, he could see a marsh hawk quartering wet meadows, and an eagle’s patient silhouette in a dead tree. Swaying grass betrayed a prowling otter, and on a mud flat near him, two jack snipe probed for worms. Soon, in that stretch of ditch that he could see, a young alligator surfaced.
Thank de Lo’d it you what stole my coon. Thank de Lo’d dis pool too shaller fo’ you daddy.
The alligator floated, facing him. Only its snout and eyes disturbed the surface, like tips of a submerged branch.
What you waitin on, Ugly? You waitin on ol’ Traver, man, you got to get in line.
The insects had found Traver, and he smeared black mud on his face and hands. Northeast, a vulture circled slowly down on something else.
Whole world waitin on poor Traver. Whole world hangin round to eat on Traver.
And though he said this to cheer himself, and even chuckled, the sense of the surrounding marsh weighed down on him, the solitude. Inert, half-buried, Traver mourned a blues.
Black river bottom, black river bottom
Nigger sinkin down to dat black river bottom
Ain’t comin home no mo’
Ol’ Devil layin at dat black river bottom
Black river bottom, black river bottom,
Waitin fo’ de nigger man los’ on de river
Dat ain’t comin home no mo’ …
Again the cabin was lit up, but this time he smelled coffee. The man’s shadow moved against the window, and the light died out. The man would be sitting in the dark, rifle pointed at the open door.
The hunt ended early the next morning.
TRAVER BELLIED ACROSS a clearing and slid down a steep bank which joined the high ground to the marsh. His feet were planted in the water at the end of Red Gate Ditch, and on his right was a muddy, rooted grove of yaupon known as Hog Crawl. The hunter was some distance to the eastward.
Traver had a length of dry, dead branch. He broke it sharply on his knee. The snap rang through the morning trees, and a hog grunted from somewhere in the Crawl. Then Traver waited, peering through the grass. He had his knife out, and his rabbit club. Lifting one foot from the water of the ditch, he kicked a foothold in the bank. Below him, the scum of algae closed its broken surface, leaving no trace of where the foot had been.
The man was coming. Traver could feel him, somewhere behind the black trunks of the trees. The final sun, which filtered through the woods from the ocean side, formed a strange red haze in the shrouds of Spanish moss.
Out of this the man appeared. One moment there was nothing and the next he was there, startling the eye like a copperhead camouflaged in fallen leaves. He moved toward Traver until he reached the middle of the clearing, just out of Traver’s range, facing the Hog Crawl. There he stood stiff as a deer and listened.
Traver listened too, absorbing every detail of the scene through every sense. The trap was his, he was the hunter now, on his own ground. The cardinal song had never seemed so liquid, the foliage so green, the smell of earth so strong.
The white man shifted, stepping a little closer. The hog snuffled again, back in the yaupon. Traver could just make it out beneath the branches, a brown-and-yellow brindle sow, caked with dry mud. Now it came forward, curious. It would see Traver before it saw the white man, and it would give him away.
Traver swallowed. The sow came toward him, red-eyed. The white man, immobile, waited for it also. When the sow saw Traver, it stopped, then backed away a little, then grunted and trotted off.
Traver flicked his gaze back to the man.
He was suspicious. Slowly the rifle swung around until it was pointed a few feet to Traver’s left.
He gwine kill me now. Even do I pray, O Lo’d, he gwine kill me now.
Traver was backing down the bank as the man moved forward. Beneath the turned-down brim, the eyes were fixed on the spot to Traver’s left. Traver flipped the butt of broken branch in the same direction. When the white man whirled upon the sound, Traver reared and hurled his club. He did not miss. It struck just as the shot went off.
Traver had rolled aside instinctively, but this same instinct drove him to his feet again and forward. The man lay still beside the rifle. The hand that had been groping for it fell back as Traver sprang. He pressed his knife blade to the white, unsunburned patch of throat beneath the grizzled chin.
Kill him. Kill him now.
But he did not. Gasping, he stared down at the face a foot from his. It was bleeding badly from the temple but was otherwise unchanged. Pinning the man’s arms with his knees, he pushed the eyelids open with his free hand. The eyes regarded him, unblinking, like the eyes of a wounded hawk.
“Wa’nt quite slick enough fo’ Traver, was you!” Traver panted. He roared hysterically in his relief, his laughter booming in the quiet grove. “You fall fo’ de oldes’ trick dey is, dass how smart you is, white folks!” He roared again into the silence. “Ol’ Traver toss de branch, ol’ white boy fooled, ol’ white boy cotch it in de haid! I mean! De oldes’ trick dey is!”
Traver glared down at him, triumphant. The man lay silent.
Traver ran the knife blade back and forth across the throat, leaving a thin red line. He forced his anger, disturbed by how swiftly his relief replaced it.
“You de one dat’s scairt now, ain’t you? Try to kill dis nigger what never done you harm! You doan know who you foolin with, white trash, you foolin with a man what’s mule and gator all wrap into one! And he gone kill you, what you think ’bout dat?”
The man watched him.
“Ain’t you nothing to say fore I kills you? You gone pray? Or is I done killed you already?” Uneasy astride the body of the white man, Traver rose to a squat and pricked him with his knife tip. “Doan you play possum with me, now! You ain’t foolin me no mo’, I gone kill you, man, you heah me?”
For the first time, Traver heard his own voice in the silence, and it startled him. He glanced around. The sun was bright red over the live oak trees, but quiet hung across the marsh like mist. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the white man with suspicion, but the other did not stir.
He dead, Traver thought, alarmed. I done killed him dead.
Avoiding the unblinking eyes, he picked up the rifle and stared at it, then he laid it like a burial fetish back into the grass. Now he stepped back, knife in hand, and prodded the body with his toe.
“Git up, now!” he cried, startling himself again. “You ain’t bad hurt, Cap’n, you just kinda dizzy, dass all. Us’ns is got to do some talkin, heah me now?”
But the body was still. A trail of saliva dribbled from the narrow mouth, and a fly lit on the grass near the bloody temple. Traver bent and crossed the arms upon the narrow chest.
“You fall fo’ de oldes’ trick in de world,” Traver mourned, and shook his head. “Dass what you done.” Badly frightened, he talked to comfort himself, glancing furtively around the clearing.
He started to back away, then bolted.
The man rolled over and up onto his knees, the rifle snatched toward his shoulder. He sighted without haste and fired. Then he reached for his hat and put it on, and turned the brim down all around.
Then he got up.
Traver was a powerful man and did not fall. He could still hear the echo and the clamor in the marsh, and he could not accept what was happening to him. He had never really believed it possible, and he did not believe it now. He dropped the knife and staggered, frowning, as the man walked toward him. The second bullet knocked him over backwards, down the bank, and when he came to rest, his head lay under water.
His instinct told him to wriggle a little further, to crawl away into the reeds. He could not move. He died.
1957
THE WOLVES OF AGUILA
On those rare occasions when a lean gray wolf wandered north across the border from the Espuela Mountains, trotting swiftly and purposefully into the Animas Valley or the Chiricahuas or Red Rock Canyon as so many had in years gone by, describing a half-circle seventy miles or more back into Mexico, and leaving somewhere along its run a mangled sheep or mutilated heifer, then Miller was sent for and Miller would go. He was a wolf hunter, hiring himself out on contract to ranchers and government agencies, and if the killing for which he was paid was confined more and more to coyotes and bobcats, the purpose of his life remained the wolf. He considered the lesser animals unworthy of his experience, deserving no better than the strychnine and the cyanide guns that filled the trunk of his sedan. Even the sedan had been forced upon him, when the wolf runs which once traced the border regions of New Mexico and Arizona had become so few and faded as to no longer justify the maintenance of a saddle pony. The southerly withdrawal of the gray wolf into the brown, dust-misted mountains of Chihuahua and Sonora had come to Will Miller as a loss, a reaction he had never anticipated. He was uneasily aware that persecution of the wolf was no longer justified, that each random kill he now effected contributed to the death of a wild place and a way of life that he knew was all he had.
Nevertheless, with mixed feelings of elation and penitence, he would travel to the scene of the last raid. There he would scout the area for scent posts where the wolf had left fre
Because of his silence and solitary habits, his glinting eyes and wind-eroded visage, his full Navajo blood, Miller was credited with the ability to think like an animal. His success was a border legend, and while it was true that he understood its creatures very well, he was successful because he did not take their ancient traits for granted. The dark history of Canis lupus, the great gray wolf of the world, he considered an important part of his practical education. Not that Miller accepted the old tales of werewolves and wolf-children, or not, at least, in the forefront of his mind. But the heritage in him of the Old People, the deep-running responses to the natural signs and sacraments, did not discount them. The eerie intelligence of this night animal, its tirelessness and odd ability to vanish, had awed him more than once, and he had even imagined, in his long solitude, that should he ever pursue it into the brown haze to the south, the wolf spirit would revenge itself in that shadowed land. Such knowledge lent his life a mystery and meaning that the church missions could not replace, and his mind asked no more. He was not a modern Indian, and he shunned the modern towns. Like the wolf itself, he abided by older laws.