Sniper

A good hunter only needs to fire three rounds.

Dawn has barely broken, and the floorboards of Dad’s usually immaculate Toyota pickup are already littered with Styrofoam coffee cups, the slimy shells of sunflower seeds, and polished brass thirty-ought-six rounds. Dad’s left wrist rests at the top of the steering wheel as the tires skip across scoria roads, kicking up a coral-colored plume in the rearview. His head is cocked perpendicular to his shoulders, scanning dark patches on the rolling plain.

“You watching that side, Sonny?”

I grunt in assertion, gripping the little rifle between my legs. I’m still asleep. This is many years before I will start voluntarily waking up before sunrise. Looking for something new to pop into my Walkman, I open the center console and run my finger across Dad’s cassette collection, unchanged in a decade: Jim Croce, Waylon Jennings, Whitney Houston.

“Let’s see. You got the safety on now?” He leans over the shifter and checks my gun before finishing his sentence. He smells like rifle oil and Irish Spring. “Good man.” His right hand floats from my rifle to the radio’s volume knob, turning the AM golden oldies station to a low murmur. His hand lands on his thermos. Steam escapes from the opened lid as Dad takes a sip of the Motel 6 Folgers. His chin is freshly shaved, but a thick salt-and-pepper mustache is perched under his handsome nose.

It’s opening weekend of deer season, and our assigned hunting unit is the highly coveted 4A, a forty-five-minute drive from our motel room in Dickinson. Bordered by Killdeer, Watford City, Grassy Butte, and the Fort Berthold Reservation, 4A is eight hundred square miles of western North Dakota badlands. The unit is cut in half by the Little Missouri, the river that carved these low canyons out of limestone around 600,000 years ago, the end of the last Ice Age and the heyday of Neanderthals. Viewed from 30,000 feet, the dried canyonlands resemble flattened millipedes, whose legs are forested gullies, perfect terrain for Mule deer to find shelter.

In these days before Garmin or Google Maps, I am Dad’s navigator, sitting in the passenger seat, with a worn topographical map of North Dakota flat across my lap. Not that Dad needs it to get around his home state. As Team Leader at the Vet Center in Minot, part of his job is driving around the western part of North Dakota to make house calls to the Vietnam and Gulf War veterans that he counsels. Even on these unmarked scoria-covered county roads, which all look the same, he’s got a sense of direction that confounds me.

Margaret Joe Brown, the family chocolate labrador, is sitting behind us on the narrow bench seat of the pickup’s cab. Maggie is more Dad’s dog than anyone else’s. He has been training her since she was a pup, honing her retriever instincts. She is his bird dog. When we hunt pheasants, she disappears into the fallow corn stalks and flushes game. It’s difficult to train dogs to stay close to the hunting party. Some labs are known to run two hundred yards ahead, well outside of shotgun range. Maggie stays close — within fifty yards — perfect for pheasant hunting. When a member of our hunting party strikes a bird, she always brings it back to Dad, sometimes two birds at a time, to his amusement. She’s smart and efficient. And sweet.

Dogs aren’t needed in deer hunting; it’s usually frowned upon to bring them out. Their scent and their barking can spook the deer. Maggie’s a good girl, though, and she’s a far superior companion for Dad than sixteen-year-old me. She doesn’t complain about Dad’s music selection or his unwillingness to eat anywhere but Applebee’s when we stay in Dickinson. True to her breed, she is the shade of a Hershey bar with a white patch on her chest in the shape of a number seven. Her eyes are deep brown and kind, like Dad’s. She’ll die far too young from a tumor on her liver. The surgery is too expensive, so Dad will opt to put her down.

We cruise along for a while when abruptly, Dad spreads his broad, gloved hand across my chest while skidding the truck to a jarring halt. A plume of pink dust billows around and ahead of us. He looks past me off into the trees, a note of disappointment in his gruff whisper, “Joshua! A monster! Heading right for that goddamn tree line.” I look where his nose is pointing and see only a blur of bald branches and wild grasses.

Dad deftly click-clack-clicks his foot down on the emergency brake and silently springs from the truck. He pulls his 7mm Remington Magnum from the gun rack over Maggie’s head and charges one round into the barrel. He’s preloaded two additional rounds into the magazine. One of his many maxims is: “a good hunter only needs to fire three rounds, any more than that, and he’s poisoning the watershed.” Never taking his eyes off the buck, which I still can’t see, he crouches around the front of the truck and down into a ditch: ever the twenty-two-year-old Marine. I quietly open my door and hop out, crouching low and following him with my thirty-ought-six. We leave the doors open as Dad has instructed. “Don’t make a sound. Mule deer can hear a duck fart from a half-mile away.” He sidles over to a buckshot, sun-faded fencepost and steadies the polished steel barrel of the weapon in his sniper’s hands. He trains his left eye, watering from puffs of wind, onto the bead, and centers the bead onto the beast.

I point the scope of my rifle in the general direction of Dad’s 7mm barrel, only then catching my first glimpse of the buck. Emerging from a dense outcropping of trees, he is indeed a monster. I can see five horns on each side of his antlers — a “five-by-five” in hunting terminology — with the barrel chest of a female elk.

The deer is over a quarter-mile away and moving. I shake my head. The last thing you want to do is shoot him in the hindquarters, destroying pounds of good venison. Given the wind and the distance, Dad will need to aim at the animal’s spine to avoid hitting low. As he’s told me innumerable times, “you don’t want it gut-shot.” That could mean hours of following the blood trail into the deep gulleys of the badlands. Our hunting parties have lost game in these situations before. Jason, a regular member of our hunting party, once delivered a non-lethal shot to a Whitetail buck. We followed the blood trail for hours, over snaggled hills and rocky valleys, finally finding the miserable creature bedding down near a creek. When he heard us approaching, he lifted his head in our direction. The little two-by-two buck’s lower jaw was hanging open. Jason’s first bullet had passed straight through the animal’s face. He now raised his rifle and put the little buck out of his misery, but Dad couldn’t quit laughing about Jason’s mangling of the deer. For years after, that deer would be remembered as “the yaw buck” because it looked like he was yawning when we came upon him. “That was a horseshit shot, Jason,” Dad said afterward, laughing. “Poor little bastard, running across the badlands, mouth hanging open like that.” Dad’s laugh is unabashed; toothy. “Yawww!”

Dad’s ungloved pointer finger rests patiently over the trigger. He controls his labored breathing as he’s taught me: “Wait until you exhale, Son, and then squeeze the trigger, don’t jerk it.” The buck begins to corner away from us. “Just come broadside, you sonofabitch,” he whispers. “Muleys are stupid,” he has told me. “They’ll run away awhile and then turn around and look at you, and that’s when you gotta get ’em. Different from Whitetails. Once you see that white ass bounding away from you, they’re gone.”

Through my scope, I can see the buck’s enormous hindquarters rippling with muscle as he trots away. Three hundred and fifty yards now, nearly out of range. Suddenly, as we half-hope, half-expect, the buck stops and looks back at us over his left shoulder. His large rack turned, radar ears alert.

A powerful blast emanates across the farmland, echoing off the canyon walls for miles. A moment later, the monster kicks his hind legs, runs in a tight, wild circle, and crashes head-first to the ground. He snorts a final, blood-spattered breath, which rises and blows briefly in our direction, before dissipating into the chill November air.

“Yo! Got ‘im!” Dad chuckles, turning to me with his shooting hand up for a high five. We return to the truck to retrieve Maggie and grab Dad’s gutting knife. He takes another satisfying sip of cheap coffee, and we go to get the deer. Maggie trots ahead, nose to the ground, as we cross the shorn wheat field and find the monster muley, stone dead. Dad lobbed a perfect shot, just behind the left armpit, straight through the heart. There are no pink bubbles around the wound, or the buck’s muzzle, which would signify a lung shot and a slower death — while the animal drowned in his blood.

It was a heart shot: clean, fatal, and made with only one round.