Twilfod Baines, Buck Hunter Unbounded
By Darrin Doyle
Rifle season is ephemeral, lasting only a few
blissful weeks, and Twilford, like his brothers
and father, uncles and cousins, and generations
of Baines preceding them, rose before sunlight
and drove to the rural acreage of land where
he’d become accustomed to spending this day,
where deer were plentiful, where trees were dense
enough to provide cover but not so thick as to
prevent sight lines to his prey. He preferred to
hunt alone, something sacred about the quiet pine
air, the flickering of birds in branches the only
disruption to the stillness.
On this particular morning, fog-headed and lethargic and emotionally spent, Twilford slipped a pinch of chew behind his lip and
propped his orange-jacketed torso against a birch.
The soil was frosty. He knew the area well, the
landowner being an old friend of his deceased
father, and he knew a trail that served as a thruway for the animals to reach the pond. Already
he’d spotted tracks, some old, some recent, and so
he positioned himself a good forty yards distant
and hunkered in for a wait. To hunt required
supreme patience and a monk-like stillness and
silence. His scent he’d dulled with a few sprays of
pine essence, not one to believe in the application
of deer urine or other methods that he deemed
trickery. After all it wasn’t hard to outwit a dumb
animal. Twilford’s true druthers was to bow hunt;
however, a high school football injury had left
a poorly healed tear in the muscles around his
scapula, making it impossible to draw the string
without intense discomfort. So bullets it was.
Twilford was having trouble staying
awake, his eyelids weighted to the point of agony.
His head throbbed from the copious whiskey he’d
guzzled mere hours ago. He felt at once numb
and wretched, left this way by a personal issue of
a magnitude he’d never experienced and didn’t
quite honestly know how to handle. The woman
he’d been seeing for over a year – her name was
Elsa; they had talked of marriage – had sat him
at the table the previous night and told him, with
a stern and placid face, that she loved another
man. That the cuckolder was his closest friend of
twenty years, his name Jeremy, seemed a tragedy
of comical country song proportions, but the hurt
was very real, deep, and debilitating. A double
betrayal. She’d been sleeping with his now exfriend for upwards of three months, she confessed
with dry eyes, a quarter of the duration of her and
Twilford’s courtship.
That evening Elsa left him, officially and
bodily anyway, he thought, because quite apparently she’d not been truly present for quite some
time. She had only been an illusion, albeit a
warm-bodied, soft, fragrant one. He secured his
lips to one bottle followed by another and got
so wasted he needed to throw up, so he throated
two fingers and purged while slumped over the
bowl. Though highly inebriated in the waning
hours of night, he still made a point of setting his
alarm before collapsing upon the mattress. He
would not miss Opening Day just because of the
cruelty he had suffered. If anything a return to
the woods and to the tradition he prized above
all might provide at least a temporary balm to his
scorched soul.
Against the tree he jerked awake, not
realizing he’d fallen asleep. Juice had dribbled out
of his mouth, spattering his pants brown. When
he spasmed into consciousness he also tipped his
Thermos, the lid of which wasn’t properly secured.
Coffee chugged out onto the ground beneath
him. Pants wet, he stood and cursed. Was this,
he thought, all to provide laughter to the man
upstairs? When and why had he been appointed
cosmic jester?
At that exact moment he heard the crack
of branches, his eyes detecting a glimpse of
movement. Two deer were cautiously proceeding
along the feed run, nosing the soil and picking at