Goat Mountain Read Free

then the road could have changed.
    The men in the cab, me on lookout, and we were high on the flank of a mountain now, an open curve of slope without trees. Only low clumps of brush and dry grass, all other ridges too far away to shoot a buck, so there was nothing to search except the warp of the hill as it was revealed ahead, waiting for antlers skylined and the quick jump and run.
    A sunny, beautiful day of blue sky and breeze and birds and our pickup winding toward the gate, which would come just as we hit forest again. I was feeling the excitement I always felt on arrival, because this place was not the same as any other. This was where we returned and had returned for generations. This was what we owned and where we belonged and where our history was kept, all who had come before and all that had happened, and all would be told again during this hunt, and for the first time my own story would be added if I could find a buck.
    The last bit of road through cutaway embankments and manzanita, a section I never remembered. And when we emerged, we could see Goat Mountain before us. We entered along the southern flank, a ridge rising to our right past the upper glades and on to steep slides of rock we never hunted. Below this, thick forest, and somewhere in there was our camp and spring and meadow, and below it, the reservoir and bear wallow and lower glades and switchbacks and the burn where a fire had swept through and every other place that had been written into us.
    We always stopped here to look, to see who we were. Six hundred and forty acres shared with two partners from the Central Valley. Far away from anything. Divided up in several chunks along the entire side of a mountain, reaching down almost to the edges of the long thin valley below and Cache Creek.
    No one spoke. And we could have stayed there looking for any amount of time. But the pickup rolled slowly forward again, the pull of setting up camp, and the track angled down into trees where all views were lost and leaves fallen already from the live oak, smooth dry plates rimmed by spines. Red and green of manzanita. A scrub jay with its harsh call and then an explosion of quail from right beside the road, lumpy brown bodies throwing themselves on low flight paths, wobbling and indecisive, into other brush and trees beyond. I was trained to raise a shotgun and fire, aching now to sight in on those dark topknots as the birds flared their wings for landing. Each of them pausing for an instant, my eye freezing the moment when I would aim and pull the trigger, a moment of perfection, but I was never allowed to kill birds here. No gunfire to spook the deer. And so the quail vanished again into brush and the pickup swept forward and I felt a dull regret. Some part in me just wanted to kill, constantly and without end.
    The air cooler now, the road fully shaded, patterns of shadow in the steep slope that fell away to the left. And finally we arrived. The gate ahead thick steel painted the color of dried blood. Heavy pipe construction that no truck could bend, both sides anchored six feet deep in concrete, and a lockbox too thick to shoot. Even a rifle slug would only smear and ricochet. An evolution of gates over the years, and this the final one, put in by my father, a gate that could never be destroyed by any poacher, a gate that would never have to be replaced.
    I jumped down and followed my father, who lay in the dirt under the lockbox and reached upward with both hands through a narrow steel chute. This prevented anyone from getting at the lock with bolt cutters or a gun. But there was hardly room for a key, either, working blind and cramped. My father grimacing, his shoulders rising up from the ground. Goddamn poachers, he said. I can’t quite turn the key. Get down on the ground behind me.
    So I lay facedown in the dirt and gravel and leaves and my father braced against me, raised up, and I heard the lock spring open.
    Finally, he said, and he worked a bit