Cedarbones

The Deer Hunter, 1973

In 1950, Kenny Gustafson, of Bloomington, Minnesota, joined the Army for the same reason most kids from that era did: being dirt poor. After doing basic in California, he and his team shipped out to Camp Drake, Japan before being dumped into the fray. A crack shot from his hunting days in Minnesota, Kenny learned quickly in the shit. For a year, he ate Army rations and camp cook meals that were heartier than his family could afford back home. In that year, he saved three Army brothers from the jaws of death at the Battle of Kapyong, where they assisted Australian and Canadian forces to hold vital ground against the Chinese. Unfortunately, he became the fourth Army grunt from that battle that needed saving, taking a round in his left shoulder.

Evacuated to a M.A.S.H. unit, he healed up, but the Army never put him back into the meat grinder. Instead, they shipped him to Amsterdam as an MP at the embassy there. And if he was honest, it wasn’t a bad gig. No more war. No bullets whizzing past him, or mortars spraying a cloud of dirt and bodies. No agonizing wails from the dying. Or the blood. Blood never bothered him before, but he had seen so much of it over there, that the sight of it made him sick. An affectation that would take another ten years to get over. But if he was being honest, the best thing about this new stint was the freedom. After his shift at the embassy, he was free to enjoy the city and the countryside outside it. It was there in Amsterdam that he met a Finnish gal by the name of Aava, who worked as a nurse in a local clinic. So smitten with Aava, they got married in Finland when he was on leave, and once his 8-years were up, they shipped out to the states to start their family.

In 1963 and after the birth of their first two daughters, Marie and Tabitha, they had scraped up enough money to purchase a small one-room cabin in the northern woods of Grand Marais. As the children grew up and a third daughter, Amelie, arrived, an affinity for the woods around their cabin grew on Kenny. They spent most of their summer weekends there, and in the fall, Kenny took to the woods each November to fill his freezer during the whitetail deer hunting season. He found a prime spot of woods just west of Jackson Lake Road, where a series of four swamps surrounded a gently sloping hill dappled with birch and oak. He had heard from the locals that the big bucks preferred the swamps. Swamp Bucks, they called them. Feeling confident in the spot, he fashioned a tree stand out of cut birch and for ten years had wonderful success harvesting his deer from there—even nabbing two trophies in an 8-pointer and a monster 12-pointer.

In 1973, Kenny made the trip up from the Twin Cities in the snow and arrived at his cozy one-room cabin in Grand Marais. He unpacked his gear, got a warm fire going in the fireplace, and when night fell, he lit an old Coleman lantern so he could play solitaire on the small table. A transistor radio played static-filled versions of hits like Charlie Rich’s “The Most Beautiful Girl,” Merle Haggard’s “If We Make It Through December,” and Kris Kristofferson’s “Why Me.” He liked Kristofferson because he too was a veteran just like Kenny. He heated a can of Dinty Moore beef stew on the potbelly stove, and while he ate, he flipped cards and tapped his foot to the music.

Opening morning, he woke up at 4:00, made some coffee and oatmeal, then shrugged on his long underwear and hunting gear and then fired up his truck for the drive in. As much as he adored time with his wife and daughters, he enjoyed his quiet time in the woods each hunting season. The drive through the backwoods of the forest always kept him alert, especially when he spotted the telltale bright dots of deer’s eyes in the bath of headlights from his truck. Sometimes, the eyes were lower and from raccoons, but when he saw a whitetail in the morning hours, it got him excited.

“Gonna be a good day,” he’d mutter to himself.

He parked about a half mile away from his stand on an unused logging road. Once he had his coat on, his flashlight ready, and his Winchester Model 70 loaded, he’d lock up his truck and begin his walk into the woods. Even though he told himself he carried no baggage back from the war, when he was alone in the darkened woods, he knew his mind heard voices. Joey Datone crying for his mother as the medics dragged him legless away from the battle. Bobby La Franco telling a joke about his girlfriend’s titties, before a mortar tore him to shreds. But worst of all was his own voice, talking to Teddy Fontaine in the chopper back to the mobile hospital as he lay next to him. “Talk to me Teddy! Stay with me. I need to know the cookie recipe your mama makes for Christmas. You talked them up so goddamn much, I need to know it. Tell me that story about Julia Henrow and how she kissed you! Stay with me, buddy. Stay awake. Don’t close your eyes, man. Don’t close them.”

As he stepped through the soft snow and followed his trailblazings on the trees leading to his deer stand, he’d shake his head, trying to remove the voices. But also, to remove the fear of being alone. Or being in that spot, so many of his friends were before they passed. The psyche doctor told him it was called survivor’s guilt, and he had to acknowledge that it was part of his trauma. But saying that never helped. What helped him most was to stop, take a few deep breaths, and visualize his wife and each of his daughters. And there, in the woods with the snow muffling all sound, the voices would trail off, and he could open his eyes again. When he got into his stand, he removed his stocking hat to cool off, and in the blackness of night, with the indigo cosmos spilling over the empty treetops above, he’d pull out his cigarettes and light one up. A habit he picked up in the Army, he had all but quit at home and especially around his family. But up in the woods with the voices of the past and his own conscience, his only friends, he indulged in the habit.

The sun rose, hit midday, and fell in the west. A sleek white ermine bouncing through the snow, a pileated woodpecker, and a small flock of chickadees flitting from branch to branch as chirpy as can be were his only visitors. After ten years of hunting, Kenny knew that the prime hours were sunrise and sunset. So, he likely had one more shot that day to see a deer. And sure enough, as the pumpkin sun shone through the slats of the woods, he noticed movement out of the corner of his eye. Slowly, he spun his head toward the movement and down the hill he sat on a buck silently stepped through the snow between two of the nearby swamps. It followed a bottleneck of woods right towards him.

He raised his rifle and scoped up the critter, counting the tines on the antlers.

“Nine,” he whispered to himself.

Patiently, he held his ground and waited for the buck to come even closer, keeping his rifle trained on the vital zone. As the buck approached, it held its snout low, using its sense of smell to detect danger or, more importantly, in-season does. Then it would raise its head, twitch its ears and look around for danger, or the rutty does. When the deer turned right and stepped farther east, it showed Kenny its broadside. And with his rifle on the true, Kenny looked down his scope and uttered, “Braaap.”

The deer immediately froze and looked up at Kenny. But it was already too late for the critter. The report from Kenny’s .308 shattered the silence in the stand of birches long after the round shattered the buck’s ribcage, tore apart its lungs, and then punched through the other side of its ribs. The buck instinctively jumped straight up in the shape of a horseshoe, and then ran back out the same way he came in. A crack shot, Kenny knew his shot hit true. He ejected the empty casing out of his rifle and loaded another. Then, he leaned back in his stand to relax and have a smoke. Halfway through his smoke, the clouds had gathered and a light snow fell. By the time he butted out his smoke, the snow pummeled the woods, casting snow in every direction. And not just flakes, but whole clumps like tea bags, pelting anything that wished to traverse through it.

Kenny climbed down the ladder of his tree stand and began his walk to find his deer. When he found the deer’s tracks running away from him, it had shed blood everywhere like a murder scene, and the crimson spray against the snow was easy to track. Through the snow, he trudged. Snowflakes dashed against his face and beard. The falling flakes turned the twilight woods surreal, like looking through static at an old television show. And for Kenny, it made him see things. Like Joey Datone, Bobby La Franco and Teddy Fontaine. All dressed in their army greens and covered in blood. When he’d see Joey crawling along the ground without legs, he’d stop, close his eyes and think about Aava. When Bobby shambled between the static with a missing arm and half a face, he’d stop again and think about Marie and Tabitha. And when he saw Teddy choking on blood and gasping for air, he’d stop and think about his infant daughter, Amelie.

But when he opened his eyes again, the demons hadn’t left him.

There, thirty yards ahead, lay his 9-point buck, awash in a pool of crimson. But something knelt before the beat. A creamy skinned woman, dirty and naked, gnashed at the deer carcass before him. Wet, ravenous bites came between feral grunts of hunger. He stopped and closed his eyes. Mumbled his wife’s name repeatedly. But when he opened them, the demon still knelt there, tearing apart his deer. His hands shook as he raised the rifle and he pulled the scope close to his face. It took a few moments to steady his aim from wavering back and forth, but when his scope lined up with the demon, it no longer knelt but stood, facing him. Grime and patches of moss covered her feet and legs, while her minge had grown bushy and wild. Her breasts hung low and covered in dirt. Pauldrons of moss hung at the demon woman’s shoulders and her face appeared haunting and wooden, like a mask frozen in rigor, bloody from its eating. Worst of all, her eyes looked back, pale, cold and lifeless, like a frozen fish staring back at him.

Kenny’s breath caught in fear, and he lowered his rifle.

Away from the scope, the demon woman no longer stood there. Just his deer.

With his heart smacking his ribs, he staggered toward the buck. Once there, he inspected his quarry, where the demon had torn open the deer’s skin and spilled its intestines. His breath came in large gusts and even though he rarely got cold in the woods, his fingers and toes tingled. It couldn’t have been real, he told himself. It was a coyote for sure. But then, he dared to turn his head in the direction the deer wanted to go, and he saw tracks in the snow. Not a deer’s. Or a coyote’s. But a human female’s. His body froze in fear. The snow fell around him at harsh angles, and he feared this was all a mirage. An illusion cast by his mind. And the only way to prove he wasn’t crazy was to follow the tracks.

So, he did just that.

He trudged alongside her footprints in the snow, his rifle pulled up into Army position, and his mind on Korean patrol. It didn’t help that the snow picked up and filled the prints, or that the sun had set and the daylight had faded. He pulled out his flashlight and kept it on the tracks. In the dark, he only heard his own heartbeat slamming in his throat and smelled his sweat running down his ears and neck. His feet plodded along tired and weary for a mile or more.

Once the night completely devoured dusk, the voices came back. But not the voices of his platoon. The voices of these woods, a bit muffled and in the distance. Branches cracking underfoot. Slow at first. Then faster. Loud male voice yelling, mumbling. Then a crunch of a log or something striking bone. A thud of a body falling to a leaf-covered ground. It was odd to him that these noises didn’t seem like his time. As he stepped through the snow, his own footsteps made little sound. What was this place? Or was it his mind? Then a woman’s scream echoed through the cedars and oaks. Clear, concise, screeching at Kenny’s ears.

In that moment, his mind switched gears. He no longer thought of the apparition as a demon, but as a ghost. A woman. Hungry, afraid. And as he hurried his pace, he heard the muffled sounds of male grunts, and underneath it the quiet sobbing of a woman, until the male orgasmed and the woods fell quiet.

Kenny quickened his pace on the tracks, thinking perhaps he could stop whatever made these noises. But then she heard the woman mutter, “No, please,” before yet more male grunting. Her sobs echoed and bounced off cedar trunks. Kenny crested a hill in the darkness and then down into a gulley. The pattern continued. Male grunting, a woman sobs, then another male orgasm. The sequence happened a third time, as Kenny chugged through a swampy grove of cedars. He stopped after the echoes of the third orgasm gave way to the bone-crunching sound of a large piece of wood smashing bone repeatedly.

Then the woods fell silent.

What the hell did he just hear? The question boomed in his mind, but he knew what those sounds were.

Rape.

Murder.

Death.

On the verge of passing out, he swung his flashlight around the grove looking for anybody, or any sign of what had happened here in the past. And when he told himself this was all in his head, his flashlight beam bounced off something more macabre than anything he saw in Korea. A young white cedar tree sprung through a pile of human bones loosely connected by leathery flaps of skin and hardened ligaments. The body’s feet lay at the base of the tree, with roots woven through. The shin bones hung higher, lofted by sprouting branches and the bark beginning to grow around them. The femurs hung from ribbons of skin and tendon from the pelvis, which the cedar trunk had also speared as it grew. Higher branches held the arm bones. The trunk also grew through ribcage at an angle, the young cedar having grown through the gaps in the ribs. Above that, the main trunk beam had grown through the fractured skull and hoisted it ten feet in the air.

As Kenny panned his flashlight up and down this monstrosity, his mind turned with the amazement at it all. For a man with a strong connection to both senseless death and nature, this totem stood as a too perfect homage to nature, holding up atrocity to humanity, waiting for justice, calling for the future to see its cruel past. In that moment, he felt a part of something beyond hunting, far away from his family, or this Earth. His memories flooded back from Korea. The bodies slumped in the cold mud. Their faces twisted into fleshy masks of horror. The inevitability of blood exploding from an arm before he heard the bullet. How even in the throes of war, the physics of it all didn’t even feel real. And here, after all that he saw, his eyes opened once more. He must bear witness to this creation. To this evil. To this implausibility. And unlike before, he felt the need to pass it on. To ensure that someone would uncover what happened here and release the soul trapped in the cedar tree, so she was no longer tied to this miserable site.

At that moment, he fell to his knees and laid his bare hands on the tree.

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