The Jackers

by ROBERT L. ROE

1

LOYD kept craning his short neck to look over the hood. Dan looked too. “There are some tracks over here,” he said.

“Which way are they heading?” Lloyd asked. “Down.”

“Those are probably mine. Ones I made coming down through, this morning. Look for any going up.”

“You didn’t come up through this way?”

“No. Past Mildreth’s and through the Hood ‘n’ Haggard pasture.”

“Any sign over there?” Dan asked.

“Some. Nothin’ like up here though.”

They crossed a little bridge. The record of the snow was plain. Only one set of footprints pointing down the road.

“That’s all right,” Dan said, settling back in the seat and gazing out through the snowy silent woods. There was a blue light gathering in there as though it were night already.

Lloyd sat huddled over the wheel watching the ruts. It wouldn’t do to bounce into a ditch at this stage.

“Wonder what Ezry thinks,” Dan said.

“If he heard us.”

“Oh, hell. This is no Silent Six.”

Lloyd laughed. “He might have been wooding it. Ezry’s allus out o’ firewood. He can’t pinch us, anyhow. Most he can do is squeal. He’d do that quick enough.”

“Oh. . . . He would?”

“Sure. Make Reynolds think he was watching the place good. Ezry’s got a soft snap and he knows it. Nothing to do but drive off jackers and keep the town boys out of the brooks, cut a little ice and a little wood and gets seventy-five a month for that.”

“Um-m,” Dan said. “They can’t do anything to you unless they catch you with the meat on you, though?”

“No. . . . Ezry’s cur’ous too. Likes to know who does what. If he comes snooping we ought to jump on him and beat the hell out of him.”

Dan didn’t say anything. The car bounced and rattled over the uneven road. Lloyd had to run one wheel on the bank to keep from hitting the crankcase on the high center. Brush shipped on the windshield and made it rattle because it was cracked. Dan peered into the woods hoping to see a pair of large ears and a delicate black snout pointed at them. But you never saw them when you were looking for them.

The car stopped in front of a wooden gate.

Lloyd said, “The deer don’t belong to Reynolds no more than to us.”

“Less. He’s rich and don’t need to shoot his meat. They don’t eat his garden.”

“They ate two rows of beaus on me last year,” Lloyd said.

Dan got out. “You got your beans back, I guess. There’s a lot of beans to a deer.”

Lloyd laughed.

The gate had no hinges. The bars rested on crosspieces nailed between two posts set at a forty-fivedegree angle to the road. This allowed the gate to be carried out of the road.

“Shall I put it back?” Dan asked, staring at the No HUNTING sign.

“No. Maybe we’ll be in a hurry going down.”

The road was worse inside the fence. They steered around a swampy place that was black against the snow. The road followed the bank of a stream that brawled over stones and around thin ledge ice on the rocks.

They came to a small, neat white farmhouse looking newly painted. Dan sat up looking worried. No smoke was coming out of the chimney. The snow was flawless.

“Looks good enough to live in,” Dan said. “Sure nobody’s here?”

“Nobody’s lived here, nor in none of the thirty other farmhouses that Reynolds bought up so’s he could control the headwaters and fence his brook — not for ten years since he bought ‘em all out.”

Lloyd cut off the motor and they sat in the car at the edge of a small orchard.

Lloyd climbed out. Dan sat still.

“Wouldn’t we better turn around? If we get anything, we don’t want to be here any longer than we have to.”

“Better to head her out of the wind.” Lloyd drew an old quilt over the radiator.

2

THEY took their rifles and headed up a steep bank through scrub spruce, pin cherry, and moose maple. The snow was slippery and the going steep. Dan found he had better footing if he stepped up with the side of his foot instead of the toe. They were both breathing hard when they reached the top of the bank and the ground leveled out to a slight slope.

“Take a breather,” Lloyd said, and grounded his rifle on the toe of his shoe.

In the silence a steady rhythmic thump was heard.

“Listen!” Lloyd said tensing.

It was a hollow thump-thump-thump, like a slow gallop on hard ground.

“Sounds like deer jumping. Hell, I hope we ain’t scared a herd.”

“Maybe they’re running in circles around us,” Dan said. He slapped Lloyd on the shoulder. “It’s my heart pounding, you darn fool!”

Lloyd stepped closer and listened. “Cheese ‘n’ crust, so’tis! You got a bad organ, boy.”

“Last me till I die,” Dan said.

They stopped in the edge of the brush and looked across a brier patch and over a stone wall into a fair sloping meadow. The meadow swept up a knoll past an orchard to the house. There was a barn beyond the house. Behind the barn another hill rose, and on top of that another house sat small and dark and looking desolate against the cold light. The brook ran along under the hill to the right and there were more spruces, thick and young, bordering the bank.

Lloyd had stopped behind a bull spruce. Dan stood just behind him looking over his head. They looked at the house in front of them. They looked at the house beyond. They searched the long expanse of snow between them and the orchard for man tracks.

A wind sucked up the draw between the hills and went f-f-fin the bull spruce. Some snow sifted off the one behind Dan and went down his neck. He shrugged and a drop of water slid down his hot spine under the sheepskin.

“Chance it,” he said.

Lloyd stepped out and Dan after him, stepping in his tracks. They crossed the stone wall and went up through the meadow. Presently they were in the little orchard.

“Look,” Lloyd said.

There were tracks all around the trees. The snow was trodden by many pointed-hoofed feet. The little w's went everywhere, aimlessly, hunting out the tiny wrinkled glazed brown apples. Dan glanced up into the twiggy trees. A few brown rotten frozen apples hung in the gray knobby twigs.

They tramped from tree to tree.

“Man track,” Dan said.

Lloyd came over to look.

“That’s mine. Let’s see. Yeah. I came through.”

They circled the house watching for tracks. Dan was in the lead when they stepped onto the porch and reached for the piece of leather hooked over a nail holding the door shut.

“Wait,” Lloyd said.

“It’s twisted. Two twists to the right,” Dan said looking at the piece of leather.

“Yeah. That’s the way I left it. Let’s go in. Be dark in half an hour.”

“Less,” Dan said and pushed open the door. The smell of the deserted house blew up around them every time they took a step. They went in all the rooms. When they closed the door they fastened it with a propped stick. Lloyd laid his rifle and Dan his carbine on the table that stood in the corner. Lloyd laid the long flashlight down carefully between the guns. He went into a little room facing north and opened the window. Dan opened the west window of the long room they first stepped into. It faced the middle of the orchard. Lloyd’s window gave obliquely on the north end of the orchard.

Lloyd dragged a crippled chair with a short leg and a wounded back in front of his window. Dan found a chair with a hole in the seat which had evidently served for a commode. He wondered what those people were like who had sold their old home to Reynolds for a fishing preserve. Anyway they had had a baby. The commode was too small for an adult.

He took his carbine from the table and set it in the corner behind him. Then he sat down. He had to crouch over to see beneath the bottom of the window sash. This made the tail of his sheepskin coat stick up, and the draft from Lloyd’s window blew up his back. He tucked his coattail under him and sat down again. Crouched over, he let his eyes rove from side to side searching the ground, the trees, the bushes, the appearance of things so that he could recognize them when darkness came.

Lloyd was moving around in the other room. He trod heavily from side to side. The legs of his chair scratched on the floor when he moved it. The chair squeaked. He had sat down again. Dan could hear him breathing heavily. The long flashlight clicked as it was laid on the floor.

Then there was silence.

Through the open window Dan could hear the faraway roar of the brook. At the same time cold air streamed past him from Lloyd’s room in a stronger current. A piece of loose wallpaper flapped in there.

Dan saw that the stone wall was a long dark line. The clumps of suckers surrounding the base of the untended apple trees appeared to be getting thicker, more substantial, joining the trunks, becoming incorporated.

“Almost dark,” he whispered.

After a time Lloyd grunted.

“Yeah.”

3

THE cold blew around Dan’s ears and his knees were cold. He foresaw a long evening of discomfort. He got up, tiptoed to Lloyd’s room, and leaning against the doorjamb said he was going upstairs to look up the hill — east. The tracks they had seen came from that way. Maybe he would see them coming.

Lloyd seemed to be thinking this over. He looked squat and misshapen on his chair. He reached under his coat and pulled a package of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, lit one, puffed, extended the package to Dan.

Dan lit a cigarette too and went upstairs to a wide landing with a many-paned window looking east. Two rooms led off it to the west. A window sash with several good panes of glass in it leaned against one wall. He worked on it quietly with his knife. Only the glazier’s points still held the glass in place. The putty had dropped out years ago.

They probably died years ago, Dan thought— all except the child, the one the commode was made for. When he grew up the work of the farm seemed silly — keeping it up. All the land that was worth clearing was cut over and the roots grubbed up. The triumph was over and the slow day-by-day grind of wood-cutting in winter, sugaring in early spring, spring plowing, spring planting, cultivating and haying, harvesting and cider-making. Then fall hunting and ice-cutting.

He got out four panes and stood them up against the wall. It was warmer up here. No drafts.

He picked up the glass and went downstairs carefully, tiptoe. Lloyd cleared his throat raucously.

Dan sat down on the commode and stared into the orchard. The tree trunks stood out dimly against the snow — gray on silver. The branches made a thick continuous mesh in which a star twinkled here and there like a fish in a net. He counted seven tree trunks and four clumps. Right.

Damn that wind! It was making his backside cold again. His knees felt numb. Lloyd sniffled like a water-closet flushing — one of the noisier kind. A wind blew the sound of the brook to him clearly and sucked it back again. The stars glittered less brilliantly.

“No moon,” he said.

“Naw,” Lloyd answered.

Lloyd got up, came out. It was strange so small a man could make so much noise. He reached along the wall and a match flared. A cigarette glowed.

“How about something to eat?” he asked.

“It sounds good to me,” Dan said.

They went into what had evidently been the buttery. It had shelves and a window, with a wide shelf under it, facing west. Lloyd went out to the table and felt around for the sandwiches.

“What’s this?”

“Glass. I found it upstairs. If I don’t get meat I’ll get some proper windows out of this.”

Lloyd laughed. “There’s more in here on the shelves. I found it when I was up earlier.”

He found the glass and gave it to Dan. Dan put all the panes together and tied them with a piece of twine he had in his pocket.

“That ought to carry.”

“Sure.”

“If I don’t fall down on it.”

“Sure! Ha, ha!”

They leaned their elbows on the wide shelf and munched the sandwiches. Sausage. Dry bread. Dan chewed slowly. There was only a sandwich apiece.

“Think they’ve stood us up?”

“They’ll be in here.”

“Yes, but when? Before we’re frozen to death?”

“You cold?”

“The sheepskin keeps my body warm but my legs are cold. I only have one pair of pants on. Must be down to about ten. Aren’t you cold?”

“Only my feet. They sweat, see, when I walk. Now they’re cold.”

“Un — hunh. I’lI take my sheepskin off and put it over my knees.”

4

DAN was undoing the button loops when they both stiffened. It sounded like someone thumping a rubber shoe on wood.

“You do that?” Lloyd whispered tensely.

“No. Thought you did.”

Lloyd flung himself silently out of the room and dropped on one knee by Dan’s window with the flashlight. He held the long silvery five-cell cylinder like a gun. There was a click. The light leaped out, dazzling on the snow, bringing blindingly prominent near branches, beyond which they could not see. The long dazzling shaft swept from side to side, paused, swept on, back, up, down, clicked dark.

“Damn,” Dan whispered.

“I heard it. You can’t fool me. He’s here somewhere.”

Lloyd dashed into the room from which he had been watching. He could be silent when he wanted to, Dan thought, setting his carbine back in the corner.

“Come here! Quick! Quick!”

Dan seized the weapon, swung around, put his feet down carefully, surged into the other room.

Lloyd was in the west side of the window, hugging the frame, one arm out holding the flashlight, his head glued to the frame. Dan looked and saw the deer; two glaring eyes and a pair of large soft ears; slender legs, poised.

“Here, here! Wait now! Get on the other side of me. Lemme get the light acrost your sights.”

“You stand still,” Dan whispered hoarsely. “I don’t need any more light than I’ve got.”

He threw the carbine to his shoulder, caught the tip of his front sight in the V, and brought the front sight to bear just below those eyes. Then he hesitated, let the barrel sink until the sight was in the neck above the shoulder, pressed the trigger.

The room roared around them. Dan lowered the carbine and drew a deep breath. The doer made a spring in the direction he had been headed, south. He would pass Dan’s window. Dan worked the ejector automatically and turned away.

“There! No . . . yes. There he goes. Come on!”

Lloyd dashed for the front door, Dan at his heels. The light went flashing over the snow. They ran around the house, down info the orchard. Lloyd stopped, waved the light around.

“He was standing here,” he said.

“But he jumped this way,” Dan said.

“Only one jump. Then he turned back north. Come on.”

They ran, following the tracks in the snow. Dan stumbled over a fallen barbed wire fence.

“Watch it,” Lloyd urged.

“Listen,” Dan said, gripping him by the shoulder.

They stood still in the dark listening. A great wheezing, labored breath came from ahead.

“Come on,” Lloyd said.

They went on. The light flashed around, bringing up leaning fence posts, trees, bushes. A big gray boulder made them pause.

Lloyd flashed his light left of the boulder. “There he is.”

The buck, a little spikehorn, was lying on his side breathing heavily, a bubbly breath.

“Finish him off.”

Dan raised his carbine and, disregarding the large bright soft eyes, fired just behind the ear. The buck gave a convulsive jerk, pawed the ground spasmodically as though trying to get up.

“Give him another, give him another.”

“That’s just reflexes. He’s finished.”

The buck straightened out, jerked, kicked with his hind legs, and was still except for minor tremors.

“Cut his throat,” Dan said.

Lloyd handed him the flashlight and, drawing a knife from his pocket, started for the deer’s head. The animal gave a convulsive jerk and Lloyd stopped.

“He ain’t dead yet,” he said.

“Here, give me the knife. Hold Betsy.”

Dan took the knife, passed carbine and flashlight to Lloyd, and took the buck by the nose, bending his head back, stretching his throat.

The knife went in easily through the windpipe, hit bone. Dan scratched around until he was sure he had cut the artery. Warm blood gushed over his hand. He washed his hands in snow and rubbed them warm on the deer’s hide.

“Our missuses will have some meat now,” he said.

“You said it. . . . Come on, we’ll get the sacks and things at the house.”

On the way back Dan said, “I ejected that shell like a damn fool, and there are only two 32-20’s in the village.”

“Cheese ‘n’ crust! Did you?”

Lloyd tramped on. Then he said, “Maybe it ain’t too bad, though. I ejected a shell like that once up here and I came back to look for it. I looked an hour. There wasn’t any snow on the ground either. But I couldn’t find it. It was a 30-03 shell. You know how big they are. In the snow an all, nobody’ll ever find it.”

They went into the house and closed the windows. Dan took the glass he had tied into a bundle and hid it on a shelf in the buttery.

“Have enough to carry without that,” he said and followed Lloyd down the rickety steps into the musty-smelling cellar. There were bins in there and old lumber. It smelled of damp clay and rotten wood and something else not easy to define — as though cats had frequented the place long ago.

Lloyd pulled some moldy old grain sacks out from under a bin. Then he reached in farther and brought out a short rusty saw.

“O.K.,” he said. Dan turned and tramped up the stairs again. Lloyd went into the west room and flashed his light around, stooped, and picked up something and handed it to Dan.

“Maybe you’ll want that.”

“It’s not that I want it so much,” Dan said, “as that I don’t want anyone else to have it.”

He put the empty cartridge case in his pocket and they went out.

Dan took a deep breath.

“Are you hot?” he asked. “I’m hot. I thought it was cold around here until I fired that shot. Now I’m as hot as hell’s hip pocket.”

Lloyd laughed. They found the buck.

“How will we do it? I’ll take one leg and you the other and skid him over into them spruces, hey?”

“No. You carry the guns and flashlight and I’ll bring the buck along.”

Dan handed over his carbine and took the buck’s forelegs one on each side of him like the handles of a wheelbarrow. He gave a tug. After it was started the body dragged easily through the snowy grass. Lloyd went ahead holding the flashlight straight down except when he flashed it straight ahead to make sure they were heading for the spruces.

“You all right?” he asked.

“I’m all right. Keep going. Don’t stop. It’s easier to keep going than to stop and start. Whew!”

They were in spruces but the branches were too high off the ground to give any shelter except from above. There were some thick bull spruces farther on. They went on with the buck, and found a good place and smoked and lazed, sitting on the warm body of the deer.

“What’ll he dress?” Dan asked.

Lloyd considered. He punched the buck in the ribs and felt around his tail. “Oh, hundred and fifteen or twenty-five.”

“Say sixty-odd pounds apiece. I guess we eat meat this week. Let’s see that knife again.”

Dan took the knife and bent over the carcass. Lloyd held the light, following with it the smoothslipping knife which began at the stab in the neck and ripped through down to the vent. Dan grunted and rose as the entrails sloshed out onto the ground. He took hold of one hind leg and slit the skin down to the joint.

“Saw.”

Lloyd sawed the joint and Dan slit the other leg. Lloyd moved over.

Dan began to skin the hindquarters, ripping off skin when he could, touching the tough spots with a knife when he could not get any further by ripping. They worked silently, only grunting occasionally or cursing in a low tone as the skin failed to come loose.

Lloyd stopped pulling and reached for the light. It clicked and went out. Dan reached in the dark for Betsy, found her, and sat still.

In the darkness they heard the brook. A breeze seemed to hiss along the snow. Somewhere far away a cowbell tolled.

“I swear I heard somebody walking,” Lloyd said.

“He isn’t walking now. Turn on the light.”

Lloyd turned on the light.

“If it was a warden we could beat him up and run like hell,” Lloyd said.

Dan glanced up under the visor of his cap.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll hold the hind legs, you pull.”

The skin ripped as far as the forequarters with a noise like tearing tissue paper. With the skin off and lying like an old rag beside them they began to work on the carcass. Lloyd sawed down the backbone. Dan held the light and used the knife when necessary. They quartered the deer and tried to get the meat into the two old grain sacks. The sacks ripped. Lloyd put one sack inside the other and managed to get his share safely disposed. Dan wrapped his in the hide and tied it with some of the same twine he had used for the glass.

5

THEY set off downhill, stumbling through tall grass hummocks. Halfway down the hill they set down the bundles and went on down to the car to make sure no one was waiting for them. There was no one there and they went back and brought down their bundles.

When they had dumped them in the back seat, Dan said, “Wait a minute,” and went over to the road.

“Footprints. Fresh, too.”

“I didn’t see them when we came in.”

“Nor me.”

They followed the tracks to the farmhouse, up to the front porch. But they didn’t go onto the front porch, which had a thin film of undisturbed snow. They went around the house to the cellarway.

Lloyd stooped over. The hatchway steps were gone. But there was a long double-track down the slope of earth.

Dan stooped too.

“Throw your light on that door,” he said.

Lloyd threw the light on the old gray door. It had a hasp and staple for fastening from the outside. The hasp was thrown back but the door hadn’t swung open. Maybe its inclination was to swing shut. Old doors like that usually swing one way or another when not fastened.

Or there might be something leaned up against it from the inside. Or somebody.

Dan felt in his pockets. He pulled out a tenpenny nail.

“Keep your rifle pointed at that door,” he said aloud, and slid down where the other man had slid.

He put the hasp over the staple and slid the nail into the staple and bent it. Then he climbed back to where Lloyd was squatted.

They went to the car and got in.

“He’ll get up through the house,” Lloyd said.

“Maybe. Maybe the door is locked on the inside. Anyway, he can’t swear in court that he saw us. All he could have seen was your car.”

“If the inside door is locked he’ll be cold before he gets out of there. Must be near zero.”

“Keep him warm getting out. Anyway, he was too nosy.”

“Yeah. We should of beat him up.”

Dan didn’t say anything.

They dumped Lloyd’s share at his house and then Lloyd drove Dan up his road, a mile off the main road, past the deserted farmhouse at the foot of the hill where Dan’s cabin was located.

Lloyd gave Dan a good sack. Dan shouldered it and started up the hill. The trees swallowed the road immediately. He began to sweat. The hill was steep. He had to rest every two hundred feet. After he rested he had to kick aside the snow where the sack had touched the ground so that blood stains wouldn’t be too noticeable. The woods were dark. The trees seemed to march with him.

After a while he came to a place where it was light to his right. He could see a distant starlit mountaintop. Moosalamoo. The road made a bend to the left and mounted steeply. The woods closed in. He was on his own land. A hundred yards farther and he topped a small rise. When he had set the bag on the ground he threw back his head and bayed, “Coo-eee!”

He waited. After a while, shrilly he heard an answer.

He coo-eed again and swung the sack on his shoulder. The grade was down and he went briskly, letting the weight of the sack push him along.

He heard a door slam in the forest. The high voice coo-eed again and he saw a light far off moving through the tree trunks. Instead of the usual answer he howled.

“Hoo-ah, boo hoo-hoo hoo!”

He heard a girl’s laugh and then she cried, “Where are you?”

“Up the road a piece where the lady-slippers grow.”

The lantern showed him her legs moving back and forth and then her shadow on the snowy expanse of the little bridge.

He set down the sack and hurried along.

He got to her almost before she had finished crossing the bridge.

“Them condemned woods is almighty dark,” he complained in dialect. “Fright me, they do.” He threw an arm around her neck.

She laughed. “My, you’re hot. . . . No deer again.”

“I walked fast up the hill. Let’s have that light a minute. I want to look at something up the road a piece.”

“What?”

“Oh, some tracks. Come along.”

“No. I’m cold. I’ve only got a house dress on under this coat. You can’t eat tracks.”

“They’re queer tracks,” he said, and took her arm and urged her along.

When they got to where the sack was standing against the bank he pretended to be surprised.

“What’s this? A sack? Deary me sus, so ‘tis!”

“Oh, what’s in it, baby?”

“Meat, darling. Deer meat, darling. Sixty pounds, more or less, of good meat.”

“Oh, baby, baby, baby! You are a good boy. Mama’ll give you a little smack for that.”

She held warm lips up to him and they kissed with the heat of the lantern flowing around their faces.

They went back to the log cabin, with its tiny yellow lighted windows, squatting in the clearing that Dan had wrested from the woods.

“Trouble? Did you have any trouble, baby?”

Dan paused with his hand on the door latch and thought that over. He thought of their alarms, of their sweat when they first found the tracks, of locking Ezry in the cellar.

He pushed the door open and the heat rushed out.

“It was cold,” he said.