The Hunter

© Charles D. Phillips

As the years passed, Ryan spent less and less time looking through the old buildings and decaying homes seeking interesting fragments of the past. His parents had been fanatical about hanging on to a world that no longer existed. They had an enormous gas-powered generator, a working refrigerator, air conditioning, and enough lights “for Yankee Stadium,” whatever that meant.

Both his parents were sure others survived that final, shattering pandemic. They watched and listened tirelessly for some sign from those others. His Dad's shortwave radio occasionally picked up what might have been signals from other survivors, garbled voices in strange languages, rhythmic burst that could have been part of Morse code. Maybe even some dogs or cats were alive somewhere. Too bad it hadn't killed rodents. It seemed as if squirrels and rats vied for control of different sectors of the city like those ancient armies or street gangs in the books his parents made him read.

Ryan thought his parents had probably been right. Others were out there, but he long ago gave up thinking about them. After his parents died, he moved out of their house and left all the antiques they cherished to gather the rust he felt was their due. The only thing that he occasionally missed was the music his parents had played. They would occasionally hold outdoor “concerts” with video discs from bands whose musicians were now just skeletons. The sounds on the discs pounded out of 20 foot speakers, while the images of music shared by thousands poured over just the three of them. The music not only surrounded him, he felt it in his bones. He left those concert fascinated at this glimpse into a dead world, but his parents always seemed melancholy afterwards.

Ryan somewhat guiltily found the slower rhythm of his life without his parents very pleasing. His days began with the gentle growth of the Sun's light. They usually ended with him sitting in a rocking chair beneath a star-filled sky until the wine made him drowsy. Guns and ammunition were plentiful, but he had taken to hunting with a bow. The crash of a rifle shot seemed to somehow violate the quiet that surrounded him. He now cooked on a wood stove as well. The silent flame of a gas fire was too artificial. He felt like that storybook character, Goldilocks. Some things were just too much; other things were not quite enough; but some things seemed just right, and there was no one to argue with him about his choices. Hard liquor was too much, but wine, now that was just right for starlight.

He also hunted for, or grew, all his own food. He was now waiting in low brush at the edge of a meadow that was at one time part of an enormous park. He had been watching this buck for a week and knew his patterns. As he knelt, he practiced a relaxed stillness that he realized would have been impossible for his parents and others of their time. He thought maybe those Buddhist monks his parents talked about, the ones who could control their own blood flow, might have been able to do it. Certainly his parents' couldn't have. His memories of them always had them rushing to do this or hurrying to-see-to that. “The Crash,” as they called it, seemed to have convinced them both that time was something that they had to chase-after before it ran out the door.

All of this idle speculation ceased as the buck finally followed a patch of sweet grass into the clearing. Ryan could hear the deer's muzzle scrape leaves aside as he sought out grass and acorns. Ryan exhaled slowly before he loosed his arrow. The buck tensed, reared, and then dropped where it stood.

He moved quickly to the animal and raised its head in his hands as the last light began to leave its eyes. He had read that some ancient peoples always thanked the animals that they took for food. That ritual was one of the things that Ryan somehow knew fit in his world. Softly, he said, “Thank you, your meat will nourish me. Your hide will give me comfort.”

Ryan paused for a moment and smiled slightly as stroked the deer's warm body. After reading all those books his parents thought were so important to “keep our heritage alive,” He felt that he had given the buck what it seemed humans had always known best how to give other living things -- death.

Ryan knew that soon the sons of this buck's sons and daughters of his daughters would own this place. They would wander safely through the broken bones of this world with its enormous buildings thrusting ever upward and its cities sprawling every outward. This world had been filled with so much technology and intelligence. For all of that, his parents' world fell victim to single-celled creatures that knew how to do only one thing, how to multiply inside a human body.

He continued to gently stroke the cooling coat of the deer and thought the sort of thing what he always thought at such moments. He would butcher that buck today and feed himself well, but the buck's descendants would rub the velvet from their antlers on the steel remains of his parent's world. Fawns would be fed by does. Grass and acorns would have fed the deer, while, he like all those others, would be dust that fed only the wind.