Back Blast

13

The three fraternity brothers were stone-cold sober, but that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that they were also wet, hungry, and pissed, and they hadn’t even killed anything yet.

They’d begun this weekend with such high hopes, and Friday had been a blast. It was Jay’s twenty-second birthday and his father had arranged a memorable time for him and his two best friends. They left the Sig Ep house at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve Friday afternoon and headed to the airport to climb aboard a Cessna Citation Mustang that was owned by Jay’s dad’s law firm. The three boys sipped rum and Cokes served to them by the jet’s leggy flight attendant while they flew to Greenbrier Valley Airport in Lewisburg, West Virginia. From the airport they were driven to the hunting lodge, and as soon as they checked in to their rooms they hit the bar and drank shots with a group of old-timers till late in the evening.

Saturday morning they rolled out of their bunks, groggy and hungover, but riding on adrenaline. Dressed in their new camo, they shouldered their rented rifles and heavy packs and sauntered down to breakfast.

The plan called for their guide to meet them in the lobby, and then they would discuss the strategy of their full-weekend wild boar hunting excursion over pancakes and bacon. The boys figured after that they would all climb onto four-wheelers, drive up into the mountains, and kill shit — maybe do a shot of Fireball or Jägermeister every time a hog went down.

But when they met the guide in the lobby by the entrance to the breakfast room, he turned them away from the food and walked them directly out into the rainy morning. When Jay asked the gruff-looking, middle-aged, bearded man what the rush to get out of the lodge was all about, he just said they would be doing less four-wheeling and more “humping” to get to their hide site.

The three boys got the impression humping meant something different to their guide than it did to them.

The man then went through each of the frat boys’ gear and began pulling things out and throwing them in a pile on the gravel drive without a word. Out came the 12-pack of Natural Light, the bottles of Fireball, Jägermeister, and Pappy Van Winkle, then the M&M’s, fried pies, and even two bags of Cheetos.

Jay’s dad was a high-profile attorney, Meat’s mom hosted a satellite radio show about Chicago politics, and Stuart’s dad had been deputy mayor of Cleveland, but all three boys were too intimidated by the rough-looking guide to protest. They’d been warned at the lodge by the old-timers that the man was surly and taciturn, but along with these cons, they’d been promised he was also the best hunting guide in the state, so they just rolled with his gruffness.

The bearded man all but pushed them into his huge pickup, although he did promise them food and coffee on the road. As soon as they left the lodge, however, it became clear their breakfast would consist of bagged military meals ready to eat and Folgers instant that they heated in a plastic bag with a chemical heater and then drank out of dirty tin cups.

They drove for two hours with the guide barely speaking, then they slung their packs and rifles and began walking into the mountains.

The guide led them off the trail after another hour and into impossibly dense forest.

They walked, climbed, and stumbled through the woods all day, and they failed to drop a single wild boar. Stuart had fired twice and missed twice, Jay blasted an anthill that sort of looked like a boar from distance, and, although he expended a lot of ammunition, the only thing Meat had killed was three pouches of marbled pound cake and two helpings of beef stew out of the MRE stash in his pack.

The guide was clearly disgusted with them all, but he had not even brought a rifle of his own, so as far as they were concerned he couldn’t prove he could have done any better.

They made camp before last light and ate more MREs, and by then the Sig Ep frat brothers had begun complaining loudly. When they did, the guide gave them the evil eye and a gruff retort about how they looked like they needed the exercise more than they needed pork chops, and then he promised them better results on Sunday.

But it was Sunday now, past two p.m., thirty hours after setting out, and the frat boys still hadn’t killed a damn thing. They sat in a hide on the side of a hill that looked down over broken ground divided by a winding creek. On the other side of the valley, some 250 yards away, sat another rocky hillside, thick with pines and brush that was lush and green in the wet spring.

All three boys had sat silently on the cold ground for the past hour, waiting for something to happen, but Jay ended the silence when he turned to the guide and cleared his throat. “Hey, man. This is bullshit. You promised us we’d shoot some hogs.”

The bearded man covered in camo didn’t even turn Jay’s way. He kept looking out over the valley, then he spit chewing tobacco on the grass between his knees. “We’re hunting, not chasing. Best when your prey comes to you.”

Stuart looked at his watch. “Any idea when that might be?”

“You just have to open your eyes, ladies. They are out there if you look.”

The boys all picked up their binoculars and searched the valley floor with their lenses. They’d missed most all their shots under two hundred yards, so they didn’t bother to scan any farther out than that.

Finally Meat said, “There’s nothing down there but squirrels.”

The guide said, “I thought you said you kids came from Case Western. Sure you don’t go to the School for the Blind?”

Jay took his eyes out of his binos and looked to the guide. “I don’t want to be a dick or anything, but you know I could make one call to my dad and get you fired. He’s friends with the old dude who owns the lodge, you know.”

The guide spit again in the grass in front of him.

Stuart finished scanning the valley floor, then he moved the glass up and searched the opposite hillside. He stopped the movement of his binoculars suddenly.

“Wait. You aren’t talking about those hogs up there, are you?”

It took a minute, but Stuart got his two fraternity brothers to see what he was looking at. Far on the other side and almost as high as the hunters’ hide site, eight wild boar rooted in the wet grass and pine needles.

Jay said, “You’re kidding, right? Those hogs have to be four hundred yards away.”

The guide looked across the valley with his naked eyes. “Not an inch more than three seventy. Actually, I’d say… three sixty-three.”

Jay pulled his brand-new laser range finder out of his brand-new backpack. After nearly a minute’s work with the device, he retracted his eye out of the eyecup and turned to the guide, a look of astonishment on his face. “That’s incredible. The closest hog is three sixty-one.”

The guide spit again. “That one in front is a little underdeveloped. I was talking about that big black fella about two meters behind him.”

Meat just muttered, “Holy shit.”

Stuart said, “But we aren’t shooting from here.” A pause. “Are we?”

“Why not?”

Jay got over his awe at the guide’s natural distance-calculating ability. “Look. It’s your job to get us within range, not just to within sight.”

The guide replied with annoyance, “I could hit him.”

Jay laughed now. “Well, you’re the fucking guide, so you’re supposed to be better than us. But since you didn’t even bother to bring a rifle, you can’t prove it, can you?”

Meat held his bolt action Winchester out. “You want to take a shot? I’d like to see you try it.”

The guide said, “Why not?” but he didn’t reach for the rifle. Instead he spit once more to the side, rolled forward from a seated position into a prone position, unzipped his camouflage jacket, and reached into the folds of his clothing. To the utter confusion of the three fraternity brothers in the grass next to him, he slowly drew a perfectly ordinary-looking black handgun.

Jay said, “You’re crazy.”

The guide did not speak. He just leveled the semiautomatic pistol out in front of him, holding it in his right hand and resting his right forearm on top of his left forearm, which he positioned perpendicular to his body on the ground.

Stuart said, “That’s an impossible shot with a handgun.”

The guide spoke now, but it sounded as if he was talking to himself. “Humidity’s got to be seventy percent. Four-point-five-inch barrel, forty-cal hollow point, it’s gonna be pretty draggy, but I’ve got a full-value five-mile wind to work with. I’d say I need about a twenty-four-foot holdover.”

Meat said, “Even if you could hit one of those hogs from here, you couldn’t possibly kill it. That bullet will go an inch into its hide and get stuck in the fat or the muscle.”

The guide nodded slowly, not taking his eyes off his pistol’s iron sights. “You’re right. Let’s do a twenty-five-and-a-half-foot holdover, go for the brain pan.”

The three boys sat there agog, staring at the big bearded man lying in the grass next to them. They saw the barrel of the black pistol rise just slightly.

“You are fucking nuts,” muttered Jay, but then he quickly brought his binoculars up to his eyes. The other two did the same, and they focused on the target.

A single gunshot pounded the air next to them. Jay jerked his binos away from his eyes with a flinch, but he got them recentered on the dark brown hog on the far hill. The animal just stood there, his snout rooting idly in the pine needles.

“You missed,” Jay said.

And then the hog shuddered, its head twitched, and it dropped snout-first into the shallow hole it had been digging. It fell on its side, its legs kicked out, and then it stilled.

Only then did all the other wild boar on the hillside begin running off in different directions. And seconds after that, the echo of the pistol’s report made its way from the far hillside to the four men.

Jay, Meat, and Stuart all moved as one. Eyes slowly lifted out of their binoculars and turned to the man next to them.

Mouths opened slightly, but no one spoke.

Zack Hightower rolled back up to a sitting position, reholstered his Glock 22 on his hip under his coat, and spit in the grass. He looked over to the three sissy college boys next to him. In a tone not quite as snide as he intended he said, “I’ll kill him for you, but I sure as shit am not going to go get him for you.”

Meat was the first of the three boys to speak. “One of the old dudes in the lodge said you were in the SEALs. We thought he was full of shit.”

Hightower sighed. “You aren’t ‘in the SEALs.’ You are in the navy. You are a SEAL.”

Jay said, “So… you were a SEAL?”

Hightower did not answer. Instead he cocked his head to the left and looked up to the sky.

“What is it?” Meat asked.

Zack kept looking around, trying to find the source of the engine noise he was hearing. After several seconds, he said, “Helo.”

A black helicopter appeared over the ridge on the other side of the valley, flew past the downed wild boar, and approached the four men.

“EC-130,” Zack added.

Jay asked, “What’s it doing here?”

Zack smiled a little now — he couldn’t help it — then he stood, grabbed his pack, and slung it over a shoulder. He brushed some of the mud and wet leaves off his clothing. “I do believe he’s here for me.”

The aircraft hovered above a rolling pasture, the flattest area on the hillside, just one hundred feet away from the hunters. It lowered down onto its skids and Zack started towards it.

Jay shouted after him. “Hey! Where the hell are you going?”

Zack turned back around and snapped his fingers, like he’d forgotten about the three boys sitting in the grass. He reached into his pocket, removed the keys to his pickup, and threw them overhand to Jay.

He said, “The truck is seven point five klicks east-southeast.”

Meat asked, “Which way is that? And what’s a klick?”

Jay stood now. “Wait! You can’t just leave us!”

Hightower turned around and headed for the helo. Over the sound of the Eurocopter’s engine he shouted back to them. “Call your dad. I hear he knows the old dude who owns the lodge.”

Zack Hightower climbed aboard the helicopter with a nod to the crew, nonchalant, like he’d been expecting it all day, and the helo lifted back off into the gray sky while the boys watched from below.