We Used to Hunt Here

Silas blinked himself awake, attempting to focus his eyes on the streaks of landscape flitting past his window: blurred ghosts of brown and black spraying across a gray canvas. His tired mind eventually formed them into tree branches, nests of power lines, the dull overcast sky of Eastern Kentucky. He stretched and returned the driver’s seat to the upright position. In the distance he could see the foothills of Appalachia. He checked his Tesla’s screen. Five more minutes until the car got him to his destination.

Well, sort of.

His destination was on no map (not the one’s you’re forced to use nowadays) and, according to the System, was no place at all. But Silas remembered, or thought he did, and the best he could do was set his car’s navigation to a System-approved charging station a mile and a half away.

He arrived in a parking lot some twenty yards from the woods. Woods which felt at once strange and familiar, as if he was recalling someone else’s memory. But it was his own, or at least belonged to a version of himself long forgotten now. The City had changed him. He may have been a son, a grandson, an Appalachian, a Southerner, a Christian, a country boy. He used to live by the duties, responsibilities, and rights of identities conferred, but conferred identities weren’t useful to the System and you can’t win a game you refuse to play. He chose a new identity (or several he rotated as needed) the moment he left. Whatever sounded good, whatever sounded fun, whatever sounded satisfying, whatever he wanted to be.

But, of course, a chosen identity is no identity at all. And decades of chasing every exotic food, every loose woman, every exciting experience and luxury tourist destination, every bleeding edge gadget, every comfort and convenience that a modern man can have, had left him adrift, a vapor in the wind, a barely embodied soul unmoored from anything that makes him Man. He had no purpose, no progeny, no legacy, and no God.

Silas walked beyond the pavement and into the mowed grass surrounding the charging station, at the end of which he was met with a barrier of tall old pines and thick brush; a border between then and now, an old way and a new way, the chains he threw off and the chains he picked up. A hum grew louder and settled above his head. He glanced up to see a small swarm of surveillance drones hovering there. He glanced back at the charging station to the cameras affixed to every post and every light and every corner. The System was watching.

If it killed him, he did not care. The System was built for pleasure, of which he had experienced every variety in every quantity, none of it satisfying. He hoped there was something more, something he was missing, something he had forgotten. But if not, death was no punishment.

He inhaled deeply, swallowing a lungful of cold earthy mountain air, and sent his boot beyond the tree line, entering the woods. He waited for death.

Death did not come. Instead the hum of the swarm drifted into the distance until they could not be seen or heard at all. He peered through the branches and watched the cameras slowly pan away and settle on the empty parking lot to continue their business. He took a few steps further into the woods, first quietly and then louder. The cameras did not move. The drones did not return.

The reality settled in, subconsciously. The Gates of Hell are locked from the inside. The doors open wide the moment a man decides to leave.

Guided only by memory (and perhaps a false one), he made the arduous hike up the mountain and down, crossing fallen timbers found on no map and small streams that had developed unnoticed. He was spooked more than once by the skittering of squirrels through dead leaves and the flapping of birds moving from tree to tree, but he marched on. What choice did he have.

The woods are a living thing, breathing in and breathing out, changing shape and size and arrangement, some things having died and some having grown since last he was here (if he was here). He found nothing familiar in the foliage, but he had started to recognize the land. The creek cut between a greater hill and a lesser hill, over which, if memory served, was the holler of his childhood. It was there or it was not. He could not lose more than he already had, so he continued climbing, grabbing at tree trunks and roots to anchor himself when the dirt beneath his heel gave way and almost took him back to the bottom. He had not sweated like this in years. He hadn’t had a reason to.

He grabbed at one last boxelder sapling and, with all the force his arm could muster, used it to catapult himself to the top. He fell to the ground staring up at a fiery red sky. The sun was starting to set. If his memory was real, this was it. He wanted so badly for his memory to be real that he hesitated to check. As long as he was here, staring at this sky, in this place, it was real, as long as he didn’t look. He almost chose not to.

“But why bother,” he thought, “to come all this way just to continue to live in a world that isn’t real.”

He stood up, dusted himself off, walked to the edge of the mountain, and, taking another nervous breath, slowly tilted his head down to study the holler. His eyes darted from tree to tree and rock to rock. He traced the silhouette of the valley, studying every nook and bend, until, at the far eastern end, he saw it. A smirk started across his face and his heart raced. As fast and awkwardly as a man had ever run down a mountain, he did, sometimes rolling before his foot caught the earth again, sometimes swinging around tree trunks and branches until he finally, safely (somehow) reached the bottom.

He approached the wooden structure, nearly lost to time, but usable. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. His eyes went glossy and wet, something he’d long since forgotten they could do. He wiped the tears onto his sleeve and reached into his back pocket. From it he pulled a small, old, crumpled photograph and held it up to the structure.

“We used to hunt here,” he whispered. It was real after all.

The photograph showed a deer strung up on the front porch and two men in camo bearing rifles. One man was older with a white beard, the other younger with a mustache. And beside him, a young boy. Silas couldn’t be sure. He no longer recognized the faces of either men. He hardly recognized himself. But now that he could see the hunting cabin in front of him, he knew.

He pocketed the photograph and walked inside. The boards creaked, the furniture was knocked over but mostly undamaged, and the cast iron stove was still there in the corner with an ax leaning on the wall beside it. Ready to take firewood any time.

Silas turned to the gun cabinet. He vaguely remembered the gun cabinet, walnut with intricate floral carvings, like something that would hold a treasure. He grabbed the handles and opened the doors wide…

There was nothing inside.

He had hoped, but he wasn’t surprised. How much time had passed.

He closed the doors again. As he stepped back he landed on a loose board that flipped out of alignment slightly and fell back down with a whack. He tapped the board with his foot and the boards surrounding it. None of them were affixed to anything. All loose. He leaned over and pulled up the boards.

Beneath them was an entry to a crawlspace, but more importantly the shimmering of something hidden, of something meant to be found. Silas reached into the hole and pulled out a long heavy mass wrapped in a tarp. Taped to the side was an envelope with handwriting. (“Who writes by hand anymore?” he thought.)

Silas found a box of matches and a candle on an old desk. He lit it and held the envelope up to the light, shocked at what he saw. In black ink, with the flourish and flow of a man who had never typed on a smartphone, the outside of the envelope read, simply: “To Silas”.

He eagerly opened it and pulled out the scrap of paper that was stuffed inside.

“It’s up to you. Plant the roots. Build the world. — John”

“Who’s John?” Silas wondered.

Silas unwrapped the tarp, revealing first a familiar maple stock. It was a rifle. One of the rifles from the photo, the one pinned to the side of the older man. Silas’ grandfather?

“John… Papaw John.” Silas was flooded with a haunting of ghosts, memories unformed and rematerializing and eager to be free. He smiled.

He took the rifle in his hands and headed outside the cabin. He did not know how to shoot a gun. He did not know how to hunt. He did not know how to plant the roots he was meant to plant or even what that meant. It had all nearly been lost to him now, but, God willing, he would recover it.

He remembered who he was, and where he was, and why he was.

And that he came from a long line of men who figured it out along the way.