Quaker Plays for First Days

$7.28 + shipping at Amazon
All profits go to Quaker organizations

Hunger

The Western Bar & Grill, which fortunately served breakfast, was just opening when Darryl and his four friends rolled in, parked, and entered. They had been hunting elk all night, without sleeping at all, and finally decided to go to town to get some breakfast, just about the time the sun was about to rise. The bank stood across from the Western, and the trees beyond that; the town was still, and there weren’t more than a few cars in the whole road.

Once they were seated in a booth, Darryl felt a tinge of tiredness, like he would fall asleep before his breakfast even arrived. But the waitress, Angel, brought coffee right away and the five hunters started arguing more or less the same way they’d been arguing all night. They each had brought different skills to the hunt; Hank knew where to find the elk, Gary knew, or claimed to know, how to get them to go from one place to another; Pete knew how to get the meat out of them when they were down. It turned out the little old guy, Jimmy, didn’t know any of that, but Jimmy was able to get them out of the deepest woods once, at about four in the morning, when all the other four were completely lost. Darryl had brought very few skills to the hunt, but he did have a gun, and he had the hunger for elk; he’d much rather be eating that elk right now, than this Denver omelet that was coming to his table fresh.

But the omelet was good, and the coffee was hot and powerful, and pretty soon Darryl was able to focus better on what each guy was saying. They were still talking about the elk; they all had wanted to bag one, like Darryl. The elk were known to come to town, especially in hunting season, and Angel at one point said she thought they knew it was the only safe place at this time of year. The elk was much larger than deer, harder to kill, far more stubborn, but the question was, how smart was it, and did it really know what it was doing when it stumbled from place to place? They debated for a while. One guy they knew would kill them and only take the head, because he valued the antlers, but not the meat, really; Darryl, however, had tasted the meat, wanted the meat, and valued it, in fact, was hungry for it even on top of this omelet breakfast, and barely able to concentrate as he was.

The Western Bar & Grill had an elk trophy on the wall; it wasn’t looking directly at the five men, but Darryl felt that when he looked at it suddenly, perhaps its eyes were turned his way. That’s ridiculous, he thought, it was dead, there was no way it could be looking at him, or anyone else, it was just a head on the wall. But he remembered one time when he’d brought his young daughter to this very room, for dinner, and she’d become upset that there would be an elk head on the wall, and started asking him all kinds of questions about how it had got there. He actually hunted much less now that she was older, and was never quite able to tell her the whole story, but as an avid hunter with the opportunity to go out with these four friends, he’d had to take them up on it, and go out Dry Canyon together.

Now they got into an argument about where they had been, and in fact, on Hank’s advice, they had gone out Dry Canyon as far as they could drive, and had set out on foot through the woods. Hank was the leader, so everyone was willing to follow his advice for a while; they had circled around a bit, got lost, gone in the wrong direction a ways, and finally figured out how to get back to the canyon and back to the truck they had taken. Now, in the restaurant, they began arguing about whether they had done the right thing. At each point in the night, even at 4 am, in the pitch black darkness of the forest, they had to make these decisions together, all five of them. Now, in the process of reliving them, the same disagreements came up. Hank was kind of a showman. He did it for his image of himself, leading his buddies into the forest and bringing back an elk to brag about. But he wasn’t necessarily right about Dry Canyon; much of his brash confidence with the landscape was unfounded. He repeatedly had to defend his decisions against the challenges of guys who also felt they knew the place.

In fact, Jimmy, for one, was becoming a little agitated. You could say whatever you wanted about the elk themselves; he knew elk, he hunted elk, but he knew he wasn’t an expert. But when you started talking about where things had gone wrong, Jimmy knew that. He knew north from south, he knew a half mile from three-quarters of a mile. It’s like he knew every deer trail up and down every mountain in the forest. And in fact, he probably did. You could argue with him on these details, but you couldn’t win. Darryl knew that without Jimmy, they might not have made it back nearly so easily. So when Jimmy started in about some decision they’d made, way back at some god-forsaken intersection of path and deer-trail, on the side of some mountain out by Dry Canyon, Jimmy was probably right.

Darryl sipped his coffee and remembered the moment. Thousands of stars had covered them as they leaned on their guns and argued, and Darryl had gotten the feeling that if they could just shut up they could hear the elk tromping about; that elk had probably known they were coming a mile away. The point was to find a place where the wind was just right, where the elk couldn’t smell the people, preferably up a little, and get real quiet and wait. But in fact they had never found that place, because they could never agree on where the elk were or where they were going. In the middle of the night, they were still arguing, instead of sitting there silently, waiting for a sure kill. Darryl didn’t know that much about hunting, but he knew that much: that if they were still walking, they weren’t going to get anything.

Angel came back around, and kept filling up their coffees and teasing them about not shooting anything; perhaps they could buy some meat from her husband, she said, and each take it home, and pretend they’d shot it themselves. Deep down, Darryl thought that was a good idea, because he no longer cared about actually shooting the darn thing, he just wanted to eat some. He was still a little delirious from lack of sleep, but fortunately it was a weekend, and nobody was in a hurry to get anywhere, except maybe Jimmy, who had some kind of weekend job as a guide. 

But as they paid their bill and walked out of the Western Bar & Grill, into the morning sun, there was an enormous elk, standing out in the middle of downtown, right in front of the bank, watching them impassively. He had broad shoulders and an enormous rack; to some degree, he was what each of them had been seeing or imagining all night.

You couldn’t shoot him here; he was right in front of the police station, and Ed, the town cop, was just getting to work. Just like Angel said, he knew he was safe, right in the center of town, and he was just looking at them as if to challenge them, or perhaps to mock them. Perhaps he’d followed their truck all the way back from Dry Canyon, or just knew where they were, and where to wait to get a good clear look at them.

Hank was the most offended, and even said something to the elk, as he took it as kind of an affront to all his effort, and felt that, in a personal way, this elk was making him look bad. Jimmy grumbled under his breath, in a hurry to get in the truck and get out of there; to him it was a practical matter. Darryl smiled, watching Hank almost walk over and grab the thing by its antlers. But the image of the elk danced in his eyes, as he was still not sure he was entirely awake. The taste of elk was stronger than ever in his imagination, but it was going to have to wait for another day.

The morning sun was now coming over the trees, and people were beginning to come to town for various reasons, noticing the elk in the process. It wasn’t that big as news; most of them had seen an elk downtown before. This one was like most elk; he didn’t much want to move, but finally was persuaded to lope off, when Angel herself came out with a pan and a big spoon to bang it with, practically right in his ear. He had huge antlers that took up a lot of room and pointed toward the sky pretty much no matter how he turned his head. He glanced at the bank, and took a last look at the five hunters, as if he’d remember their faces, and come back for them later; then, he headed out of town toward the woods. 

In the truck now, the men went their separate ways, and when Darryl got home, he told his wife that he’d seen one, but wasn’t able to shoot anything. It’s just as well, she said, since she'd have been unwilling to cook it, if he had.

8-17-2016