ALWYN'S father always loved to hunt. When he could afford it and the farm work was not too pressing, he went north in the autumn during the deer season. Then his brother Jim, the minister, came from Chicago with a little armory of guns and cases of expensive fishing tackle; and the two went off together, to forget, in a tent under the hemlocks, that one had sacrificed his future to the other, that one was happy and the other unhappy (though they might not have agreed which was which), and that an abyss of prosperity and college education lay between them.
After they came back, the farmhouse smelled of hides, and for months little meat was eaten but venison, which made Alwyn sick. His uncle Jim's handsome face glowed with the conventional poetry of recaptured boyhood, with delight in the photographs which he tinted artistically with transparent water colors, with pride in the analogies which had been suggested to him in the north and which would serve him in many private conversations if not in sermons.
Alwyn's father, on the other hand, talked by the hour of exaggerated dangers and mystifying sensations of danger where there was none; of men who lost their compasses and strayed in circles and were found half dead; of timber wolves baying up and down the darkness; of stags marching slowly into clearings to keep a rendezvous with him; and he spoke very shyly of killing things, as if to kill were a love gesture. Then there was upon his face a shining expression of tenderness without pity and violence without fault, which was the equivalent of beauty—though he was what is called a homely man, with his very long nose, his low forehead, his delicate, outstanding ears, and small eyes.
When he was first married fox hunts were still held in the county—cutters and teams of young horses racing around the snowy fields and marshes, and waiting here and there for the hounds to bring the fox across the road. Now most of the hunters he knew went to the woods merely to get drunk together away from their wives. And the immigrants who were steadily buying up the land were not sportsmen; they hunted out of season, only for food, and exterminated the game fish with nets. One year he held the office of game warden, was menaced and even stoned by loafers along the mill races in little saloon towns, and arrested many lawbreakers. It was good sport, but very lonely; indeed, all the sport which was left in that part of the world was lonely.
So he took his little son with him along woodland paths where partridges walked, moving their fine throats and crowned heads, uttering a sort of girlish, insane cry. Or before dawn they drove many miles—the boy wrapped up in strong-smelling blankets, the horse's hoofs ringing under the mist—to small, hidden lakes not yet emptied of bass and pickerel. Alwyn held his breath as in wet boats they ventured out from the piers as if on a pane of glass, and shuddered automatically when a gun was fired or a bleeding bird or animal was found in the bushes. But the company of the timorous, overwatchful boy did not satisfy his father, then (as he grew up and his character crystallized) embarrassed, and finally displeased him. Alwyn was disappointed when he ceased to be taken along; for the heartbreaking landscapes, the blue herons like dwarf angels, the stateliness of other birds and animals just before they were disfigured by their own blood, his father's silent, primitive enjoyment, even his own distaste and fright, had enchanted him.
During the winter months his father earned money as a taxidermist, having taken lessons from a man who had spent a vacation at Hope's Corner when he was a boy, and later having studied it from a book. He was remarkably skillful, and many sportsmen brought him their dead trophies to mount, so they might hang permanently in the lodges of secret societies, in dining rooms and dens. Alwyn invariably felt sick when he went into the room at one end of the house which was his workshop. Bodies of birds and small animals bleeding slowly on newspapers, while his father imitated them with wire, tow, string, and wet clay; the pelts drying on wooden forms and the bird skins turned inside out, and dusted with cornmeal and arsenic; scraping-knives in the skulls of deer; the odor of stale meat and green bone; the rank odor of water birds' flesh, almost black with oil. . . .