The rain was steady, soaking through my jacket and pants, pimpling my skin and drenching the hair at my collar.
And then, there it was, its head thrust back to sniff, a sweep of antlers grazing his back. Silence. A few short steps to corral its hind, and it stopped to watch, to assimilate. I looked at Alejandro.
“He’s not huge, but he’s mature, and you won’t get another shot.”
I lifted the rifle to rest on the bush and cycled the bolt slowly, quietly. I popped the covers and found the stag through the raindrops, and it still seemed impossibly far.
“One hundred seventy-six meters, maybe a bit more,” said Alejandro, and I breathed and flicked the safety.
The day before, I’d spoken with Rance about this moment purely hypothetically, and let slip my tendency to rush and jerk and miss. “Just breathe . . . ,” he’d said. “Many things, most things, go better when you breathe. Just breathe and shoot and don’t miss.”
I breathed again, and nestled my left hand under the toe of the stock. The stag took a step and turned downhill, giving me a good broadside, head high, facing right. It stepped again, and in that moment I saw the potential of it slipping out of my story and into the brush, into the ephemera it’d come from and the haunted places of loss and regret. This became very clear to me, as did my focus on that left shoulder, as palpable as my finger on a trigger. I breathed. Stopped. And was silent. And then I shot. I chambered a second round, and watched a sea of hinds break free from the places we’d been watching for days and seeing almost nothing at all.
The stag was nowhere.
I looked over at Alejandro, who shrugged behind his binos but kept looking. I did the same. “I’m pretty sure I got a good hit on him, but I never saw him fall,” I said despite the seeds of doubt already settling into fertile places of my conscience. Alejandro shook his head. He took his shooting sticks and bailed over the edge and straight down, riding a slide of gray mud and sand all the way to the canyon floor. I walked higher up-canyon, along the rim, ready to shoot again or at least gain a better angle into the brush where I’d last seen the stag. Working higher and harder, I dropped down and found a lower tongue, losing sight of the scene for the first time, pulling myself up to a lower ridge to see the place I’d marked, a place receding fast into that place of frozen memories behind closed eyes. I was soaked and sweaty and shaking and breathing hard, and I looked down to the ribbon of green to see Alejandro’s shooting sticks standing out stark white, almost as white as the polished ivory tips of the antlers that he held in his outstretched hands.
THE ANIMAL LAY WITH ITS TONGUE LIMP AND LOLLING, eyes still bright but glassy. We rolled it onto its back and straddled it. Brian held a front leg that wobbled from a broken shoulder. Wet musk, steam, rain, and mud mingled and rose, and I slipped the cavity open with a knife and the paunch bulged white with lacework fat. I worked up to the diaphragm and punctured it in a vacuous rush of blood and air, and my arms became soaked to the elbows. I severed the trachea and pulled the upper organs back, and handed Alejandro the knife. He delicately circumvented the anus and pulled it away clean, and rolled the mass of innards out onto the wet grass, where they settled in subtle peristaltic spasms, as though clinging to a life that still hung nearby, not yet having departed the canyon. A hind, confused, circled within 20 meters, then saw us and bounded out. I lifted the heart from the mass of guts, and saw it had been torn with a ragged groove, a half tunnel in the purple muscle about the depth and width of a 30-caliber bullet. I smiled a bit and was grateful.
As Alejandro climbed out of the canyon for the truck, Brian shot pictures. I sat with my hands in the cavity, my fingers wet and warm with blood, and I realized, somehow without irony or pretense, that I’d killed a lovely animal in a faraway place, with intention and conviction and what humility I had in me, and I was sorely happy. In that moment, my outlines became distinct, and the feelings more crisp, more angular. The rain stopped then, and the sky broke open just enough for me to see a wedge of Andean rock and scree slope, and an autumn coming fast to manifest in the early days of April.
A bird hunter at heart, Reid Bryant lives and writes in southern Vermont, where he serves as Endorsed Operations Manager for Orvis. He is the author of The Orvis Guide to Upland Hunting. See more of his work at www.reidbryant.com.
IF YOU GO
Rance Rathie and Travis Smith, owners of Patagonia River Guides, operate red stag hunts outside Trevelin, Argentina. Over the last decade, PRG has been celebrated for outfitting anglers throughout Patagonia, but a love of Rocky Mountain big game hunting compelled Rance and Travis to explore the stag resource in the nearby Andean foothills. Using western spot-andstalk techniques, PRG hunters pursue stags during the vocal period of the roar, which typically runs from early March through early April depending on weather. PRG hunters are welcome to use archery equipment of their own provision or lodge-supplied Remington rifles. Gun imports can be arranged.
Stag hunts take place on vast estancias that are generally less than an hour’s drive from PRG’s main Lodge at Trevelin. Using the lodge or full-service outpost ranch houses, hunters pursue stags in dedicated fashion or round out the hunt with some fly fishing. Guides are experienced and conversant in English, and access is managed for exclusivity by PRG; hunters will never encounter another group and will rarely see another human being during the hunting day. Flights from the US connect through the international airport in Buenos Aires, with domestic connections to Patagonia requiring a twohour flight from the capital city direct to Bariloche.
For more information, see patagoniariverguides.com.