The Hunting Camp Rule Nobody Would Explain To The New Guy

I got invited to a camp by my brother-in-law, which is how most bad ideas enter a marriage.

Four men, two of them in their sixties, a cabin with a stove and a smell.

On the first night, the oldest one — Ray, who talked like a man being charged by the word — told me the rules. Where to walk. Where not to. Don't leave meat out. And then: "You don't shoot anything that's standing up."

I laughed. Nobody else did.

I said something clever about bears. Ray looked at me for about four seconds and then he said, "Bears go down. You'll know."

Second night, about two in the morning, something walked round the cabin.

I want to be careful. I did not see it. Nobody saw it. What I have is sound, and sound in the woods at two in the morning is the worst evidence in the world, and I know that.

But it was bipedal. Two beats, not four. Slow, unhurried, all the way round the cabin, and it went round three times, and on the third pass it stopped at the window on my side, and the window was black, and I lay in my sleeping bag with my heart trying to get out through my ribs.

Then a sound like a breath being let out on purpose. Right at the glass.

Nobody in that cabin was asleep. I could hear the difference in everybody's breathing. And nobody moved, and nobody said a word, and Ray, who slept nearest the door with a rifle he had cleaned twice that evening, did not touch it.

In the morning nobody talked about it over breakfast. I broke first, because I am from the city and we discuss things. I said, "So we're not going to—"

And Ray said, "Eat your eggs."

That is the whole story. That is all I have. A sound, a rule, and four grown men eating eggs.

I went home. I did not go back. My brother-in-law goes every year and does not want to talk about it, and my sister thinks the camp is a drinking club, and I have let her think that for six years, because the alternative is a conversation I do not know how to start.