Piebald Strags
Forest | Rose Slade | Digital
Piebald Stags by Alan Mullen
The best summers are impossible to recreate, and yet I recreate them every three years or so. Me and my friends are a bunch of old church grims, the modern nomads in today's age. We snarl at the sun for rising without our consent and howl at the moon as tribute to its turning face. We all share the same taste for balance, justice, vengeance, punishment, reward; we’re brothers in most sense of the word.
When mid June rolls around and the school doors close, we’ll all breathe a collective sigh of relief; the burden of responsibility will be lifted off our shoulders. From now till August, our only problems will be authority; every school and every workplace wont reach us till the trees are bare. We’ll play the government’s game and we’ll be everything that the ATF hunts for sport; we’d be more than glad to become the next Waco. We’ll run into the woods and we’ll build our own churches out of fallen trees and mud and grass and we’ll preach the good Lord’s word. Anything that exists in our neck of the woods without our knowledge exists without our consent, thus a debt is owed, no more and no less than one pound of venison jerky or any consumable item in any equivalent amount. We’ll pour out Jagermeister for the fallen and wrestle our muscles wiry and dance in circles till our legs fall off. That’s what they would’ve wanted. We make our summers out there an episode straight out of Jackass, and each year the rerun of that episode gets better.
One year my brother-in-arms, for lack of better terms, took me out into the woods purely because he was in town and we hadn’t seen each other in a hot minute. It was a hot sticky summer in July; it had rained a few hours prior. I remember he brought along his horse ‘for good time’s sake’. We shared drinks and some gum, then hiked out into a little spot into these woods that was maybe-maybe-not a campground. His horse sat some feet away as we wrestled in a mud pit we found. And when we were done, we murmured prayers and found a tree to lean up against, sharing more drinks and snacks and gossiping about ‘teenager things.’
The sun had just begun to set; the dewdrops on the leaves began to sparkle like little circular crystals. Trees glistened with rain and the soil gave up its friction. Birds were still singing their announcement; Out of hiding! Rain hath passed! Out of hiding! Rain hath passed! The forest was rejuvenating itself with the gifts of passing rain. And I remember, there was this one spiderweb that looked near perfect, with dewdrops and silk that shined; kind of like the stained glass windows in churches.
Me and my brother leaned on each other, but in the most peculiar way. He had facial scarring from a burn and some shrapnel on the right side of his face. For years he let no one, not even his twin, anywhere near his right side. And yet this time, this one time that seemed so innocuous and insignificant at the time, he let me sit to his right and rest my head on his shoulder.
I had just begun to nod off when he spoke; Deer, was all he said, and I lifted my heavy eyelids to look out, expecting nothing more than a doe. And maybe four or five yards from us was a spectacular stag. Its antlers branched out like sprawling bonsai trees, the tips dripping with dew. It was lean in stature, evenly muscled, with ripples of brawn framed by the sunset behind it. Dapples of cream painted its fur like sunlit water; a piebald. And it stared directly at us, with its angled and seasoned face. Not scared, not welcoming; assertive, I’d say.
Piebald, twelve points, I think, I replied. He only nodded and paused, eerily quiet and still. This was no hunting trip, yet he held himself as if he had a rifle poised for it’s lungs. He then shifted, lifting up an empty bottle of Jagermeister, framing it right next to the whitetail in front of us. It was a one-to-one recreation, the face of a whitetail illustrated some hundred years ago, recreated now by pure chance/
He spoke again, A mature piebald. Strange. Normally they’re killed as teens because their pelts are so rare. This one had to fight. You know that fallow deer mount Anton has back in Ukraine? I think that one was also a piebald, or maybe it was completely white. Whatever. I forget. I need to go back eventually.
You need to be like that deer. You’re a rare and special thing; so rare and special you gotta fight to live ‘cause people are hunting you for sport, eh? Well keep fighting cause I don’t want to see your head on a wall.
And of all things he said to me, that one stuck. It was the last I had ever heard from him. Yeah, he did end up going back to where that fallow deer mount was. He also ended up where that fallow deer ended up, too. This summer, the summer of 2025, marks the third year I’ll be going out and pouring something for that man. That's where I get the taste for balance and justice from. I can’t get Jagermeister like I want to, because I’m 16 and have a baby face that would cancel out any effect a fake ID would have. So normally it’s water, on one occasion it was an energy drink. And you know, I won his guitar pick and necklace in that wrestling match; God forbid I take those off.
God forbid a lot of things.
God forbid I become a head on a wall.
God forbid I become tame.
God forbid I lose my yearn for justice.
O Lord, hear me pray, Amen.
