The cold wire handle of the metal tackle box bit right into the palm of my hand because I had been gripping it since four in the morning without once loosening my fingers. There was frost on the aluminum bed of the Dodge when I loaded the gear, a thin white skin that scraped off easily under the edge of an old thumb ring I’d worn since the Clinton administration. Warren had told me three nights earlier down at the bait shop that the pinttails were coming down heavy through the sloughs behind the old power plant, and Warren didn’t usually talk much unless he had something worth hearing. I had twelve hundred dollars in overdue feed bills sitting on the kitchen table back home in a coffee tin with a rubber band around it, and the camera body slung across my chest was my only real leverage against the winter.<\/p>\n
The morning air smelled like wet limestone and rotting willow leaves, that heavy bottomland stink that settles over southern Illinois when the river drops three inches overnight. My boots made a wet, sucking sound in the muck every time I took a step toward the blind I had set up near the beaver dam. I didn’t have much room for error, and I knew it. The shutter curtain on my old Nikon had been sticking on high speeds since the first freeze, but I had oiled the track with sewing machine oil and prayed it would hold together until I got the plate of the hooded merganser that the St. Louis Audubon chapter was offering five hundred dollars to license. Five hundred dollars would buy two tons of clover seed and keep the electric company from pulling the meter.<\/p>\n
The grass was stiff enough to crack under my shins as I pushed through the brush. I reached the blind, dropped my pack on a flat stump, and checked the battery light. It flickered once, amber, then went steady. Good enough. I settled onto the three-legged camp stool and waited for the light to bleed over the tree line.<\/p>\n
The light came up gray and flat, the kind of morning where the sky looks like an unwashed window pane. For two hours nothing moved except the water rats paddling through the duckweed and a lone muskrat dragging a willow branch toward the bank. My fingers were starting to go numb inside my wool liners, so I pulled my hands back into my sleeves and rubbed them together until the skin burned. That was when I heard the whistling wingbeat over the reed tops.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t a pinttail. It was a northern shrike, small and slate-gray with a black mask that looked like grease paint across its eyes. It dropped onto the top branch of a dead sycamore twenty feet out, perfectly framed against the pale fog coming off the slough. It was the shot I had been trying to get for three seasons.<\/p>\n
I brought the viewfinder to my eye, breathed out slow the way my father had taught me when he taught me to shoot deer with an open-sight Marlin, and squeezed the shutter release.<\/p>\n
There was no click. Just a dull, dry snap, like a dry twig breaking under a heavy boot.<\/p>\n
The mirror stayed up. The screen went pitch black. I flicked the power switch off and on twice, but the gear inside the housing gave a sickly grind and then went dead. The shutter curtain had jammed halfway across the frame, wedged tight against the brass track.<\/p>\n
“Damn it,” I whispered into the empty air.<\/p>\n
The shrike tilted its head, looked right down at me with one black button eye, and then launched itself off the branch, cutting a sharp line straight toward the timberline before I could even lower the rig. I sat there in the wet cold with my camera dead against my chest, feeling the blood hot in my ears. I didn’t scream or throw anything, because when you’re fifty-eight years old and broke down to your last spool of wire, you don’t waste energy on shouting at the trees. I just stood up, packed the useless junk into its case, and started the long trudge back to the truck.<\/p>\n
The walk back took forty minutes because my left knee had started acting up again, that dull ache right behind the kneecap that always told me rain was coming. I didn’t look at the water. I didn’t look at the sky. I just watched the toes of my boots rise and fall through the frost-killed smartweed, counting my steps the way I used to do when I was logging cedar up in Hardin County and had to keep my mind off the cold.<\/p>\n
When I reached the Dodge, I tossed the camera case into the bed without bothering to latch the tailgate. It slid four inches and hit the wheel well with a hollow thud. I opened the door, climbed into the cab, and reached for the key.<\/p>\n
That was when it landed on the hood.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t the shrike. It was a woodcock, heavy-set and mottled brown, with its long comical bill pointing straight down toward the rusty fender. It had probably been flushed out of the brush by my boots on the way back and had nowhere else to sit while it caught its breath. It was close enough that I could see the tiny gray speckles on its throat and the way its dark, wet eye caught the dull reflection of the windshield.<\/p>\n
I reached for the camera case in the back, then stopped. The camera was dead. There was no film advance, no power, no way to capture the light falling across its back feathers.<\/p>\n
“You’ve got twenty minutes,” I muttered to myself.<\/p>\n
I pulled a yellow legal pad out from under the spare oil jug on the floorboards and grabbed a stub of a carpenter’s pencil with the lead bitten flat. I didn’t turn the key. I didn’t start the engine. I just sat there behind the frosted glass of the Dodge and looked at that bird until my eyes watered from the wind coming off the river.<\/p>\n
I looked at the way the rusty brown feathers on its back folded like overlapping shingles. I looked at the way its dark eye sat high up on its skull, close to the crown, so it could see behind itself while it probed the mud for worms. I watched it blink once, twice, three times, each movement slow and deliberate like an old gate swinging shut in the wind. I memorized the notch where the wing coverts met the white-tipped tail feathers. I didn’t miss a single line.<\/p>\n
After twenty-one minutes by the dashboard clock, the woodcock dipped its head, dropped off the fender into the ditch, and was gone into the brush.<\/p>\n
I didn’t drive straight home. I drove forty miles north to the hardware store in Metropolis and bought two tubes of titanium white oil paint, a jar of linseed oil, and a three-dollar hog-bristle brush with bristles that were already starting to flare out at the edges. I didn’t have money for canvas, so I took the back off an old wooden cupboard door I had pulled out of the Methodist church basement when they remodeled the kitchen back in ninety-four. I sanded the flat pine side down with a coarse block until it felt smooth under my palm.<\/p>\n
I didn’t turn on the radio. I sat at the oilcloth-covered kitchen table with a single gooseneck lamp pointed down at the wood, and I painted the bird the way I had seen it through the windshield.<\/p>\n
I didn’t use fine strokes. I used the flat side of the brush to block in the mud tones, then dragged the corner through the wet white to catch the light on the shoulder feathers. My hands were shaking a little from the cold in the room, but I didn’t stop until my coffee went cold and the gray light of dawn started coming through the kitchen window again.<\/p>\n
When I finished, the woodcock looked back at me from that piece of old cabinet door with an eye so sharp it made me look away.<\/p>\n
I wrapped it in an old woolen blanket and shoved it under the bed so I wouldn’t have to look at it during the day. It felt too raw, too much like something I had pulled out of my own ribs while I was still awake. I went back to cutting firewood and hauling scrap iron to the yard in Cairo just to keep the lights on and the sheriff off the porch.<\/p>\n
Two months later, Clara found it when she was looking under the bed for the spare storm windows. She didn’t say anything for a long time. She just held the piece of pine by the edges, turned it over to look at the old grain on the back where the church stamps were still faint in the pine, and then set it down on the kitchen table right where the feed bills used to be.<\/p>\n
“Who told you you could paint like that, Arthur?” she asked. Nobody else was in the room, and the clock on the wall had that hollow ticking sound it gets when the room is too quiet.<\/p>\n
“Nobody,” I said. “The camera broke.”<\/p>\n
She didn’t smile. She just traced the corner of the wood with her thumb where the old hinge screw had left a dark circle in the pine. “You should send it to the state fair. They’ve got that heritage show in Springfield.”<\/p>\n
I told her she was crazy, but she packed it in an old cardboard box with three layers of bubble wrap anyway, and she paid the twenty-dollar entry fee out of her own egg money without telling me until the receipt came in the mail.<\/p>\n
I didn’t go to Springfield when the letters started coming. I stayed right here on the porch and patched the chicken wire with galvanized staples while the wind blew down from Wisconsin. When the check arrived in a window envelope from the Department of Agriculture with the state seal embossed in blue ink, I laid it on the oilcloth and looked at the figures for a long time before I believed them.<\/p>\n
Thirty-two thousand dollars.<\/p>\n
That’s more than the tractor cost. That’s more than three years of feed bills and property taxes combined, with enough left over to fix the roof on the barn before the winter snow sets in for good.<\/p>\n
The camera is still sitting on the top shelf of the closet in the back room, right where I tossed it that morning with the jammed mirror and the scratched housing. I haven’t touched it since, and I don’t reckon I ever will. Warren asked me last week if I was going to buy a new digital rig with the prize money, something with autofocus and a high-speed motor drive that could catch a hawk mid-dive.<\/p>\n
I told him no. I told him I didn’t need the glass anymore.<\/p>\n
Sometimes you have to lose the machine before you realize you were the one carrying the picture all along.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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