Hunters Read Online Free PDF Page A

it's like if some aliens came down to earth one week a year
and were allowed to kill as many people as they wanted, throw them
on the roof of their spaceship, and then fly away till next
year."
    Jean ate seafood, and Andrew was about to
ask if fishermen didn't invade the fishes' home, but then decided
not to. He didn't think Jean would like the parallel.
    Over the year that he dated her, Andrew
watched her concern become a passion, and the passion become a
mania. But it was a mania that he slowly learned to share. It
wasn't too long before they and Tim Weems and Michael Brewster
decided over drinks that it would be a good idea to set an example,
to hunt down and do to a hunter exactly what a hunter did to a
deer. It was then that the four of them became the Wildlife
Liberation Front. Then when Chuck Marriner and Sam Rogers joined
them, the violence quotient escalated, until they thought about
doing even more.
    But first they had to find the right
camp.
    Andrew moved through the Pennsylvania State
Game Lands 25 unconcerned with stealth. He was hunting a place, not
a deer. Most of the primitive, backwoods cabins were along creeks
to insure a good supply of water, so Andrew walked toward where the
topographical map said was a stream, but grew frustrated when he
didn't come across one.
    These maps were a pain in the ass. Chuck was
the only one who really knew how to read them, but he was an
impatient teacher, and hadn't been able to pass the art along to
the others. So Andrew trudged on as the sun came up, looking for
the stream.
    So where was it? Where the hell was the goddam
stream?
    T he one-room cabin
that Pete Diffenderfer shared with his two fellow hunters was next
to a stream. It had been built in the early forties, when hundreds
of cabins had been constructed on leased state land.
    That morning Pete Diffenderfer had awakened
an hour before dawn, pushed in the button of the wind-up alarm
clock, and shivered with excitement and the cold. The fire he had
set the night before in the wood stove was dead, and he was glad he
had worn his insulated long underwear in his sleeping bag. He
didn't think he could have stood the chilly air against his bare
trunk and legs. He woke his friends, slid out of his bunk, and put
on two pairs of socks, one cotton, the other heavy wool. He stepped
into his thick trousers, then slipped his feet into ankle-high L.
L. Bean hunting boots.
    Pete was out the front door before the
others had disentangled themselves from their sleeping bags. He
breathed in the air, reveling in the sharp crispness that stung his
throat. He walked up the hill from the cabin to the outhouse,
defecated quickly and efficiently, and walked back again. Then he
broke the ice in the basin that sat on the railing of the tiny
porch, and splashed frigid water on his face. It made him even more
wakeful than before.
    Back inside, the men joked, ate donuts, and
drank the coffee they had made the night before. Then they finished
dressing, ending with the heavy coats of blaze orange, put wads of
toilet paper under their scope covers so the lenses wouldn't fog in
the colder outside air, and stepped outside to hunt.
    It took Pete Diffenderfer a half hour of
walking in near darkness to reach the spot he had chosen the day
before, when they had helped each other erect their stands, the
elevated platforms in which they would perch and wait for a deer to
wander by. One of his friends was a half mile to the northwest, the
other a mile south. Pete could easily hear their shots, and if he
did he would hold still for five, ten minutes, waiting even more
silently in case of a miss or a wounding that would make a deer
run, limp, or drag itself past his stand.
    By the time Pete had climbed onto his perch,
he could just make out streaks of rose through the ragged treetops
to the east. He settled himself, his Remington pump .760 resting
across his legs. His feet dangled over the edge of the stand,
fifteen feet above the ground. For comfort's sake,