Free Into the Twilight, Endlessly Grousing by Patrick F. McManus Page A

That Got Away, those fish that live on as long as memory lasts. And so, you might ask, do I not deep down believe it was a far, far better thing for the great fish to have slipped once more beneath the dancing diamonds of Sand Creek and to have darted away into the watery depths, still wild and free? Fat chance.

Will
    It had been a good hunt but had gone on way too long. It was time to quit.
    â€œYou can’t quit now,” Jack said. “Give it a couple more days.”
    We were more or less bivouacked in a big old abandoned ranch house equipped with shutters that pounded incessantly in the wind. Camping inside a drum would have been quieter. I still count Jack and his brother Ben, both scarcely out of their teens, among the best guides I’ve ever had. They were in the kitchen, busily assembling the day’s sack lunches for their clients, the rest of whom were finishing breakfast in the dining room.
    I walked back into the dining room and poured myself another cup of coffee.
    Marcella said, “If Pat leaves, I’m going with him. I can’tstand another
bleep
ing day of this
bleep
ing wind! It never
bleep
ing stops!”
    â€œIf it stops,” I said, “half the ranchers in Montana fall over.”
    Marcella was blond, pretty, and had mastered the pout. Her pout had been kind of cute at first, but cute has its limits. Marcella’s pout had now gone way beyond cute and was pushing the envelope of serious irritation. She was possibly married to Bennett, but in any case they had come on the hunt together. Bennett, who seemed to have grown oblivious to Marcella’s existence, was one of those fiercely macho hunters who make guides regret they dropped out of college. But I will say this for him. He had a really nice haircut.
    The other couple at the table. Will and Jane, were in their eighties. Will was terminally ill, and his doctor had warned him that if he came on this hunt, he’d die. Will replied that if he didn’t come, he’d die. So he and Jane had flown out from Chicago in their private jet. If my wife and I make it into the eighties, I hope we are just like Will and Jane—filthy rich! I jest slightly.
    Will and Jane were fine and elegant and brave and smart, and they had hunted all over the world together for just about everything it’s possible to hunt. Jane got a nice antelope on the first day of the hunt, but Will had had no luck at all, without much time left now—for anything—and every day seemed to take a greater toll on him. Because he was hunting, he refused to take his painkillers, but he remained chipper and funny and classy, and I knew this would turn out to be a truly rotten hunt if Will didn’t get his pronghorn. I feared that if that happened, Ben, the old man’s guide, might go off and do something truly awful to himself, like become a lawyer.
    I groaned loudly for Jack’s benefit as I hoisted my legs one more time into the battered Suburban.
    â€œWhat’s wrong now?” Jack said.
    â€œJust extreme pain,” I said.
    â€œDon’t worry. You’ll loosen up.”
    â€œThat’s what you always say.”
    Marcella and Bennett were in the backseat, Marcella slouching in a pout in one corner, Bennett looking intense. I hate for an armed person to sit behind me when he looks that intense. Bennett had his hunt for the day all mapped out, and he directed Jack to drop him and Marcella off at the top of a ridge. He strode off through the sagebrush with Marcella pouting along behind, rifle slung over her shoulder. We watched until they disappeared down a wash.
    â€œI wonder if Bennett has ever read Hemingway’s ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’?” I mused aloud to Jack. “You know, where you think Macomber’s wife is going to shoot a Cape buffalo but instead she shoots—”
    â€œYou would have to mention that,” Jack said. His forehead wrinkled into a worried