Wait for it
He sat, watching. Waiting. He was good at waiting. He spent his life waiting. Once he had been asked to describe the hunt. A long wait, he had said. He shouldn’t have been called a hunter, he was a professional waiter. It was easy to drift away to places in the mind sitting and waiting. Sometimes he daydreamed about living on the clouds and watching the people go by. But most times he watched the trail and waited, knowing someday the prey would come on down that hill and all the waiting would be over. On that day, he knew, he’d have to pack up and move on to another hill, and another big wait. He had long since stopped checking his sights on the rise, because after a while even magnified grass is just grass. Even the sounds of the woods, at first so clear and peaceful, were as good as silence to his ears which had heard the birds sing and the trees whisper so often that it was as though he was in a velvet fishtank. The sun dappled the woodland through the leaves with pools of golden light. He looked up, wondering at the sight of flecks of blue through bright yellow and green. It was the one thing that he could watch all day and not get bored. He had to watch the hill, but he got bored of that soon enough and there was nowhere else to look but up. Birds sometimes flitted through his vision, and now and then the humming rumble of a plane flying low over the trees. He watched it all impassively, his heart not even quickening in it’s timeless rhythm any more. They didn’t know he was down there, in that sea of green, and they didn’t know he could see them, so it made no difference whether he did or not. He shifted on his small tripod seat, tasking a deep breath of damp woodland air that smelt of bark and leaves and smoke.
Smoke. The hunter scanned the hilltop, looking for the wisps of darkness he could smell. The wind slid over him, oblivious to the panic she had brought to this calm watchman, slid on to the sea and desert, a world away from the woodland.
His ears actually pricked. He felt them rise up the sides of his head. His mind, whilst buzzing with adrenaline, managed to regret the moment as the prelude to the end of the wait. More smoke wafted to him on the breeze. Not woodsmoke, nor the smoke a burning village, but cigarette smoke. Man smoke. Sweat beaded on his brow, setting up tense rivulets down his neck and off his nose. He blinked back the sting and watched the hill, trying to calm his breathing as he knew it would all be over soon and he would have to sit waiting again. Savour the moment, he told himself, make it last.
The wind brushed the long grass of the hill into waves. Waves which through the magnifying lens made the man seasick. He closed his eyes for a second, trying to quiet the humming in his head. When he looked back he almost fell off his seat with the shock of seeing a angular pair of half-asleep eyes swaying inches in front of him. He gritted his teeth, taking one final breath of the long wait, and squeezed the trigger on his rifle.
Larger than death the head fell out of view, only the slight pink mist an indication of success. With the first out of the way the man fell into a calm pattern, the paranoia of being ambushed gone as he knew just where everyone was. Pull left for a second, fire, left, fire, left. As he aimed once more the head disappeared under the grass and he heard sharp orders on the breeze.
Time to go, he thought in the high-speed calm of panic. Opening the trapdoor in his treetop hide the hunter looked down the camouflaged ladder to the ground. It took almost a second for the oval face staring up at him to register in his mind and he fell back, fumbling with his rifle. He hugged it as a child hugs a comforter in bed, it was his comfort, his only possession and the only thing standing between him and death. With it he kept death at arms length.
Before he could close the trapdoor he was discouraged by a splintering crackle of bullets hitting the roof of his hide. He spent a moment thinking how quickly things could change, sitting with his back against the front wall of his hide, his rifle balanced between his legs. He heard through crowded ears the yapping of people below, and he knew his time was up, the wait really was over. A grenade tumbled into his small room, and he looked at it, seeing the cross-hatched casing which was about to explode and shower him with shrapnel. He breathed a deep sigh and closed his eyes. The tree blossomed with flame, and his wait was over.
