Tracker by Gary Paulsen

ONE

    John Borne sat at the breakfast table and tried to see the look of death on his grandfather. He could not. If a change were there, he could not see it.
    Clay Borne had ruddy cheeks, a head of white hair, clear eyes and steady hands as he buttered a great slab of fresh bread hot from the woodstove, and humor in the corners of his eyes just as he always had.
    He is life, John thought - not death.
    He will never be death. Whenever I turn around and need him, Grandpa will be there.
    But that’s not what the doctors said. Two weeks ago, at the hospital in Grand Forks, the doctors had asked them to come into a small green room—or had asked his grandparents and John had gone with them because nobody said he couldn’t.
    â€œThere is nothing more to do,” the doctors said. They looked sad. But it was a sadness that would go away. “We can’t stop the cancer.”
    And John had watched his grandmother sag. She made no sound but just sagged. A part of her went out at the words and she started down and John caught her on one side and his grandfather on the other and they put her in a chair.
    â€œIt will be all right,” Clay told her gently. “It will be all right.”
    But how could it be?
    The doctors had done tests and more tests and worked with chemicals and knives and finally had sent John Borne’s grandfather home to die in peace on the small farm at the edge of the woods,the farm where he had been born and lived all his life, the farm where John had lived for nine years, since he was four and his parents were killed in a plane crash in the northern woods.
    Home.
    â€œYou’re not eating, John.” His grandmother turned from the stove. “Cold breakfast sits hard, and a hard breakfast won’t warm you on a snowy morning.”
    He nodded and put food in his mouth but tasted nothing, felt only the texture of the eggs and crumbled bacon. His grandmother talked like that, as though she were just about to break into poetry. When John listened to her for a while he caught himself expecting things to rhyme but they never quite did.
    She had cried for a time, for days, but she was through with that now just as John had cried but was through with it now. Crying changed nothing.
    There was still the fact that the doctors said his grandfather had only a few months to live and so John had tried to see the look of death on him but could not.
    He had seen it on many things. They lived close to the land and made all their own meat, and to make meat it was necessary to make death. Hehad helped his grandfather slaughter cattle and seen death there, and once on a man, the farmer who had lived next door. His tractor had backed over him and John had been the one to find the body when he went to deliver eggs and there had been death on the ground.
    But it wasn’t here now.
    There wasn’t the looseness of death or the hotsweet smell of it or even the tiredness of it. There was no change in his grandfather, no change at all. He kept right on working and carving the little woodcarvings in the kitchen at night and laughing and playing small jokes and eating well and looking to the next day. Always looking to the next day.
    His grandfather glanced up from his plate suddenly, his fork halfway to his mouth. “Isn’t the food good enough for you?”
    John had stopped eating again without knowing it. “Of course …” He took another mouthful.
    â€œThere’s an inch of snow out there.” The old man chewed slowly and carefully. “Deer season starts Saturday. The snow will be good for tracking.”
    They hunted deer every year and normally John would start getting excited two or three days before season. He’d clean and reclean his rifle,look more and more to the woods and start losing sleep. This year was different. Normally they would get up at three in the morning and do chores and the milking so they could be in the woods by first gray light; and