No Bear, No Forest, Barry Rachin [freenovel24 .txt] 📗

the woods.”
Near the top of the first trail Lester’s mother spotted a piping plover with its scalloped black collar and russet colored wings. Then just a short distance away she sighted an American Golden, a close relative to the plover. “Mr. Moshel seemed a bit better at breakfast, don’t you think?” Lester asked.
They approached a small trestle footbridge that spanned a gully. “Hard to say,” his father replied. “He’s only in his forties and an invalid.”
Mrs. McSweeney hurried ahead as they approach a rest area with an information board alerting visitors to recent sightings of uncommon birds. Two American oystercatchers and a Virginia rail were seen on the island of Shoals on June first plus a Sandhill Crane only a few miles down the New Hampshire coast a day earlier. Mrs. McSweeney pulled out her Sibley’s Birding Guide for a quick reference. Sometimes she also brought along Mac’s Field Guide to water birds of the Northeast Coast. The prudent woman had sealed several pages of her Mac’s guide in waterproof plastic for easy reference; the brightly colored pictures featured head and wing markings as they appeared in various seasons. Winter plumage, which was frequently much lighter and less dramatic, could easily confuse even a veteran bird watcher.
“Seventy-five black scoters were spotted along the coast, mainly off North Beach in Hampton,” Mr. McSweeney read from the list as his wife thumbed through her manual. Neither Lester nor his father shared the mother’s passion for birding, but they readily got caught up in her zany enthusiasm. Up ahead on the trail was a tulip polar with a thick spread of golden leaves. Mrs. McSweeney located an outcropping of rocks overlooking a meadow and was scanning the brush and foliage with her Eagle Optics birding binoculars. The waterproof lenses featured nitrogen purged fogproofing. Nobody—not even Lester’s father—had a clue what nitrogen purged fogproofing was, but it sure sounded special and his mother claimed that the lenses remained clear even in the worse weather.
“Mr. Moshel isn’t sick,” Lester said. “Least not in the conventional sense.”
“Is that so?” his father slowed to a halt and lowered his voice. “What’s the matter with him?”
“The Israeli Army court-martialed him. They sent him to a military prison for half a year.”


As Tovah explained it sitting in the beached rowboat, Mr. Moshel served three years as a tank commander in the Israeli Defense Force. Following the second invasion of Lebanon he returned from fighting in the northern campaign and muttered, “Maspeek! Enough! This is no war. It’s a goddamn massacre! I will not kill defenseless civilians.”
Bogade. Traitor.
When he refused to return to active duty, the military banished him to a prison in the Negev desert south of Tel Aviv where the food was inedible, living conditions intolerable. Eventually his health broke down. The IDF agreed to release him on one condition: the man recant his foolishness and immediately return to his military unit. Sick as he was, Mr. Moshel opted to serve out the remainder of his prison term.

Up ahead, Mrs. McSweeney waved her binoculars over her head, indicating that she had finished studying the meadow and was continuing on down the trail. Mr. McSweeney kicked at the loose dirt and a stone went skittering into the underbrush. “The War in Lebanon was an ugly business.”
“Do you think Mr. Moshel’s a traitor?”
Mr. McSweeney was staring at a patch of bunchberries with clusters of turgid, reddish fruit dangling from the plant. Further down the ravine a profusion of hollyhock, their ivory petals stained with purple bleeding toward the edges, spilled over a granite ledge. “Hell no!” He rubbed his jaw between a thumb and forefinger before bolting off down the trail without further elaboration.
After traipsing over three and a half miles of rugged trails in the midday sun, Mrs. McSweeney never saw a single oystercatcher, Virginia rail or black scoter, but she did spot a blue-winged teal, which was so gorgeous she talked incessantly about the magnificent bird all the way back to the cabin.

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There was no bear and there was no forest.
Mr. Moshel, the tank commander, would have stood a better chance fighting off a rabid grizzly bear barehanded! Even Lester’s father was at a loss for words when he learned what happened to the Tovah's father. Out of a sense of decency, the boy had glossed over some of the more unsettling details! Nothing made any sense.
There was a story in a Louis L’Amour collection - Caprock Rancher - about a crusty cowboy with a broken leg who outsmarts a band of outlaws. It was one of Lester's all-time favorites. The injured rancher shows the gunslingers for what they are: a band of cowardly hooligans. Toward the end of the story, the leader of the desperadoes, an ornery psychopath named Hazeltine, is reduced to a whimpering bloody mess with all the piss and vinegar beaten out of him by the rancher’s teenage son.
Instead of fighting off a band of unruly gunslingers, Mr. Moshel had the entire Israeli army to contend with. Not a fair fight. Short of a miracle, it didn’t seem to Lester the sort of material even a literary magician like Louis L’Amour could do much of anything with. No, not even Louis L’Amour could fix what was broke on Lake Winnipesauke. The master storyteller would have to revise the sordid history of Western civilization, rework the bogus script.
Perhaps in the new and improved version, Lester McSweeney would marry the persnickety Israeli girl and travel west. They'd build a log cabin in the wilderness country of Oregon, buy cattle, preferably Durhams that they could graze and breed on the open range. Lester would purchase a rifle, maybe a .56 caliber, 360 grain Spencer plus a .44 caliber derringer to hide up his sleeve with a rubber band. The Spencer could blast a hole as big as a frying pan in any nasty varmints, two-legged or otherwise. For horses, he would get buckskins - mustangs used to living out in the wild in all sorts of weather.
The Moshels could come and visit any time they felt the urge. In the rarified, high-country mountain air, Mr. Moshel’s health would quickly be restored and the only time his hands would ever shake again would be to applaud the antics of his half dozen, give or take a few, grandkids. And of course with her nitrogen purged, Eagle Optics binoculars, Lester's mother could study native birds of the scenic Northwest. She might even spot a Beckwicks wren with its elegant brown tail arched over a slender back. Lester and his new bride, Tovah McSweeney, would live off the land, can berries and fruits, smoke fish like the Indians anticipating the winter shortages of fresh game; they would hunt and trap until their cattle business was firmly established then trade their home grown produce for cloth, spices and other necessities
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Tovah Moshel’s penchant for uncompromising honesty was too much! Even Lester, recently graduated from middle school knew better than to say every fool thing that stumble-bumbled into his adolescent head. To save face and avoid embarrassment, Mrs. Moshel shamelessly fibbed about her husband’s physical affliction. Tovah had no qualms about telling Lester or anyone else who cared to listen the ugly truth. If the Israeli girl chose to ridicule him over the phantom fish that got away, that was one thing. Tovah was stubborn, opinionated, arrogant, combative, insolent, uncompromising and utterly disinterested in anyone else’s point of view. A boorish blockhead wrapped in pig-headed certitudes, she edited and filtered nothing that escaped her lips. Like that nutty business about first kisses and virginity - people didn’t talk that way. At least normal people didn’t. Later that night as he was lying in bed, a stab of pain, more like an inconsolable grief, coursed through Lester’s body. The boy was shattered by the purity of his feelings. First love—it snuck up on tiptoes, beguiled, tantalized and scared the bejeezus out of him.

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The day after the trip to the Audubon bird sanctuary, Lester heard a horse whinny. Zigzagging through a stand of willows, he followed the braying and snorting to a small stable hidden away behind the main dining room. A brown mare with three white stockings from fetlocks to knees was grazing on the vegetation, cropping the grass and clover right down to the bare earth. Lester reached through the pole fence and ran a hand over the animal’s withers. Several bales of fresh hay were neatly stacked in a barn adjacent to the outdoor pen.
Lester spied a metallic object abandoned in a clump of goldenrod. Reaching down he retrieved a small cap gun. The barrel had broken off, the left side of the handle smashed. He pulled the trigger and watched as the hammer sprung back and the chamber shifted one, make-believe slug to the right. For his tenth birthday he begged his parents for a pair of cowboy guns and matching holsters. Not just any firearms. Lester insisted on Colt 45 six-shooters, the original Peacemaker model.

‘You can hear the hoofbeats & smell the gun smoke of the old West!’

Or at least that’s what the sappy promotional material guaranteed. The gun that tamed the Wild West. Prized by the U.S. Army, frontiersmen, cowboys and Indians as they blazed new trails. Jesse James, Bat Masterson, Billy the Kid lived by this gun. Lester’s set was nickel plated even though the military version was gun blue. Another saying on the side of the box boasted: 'God made man, Colt made them equal.' Saturday morning an hour before the McSweeney clan left on their Lake Winnipesauke vacation, Lester strapped the double holsters around his waist and stood in front of the full-length closet mirror practicing his quick draw. He could shoot from the hip and twirl both barrels simultaneously a full 360 degrees on taut index fingers. God made man, Colt made them equal. The macho sentiment had a comforting ring.

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The kiss changed everything.
Though the lake was loaded with pickerel, largemouth bass, sweet perch, slimy, bottom feeding horned pout—some people called them bullhead catfish—and god knows what else, all Lester could think about lately was the feathery caress. The way the dark-skinned girl snaked her lanky arms around him, wrapping Lester in a bear hug until the succulent kiss was finished. Even then, she held on for a full half minute longer.
The night before the vacation ended, Lester escorted the Israeli girl down to the coral. The brown mare was huddled between a swaybacked nag and sorrel gelding. He waved a bag of carrots in the air, and the horses shambled across the muddy pen to where they were waiting. They ate noisily mashing and grinding the carrots into orange pulp. “Give me a kiss,” Tovah murmured. He obliged her. “The Boston Red Sox are the home team?”
Lester eyed her quizzically. She had never expressed any interest in baseball. “Here in New England, yes.”
“And David Ortiz’s the best hitter.”
“Ortiz and Rodriquez. Manny Rodriguez. They’re both batting up over three hundred.”
The Israeli girl leaned against his chest and raised her chin expectantly. After a flurry of kisses she cradled her cheek against his chest. “Tom Brady?”
“The Patriot’s quarterback. Their stadium's in Foxboro.” The horses had drifted away and were huddled together at the far end of the coral. “Since when did you become such a sports enthusiast?”
Somewhere in the darkened New Hampshire countryside an owl hooted. The smell of fresh mown hay and fetid horse dung permeated the warm air. A good half mile away, an animal barked like a dog—a convulsive burst of short, feral yips. Coyotes had raided a chicken