The Deerhunter – beats working

We were in Canada a little while back. Went walking everyday in the snowy woods behind our friends’ house, where we saw plenty of wild turkey and deer. The deer were skittish, white rumps scattering whenever a branch cracked or a silhouette loomed into view, but one day I noticed one peering at me through the scrub, standing stock still. He was clearly quite taken with me. I was quite taken with him, too.

“Let’s see how close I can get to him,” I thought.

I started moving through the bush, which is easier said than done when the bush is a mass of broken branches and knee deep snowpits, carefully creeping up on this deer, stopping every now and again to make sure I hadn’t startled it. I lost him on a couple of occasions, obscured by the odd fallen tree or the fretwork of branches or the shifting perspective of my progress, but found him again each time, still staring at me in the same attitude. He was entranced by my cunning stealth.

So I carried on, ever so circumspect, one step at a time, dissembling for all I was worth, well chuffed with my bushcraft until I was some seventy-five metres short of the little blighter (I confess, he was suspiciously little, quite apart from being uncommonly inert), at which point it dawned on me that this ‘deer’ I was creeping up on wasn’t a deer at all and I was actually stalking the scorched stump of a dead tree with a couple of patches of snow standing in for the throat flashes, a deficiency in vitality on the part of the ‘deer’ that was hard to forgive. Forget about hightailing it out of there. The deer was wood and the wood was dead and the dead wood wasn’t going anywhere no matter how bloody close I got. Happily, nobody saw me, apart from a couple of deer peering over a hedge off to my right, real deer with legs and all the rest of the bits, and they scarpered the moment I looked at them.

Anyway, having spent twenty years writing and failing, writing and failing, then finally getting into print in my forties just in time to see the publishing industry go glassy-eyed and turn four paws cloudward, it struck me that I’ve perhaps spent my entire life stalking a dead tree. You don’t want to be too pessimistic about these things . . . not too pessimistic, but enough to wonder whether the decades bent over a keyboard cultivating alopecia and a chronic back problem were not a large waste of time and energy. Trouble is, I’m none too sure what to do about this.

If I really want to spot the difference between a dead tree and a deer, I can always get some glasses, but there’s precious little I can do about the disappearing reader and an industry obsessed with celebrity, chefs, pocket wisdom, self-help, health and combinations thereof. The average shelf-life of a book by an unknown writer nowadays is less than that of a sack of potatoes and that’s assuming you’re fortunate enough to get anywhere near a shelf in the first place. What’s the obscure novelist publishing with a small press to do?

But then I thought, “Tell you what, I don’t care!” The thing is, I had a lot of fun creeping up on that tree and I laughed out loud when I realized it was transfixed by roots rather than the deft subtlety of my stunning Natty Bumppo impersonation. I’ve had a lot of fun writing, too. Never did understand that business about the foreboding blank page and the woeful pain of pouring your suffering soul into a story. True, there’s plenty of stuff I’ve written in the past that I find painful to contemplate now. But of itself, the writing has always been a blast. Certainly beats working as a way of passing the time.

So even if the book is doomed, I think perhaps I shall carry on creeping through the woods, doing my damndest to mesmerise that dead tree over there. Who cares if it’s not going anywhere? I am and I’m enjoying the journey.