In One Person

various sawmill men and loggers who’d made unkind comments about Grandpa Harry’s onstage appearances as a woman—especially those offenders who’d objected to Harry
kissing
as a woman.)
    In Borkman’s opinion, not only was Miss Frost an Ibsen woman—to Nils, this meant that Miss Frost was both the best and most complicated kind of woman imaginable—but the obsessed Norwegian went so far as to say that Miss Frost was
more
of a woman than any woman Nils had met in the state of Vermont. Quite possibly, the only woman who was not offended by Borkman’s outrageous assertion had been Mrs. Borkman, because Nils had met his wife in Norway; she was not from the Green Mountain State.
    Borkman’s wife was little seen, and she’d been more rarely heard. Almost no one in First Sister could remember what Mrs. Borkman looked like, nor could anyone recall if she—like her husband, Nils—spoke with a Norwegian accent.
    Yet the damage done by Nils was instantaneous. Hearts were hardened against Miss Frost; she encountered a more entrenched resistance because Nils Borkman had boasted that she was
more
of a woman than any woman he’d met in Vermont.
    “Not good, Nils—not good, not good,” Harry Marshall had muttered to his old friend at that First Sister town meeting, but the damage had been done.
    A GOOD-HEARTED BULLY is still a bully, but Nils Borkman was resented for other reasons. A former biathlete, Nils had introduced southern Vermont to his love of the biathlon—the curious sporting event that entails cross-country skiing and shooting. This was at a time before cross-country skiing had gained the popularity in the northeastern United States that the sport enjoys now. In Vermont, there already existed a few informed and determined zealots who were cross-country skiers in those days, but no one I knew skied with a loaded rifle on his (or her) back.
    Nils had introduced his business partner, Harry Marshall, to hunting deer on cross-country skis. A kind of deer-hunting biathlon ensued; Nils and Harry silently skied down (and shot) a lot of deer. There was nothing illegal about it, although the local game warden—an unimaginative soul—had complained.
    What the game warden
should
have complained about simply filled him with a complacent sullenness. His name was Chuck Beebe, and he ran a deer-checking station—a so-called biology station, where he compiled deer ages and measurements.
    The first Saturday of deer season, the checking station was overrun with women, many of whom, if the weather was nice, were wearing open-toed shoes. The women displayed other signs that they had
not
been deer-hunting, but there they were—lipstick and halter tops, and all—presenting Chuck Beebe with a stiffened deer, caked with congealed blood. The women had hunting licenses, and they’d been issued deer tags, but they had
not
, Chuck knew, shot these deer. Their husbands or fathers or brothers, or their boyfriends, had shot these deer on opening day, and those men were now out shooting more deer. (One deer tag, per licensed hunter, entitled you to shoot one deer.)
    “Where’d you shoot this here buck?” Chuck would ask one woman after another.
    The women would say something like, “On the mountain.” Or: “In the woods.” Or: “In a field.”
    Grandpa Harry made Muriel and Mary do this—that is, claim that they had killed Harry’s first two deer of the season. (Nana Victoria refused.) Uncle Bob had made my cousin Gerry do it—until Gerry was old enough to say she wouldn’t. I had done it for Nils Borkman, on occasion—as had the elusive Mrs. Borkman.
    Chuck Beebe had long accepted this perpetual fiction, but that Nils Borkman and Harry Marshall hunted deer on
skis
—well, that just struck the game warden as
unfair
.
    Deer-hunting regulations were pretty primitive in Vermont—they still are. Shooting deer from a motorized vehicle is not permitted; almost anything else goes. There is a bow season, a rifle season, a black-powder season. “Why not a
knife
season?” Nils Borkman had asked, in an earlier, now-famous town meeting. “Why not a
slingshot
season? There are too many deers, right? We should kill more of them, yes?”
    Nowadays, there are also too few hunters; their numbers decline each year. Over the years, deer-hunting regulations have attempted to address the deer-population problem, but the overpopulation has endured; nevertheless, there are townspeople in First Sister, Vermont, who remember Nils