The Deer Esau Tied to the Tree Kept Vanishing From the Rope

The old man's hands were on the boy's face, reading it the way blind hands read, finding the line of the jaw and the heavy growth at the throat. Isaac had counted his years that morning and arrived at a number that frightened him. His mother had died at one hundred and twenty-three. He did not know whether the days allotted to him followed hers or his father's, and a man who does not know the length of his rope acts before it runs out.

"My son," he said.

"Here am I," Esau answered.

"Take your weapons, your quiver and your bow, and go out to the field, and take me venison; and make me savory meat, such as I love, and bring it to me, that I may eat; that my soul may bless you before I die" (Genesis 27:3-4). The boy was already moving before the sentence ended. He loved his father, and his father loved him, and the love had grown so heavy over the years that it had pressed down on the old man's eyes until the light went out of them. That was the price, the legends would say. A gift blinds the eyes of the wise. Esau's affection was the gift, and it had cost Isaac his sight.

Esau Goes Out Into the Field With His Bow

Esau knew the hills the way he knew his own hands. He knew where the deer came down to drink in the gray hour, where they bedded in the brush at midday, which slope carried his scent away from them and which carried it toward. No man in that country put more meat on a fire. He went down into the field with the bow across his back and the knives at his belt, and the work began the way it always began, with patience and silence and then the snap of the string.

The first deer dropped clean. He bled it, bound its legs, and lashed it to a tree at the field's edge so he could go after a second before the light turned. He pulled the knot tight and tested it with his weight. It held. He left it and went up the slope.

The Rope Hangs Empty Where the Kill Had Been

When he came back the rope was still knotted to the tree, and the deer was gone.

He stood over the spot. The ground was scuffed where the animal had lain. The cord hung from the bark exactly as he had tied it, the loop closed, nothing cut, nothing chewed. A deer does not slip a binding it cannot reach and then vanish without dragging the rope behind it. He turned a full circle, reading the dirt for a track and finding none that went anywhere. There was no blood trail. There was no carcass. There was only the empty rope swinging a little in the wind.

He told himself he had tied it badly. He went back up into the hills and took another.

He Ties the Knots Tighter and the Deer Still Vanishes

The second one he bound so tightly the cord cut into the legs. He wrapped it twice, knotted it twice, set his knee against the trunk and hauled until the fibers groaned. He stepped back, looked at the work, and was satisfied that nothing on four legs or two could undo it. Then he went after more game.

Gone. The rope tight, the knots whole, the deer simply not there.

He did it again, and it happened again. The whole afternoon went like this, the best hunter in the country watching his kills disappear from bindings he had set with his own hands. He grew frustrated, then angry, then quietly afraid, because a man who lives by the field trusts the field, and the field had begun to lie to him. He searched the brush. He doubled back on his own steps. He could not find a single one of the animals he had taken. The sun slid down the sky and his quiver did not empty into a single meal, and all the while he had no idea what was working against him, because he was a man of the field and not a man of the unseen, and the unseen was exactly what stood at the tree.

The Accuser Loosens What the Hunter Bound

The one untying the ropes was Ha-Satan, the heavenly accuser. Not a rebel and not an enemy of his master, but a servant carrying out an errand. He had been sent into that field with one task: keep Esau out among the hills until the day's work could be done elsewhere. So each time the hunter walked off, the accuser walked up to the tree, slipped the knot, and set the deer loose to bolt back into the brush. Then he stood aside and waited for Esau to make another kill, and undid that one too. A cosmic game with the hunter as the one who keeps reaching and keeps coming up empty.

The reason was in the tent. While Esau chased deer that would not stay caught, Rebekah was at the fire with two young goats from the flock, working their meat into the dish the old man loved, the dish he believed only his elder son could bring him. She favored her younger boy. A warning had already passed through that house like a whisper into the grain of the story, that the elder son hid seven abominations in his heart and would in time bring down seven holy places. The blessing was not going to the field. It was going to the tent. The accuser's whole job that afternoon was to hold the door open by keeping the field empty, and a rope that will not stay tied is a very quiet way to hold a door.

By the time Esau gave up and came down out of the hills with whatever he could finally hold onto, the savory meat was already eaten, the hands already laid, the words already spoken over the wrong head. The hunter who never missed had been beaten by a thing he never saw, working knots he had tied himself.