Hunting Political Quarry

Back when I was Sacajawea, my friends and I spent long summer afternoons tracking animals through the fields and yards of our neighborhood. I think I dreamed up the game, and I think it sprang from a heated argument between me and certain members of the Helton clan, who lived down the street.

They didn’t believe I had one drop of Native American blood in me, and I knew I had several. Unfortunately my grandmother refused to get involved in the discussion, and the only way I could think to prove it to the Heltons was to show them I could track animals.

Which I couldn’t. My family hadn’t tracked animals for two generations, but I figured it would be like falling off a bicycle, cosmically speaking, like the ability to track animals was a trait handed down, along with green eyes and long arms.

The Heltons were five girls, all named after biblical characters. Their father was an itinerant preacher, a gentle man who nevertheless held his giggling girls firmly in check. The older girl had a crush on my older brother, and I used her desire to keep that love a secret for my own gain. All it took was a threat to run home and tell Dan, and Beth would let me have the largest cookie, or she’d convince the other girls that I should have the choice of game we played. Why they tolerated me for so long is beyond me. I would have thrown me out of the yard, pronto, but they didn’t.

Oddly enough, through sheer persistence that summer, all of us became pretty good at tracking--even the Heltons, who professed no Native kin. We got a book from the library and learned the different foot or paw prints of the animals indigenous to our town, and we kept charts and notebooks of our finds.

Dogs, of course, were the easiest. Squirrels were the worst, what with their ability to skate across the top of grass and disappear into the trees. When we couldn’t find real animal tracks, we used each other. It was kind of an elaborate hide-and-seek, only you were expected to leave a few clues behind, like a torn piece of shirt or a thong sandal. If the finder was one of the younger girls, you left blatant clues, like rocks stacked in the shape of an arrow, pointing to the way you went. That way, even 5-year-old Hannah had a chance. If the finder was older, you made your track a little less clear.

But once we’d mastered the ability to find and follow tracks, it wasn’t so much fun anymore. The fun was in the search, not the actual find. It was like getting lost in a hard math problem and having so much fun looking for the answer that it almost didn’t matter if you found it or not.

We learned a lot more than just animal prints in the Sacajawea game. We tasted the tenuous relationship between hunter and hunted. When you are in pursuit of a quarry, you can watch in frustration as she eludes you but still respect and grudgingly like her for her ability to confound you.

It becomes something more honorable than an enemy-enemy kind of thing. You don’t hate. You spy the prints in dust, note the broken branches and keep going. Part of you, the noble part, applauds your opponent’s abilities, even--maybe especially--when your opponent is besting you.

*

I thought of our tracking game this week. There was a certain beauty to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s closed-mouthed non-answers to the persistent questions about her husband’s infidelities--most especially those involving intern Monica Lewinsky.

But in one much-reviewed magazine interview, Clinton places the blame for her husband’s philandering on the thin shoulders of his dysfunctional childhood. To the rest of us who lived through dysfunctional childhoods--and that would be, at last count, almost all of us--it was a pretty stupid thing to say.

To be honest, I’d rather we’d just skipped the whole thing. That’s akin to treason, coming from a journalist, but there you have it. I like mysteries, and vagueness and filling in the blanks my own self. I like respecting an unbagged quarry from afar.

However, I suppose I knew that this particular quarry would be tracked to her tree. Her dignified silence wouldn’t last, particularly when she began her run for New York’s carpetbagger Senate seat. Remember this, though. The quarry has not been bagged. We won’t ever know what went on between Bill and Hillary in those months and long nights, and you know what? I don’t want to. Thanks just the same.