Yesterday was Thanksgiving and I spent the
morning in my tree stand in Concord, Va. I’m a single dad and my daughter has a
boyfriend and she goes to his house for the day because he has an intact
family. His parents have been married for almost 30 years and it feels more
like a home to her. I understand it and honestly, I am thankful for it. It’s
better than her spending the day with her dad, at home doing nothing except
cooking a bird.
As of this morning, “Conventional Firearm”
season in Virginia is six days old and I’ve been out three times. Twice for
all-day hunts and once for an afternoon. Thus far, the score is Deer 3 – Craig 0.
I’ve managed to get some grunts, and I heard one estrous bleat. But I haven’t
seen anything, and I haven’t gotten a shot. It’s fine. I’m patient and it’s a
long season. I plan on being out there as much as possible, right up until
January 5 when the season ends.
But there are other trophies one can take
from the hunt. Trophies that go beyond the four-footed game we pursue. There
are benefits to time in the field that aren’t measured in a full freezer, a
mounted trophy, or bragging rights at the gun club.
As the season progresses, I collect things
along the way. Signs that mark my status as a hunter, and outdoorsman…and even
as a man. Yesterday was such a day. It was a very cold morning for
Thanksgiving. Growing up, Thanksgiving was almost always a day spent under the
grey canopy that is November. Something happens in November in the Delaware
Valley. The clouds form and seem to never go away. The sky is a light grey, and
the sun -when you can see it—appears like a little grey / orange ball in the
sky, visible sometimes, invisible most. There is a sameness to each day that
makes them all run together. It’s like that almost all winter back home and it
makes you appreciate the rare occurrence of a clear, brilliant-blue winter sky.
Yesterday, while colder than any
Thanksgiving I can recall, it was such a day. The sky was brilliant blue and
the cold air made sounds carry. As sunlight first made entrance into the
forest, I heard the buck, or bucks, in the neighborhood grunt. Just a single,
deep bark that lets everyone know he (or they) are here. I heard one of them
scraping, but I just couldn’t get him out in the open. But he answered my doe
bleat call and I chalked it up as an accomplishment. He could have scared off,
but he grunted. He at least thought my call was a real doe, although he didn’t come
out to find her. Perhaps the rut is still a few days off. There will be a day
when the randy old gent won’t pass up on a willing lady, and he’ll show
himself.
There is something different about the
elements when you are in a stand. Something about the sounds and the smells. In
such cold air, sound carries farther, and more clearly. I could hear the farmer
as he talked to his help, in a field beyond the woods where I hunt. He was a
good half-mile away, or more. But I could hear him and almost make out the
conversation as he started his tractor.
There was a moment when a breeze blew. I
could hear it coming as it moved along the treetops in the distance and then
reached my tree. We forget sometimes, when we’re caught in such a wind, that it
has a beginning and an end. I saw the tall cedars rustle and bend in the distance.
Then I felt the wind on my face, and felt my own cedar begin to gently sway. It
could be unsettling at first, if the tree were to move very much. But the big
cedar moved softly, and it felt like it was rocking me as I sat against it,
fifteen feet up in my stand. I closed my eyes and moved along with it. I am no hippie,
and not a “one with nature” type. But if this is an example of being “one with
nature” I just might be after all. For some, being one with nature means some
sort of communal existence. For me it’s practical. Knowing how to use a doe
call and getting a grunt in return. Getting a shot would be nice too but
getting the buck to even admit to his existence is a win. Spotting rubs, and
scrapes and deer trails and tracks are part of this for me. Knowing the signs.
Finding them myself and following them and letting them educate me on where to
place my stand, how and when to call, and hopefully, to harvest.
I’ve learned a lot since I was a twelve-year-old
boy hunting a soy field with a shotgun. We relied on nothing more than patience
and luck back then. Nobody even thought of a doe call or a grunt tube or camo
or red colored flashlights. (Deer can’t see red or green) We just found some
trails in the woods, built a stand in a tree nearby, and waited to see
something.
I was learning from nature even then. I
had moments even in those more “prehistoric” hunting days. I’ll never forget
lying very still in a row of soy stalks, while turkey buzzards circled
overhead, trying, as a twelve-year-old boy might do, to be still enough
to get them to try to land on me. What boy hasn’t at least thought of that
once? That same evening, I saw an owl for the first time out in nature. He soared out from the treetops against the darkening sky and I was amazed at how big he was. I remember learning how to tell which direction a deer was travelling by
seeing in what direction the twigs were broken on his trail. I remember picking
up a handful of deer scat to see if it was still warm, because that would mean
he had just been here.
These are moments that had as much value
to me as the moment when I squeezed off a shot and dropped a beautiful
eight-pointer, on a late November afternoon in 1981. These moments have consoled
me after more than one unsuccessful hunting season ended, and I once-again
waited until next year for a buck.
My best friend and I building our first
goose pit was as much fun as the days we spent sitting in it. Observing live
geese, and patterning my decoys after them, was as much a life- enriching thing
as the goose I finally took that winter. Shooting and missing teaches you to
shoot better. I have a lot of rabbits to thank for that lesson. A good bird
hunt is better with a good bird dog, even if you don’t actually take any birds.
My old Springer, Jesse, taught me that. Especially on the ride home, when we
had no birds to show for the miles walked and the cold in our bones, and he’d
lay his head on my lap as the heater in my truck went to work and he fell asleep,
exhausted but happy. I lost him way too soon and sometimes, I still feel him
with me in the field.
Time spent out there…moments, they give
old friends something to talk about years later, and long after the size of a
rack, the number of pheasants, or the pitch of a goose as he landed is
remembered. My friends and I remember the sunrises and sunsets, the funny
stories told at the check-in station by guys who just shot a deer an hour ago
and already see him as much bigger than he really is. We talk about the stories
that great old hunters told us. Men like Poppa John Iorizzo, and Mark’s
grandfather (who owned the only ten-gauge I ever saw up close.
Pop was a man who lived for these moments.
I don’t know anyone who loved the outdoors like he did. He loved everything
about it. Whether he shot a deer or caught a fish was secondary to a good
conversation, a warm hunting coat on a cold day, a bit of dip, and a cup of
strong coffee. I learned more from three hours spent fishing a spillway at
Noxontown Pond with him, than I learned in weeks of school.
My other “adopted” dad has hunted the
world over. He has taken animals I never knew existed before seeing his photos.
He’s proud of the shot, proud of the trophy, and can cook most anything he harvests,
and leave you wanting seconds. But it’s the stories he tells, that hold my
attention. His description of the terrain. The weather. The guides and skinners, and the villagers to whom he most often donates the meat. The wonderful folks he
gets to know as a result of his time out there. Those moments…those fleeting,
interruptions into our daily grind, are why we find ourselves out in a tree
stand on Thanksgiving morning, shutting my eyes as my giant cedar sways, and
the sun shines on my face and provides a few seconds of warmth against a
bitterly cold day.
I wouldn’t find this sitting at home,
watching football and making small-talk. Nothing wrong with those things at
all. In fact, I miss those times. But at this stage of life, for me, I’m
gathering these moments for my scrapbook. The one I keep in my heart and try my
best to share on these pages. Hoping that somehow you can feel that cedar in
the small of your own back, feel the brief sunlight on your face, hear a buck
grunting in the woods to your right, and know that you’re better off for the
few hours here in this place.
