Texts and Memories...

     The text came through a few days before Christmas. It was from my lifelong best friend. I glanced at my phone and saw that there were two images attached. I knew what was coming next. Mark had taken two beautiful eight-point bucks within a day of each other, hunting in the mountains near Morefield, WV. He has family there and hunts there every year. He had to show me.

    I smiled at the size and beauty of the two bucks. Replying with a congratulations and asking him if he used a grunt or a bleat, trying to scrape together some hope for the remaining two weeks of hunting here in Virginia. “The West Virginia rut is probably the same as it is here,” I thought, “Maybe I still have something to look forward too for the late season.”

    Thirty-Six years ago, when I got my first, and so far, only, deer, I called Mark that night. (This was before cell phones and I had to drive to the gas station in town to call his house.) He had opted to hunt downstate instead of the farm I had access to. I had scored a nice eight-point youngster, about three and a half years old. He immediately popped my balloon by telling me he’d taken a monster of a nine-point, weighing in at 195 lbs. dressed. I was jealous at first, but he was and is my best friend and I had to be happy for him. We’d both had success, he just had a little more than me this time.

     That was how it happened throughout our friendship. Mark grew up in a more rural setting and had been hunting longer than I had. He could walk out his back door and into a farmer’s soy field and take rabbit and geese and the occasional deer. I lived in the suburbs and had to wait until I could drive to get anywhere to hunt.

     This made Mark a little better shot than I was at first. He was a little better tracker, a little more attuned to where the animals were. I can’t say it didn’t bother me in the beginning of our friendship, (we met at age fourteen) but I got over it soon enough. I loved him dearly. He was the brother I’d always hoped to have, (I have three brothers but we’re not particularly close) and he felt the same for me. We were inseparable throughout high school and the first few years of our twenties.

     On the water, we were equals. I could find the bass as easily as he could, but in the field, he was just a little better when we were kids. I never minded, and he never gloated. It wasn’t really a competition, not me against him anyway. It was more like “us against them.” Mark was happiest when we both scored a buck, or a few Canada geese, or some rabbits, or a bucket full of crappie that his grandmother cooked in cracker meal. I felt the same. I don’t care that his first buck was bigger than mine. I cared that he got one too. Next year…or the year after, I’d take the bigger buck, but this year was his.

     We talked, back then, of buying land near each other and raising our families near each other and remaining friends in the same way we had been through high school. We only got as close as sharing an apartment one year. Life took us in different directions after that and we never did buy that land. Our children, his son and my daughter, are almost the same age and have only met once. It didn’t happen like we’d figured.

     But he is still my best friend, and I am his. He lives in Delaware, where we grew up, while life had me in Tennessee for seventeen years and now in Lynchburg, Virginia for the past five. I’m likely here to stay and, while I’m only six hours from home these days, (as opposed to fifteen when I lived in Nashville) I still haven’t seen Mark in over seven years.

     We stay in touch by text. In the summers he is working on a crab boat in the Chesapeake and doesn’t have time to chat. So, we text when we can and keep “caught-up” and promise each other that one of these days, we’ll get together. I mean it when I say it, and I’m sure he does too…but we’re both in our mid fifties now and it’s just plain hard to find time. We will, someday, I’m sure.

     But until then, we text, and those texts are filled with running jokes, stories and remembrances from our wonderful childhood days together, lines from movies we loved, snippets of church sermons and Field and Stream articles, and, on good days in the woods, pictures of the beautiful eight-pointers he took, or the bronze back I hooked last spring, or the James River Gorge where I fish with the caption… “Wish you were here.”

     I do. I do wish he was here. I wish we were having these conversations face to face, not in text messages, as the busy-ness of adulthood gnaws away at our time. I wish we were boys again, wearing varsity jackets and cruising Newark, or orange vests, with deer tags flapping in the breeze, stalking some yet-to-be-found buck and not realizing that the last time we hunted together would really be the last time…at least for a long time.

     So, I’ll take the texts and I’ll happily concede this year’s buck trophy to my best friend. I’m happy for him. Happy because I know him, and I know how he loves hunting, and happy that he had success this year. I know how much it means to have those few days respite from the grown-up world that has swallowed our childhood plans. I have about three more days available to hunt before deer closes here where I live. I hope I can send him a mildly braggadocious text sometime in the next seven days. It won’t matter if I take a buck that’s bigger than his or merely a doe for the freezer…he’ll be as happy for me as I am for him and he’ll probably smile and remember when we hunted and fished and did pretty much everything else together. And he’ll shoot me a text reminding me of those days.

And I’ll smile.

When Older Men Gather

                                            

     After a second unsuccessful day in my stand on Thanksgiving Day, my daughter and I drove the next morning back to the Delaware Valley and the Philly suburbs where I was born and raised.

     I suppose I’ll always call that place home, although, Lynchburg Virginia, where I now live, is becoming more and more my home as time rolls on. I love it here. I love the backdrop of the Blueridge Mountains and the upper James River in the spring. I love the woods and farms where I hunt, and I love living in a place where hunting and fishing and the outdoors is still such a central piece of the societal fabric.

     I’m fifty-five years old, and if there is anything I miss about living here, it’s the kinship and camaraderie of lifelong friends and the things they talk about when they find themselves in each other’s company. Often, those conversations are enriched by a cup of coffee, or expanded by a glass of wine or a generous amount of bourbon over not-too-much ice.

     I moved here at fifty-one. Not an age where a man makes such friends unless something should occur that brings them together. A man generally makes all his close friends by the end of his college years. After that, with the pace of life and our territorial nature, a man doesn’t open himself up to the possibility of adding another trusted friend to the short list of those he holds close.

     In the absence of childhood memories, there’s not much that would bond two men, and it takes something outside them both to bring them together and create a friendship. It could be church, or a sporting event, or a neighbor borrowing a crescent wrench.  Or, it could be time spent in a hunting lodge, after a day afield.

     This past weekend I was in the company of such a bond. Two men who came to know each other later in life and found a friendship in their love of hunting. Men of similar station and accomplishments. Men of character. Men who hold to an enduring view of life, and sport, and adventure.

     My dad met this other fellow on a hunt more than a few years back. A guided hunt that only men of some measure can aspire to. The sort of experience envied by anyone with a love of the outdoors and a taste for the sort of adventures that we read about as little boys. The sort of trip that only a man of sufficient means can make.

     I’ll call him Bill. Bill holds a law degree from a substantial law school at a university deep in the South, steeped in tradition and grandeur. He made his life work in service to our country and speaks from a volume of experience that a man like me will never know. I couldn’t even bring myself to envy him. To me, envy cheapens that which deserves respect. I respected him. I listened to him tell me -over the course of the two days I was home during which I spent several hours each day in his presence—about his life and his accomplishments and some of the hunts he’d been on…many with my dad.

     Bill, like myself, is a transplanted Virginian. I’m from the Philadelphia area and Bill is from the deep South. We both spoke of Virginia with respect and admiration for all the sporting opportunities she offers us. I told him where my deer hunt is located, and he knew the area right away. He realized that I’m not far from Fluvanna County and he showed me the obligatory photo on his phone of an enormous buck that a friend of his took, up in Fluvanna, outside of Charlottesville.

     I was in the midst of explaining to my dad about my getting skunked, so far, in this deer season. I told them about hearing some grunts, and a bleat. I explained that I was hunting an area not very pressured with other hunters. I mentioned the fact that there were some men running dogs on the lands near where I hunt. My dad was a bit shocked and I explained that deer hunting with dogs is legal in Virginia, to which Bill spit out; “Dogs…so much for a Gentleman’s Hunt.”  I liked him right away.

     Something told me to ask more questions than I answered over the weekend. Bill was a man of great depth and breadth and would have held my interest on his own. Coupled with my dad, though, there was a presence in the room that commanded my attention and demanded my near-silence.

     Something takes place when older men gather. Something that young men recognize if they are wise, and while I no longer consider myself a young man, I am younger than they are, and I understood that there was a lot of wisdom talking. It had been many years since I talked of the outdoors and “gentleman’s hunts” and I wanted to hear it all. So, I listened as Bill and my dad talked, on Saturday morning, fueled by the knowledge that in my presence there was a new audience for the stories. And later, on Saturday night, expanded by a few glasses of Cabernet.

     The conversation was magnificent and large. I contributed the most by simply asking questions…I had little to offer these two men and I was all the better for realizing this and accepting it. This was a chance to hear tall tales of high adventure and to look, full-on, into the rarity of a friendship that formed long after either man was of college age. These two had come upon each other in a hunting camp well past the time when most great friendships are made, but had been blessed by it nonetheless.

     There was a point when the conversation turned to the great writers of outdoor stories, the chroniclers of safaris and adventures, and I mentioned Gene Hill and Robert Ruark. For a moment, I was on equal footing with both men, as they were fans of the great Ruark and I believe I earned just a smidgeon of respect for knowing his name and being somewhat familiar with his work and his life. I spoke of my love for Hill and my own desire to write stories in the same flavor as these men. The smile and the twinkle told me I had broken just a little ground with Bill, and it felt good for me.

     The evening was full of talk of deer, and bear, and hunting camps and politics. Of rifles and fly rods, and gun dogs, and duck blinds. I added to my education, the knowledge of  what makes a fine Cabernet, the difficulties of transporting your own gun internationally for a hunt, and that a French Chamois is definitely not the same as a Chamois you’d detail your car with.

     When older men gather, some younger men can find themselves feeling threatened or bothered. Some younger men don’t have the confidence to accept that there are moments when your best play is to say as little as possible until the conversations turns to that rare topic where you really have something to offer. In that mystical moment, you gain in stature, because the older men recognize your respect.

     One takes a lot from such moments, when older men gather. You leave with a generous supply of wisdom, a healthy view of your own adventurous spirit, and the knowledge that one of these days -sooner than you figured it would ever happen—you’ll be the one regaling a younger gentleman-hunter, as he listens intently, hanging on every word spoken…

…when older men gather.

           

    

Moments in The Field...

     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.

The Wilderness Within...

     Yesterday was my first deer hunt in thirty-seven years. For reasons I’ve outlined here previously, I just couldn’t get back out in the woods since getting my last (and so far, only) buck in 1981. I hunted for birds, and rabbits a few times after that, but since 1989, haven’t been out until yesterday.

     In the years that passed, I married, became a dad, divorced, grew a business, bought a house, sold it, bought another one, lost it in 2008 when the economy collapsed, graduated from college, wrote six books, moved to Virginia, found the Upper James River, and finally, took the steps necessary to get back out in the woods again.

     I knew I missed it. I knew there were memories that called me back to the woods. Conversations over bad coffee around a warm fire that helped me grow up. Friends who smiled at the same things I smiled at. Who spoke the same language out there. Out where words like “rut” and “bleat” and “scrape” and “rub” meant something. And where a good hunter knew the difference between them.

     I missed those guys and those days. I missed the goose pit I shared one winter with my best friend Mark, and the two birds we took one snowy, cold December afternoon. The miles and miles we walked along the canal at St. Georges, Delaware with my beloved Spaniel, Jesse, walking and talking and occasionally finding something to shoot at. Hunting can occasionally be secondary to the deeper joys of two friends talking their way into adulthood, even if the two young men don’t realize it at the time.

     But there was something more to my time away from the hunt. Something that hid beneath the surface and I didn’t recognize it until this morning. When I did spot it, I realized it had been there all along, but it took someone else pointing it out to me to make it stand out from the brush. Today it was the late Gene Hill.

     I’ve been working my way through Gene’s classic “Hill Country.” It’s a compilation of his articles for Field and Stream and Sports Afield. Gene was known for short stories that capture the “why” of outdoorsmen, far more than the “how.” He didn’t write much about which lure to throw for a bass, or which shot pattern would bring down a pheasant. He wrote about how it felt to be throwing that lure with your grandad on a farm pond on a late summer afternoon. He wrote about the joys of a good bird dog, a sweet-smelling pipe, and a warm fire at the end of a day out amongst them.

     I started reading his work when I was about nine and used my lawn mowing money to subscribe to Field and Stream. I subscribed to learn how to become a better fisherman. I was too young to hunt on my own and my stepfather had no interest in the outdoors. I stumbled upon Mr. Hill’s monthly column because I love to read, and I would faithfully read every line of that magazine as if it were Holy Writ.

     What I found, when I began reading his work, was a picture of the outdoors, and the outdoor life, that I longed for. A place where men were men. Where friendships were forged in the deep quiet of the woods and around an applewood-and-oak campfire, where average food tasted like manna, warmth was appreciated and seen in a whole new light, and there was no such thing as bad coffee.

     I found the thing I was missing at such a young age. It was primal. It is stronger in some than in others and in today’s society it is being stifled and replaced. But it is there nonetheless. I found the secret to real lifelong friendships and memories that you can still feel, forty-plus years later. And I discovered that this gene of ours -once activated in a young boy—never goes fully dormant. It’s pull may be muffled by life and circumstance, but it never stops tugging.

     This morning I read Hill’s story; What is Wilderness? I had an epiphany of sorts. I found it to be almost like looking into a mirror, or maybe as if Gene Hill had known where I was going to be at fifty-five and wrote this story, so I’d understand. I was so moved that I considered painstakingly copying it verbatim and posting it on this page before writing this article. It was that good.  I won’t try paraphrasing it here. I wouldn’t desecrate Mr. Hill’s words like that. But bear in mind as you read, that this story grew from the fertile soil he turned over in the space of the ten or fifteen minutes it took me to read his work this morning.

     I got to my hunting land at 4pm on Friday night. I live about thirty-five minutes away, so I certainly could have slept at home, in my warm bed, and driven to the hunt early the next morning. Like any sane person would have done. But something in me needed to camp there the night before. I hunt this land alone. I’ve only lived here four years and don’t know anyone well enough to ask them to hunt with me. Sharing hunting land is sacred for guys like me and you don’t just wander into that inner circle uninvited.

     I got to the site and immediately made a mental note that I’d forgotten the two gallon-jugs of water I’d set aside for washing my hands after I scored my inevitable state-record buck the next day. “Oh well,” I thought, “I brought the latex gloves, so I probably won’t be too bloody anyway.” I checked my gear, made sure my backpack was loaded with the right stuff for the day, laid everything out in order so it was readily available in the dark the next morning. I texted my daughter to make sure the texts would go through and assured her that she could reach me if she needed me. I reminded her to lock the doors. She’ll be twenty-one soon and it’s not like she needs me to worry about her, but I still do, and I suppose, I always will, a little.

     I sat outside and watched the stars begin to reveal themselves as the sunlight faded. By 6pm it was dark. I figured I might as well get into the truck for the night, so I laid the passenger seat back as far as it would go and piled my sleeping bag around me, stuffed the pillow beneath my head and lay there, waiting to sleep.

     I’m not a twelve-year-old novice hunter anymore, so, excited as I was about the hunt, I drifted off around 7:30. I knew I’d be awake early but why fight it. As I laid there, waiting for sleep, I stared out at the stars. There is something about the canopy of stars over a deer camp. Something that reminds you that this is the real world…not the suburbs where you live, or the city where you ply your trade. There is something wondrous and massive about the Milky Way. Something that never gets old and never loses its magic.

     As I lay there, I listened for the rustle of wildlife. The hoot of an owl, the plaintive cry of a coyote, or the local deer or bears on the move beneath a brilliant half-moon. It was quiet, and I heard little, but I listened intently nonetheless. Because this, too, is part of why I come here. I come to take a deer, or a pheasant or a goose. But I also come here because deep inside I long for the wild. I need to remember how to depend on a compass, the stars, my skill with a grunt call, and the accuracy of my shot. I am only a half-hour from home. I can here the occasional car on the road about a half mile from my camp, but I am alone out there in the wild, and it could just as easily be in the middle of the Rockies.

     I was freezing by the time I woke at 4:15. I hadn’t packed a heavy enough sleeping bag and assumed that I had enough layers to compensate. I was wrong. I felt like Robert Redford in Jeremiah Johnson, when he first arrived in the mountains and almost froze to death, before meeting “Bearclaw” Chris Lapp, (played wonderfully by the lovable Will Geer). The elements are a part of it. A part of this need of ours to get back to the wild and put our real survival skills to the test. Yes, I had my truck. Yes, I could have just gone home if I thought I was in real danger of freezing. (I did compromise and at 1:30 started the truck and ran the heater for twenty minutes) But pushing through the cold, and the briars, and the wind, and the rain and the sore feet, is part of the why. I have a lot of friends here who hunt and who would donate a roast or some jerky. It’s not the taste of venison I need…it’s the pursuit. The endurance. The return to the one thing that links all us men, on a genetic level. The Wilderness.

     I marched out to my stand, a little hesitant since there are bears in these woods and I’ve never been around bears before. As has always been my nature, I placed my stand deep in the thicket and briar. I had to chop my way in the day I set my stand. I like it like that. I try to think the way my prey thinks. They aren’t going to come up to me with a bullseye-shaped birthmark over their shoulder, waiting to be shot. The big ones, the old ones, the wily ones live a little deeper in the woods, where it’s harder to get in and out and where they have cover. That’s why they lived to be older and bigger.

     I climbed up in my stand and waited. I was cold. I shivered. I certainly had enough layers on for the day, but the cold of the overnight chilled me to my core and I couldn’t get warm again. I listened. I watched a spectacular Venus as it hung right above me, more visible than any planet I’ve ever seen. As I sat in silence, I thought about all the times I’ve sat in deer stands, and why I was in this one. I thought about being a young boy in Delaware, where just seeing a deer was a victory. I thought of the men I used to hunt with and how I’d love to have them along right now.

     At times, I was so cold I thought about just going back to the truck. I almost convinced myself that I wasn’t going to see anything anyway. That maybe this was a mistake. That I picked the wrong area for my stand. But I resisted those thoughts and as I sat there a little longer, I realized why it was I was there, and why I needed it. “It had been so long,” I thought to myself, “So long since I’ve been up in a tree on a cold November morning. Now, here I am again. At last.”

     I thought about the area of the country I am hunting. I’m near Appomattox Virginia. Where the only civil war we’ve ever fought was ended. I wondered if any young Confederate soldier had taken a deer from this land, a hundred and fifty years ago, while marching toward what might have been his final battle. Or what Powhatans or Appomatoc, or Monacans might have harvested here.

     I realized, freezing and doubtful as I was, that this is also why I’m here. I’m here to shiver. To test myself. To see how much I can handle and still achieve what I am out here for. Throughout this fall, in preparation for the hunt, I had tried to locate tracks, but the floor of this forest was full of pine needles and briar and leaves. It was so thick that the deer simply weren’t sinking in and leaving discernable prints. I had to go by my knowledge of scrapes and rubs and set my stand as best I could. I questioned my placement. I wondered if I was right about any of this…until I heard a grunt off to my right. It was still too dark to see, but he was out there, and he’d answered my one, lone bleat from my “can” and I felt a swell of pride just knowing I got an answer from some wily buck, down in the hollow to the right of my stand.

     The sun crept into the forest slowly. I got another grunt of two from my neighbor, but I never did coax him out. If I needed him in order to survive, I could have tried stalking. But as it was, I figured I’d just leave him be and try getting him out in the open before January fifth, when the season ends.

     I walked out to my truck around eleven a.m. Here I found the first prints I have seen since September, when I first got permission to hunt this land and took some walks in the area to find signs. They were walking right down the path the landowner had cut with a bush hog. I really didn’t expect them to be using this area, but then I realized that he’d cut this wide swath several years ago. They’d grown accustomed to it by now. I laughed mildly when I realized that had I stayed in my truck, I would have seen them walk right by. (I figured they walked by around sun up, maybe a little later)

     The decision was made to relocate my stand and wait a week. In the meantime, I put together a ground blind in the corner where the path turns ninety degrees to the left and heads toward the woods. I’ll see them coming and I have room to wait for a good clear shot. There was a satisfaction to finding those tracks. To walking them backwards to see where they are crossing the woods and where they’re heading. Something wonderful about reconnecting with a skill I learned at age twelve, when Carl Ramsey, a coworker of my stepfather’s, who was half Cherokee, taught me to track. It came right to me, as if I’ve never been away from the woods.

     I didn’t want to leave but something told me it was best to let the land be at peace for a few days. I have some bearings now, I’ve found some signs. Thursday I’ll be back there, this time with a little bit of a “map” as it were. A means of placing myself where I have the best chance.

     I drove off, realizing that even without a deer, I’d accomplished much of what I’d wanted. I was alone out there. In silence, with only my thoughts and my heartbeat. I’d tested myself and come out okay. I was only thirty minutes from home and a shower and dinner…but for me it was the wilderness. Finding it again is like finding my own soul. Touching it was touching the core of who I am and how I was created.

     This is why I hunt. It’s why I walk three miles upstream to fish parts of the James where I seldom, if ever, see another human being. Where I can feel as if I’m fishing with Lewis and Clark, on a river no white man had seen before my fly hit the water, even as a freight train rolls by, not fifty yards from the rocks I cast from, reminding me that the only wilderness here is in my soul. It’s what I felt yesterday as I shivered in a tree stand, feeling, for all I am, that I was alone and far from humanity…ignoring the farmer’s tractor that started on the other side of the woods, reminding me that this wilderness of mine was a result of my perspective, not reality.

     Wilderness is where you find it. Isolation is a precious commodity and testing one’s mettle against the elements is more difficult with the advent of each new hunting jacket. But we do it anyway, because we need to. We need the feeling of a pocketknife on our hip, a grunt call in our vest, and our pulse racing as we see those antlers, slowly, cautiously edging out of a tree line. We long for the smell of decayed leaves, autumn air, and the wisp of gunpowder after we take a shot. We long for tangled lines and spent shells because they remind us, after all, that we are still made of the same stuff our forefathers were. And if we can reconnect to it -and to them—once in a while out here…we’ll be okay.

    

    

Initials in a Tree Stand and a Notch in the Stock...

     The first year I went deer hunting with my stepfather, he parked me under the drooping boughs of an evergreen that sat at the edge of the soybean field on the farm we hunted. The only deer I was going to see from there was some straggler crossing the massive soy rows between the tree lines. I was probably seventy-five yards from the action and given that we could only use shotguns and slugs or buckshot, I was essentially just a placeholder.

     The old man only brought me along so that my mother would permit him to go hunting. So, the right placement of my stand wasn’t a concern to him. But I was out there, deer hunting like I’d always wanted, and that was all I cared about at first. As I got older, I wanted a real stand. Up in a tree. With at least a passing shot at a deer.

     After a couple of years of hiding under this evergreen, (where deer were apparently bedding down at night, given the amount of scat and hairs I found under there) I built my first stand about twelve feet up in a pine at the edge of the scrub trees on the south end of the tree line. I use the term “stand” very loosely here. Essentially, I nailed two boards across some branches and made a seat. I scampered up the limbs without a ladder, and parked myself there, under the canopy of pine needles and cones. It was basic, it was sturdy, and I was sixteen and didn’t care, so long as I had a real stand.

     I actually saw some deer that year. I watched a small buck and three does run, flags up, toward the center of the woods. A minute later I heard two shots and our friend Hank, had dropped the nice little five pointer I had just seen scurry away. Deer aren’t as populous or as big in Delaware as they are in other places, so taking a young five pointer was nothing to snicker at. In Delaware, you aren’t trophy hunting like you are elsewhere. In Delaware, you either get a deer or you don’t. The dimensions are just bragging.

     The following year, I found an old stand on the opposite side of the soy fields. It was about fifteen feet up in a split-trunked maple tree. Whoever built it made the steps out of limbs they’d cut and nailed to the main trunks. It seemed sturdy enough and I made my way up into the stand. I laid my shotgun on the floor of the stand and stepped onto the last step and snap…the step broke in the middle. I had an arm around each side of the trunk and I broke through the next step, then the next one, then the next one. I rode this thing down to the forest floor, like a primitive elevator. I was safe but shaken. I looked at the steps to the stand, all broken in perfect “V”’s and the inside arms of my jacket worn through from the bark on the tree as I held on and slid down. One or two long seconds to count fingers and toes and make sure I was okay, and I laughed at the whole thing. Until I realized my gun was still up there. Thankfully I unloaded before climbing the tree. I found a long branch and knocked my shotgun down to my waiting arms.

     The next year, I went to the farm by myself in September. I found the spot were a buck had been rutting for several seasons prior and laid claim to a nice, wide, multi-trunked maple in which to build my stand. I came back a couple of weekends later with lumber for the build. Using all my tree-fort design abilities, this was not a big deal for me. I come from a time when boys built tree forts every weekend. I was a master at this.

     It was big enough for me (by this time I was 6’1) it was comfortable, covered, concealed, and safe. I bought a dozen forty-penny spikes and hammered them into the tree for steps, and I was all set.

     I took my first -and so-far, my only—buck from that stand later that fall. He was a beautiful, symmetrical eight-pointer, about three and a half years old. One Brenneke rifled slug from my beloved Glenfield 778 (30” full choke, pump) and he fell where he stood. The next morning, after we’d dressed him and hung him in a tree to cool, I walked back out to my stand. I climbed up and took out my pocket knife and carved my initials, and the year (1981) and “8 PT” in the trunk of the tree. From then on, until that tree falls one day, that spot is memorialized in my heart. I climbed down from my stand and walked back to our camp. In Delaware you only get one deer per year, so I stayed and hunted again that day, with the sole intention of just helping with the drive later in the afternoon. I wasn’t there to kill another deer.

     That evening we loaded my buck into Hank’s van and took him home. We checked him at the station and I was congratulated by other hunters admiring the beauty I’d dropped. The next day I laid him out in our front yard, posed dutifully with my shotgun situated in his rack, and then took him for processing.

     Later that same day, I broke down my shotgun for a general cleaning, and while I had it out, I took out my pocketknife again, and carved a small notch at the top of the buttstock, right below where it joins the receiver. Just a small line carved into the walnut. I loved the way that gun looked, so I didn’t want to gouge anything big and garish into the wood. Just one line. Just enough to remind myself that I had joined the club and dropped a buck.

     That one line was like the threshold to manhood. One line…just an inch long. But the story it represented was wide, and deep and immeasurable. I could look at that notch and hear the crunch of that soybean stalk that he’d stepped on, that alerted me to his approach. I could see him again, walking carelessly toward his rut, unaware of my presence in that tree, twenty feet above his line of sight. I felt my finger squeeze the trigger. Felt the kick to my shoulder. Saw him rear back. I could hear myself cycle that pump action so quickly, it could have been a semi-auto.

     I can see him down that vent-rib. I can hear my voice, whispering to him as he lay there, took one deep breath, and kicked out his hind legs…and then stopped moving; “Stay down, big boy. Don’t get back up!” I had chambered another round, but I was hoping I didn’t have to use it. I wanted this to be quick and clean and hopefully, painless.

     I can feel my body relax when I realized he was gone. I feel the exultation building as I called to Hank, “Hank! I got a buck!” Feel the steps beneath my feet as I climbed down, the slight tension as I approached my prey, the momentary sadness as I realized I’d taken him, followed quickly by the sheer joy of accomplishing this lifelong goal.

     All this… all those memories live in one groove cut into the Walnut stock of a cheap shotgun I’d gotten for my sixteenth birthday. One line scratched into the wood with a ten-dollar pocket knife, the day after I’d taken my first deer. A gun I don’t even own anymore and haven’t for almost thirty years. A gun I would trade any gun I have for right about now.

     Next Saturday I’ll be back in the woods, deer hunting for the first time since that November morning in 1981. I have a Remington 783 / .308. It’s a wonderful gun, especially for the price. (I found it at a pawn shop with a Nikon Pro Staff 3x9 for under $350) I’ve put sixty rounds through it, acclimating myself to it and sighting it in. yesterday, after (finally) figuring out how to properly adjust the scope, I shot two groups of six, all within about a two-inch area. I also broke a six-inch-round steel plate at 100 yards. The gun is ready. The man is ready. The hunting land is ready. But…something is different.

     I’ve been to the land I’m hunting three times in preparation for the hunt. I had to machete my way in, because it is so dense. Part of the area was timbered-out several years ago and all that remains is a cedar / pine / coniferous forest and the densest thicket and bramble I have ever walked through. Stickers, briars, vines, and scrub-tree saplings made locating a good tree for a stand really hard work.

     My intention was to build a stand, like when I was a kid. But with full-time jobs and a daughter who at least needs to see my face occasionally, (I’m a single dad and she lives with me. She’s twenty, so she’s not a child, but she still likes to at least know I’m there), the opportunity to buy $150 worth of treated lumber and haul it down there and build a tree fort…I mean a stand, yeah a stand… just didn’t present itself. So, I bought a sixteen-foot ladder stand on sale at Dick’s. I assembled it in my living room, loaded the sections in my Yukon, and took it down out to the land I hunt in Appomattox County Va.

     I leaned it against a nice, tall, straight cedar, with a good view all around, climbed up and ratcheted it tight and that was that. I put a camo skirt around it, piled some brush against the ladder so it looks more natural, and left it until next weekend. And just like that…I had a deer stand.

     What the heck kind of fun was that? I assembled a metal stand in my living room. It has a seat and a footrest and a safety bar that doubles as a shooting rest. They included a safety harness system. A what? When I was a kid, I just fell out of the tree stand. I got the wind knocked out of me, got up and checked to make sure nobody saw me fall, and went on about my day, embarrassed but more careful next time.

     We didn’t wear camo back then either. We wore brown. All except for the blaze orange we were required to wear. We wore brown. We used doe urine as an attractant and we waited in the trees. No grunt calls. No “The Can” no face masks or gun covers. No camo anything. We tried to hold our pee for as long as we could, but the watered-down Maxwell House coffee from the Townsend Volunteer Fire Company’s annual Deer Hunter’s Breakfast would win every time. That coffee lease ran out around 9AM. Nobody thought about bringing empty Gatorade bottles up in the stand with them. We just let it fly off the side of the stand we didn’t have to climb down.

     Now I wear camo, (actually I prefer a ghillie suit) I have a “Can” a rattle bag, and a grunt call. I bottle my own urine, like Howard Hughes, and God forbid I eat something up there and the scent run off a buck. (What buck could resist the smell of PBJ?) I sit in a too-safe and too-comfortable steel tree stand. And my gun has a composite stock.

     Where am I supposed to carve my initials and the year, and the number of points in my steel stand? How do I notch a composite butt stock? If my fifty-five-year-old heart gives out, they’ll never find me in my ghillie suit. I’ll look like a big brush pile sitting up in a metal chair, like a tennis judge at Wimbledon. Some guy will find me up there by accident, and pry my Remington from my hardened fingers, like Robert Redford taking Hatchet Jack’s “Barr Rifle” from his frozen fingers in “Jeremiah Johnson.”

     I kid, of course. I’m not quite Walt Kowalski yet, snarling from my clenched teeth and telling the whole world to get off my lawn. The steel stand is taller than what I’ve built by hand and doubtless it’s safer. But I didn’t build it. I didn’t find a nice tree with several split trunks and design my own perch. I didn’t drag the lumber down there and cut it with a handsaw and nail it with a hammer. It’s not permanent. If it’s not productive, I can unbuckle the ratchet straps and move it. Move it? A tree stand was a badge of honor in my time. It remained in its location, like a shrine. Carl Ramsey, one of the guys who hunted with us when I was a kid, had a tree stand that was as high as a crow’s nest on a pirate ship. It swayed in the breeze and we all thought he was nuts to go up there. But it was situated in a tall oak that straddled the convergence of about four deer trails. We nicknamed his stand “Death Alley” because Carl got a deer every single year we hunted there.

     I’m doubtful as to whether metal stands that I buy at sporting goods stores and assemble in my living room with wrenches, can ever have that sort of character. What nickname do I give it… “Chief Ironsides?”  I love my Remington, but I don’t admire it. Not like I did that old wooden-stock Glenfield. The one-piece composite doesn’t have the feel that some craftsman somewhere hand-shaped it. It doesn’t look like someone might have hand-carved the checkering. It’s not hand-rubbed and oil-finished. It looks serviceable, and durable, and imposing in its dark, plastic, cold way. But it doesn’t look like art. Like it ought to be in a display case when not in the field.

     I’m discounting the new and romanticizing the old right now. I know this. But we hunt for more than deer (or bear, or rabbit, or ducks, etc.) when we’re out there. We harvest the stuff that make our lifetime memories. Right now, one week before my return to the woods, I’m wondering if I’ll make memories in my steel stand, with my composite-stock rifle, wearing my polyethylene ghillie suit, with a bottle of my own pee hanging by my head, making more artificial deer sounds than the “See-and-Say” my daughter had as a child. And if I do, will those memories hold up like the ones I made from a hand-built tree stand, and a hundred-dollar shotgun with a notch in the stock.

     Next week at this time…we’ll have our answer.

    

    

Staying Downwind

                “By-God if you’re gonna pick your feet like a monkey…you do it downwind!’

  -Bluebonnet “Boss” Spearman

    Open Range

     It’s one of the funnier lines from one of my favorite movies. Boss Spearman (played wonderfully by Robert Duval) is chastising his young hand “Button.” Button is a young kid who Boss saved from a life of poverty and who now works for him. Boss is both his employer and his de facto father. He dutifully gathers his sock and his boot and nudges his horse downwind a few yards, and another life lesson is learned.

     Being downwind is on my mind these days. Ten days from today, I’ll be in a tree stand for the first time in thirty-six years. When I hunted as a young boy and a young adult, I split my time between the stand and the floor of the forest. I liked to walk the woods and see the signs of the deer in the neighborhood. I always tried to be mindful of the wind and remain downwind of where I thought the deer would be. Sometimes you get it right, and sometimes you get it wrong and they smell you before you ever see them.

     Now, I’ve never been one to go overboard in putting too high a value on scent and scent blocker. Especially during the rut, when most bucks are so randy you could wear a suit made of pine tree air fresheners and they’d still take the chance to get near a doe. So maybe I’m not that careless about scent…but I think you get the picture. I’m not marching out into the field covered in Old Spice, nor am I keeping my hunting clothes “hermetically sealed in a mayonnaise jar on Funk and Wagnall’s back porch” to quote the great Johnny Carson.

     I’ve done my best hunting and had my greatest success from a stand. A stand gets you up and out of the dense ground cover. It broadens your view and…it keeps you essentially downwind, regardless of which way the wind is blowing. A stand keeps you up and out of sight. I remember an episode of “In The Heat of The Night” where Carroll O’Connor’s character was giving a life lesson to one of his deputies and he used deer hunting as the teaching tool. He explained why we hunt from tree stands. “Now, the deer has no natural enemies in the trees. So, he normally doesn’t look up to spot danger.” I don’t know if Carroll O’Connor ever hunted, or if the script writer ever did, but it was sage advice. Your best bet when pursuing a wary prey is to hide where they won’t look.

     I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of weeks as deer season approaches. Thinking about being downwind. I’m downwind of middle age now. (I just turned 55) In December I’ll be 20 years downwind of a painful divorce that shook my soul and reshaped the rest of my life. I’m downwind of some hard years when a business failed, and losses piled up.

Downwind of some relationships that needed to go, and sadly…some that I wish were still active.

     I’ve learned the value -stubborn as I am—of accepting the facts about some things and just getting downwind of them. It was hard to just let go of the harm done by my ex and her (now second ex) husband and just move on, but I had to in order to get downwind. It was hard letting go of the sting of the crash of ’08 but I had to get downwind and move on.

     Lately, for the last few months or so, I’ve been realizing more and more how I’ve allowed fear to paralyze me. The last economic downturn was horrible for me and for my daughter. It took a long time to find a decent job again and once I found one, I’ve found myself slowly being constricted by it like a python, in exchange for the relative security of a steady paycheck every two weeks. I’ve worked where I work for four years now and it’s the longest time I have ever been in a non-commissioned role in my life. I have always made my own money and always risen or fallen as a direct result of my efforts.

     I yearn to face that challenge again, but I find the fear of the unknown, or rather the not-guaranteed, is very great and its power is strong. I’ve been afraid to do what I know I need to do if I’m ever going to have a life that resembles -even remotely—what I hold in my heart. I want a home again. I want time to write more books and work on cars in my own garage and be around people a little more. My current job -and all the side jobs I must do to supplement my income—is not conducive to this life I seek. So, I need to make some decisions.

     Next Saturday I’ll be climbing up into a tree stand to place myself downwind of the thing I seek. The height provides me with a clearer view, a sharper angle, a keener sense of what is moving. I can hear a little more, see a lot more, and I can be downwind of the prize I'm after. I can watch it, and study it, and decide whether it’s the one I want, or if I’ll wait for another one to come by. There are times when  buck looks big and his rack looks record-breaking because your view is hindered by the thicket. But up high, you can discern better whether you want this one or not.

     While I’ll be seeking this position next week, I’m also seeking it in life. Now, especially as I’m downwind of youth and every shot must count, I’m looking for a stand in a tall tree, above the trails and ruts and beds of the things I am looking for. Up where I can take it all in, think about it, and then take my shot.

     I think that’s the lesson I’m learning as I return to the woods for the first time in so many years. And I think it’s one of the reasons we hunt, besides filling a freezer, of course. Because it takes us back to something elemental in our lives. There are life lessons we can learn, regardless of our age or how many times we’ve come to these woods and fields. I’m learning that I need to find my stand. To get up above the normal view of those things I am after; success, a home, an adult relationship with my now-twenty-year-old daughter (it was easy when she was six and I was her hero) maybe even love again. I need a place above where those things are looking, so I can take the shots and make them my next trophies.

     I’m seeking a spot downwind. Downwind from something much more than a high-scoring buck. Downwind from the things that have brought me to where I am, and the things that might be preventing me from going where I want to go.

    

My Second First Hunt

     Two weeks from tomorrow, I’ll be in my deer stand on a friend’s land in Appomattox, about 25 miles from here. It will mark the first time I have deer hunted in 36 years. In fact, it will be the first time I’ve hunted for anything in probably 30 years. A lot has changed since I was last in a tree, looking for a buck.

     In 1982, when I took my last buck from a tree stand in Delaware, I was 19 years old. I was using a Glenfield 778 shotgun, because rifles -other than black powder—can’t be used for hunting in Delaware. There just isn’t enough open space to shoot an HPR safely. Nobody wore camo back then. Nobody rattled or used a call. The only trick we had was doe urine. The most high-tech weapon in our arsenal was the Brenneke rifled slug.

     Back then, our hunting party consisted of me, my stepfather, Carl Ramsey and Hank Teryzcak. Carl and Hank were friends of my stepfather. To be honest, he only brought me along because if he didn’t, my mother wouldn’t let him go hunting. I was always his passport to things he wanted to do. It did nothing to endear us to each other. By the time I was about 16 I figured out that he couldn’t have cared less about me being there. I served a purpose and that was good enough.

     I didn’t let that deter my love of the outdoors and the hunt. Carl and Hank taught me about hunting. Carl taught me how to track a deer. How to tell which way he was moving by examining the direction he broke branches on his trail. He taught me how to tell how recently he’d been through, by feeling the poop. As a young boy, eager to learn how to score my first deer, I was not above picking up deer poop.

     We hunted a farm in central Delaware, the owner was the aunt of a friend of my stepfather’s. She was seldom there, staying in the house only once a month or so. She leased the farmland to a local man who grew soy beans. Over the years, I had three stands on that farm, all of which were in various positions within the tree line, looking out at the soy. Each year, one or two of us took a deer. We weren’t scientific hunters then…we just sat in the stand and waited. Then after lunch we’d walk the woods for a bit, and then back to the stands in the afternoon, until dark.

     Looking back, we probably did it all wrong. Or at least half wrong. We drove them way to early. This land was not very pressured, the deer weren’t spooky. It’s just that we were antsy to harvest and thought we’d stumble on them if we walked the woods.

     But taking deer was really only half the reason we came here each year. The other half was being together. It was for me, anyway. I treasured deer season, for the hope it held in the possibility that “this would be my year” but also for the camaraderie that I experienced at our campsite. The relationship with my stepfather was tentative on the good days, and vacuous on the rest. But with Hank and Carl, I found the brotherhood I needed at that age. They laughed at my jokes, appreciated my youthful zeal, and gently nudged me toward adulthood by imparting their wisdom on me for two or three days each November.

     We walked through the freshly-cut soy in the dark of early morning, and one by one disappeared into the woods as we came upon our stands. They’d wish me luck and slap my shoulder. Lunch was our own call. Sometimes I’d stay in my stand, other times I’d walk back to the camp, and one or two of them would be there. But the best moments were in the late afternoons. Whoever got back first, got things started. He broke out the Coleman stove and got the coffee water going. We’d heat up the food and begin the recounting of our day. One by one, my hunting friends would appear from the lengthening shadows, and we’d talk of rut signs, and rubs, and the annoyance of squirrels and how beautiful the sunset was. Sometimes there’d be a deer hanging in a tree near camp, cooling, the reward for patience and a well-placed stand. Other times, there was nothing but the lament that “they must be moving through here at night.”

     But the one constant was the excitement of the hunt, and the satisfying feeling that, regardless of whether we harvested a deer…we were here, together again, doing this thing we loved. This thing that tore us from our mundane, suburban lives and made us feel like old-school men again.

     I took my first buck on the last day I deer hunted before my 36-year hiatus. He was a beautiful 8-point gent. About 3 and a half years old. He was making for his rut, walking across the recently cut soy fields with not a care in the world, randy, as bucks-in-the-rut will be. He stepped on one lone stalk of uncut soy and I turned to see him. He walked carefully but not too carefully. He stopped to nibble now and then. I waited for him to turn to the side, so I could get a shot at his shoulder and be sure to drop him. (It was getting late and I didn’t want him running off and to have to try tracking him in the dark.) He never turned to offer his shoulder, and when he was about 50 yards out, I decided that he’d spot me eventually, so I raised my shotgun slowly, and squeezed off a shot at the white blaze in the middle of his chest.

     A shotgun impacts hard, and the buck reared up, straight up on his hind legs. He flipped over backward and laid there. One deep breath, and his legs kicked out…then he was still. I had pumped the fore stock so quickly that I doubt a semi-auto could have chambered the second round any faster…but it wasn’t necessary. I remember whispering; “Don’t get up, big boy…just stay there.” After a few long minutes of watching him, I climbed down from my stand and called to Hank.

     I walked out to my deer and circled him cautiously. His tongue was out, and he was gone. I stood in silence, admiring this magnificent animal, and thinking to myself, “I did it! I finally took a deer, and he’s a beauty!” Hank joined me in a moment or two, placed an arm across my shoulder and said, “He’s a beautiful buck, Craigy.” (He always called me that) and we fell to work dressing him.

     Back at camp, we hung him in the tree to cool overnight and started our dinner. Carl couldn’t make it that year and my stepfather was coming down that evening. He pulled in our camp to see my buck hanging in the tree. He asked if Hank had gotten it and he was shocked to find out that I had bagged him. I sensed a little jealousy in his demeanor and I thought, later that night, that he really wasn’t very happy that I’d gotten a deer before he did.

     The following year I was away in college, and the year after that, Mrs. Mills sold her farm and we didn’t have our place to hunt anymore. I moved out, then life took me down some paths I didn’t see on the map, and before I knew it…36 years had passed since I was out in the woods.

     I lost track of Carl 30 years ago, stopped talking to my stepfather 13 years ago, and found Hank on Facebook 15 years ago. Life is different. I’m 55 now. I’m a single dad with a daughter who loves music. Any sentimental notion of taking my son hunting is going to have to wait until -and if—she marries and has a son.

     I live in a place now that I dreamed of when I was a boy. A place where the deer are abundant, where the fishing is beyond my dreams, and where the scenery reminds me, daily, that Someone bigger than me spent a few extra moments when He created this part of the world.

     I have tried convincing my best friend to come down for deer season. Oddly enough, as much as we hunted together when we were boys, we never deer hunted. He had friends downstate who had land where the really big bucks lived, and he went with them. But Mark and I traipsed through every patch of woods and every field and every swamp, pursuing every possible variety of game we could hunt. What we were actually pursuing was the moments we had out there. We were too young to realize it, of course, but looking back, it’s the moments that make up a hunt, that we remember forever.

     Yeah, I remember the points on the rack, and the weight. I remember how many rabbits we took at Phillip’s Nursery, or the Canada Geese we got that one winter we had a pit in Middletown. But it’s more than that. It was the conversations in the truck on the drive to the fields. It was the laughter, and bragging, the moments when we realized that we had talked our way through some serious matters for such young men. Or the moments we realized we hadn’t spoken a word for miles, but we wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

     Two weeks from tomorrow, I’ll be out in my stand for the first time in more than half my life. Out there alone. I haven’t lived here long enough to know anyone well enough to hunt with them. To be honest, I enjoy my time alone. My job demands that I spend most of my day, in service to other people, and when it’s time to go home, I am spent like an old shotshell. I am gregarious and outgoing. I am also introspective and often, reclusive. I really, deeply love having time alone, particularly when I hunt or fish.

     So, I’ll make my way to my new campsite on the afternoon before the hunt begins. I’ll set up by myself and eat my dinner and sleep in my trusty old Yukon. I’ll awaken at 4am and walk to my stand in the dark. But if I listen closely, I’ll hear Carl and Hank wishing me “Good luck, Craigy.” (They always called me that) If I stand real still for a moment, I’ll feel Hank slap my shoulder as I head down the trail. I’ll be sitting in my blind as the sun rises and I’ll smile and think of Mark and wish he was here in these woods with me…still competing with each other, if only mildly, to see who would score first and who would score biggest. If I score a big buck, I know I’ll be texting a photo to my dear friend of 40 years, Dave Lewis. And he’ll be thrilled for me.

     I’ll maybe blink back a tear, thinking of Poppa John, my dear friend, and father-figure who loved the outdoors like few others, and who was a Virginian himself for the first half of his life and who always hoped we’d hunt together at least once before he passed. I’ll think of my “adopted dad” Bob, the greatest hunter I know or will ever meet, who loves these moments and would love this one especially, because he knows what it means to me to finally be back out here.

     If any tears remain, they’ll be from the memories flashing through my soul. The years I spent in the woods as a boy. The dreams of hunting a place like this, and finally having the chance. The jokes we told, the funny things we did. The slow, careful, old-fashioned way I grew into manhood out in tree stands, and honeysuckle, and briars.

     I don’t have my old Glenfield anymore, although I’d give anything to find it. I’m hunting with a Remington 783 in .308. I have camo, a rattle, a grunt call, and trail cameras. It’s a long way from an old Carhart jacket, a pair of Levi’s, an orange vest and a shotgun, and a bunch of wonderful guys who didn’t approach things nearly so scientifically.

…or is it?

   

Gun Laws Work. I'm Living Proof

Allow me to introduce myself.

     I’m 55. I’m a single dad. A college graduate. I work for my alma mater, I have a business on the side, I work as hard, or harder than anyone else I know. I am a member of a local church, attend regularly, read the Bible daily, and even write Faith-based books. I’m pretty much, by all accounts, a decent guy.

     I’m also a perfect example of why gun laws work. And why they don’t.

A month ago, I traded a friend of mine a nice MacBook Pro for a Ruger SR9. It was the first gun I’ve owned in 28 years. In fact, it was only the second gun I’ve even touched in 28 years. Not because I am anti-gun…I absolutely love shooting and love hunting and the outdoors. In fact, my dream is to write the kind of articles and books that the late Gene Hill wrote. Stories of the emotional attachment, and the memories created by fine firearms, and days in the field.

     But, until September 28^th of this year (2018 for future readers) I was prohibited from owning or possessing firearms. I was a convicted felon.

     I never did anything violent, just stupid. In 1990, I had a construction business. I also had a partner. He had a drug addiction. Having never been around drugs and being unfamiliar with the signs of addiction, I didn’t recognize the telltale traits. We were cruising along, doing well, and I decided to take a week of vacation to hang with my best friend before he got married.

     The Friday before I left, my partner and I wrote out our bills, I signed the checks, (Lindsey, for some reason, never wanted to sign a check, even though our account was set up for either of our signature, not requiring both) we sent them out, and I told him I’d see him about ten days later.

     When I returned, my answering machine (remember those?) was full. Employees were calling, suppliers were calling, customers were calling. “Where was Lindsey?” asked the customers, because he apparently hadn’t shown up on the job he was running all week. “Why did our checks bounce?” asked our employees. We had two crews, and both Lindsey’s crew and my crew went to the bank to cash their paychecks and were told the money was gone. My suppliers repeated the same lament.

     Before I left, we had deposited about $12000 in receipts from jobs we completed, so the money was there when we wrote the checks and I signed them. I called Lindsey but could not find him…or my checkbook. The next morning, Monday, I went to the bank. The lady we normally dealt with looked up my account when I told her what had happened, and she went white. The account was overdrawn almost $7000. She checked the recent history and saw that Lindsey had gone to another branch -where nobody would ask why he was doing this without me—and withdrawn $9000 of the $12000 we’d deposited. Then he vanished.

     I found out later that he went on a drug bender and wound up in a rehab outside of Washington DC. My checkbook mysteriously reappeared on the front seat of my truck overnight, but Lindsey never contacted me again. I sold the extra truck, and the extra tools, (fortunately, the business was all mine before I met Lindsey and I still owned the assets). I managed to repay about $5000 of the debt within a week or two. My crew got paid, most vendors got paid, but there was still about $4000 outstanding. I went to each person personally and asked them for patience. I explained what happened. Most were kind and waited until I paid them back. But some of the vendors were larger corporations and had rules they could not bend for me.

     In a two-week period, I was arrested 11 times for bad checks. (Since I had signed them, I was on the hook) I could have gone after Lindsey for embezzlement, but I had no idea where he was and he had nothing of value. I was too busy trying to salvage my own life now. Three of the checks were over $500 (the largest being $1025) and so in Delaware, I was now charged with a felony.

     Long and short of it…by the time I got to court I had repaid most of the debts, but the state wanted at least a piece of a scalp and so I accepted a plea deal to plead guilty to two felonies and drop the other to a misdemeanor. I was stupid to do so, but I was 27 years old, I had never been in trouble before, I was afraid I would go to jail, and I had a public defender. That added up to me accepting the felonies.

     I walked out of the courthouse, thinking I was lucky to be walking to my car instead of the DOC van, heading to prison. I got probation and within two years, all of this was in the past. Except that I couldn’t own a gun anymore. And I couldn’t vote. And whenever I filled out a job application I had to check that box. I was ashamed and broken-hearted.

     The day after court, I took my beloved Glenfield Model 778 shotgun to a pawn shop that a friend of mine owned and sold it to him. I knew Dave would give me a better price than anyone else. I tried not to cry when I signed it over to him. I saw the notch on the fore stock where I’d commemorated my first buck. I thought about all the years hunting with my best friend and all the times we’d had as boys -becoming men— with our guns in hand. 

     That was March of 1991. Other than one afternoon in 1997, when we were in Utah on our honeymoon and my wife’s friends who owned a farm insisted we go out back and shoot some clays…I had not held a gun, owned a gun, possessed a gun until three weeks ago.

     In 2011, my “adopted dad” Poppa John passed away. Pop was a legendary hunter and shooting instructor back home and he’d always wanted to go hunting with me. He knew about my legal issue and he kept pushing me to pursue a governor’s pardon. I investigated it once back then, but the paperwork was daunting. We always talked about eventually hunting together, and Pop teaching me to shoot trap. But Pop passed before I got around to getting that pardon and to my regret, we never hunted together. (Even as I write these words, I have tears. I miss Pop and I miss the hunts we would have had)

     I’ve had opportunity to shoot. I was offered a Beretta P380 once. A friend of mine, who had no idea that I was restricted, had taken it off a guy at a bar where he was a bouncer. The guy was also a felon and did not try getting it back. I told Mike I didn’t have the money to buy it and that was that.

     In 2013, Delaware restored voting rights, so I could vote again. That got me started back on the road to a pardon. And so, in 2017 I started the process. In June of 2018, I appeared before the Board of Pardons and was recommended. In September 2018, Governor Carney signed my papers and restored my rights. I will tell you that twice in the process I wept. The first time, when the Board said they recommended me unanimously without my even having to testify. The second was on that Friday, September 28^th, 2018, when I opened my mailbox and saw the letter from the governor. I went in my house, opened the letter and read those words. I saw the gold seal affixed to the page and I broke down in tears. I did this right. My fellow citizens decided that I had lived my life in such a way that I deserved to be restored to normalcy.

     I never mentioned it to anyone during the process and no one asked, but I was proud of the fact that I abided by the rules from the moment I became a felon, until the day my pardon was in my mailbox.

     And that is the point of this story. The current gun laws are more than adequate. They succeed because of people like me. People who understand where we messed up -even if we were a victim ourselves—and we understand what it takes to get this fixed. And in the time between, we abide by the law. I knew the penalty for having a gun. I chose to obey the law. There are criminals in this world who also know the penalty. They choose not to obey the law. They straw-purchase, or they steal guns, or they buy them in the black market. But regardless how they acquire a gun, they’ve acquired it illegally.

     They were already law breakers, so they just see gun laws as merely another law to break. Me…I saw them as a guaranteed trip to prison. My obedience to the laws came at a great cost. It cost me years in the field with my best friend. It cost me precious memories with Pop. I was ashamed and embarrassed. But I abided by the law.

     Gun laws were made for people like me. Because people like me abide by the law. Criminals do not. And no law on any books anywhere will change that. In 27 years of restriction, I never used a gun in a crime. Never shot anyone. Never robbed at gunpoint. Because I chose to abide by the law. The laws are just fine.

I’m living proof.