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.