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.
