I’ve woken up the past few mornings, and taken the dog out, while my wife and baby are sleeping contentedly away – to greet the sun with a nip of frost in the air, and the smell of leaves changing and falling on the forest floor. It brings about strong memories and a growing urge from the depths of my soul to spend time again deep inside the forest, watching Fall pass deeper and deeper towards Winter, and glimpsing the secrets of the wood once more.
Deer season is a month away out here in East Central Missouri, and it is one of those times in my life that is a marker upon which I engrave something deep in my soul as another passage of the years gone by. It’s a traditional pastime, passed down from father to son, over many generations on both sides of my family, and one that I have had the privilege to imbue on a few of my close friends growing up. It’s a time of making meat and filling the freezer, and camping with old friends. Of cold mornings, numb feet, sunrises and sunsets, communing with the gods, and being one with the forest.
It started when I was 9. My Grandpa and my Dad went to visit a cattle farm owned by my fourth cousin, Louie. He had spent WWII in the Navy as a machinist out in the Pacific fleet, came back home, married, had kids, and owned a full-service gas station, bought this spread in the 70’s, and was spending his retirement running 100 head of cattle over his place. It was 112 miles south of my childhood home, nestled deep in the Ozark hills, spread out over a river valley and two ridges on either side – 400 acres of prime Ozark cattle land. Grandpa and Dad went and visited Louie (who was 75 at the time), and spent the day walking the property lines (5 miles of hilly fence walking), and we were invited to come deer hunt. Dad took me there my first season, and we spent the nights in a two-person pup tent – temps dropping into the teens at night, and climbing to the mid-30’s by day. I was wrapped up in a snowmobile suit, carrying a Red-Ryder bb gun as my firearm, learning how to sit quietly in the woods (or sleep among the leaves as it often happened) for hours at a time. Dad was teaching me to be quiet and move slowly, to listen to the woods around me, to see the signs of tracks and droppings left by earlier visitors, and become part of the woods around me. We built ground blinds that year ( in a time before tree stands became popular, and were much more expensive), from piles of tree branches and logs and leaves, with lawn chairs in the middle, covered with heavy packing blankets. It was the start of many wonderful memories and lessons to come.
I’ve made that trek to the same farm – both weekends of firearms deer season every year since that fall, save one – the year I turned 11 and had a bad case of mono (this was coincidentally, the first year I would be able to legally and responsibly carry my own high-powered rifle on my own for the season). I’m now 32 going on 33, and there are so many memories, and places in the woods I know on that farm now, I can’t walk very far without memories and stories so thick that I have to brush them away with my hand.
I mark the years with silly names that make sense to only me and my close friends and family, but give note of the passage of time (each one has a story to it that could take an entire entry all to itself).
• The 1st year.
• The 1st shot (I was 12, first time I took a shot at a deer, but missed).
• The Year of the Flood (11 inches of rain over the 2nd weekend).
• The first deer (I was 14).
• The 1st time I cleaned and carried a deer out of the woods by myself.
• The Year of the Snow (cold front came through and dropped ice, then 1 ½ inches of snow overnight before Opening Day, Dad and I both tagged out that weekend).
• The Year of the Monster Buck (a never before seen beast that tore across the field we were camped next to and having lunch, he had a sycamore tree coming out of his head, and ran like a draft horse – by comparison, a 12 pointer came by 45 minutes later that was tiny).
• The 1st year of college, aka, the time my idiot uncle got my cousin and I got busted for bringing his deer home by the MDC for not having the proper transportation tag attached to it.
• The Year of the Cold (sub-zero temperatures every morning – high’s in the 20’s).
• The Year of the Logging of the Forest.
• The Finding of the killing tree.
• The Year of the 3-shot miss.
• The Year of the One that got away.
• The Year Completely by Myself.
• The Year of the Long-shot.
• The Year of the 10-minute Buck.
• The Year of the Meteor Shower.
• Jim’s First Year or the Year of the Ghost deer.
• Craig’s First Year.
• The Year of the 3 Bucks.
• The Year of the Bobcat.
• The Year of the Lazarus Deer (also known as the story of how I ran my deer down on foot over 3 miles and got 12 people involved by the end).
• The Year my Brother and I both got our deer 1 minute apart.
• The Year of the sleeping deer.
And On and on and on….These names won’t mean much to you, but to me, they are 23 years of memories and stories wrapped up in these 2 weekends.
Lest you think we are your stereotypically redneck hunters, out shooting things simply for the sizes of their headgear, and just beer-drinking fun – I want to explain to you what this season really means to me.
To me, deer season is a connection with not only my immediate ancestors, knowing how my Grandpa was helping feed his family of 14 siblings during the Great Depression with his .22 in northern Minnesota, while I pack his hunting knife every morning; but it’s also a connection to our greater ancestors, stretching back in time over 200,000+ years. It’s a lesson in skill, both in knowing the quarry, and accuracy in my weapon. Being in the woods is not simply walking down the paved hiking trail with an IPod in your ears, its listening to every step and noise of the forest – discerning between a squirrel’s scamper, or a turkey’s gait, or the soft steps of an approaching deer feeding on acorns – doing this in weather that changes from sub-zero and snowing, to balmy and rainy with everything in between – from mornings so quiet that you can hear a song-bird from a quarter mile away, to blustery days when nothing but the screaming wind fills your ears. From rising each morning to reach my chosen spot an hour before first light – watching the sun rise and seeing the forest wake up, spotting the animals who hang on the edges of such times as they make their way to their beds, while blending yourself into the forest so much that squirrels mistake your limbs for branches, and birds fly within inches of your face. To watching the sun set upon a glorious sky, sinking ever lower in the horizon – while the shadows grow longer, and the woods grow cooler – cold air suddenly spilling down the ridge tops, and hearing the creatures that have lain hidden all day, suddenly stirring in the quickly vanishing light.
I don’t do this simply to see if I can shoot the largest buck each year, or simply for the “sport” (I hate that word); I do this with the utmost reverence and respect for the animal itself. There are many prayers spoken to the Grandfathers for the time spent on the hunt, and for the sacrifice of the animal itself, and then afterwards as the animal is honored and used. My skill with my weapon is honed to be as refined as possible, because ensuring a clean, responsible kill, with the least amount of suffering possible – is my ultimate goal. The very act of killing itself, is done with incredible amount of emotion (both good and bad), and is not taken lightly at all. My decision to take the animal is based always on - whether this is possible, can I do it cleanly, is it a safe shot; I never shoot at running animals, and my favorite remembrances are when the animal is not even remotely aware of my existence, and simply falls in its tracks.
That being said, while this tradition may be repugnant to some, I almost never buy commercially produced meat – the only exceptions being pork, chicken and the occasional stop at a restaurant for a burger, or a steak house a few times during the year. There is an incredible honor in knowing the full path of my food, from the time it was walking around in the forest, to its process all the way to my freezer, and then on to the plates of my family and friends.
So in just a short few weeks, another turn of the wheel will be upon me, and I will make note of it, with another set of stories and experiences, of lessons learned, of memories and thoughts from past years’ remembered. When I look at my beautiful, sleeping son nestled with his mama, I take comfort and pride in knowing that he will someday be embarking on the same trek through the woods with his father, like I had done, and he had done with his father, and on back towards the beginning. Those blue eyes discovering everything anew, in the same wonderful way I did, and making his own stories and experiences as he grows up. And so continues the circle of life.