Always a Hunter

In the picture, the photo taken hurriedly, as time was wasting and good meat spoiled, the edges a little faded and dog-eared from time, the pride is clear on their face. They look leaner and more of the woods than photos I've seen in some fancy hunting catalogs now. Men who counted on their hunt to feed their families. They look into the camera with eyes a hundred years old, there in the glare of the camera bulb, the courage, the restless heart, too strong for the indoors. There it is, captured in that brief flash of light, then disappearing into the darkness, home with their kill.

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It was a picture of an old deer hunt. At the time I held this photo in my hand, I'd not ever hunted deer but I'd hunted chucker and quail. I often come home empty handed, yearning for bigger game, the desire for that a shadow around me, dark like the edges of the photo.

I grew up around firearms. Both my parents were shooters, but once money was a little less tight and they no longer needed to hunt for food, they simply target shot in their spare time for proficiency and time that once might have been spent hunting was spent in other pursuits. For my Dad it was the siren call of fishing, for my mother her art - stonework, ceramics and pottery.

The bird hunting was fun, but I yearned for the hunt of the North woods, deer, elk. But I had no one to go with me, and college took up most of my time and money. Then I was married, and my husband invited me neither to hunt or to shoot. He considered that a man's calling, and would leave me home, to care for the place while he would go. He didn't do that to be mean, it was simply the way he was raised, how women were expected to act. So tending the farm in addition to a full time job was all the vacation I got, and the call of a loon was nothing more than a deep keen that would be released from my soul in sleep, the sound sometimes awakening me.

Then in my mid thirties, suddenly alone, came the question. From family friends a few hours away who had included me in their gatherings at holidays so I wouldn't be alone, a question. "Do you want to go whitetail hunting". My wife isn't going this year, since she's expecting, but we think you should. You can borrow her gear."

And it started. We were serious in our hunt. No beer drinking til we stumbled off to bed, then a mad dash into the nearest thicket. We scouted and built blinds and checked for rubs and scrapes, long before the season started. The night before, we sat and told the stories that hunters tell, myself simply listening, as I thumbed through the old photos of previous generations. The men in the photos were all dead and gone. But at least they weren't dead and gone while still drawing breath, trapped in thickets of suburbia, all the instincts of their fore bearers watered down to tasteless existence. Food from the store, health from a tanning bed, and dreams trickling down a drain in a house that saps all your money and energy.

We sat up until the fire died down, an ember jumping free of the flame and lighting on one of the old photos. I quickly jumped to brush it off, realizing too well that a 1/4 inch cinder is longer than time, and the flame it can start is larger than remembrance or grief. I've found out the hard way that burning wreckage is, unfortunately, stronger than both courage and will.
We were all up well before daybreak. I'd given up perfume weeks before, and washed with soap that would leave nothing in my wake. My scent was merely Adrenalin and woodsmoke, my eyes bright from excitement, not from a pencil or a pot of glittery shadow. I was ready. Was I ready? I knew my weapon, I was learning the woods, but did I really know myself? How would I do out alone in the cold and the dark, the elements around me reminding me again, how alone I really was.

But the Adrenalin pushed me out the door, eager to rush into something I'd wanted for years, leaping into something I'd known would happen, that feeling that somehow lovers and suicides both grasp in that instant when it's too late. The fact that it was spitting snow with temperatures in the minus area, did not even slow me down. I was going to hunt if I froze to death trying.

From the woods behind their house, came a deep seated grunt. A primordial huff from inky nothing, letting us know, that not only that he was there, that he knew WE were there. Deer don't get to be enormous by not being wily. We split into 4 lone hunters, waking a couple miles, widely spaced on the 500 acres we were on. We walk through trails barely visible in moonbeam, avoiding the deer trails so not to leave scent or sound, taking back brush filled routes into out spots.

Where I now wait. Alone. Hearing the celestial hush of a world hurtling through space, the small tiny rustle of a tiny creature worrying only if he is prey before daylight. I was up in a mid-level blind, nothing more than a small platform from which I'd climbed up simple stakes set into the trunk. Cautious as to the final silence of night that would envelop me if I fell out if it headfirst, I lean around cautiously, feeling my shoulder hang there just for a moment in space, so I knew where my best balance was, counting my backbone as it lay up against the trunk that was my only support.

The woods came alive. If you hunt or camp, really camp, you know what I'm talking about. When sound by sound you become aware of life around you, the chirping of birds and a squirrel mocking the deep episcopal purple of the night. I sat, flexing my feet in their boots to keep them warm, clutching my weapon to me like a babe in arms, ears picking up every little sound, eyes scanning my world for what I sought. The sounds themselves flexed, continuously rising, then falling to silence, life, then death, a sharp cry in the underbrush a small joy, or a sudden end. The woods were alive, as am I.
Time passes in slow motion, the woods trembling with shimmering forms that flash before my eyes, glimpsed for only a moment as they blend into green as the dawn slowly melts into view. Leaves caress my check, as a small storm moves in. From where I sit I can see if for an hour, not encroaching closely enough I needed to seek a safer spot, but flirting with a small spot of land, distant artillery flashes against a the sky slowly bleeding into brightness.

This was a day alone hunting, not boredom or despair but listening to the sound of the world as I dream of gods, men, blackpowder,long, slow kisses, prime rib and everything in between. Joined by an old old company of oak that leans into me, reaching upward from the matted miracle of the forest floor, teeming with life. Looking upward into the deep veined richness of space, any lingering doubt I had as to my ability to be in this spot, at this time, stops, as my heart jumps at the shadow on a 12 point buck entering my view.

It was almost dusk when I see him. From a small ridge line marked by sentient rows of corn, he moves quietly, stopping, listening, smelling. Seventy-five yards away, one movement on my part as he looks my way, and he would be gone before I could pull up and aim. The moment is there in between a heartbeat, a sound, a sixth sense and he begins to dart away. Thinking back to something that came from one of the previous evenings old stories, I put up my fingers to my mouth, tasting the earth, tasting myself, and I whistle. One brief, sharp sound that breaks the lie of silence. The buck stops for just a moment and my shot rings out.
He didn't go far, the bullet going through his heart, he was down in an instant, providing in that moment, a closure of a cycle for both he and myself. With his life, giving sustenance for the upcoming cold winter, I stand in respectful silence for a moment over his body, thankful for what we will have on our table this winter.

I knew with the shot, that soon, someone will come from the woods, to help me bring in my bounty, as darkness was close. But for now I am alone. And truly happy to be so. It is a sense of self that I never experienced before. At home alone, I felt just that. Lonely. Here, it was something else, the not quite believing, not quite awakened sense of isolation that was fully alive. The breathing spell of ancient verbiage of desire and newly found need. Looking onward up the trail with eyes hundreds of years old, an esoteric glance, not of this world, but the new one I've found. I am now a hunter, one of a breed of those seen for an instant in the glare of a bright flash of light, then disappearing into the night.